‘Bright Line in the Sky’: Florida Passes Bill to Ban, Criminalize Geoengineering
The Florida House of Representatives last week passed a bill to ban and criminalize geoengineering and weather modification, Newsweek reported.
The Florida House of Representatives last week passed a bill to ban and criminalize geoengineering and weather modification, Newsweek reported.
The bill makes it a third-degree felony to release any chemical, substance or apparatus into Florida’s atmosphere to affect the weather or climate.
It imposes a penalty of up to $100,000 for any person or corporation and up to $5,000 and five years in prison for an aircraft controller or pilot involved in such releases.
It also requires Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection to develop protocols to investigate reports of geoengineering and directs the department to send the reports to other state agencies, including the health department, when appropriate.
The bill has cleared both the House and the Senate and awaits Gov. Ron DeSantis’ signature.
“There is a lot of unauthorized activity that is currently not regulated, both at a federal and a state level, and this is where we wanted to start,” Sen. Ileana Garcia, who introduced the bill, told members of the Senate.
GreenMedInfo’s Sayer Ji praised the bill on his Substack. “Florida has drawn a bright line in the sky: It will not allow corporate interests, climate interventionists, or covert operations to tamper with its atmosphere or pollute its environment.”
Since the bill was introduced, the Florida Legislature has received more than 100,000 emails demanding action on geoengineering, Ji reported.
Health Freedom advocacy organizations, including Stand for Health Freedom supported the bill, arguing that such practices “endanger human health and safety and the environment; threaten air, water, soil, and wildlife resources; disrupt agricultural operations; and potentially interfere with aviation, state security, and the economy of the Commonwealth.”
Rep. Kevin Steele introduced the bill in the House. Neither of the bill’s sponsors immediately responded to The Defender’s request for comment.
Nearly half of U.S. states consider action on geoengineering
Last year, a similar bill passed in Tennessee. Kentucky, Arizona, and Iowa have introduced legislation proposing similar bans, and an Alabama legislative committee discussed a similar bill in March. Ji reports that 24 states are proposing action to stop geoengineering.
U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently posted on X that HHS would “do its part” to fight geoengineering.
Mainstream media coverage of the proposed laws has consistently portrayed the legislation as driven by right-wing conspiracy theories, claiming that geoengineering is “largely theoretical.”
However, those same outlets have reported that geoengineering experiments to remove carbon dioxide from the air, and to brighten clouds to deflect the sun, are already underway.
Many scientist-entrepreneurs, like David Keith, Ph.D. — formerly at Harvard and now at the University of Chicago — have long advocated for climate geoengineering and have launched companies that have made tens of millions of dollars trying to implement it. Keith has received backing from billionaire investors like Bill Gates.
The Biden administration in 2022 set up a five-year research plan to study ways to modify the amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth. Proposed methods include stratospheric aerosol injection, marine cloud brightening and cirrus cloud thinning, CNBC reported.
The European Union in 2023 called for an analysis of the risks of geoengineering and said countries should discuss how to develop a regulatory structure for the eventual deployment of the technology.
Last year, officials in Alameda, California, halted a secret experiment to spray sea particles into the air to test global warming mitigation, following news reports about the experiment. The council had not been informed of the plans.
Other geoengineering practices — aimed at local weather modification, rather than at climate change — have existed for decades. For example, it has been widely reported that Chinese weather authorities have successfully controlled weather for important events, such as the Olympics, at least since 2008, and that they continue to expand those programs.
They use a method called cloud seeding, where small particles of the chemical silver iodide are added to clouds to cause weather droplets to cluster around them and increase the chances of precipitation.
The Guardian reported that by 2021, cloud seeding was underway or planned in many drought-stricken U.S. states. States that have programs for weather modification through cloud seeding include California, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, North Dakota, Utah and Idaho.
Critics of the practices aren’t only on the political right — people across the political spectrum have raised concerns.
Friends of the Earth says the side effects of the practices are “unknown and untested,” and that attempts to use the technology to influence climate would need to be massive and global.
“These ‘experiments’ would not only take action in the absence of scientific consensus, hence violating the precautionary principle, but could also easily have unintended consequences due to mechanical failure, human error, inadequate understanding of ecosystems, biodiversity and the Earth’s climate, unforeseen natural phenomena, irreversibility or funding interruptions.”
Keith’s attempt to implement a geoengineering experiment at Harvard was canceled after years of pushback from scientists and indigenous environmental activists. Keith later stated he would be less “open” about his future experiments.
Meanwhile, other controversial projects have gone forward. The venture-capital backed startup Make Sunsets has launched several weather balloons containing sulfur dioxide that it claims will likely burst in the stratosphere. Between February 2023 and September 2024, the startup released 53 kilograms of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, outraging many members of the public.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin last month opened a federal inquiry into Make Sunsets, Ji reported.
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The first of many states and countries to do this…if we choose to make it so. ✨🙏🌏🕊️