Conspiracy Theories Are Not a Good Reason to Ban Geoengineering Research
Can you hear that? It’s the sound of attempted climate intervention bans and harsh regulations against research failing across the country. Twenty-nine states attempted to curtail research or deployment of geoengineering, solar radiation modification, and/or weather modification by introducing 70 ban bills this past legislative session. But it didn’t work. Only one passed into law – and only one succeeding is a big win!
These bills mostly attempted to prohibit geoengineering, also known as “climate stabilization” or “climate interventions,” which refer to a broad set of emerging strategies designed to deliberately modify Earth’s systems in an effort to stave off the worst impacts of climate change. Examples of climate interventions include cloud seeding (in use since the 1940s) and solar radiation modification (SRM), which is still largely theoretical.
Climate intervention (CI) ban bills put the cart before the horse. They are attempting to ban techniques that have not been thoroughly studied or even deployed, without regard to the potential benefits that these techniques may bring globally – or the unintended consequences of banning relevant research.
Science shows that climate impacts are getting worse and that there is a real possibility of passing critical climate “tipping points,” such as sea level rise, Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) collapse, and irreversible melting of glaciers, before the mitigation strategies we have in place have sufficient impact. It may therefore be critical to pair mitigation and the continued clean energy transition with climate interventions to avoid or limit the consequences of overshoot and reduce tipping point risk. This could save countless lives from extreme weather and reduce irreparable harm to our climate systems. But premature ban bills would take this option off the table and keep us from accessing a valuable hazard response tool.
Misinformation in the Driver’s Seat
Three states have succeeded in banning CI research and deployment: Tennessee, Louisiana, and Florida. Florida’s bill, for example, prohibits the injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals or substances into the atmosphere within the state “for the express purpose of affecting the temperature, weather, climate, or intensity of sunlight.” The state touts the bill as successful in stopping CI activity, even though CI activity wasn’t happening in the first place. Florida could achieve the same track record if it passed a bill banning rocks from floating.
Why ban something that’s not happening? At the most basic level, these bills are driven by misinformation. Climate interventions, specifically stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), have been wrongly conflated with chemtrail conspiracy theories – the false claim that airplane emissions known as contrails (not chemtrails) are comprised of toxic chemicals that hurt human health…and serve as a form of government-orchestrated weather and mind control… (which sounds like a great plot for a science fiction movie, but is far from reality of what’s happening here on Earth). This argument has resonated with the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, adherents of which are also strong supporters of many of the state ban bills. (I don’t need to point out the irony here, but I will, that geoengineering research is exploring ways that we can reduce the health impacts of heat, wildfires, and other climate driven threats.) This vocal faction also influenced the Clear Skies Act, federal legislation introduced by Rep. Majorie Taylor Green last year to criminalize CI and weather modification research.
Even though the Clear Skies Act didn’t become law, it is a worrying example of how public policy from the state level all the way up to the federal level is being influenced and informed by conspiracy theories instead of fact. This can become a self-perpetuating cycle, in which policy predicated on misinformation ends up giving increased visibility and credibility to that misinformation, which in turn helps it spread further.
Far Flung Impacts
TLDR: research bans have real consequences for public health and American innovation.
The public health sector suffers from research bans because we need experiments and other research in order to accurately characterize and guard against adverse health effects of proposed CI techniques. This includes potential impacts to humans as well as the systems humans depend on, like agriculture, where some research suggests that disrupting weather patterns can affect crop yields. On the flip side, there is other evidence that the stabilization of climate temperatures will create more ideal growing conditions for certain crops and with the lowering of temperatures, comes the decrease in heat related illness and deaths. The reality is, without additional field research, we won’t know what to expect, if the adverse consequences of CI outweighs the benefits, and how to minimize ill effects to the greatest extent possible.
Research bans also impact American innovation. I know you may be thinking, why should I care about that? It’s because stifling science in any domain creates a chilling effect, can introduce knowledge gaps, and can hinder the development of new and potentially beneficial technologies. Imagine if we had banned research into vaccines because of the contingent of anti-vaxxers that exist. We wouldn’t have saved 154 million lives worldwide. The U.S. also needs to keep pace with the scientific advances and innovations of other nations so we can verify new approaches, technologies, and research outcomes that advance our own national goals and priorities. AKA – if another country is able to harness the benefits of climate interventions, we will want to know if the same benefits are replicable here.
Walking hand in hand with the necessity of research are the frameworks that inform its design. Research frameworks need to be grounded in transparency, accountability, and legitimacy. How else do you expect the public to support a large-scale climate intervention? It only works if the researchers can tell the public exactly what they are going to do, detail how they plan to do it, and give impacted communities a seat at the table to give critical feedback (and even veto power) along the way. This will be evermore important as laboratory research evolves into outdoor experiments.
What Experiments Have Actually Happened
Currently, most of what we know about CI comes from computer models, not field research or outdoor experiments. SRM 360, a nonprofit organization that supports informed and evidence-based discussion of SRM, tracks completed, cancelled, and upcoming outdoor experiments related to CI from 2008 to 2028. The grand total? A whopping…14, only three of which have been completed. So it’s not that there’s a lot of real-world CI experiments going on, counter to what the ban bills would have you believe. It’s that a couple of experimenters haven’t done a great job of communicating their plans.
Consider an experiment that was planned in the Bay Area city of Alameda a couple of years ago. Researchers at the University of Washington were planning to test marine cloud brightening (MCB), a technique that involves spraying sea water particles into the air to brighten clouds to aid in blocking the sun’s rays (Australia has had success experimenting with this approach to reduce coral bleaching). The city council unanimously voted no against the experiment – not because they outright opposed the concept, but because the researchers took the “ask for forgiveness instead of permission” approach by not disclosing the experiment to the public or to local leaders well in advance. Another similar incident arose from Make Sunsets, a start-up that has experimented with small-scale applications of SAI, also without gaining public support. The public had questions, and they deserve answers, but banning research keeps us completely out of the loop.
These examples demonstrate the need for regulation surrounding transparent oversight (instead of outright bans). Having a blanket ban risks losing valuable information and advances into modeling, laboratory research, and small-scale outdoor experiments needed to resolve the questions and uncertainties of climate interventions. Outdoor experiments especially are an important tool to understand the most pressing research questions related to CI and how it could mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, but the experiments need to have sufficient guardrails built in.
With outdoor experiments, scientists can test what computer models predict will happen, rigorously assessing in real-world conditions both the potential benefits of CI and what it would take to deploy at scale, as well as potential adverse consequences and strategies for avoiding them. These experiments will need to be done carefully, with transparent oversight and consultation with affected communities. Experiments that violate good research and engagement practices should be shut down. We do that in plenty of scientific disciplines. But responsible experiments should be allowed to proceed and we should reap the benefits of that responsible research. The right policies can make that happen.
Venturing into the Unknown
In an ideal world, we would not have state or federal climate intervention research bans. We would have affirmative policies and protections for researchers to be able to research climate interventions and solar geoengineering technologies. We would have researchers and institutions that would not shy away from revealing the good, the bad, and the ugly of these technologies and doing so responsibly. That world does not yet exist, but FAS believes it is worth building. Creating that world and believing that robust research is needed to answer the tough questions, alongside the creation of forward-thinking governance structures grounded in transparency and legitimacy will take time. But stopping bad policy and premature bans is the floor, not the ceiling. The path forward is building a research environment where good science can thrive, governed by frameworks worthy of the problems we are trying to solve.
In an ideal world, we would not have state or federal climate intervention research bans. We would have researchers and institutions that would not shy away from revealing the good, the bad, and the ugly of these technologies and doing so responsibly.
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