Louisiana Latest State to Pass Legislation Banning "Chemtrails"

Louisiana has joined Tennessee and Florida in passing legislation banning “chemtrails” in the skies above their state. So far, a dozen states, including New York and Arizona, have introduced similar legislation.

Although the word chemtrail was carefully omitted from the Louisiana bill (as it has been in other states), state representative Kimberly Landry Coates used arguments long associated with the conspiracy theory when she introduced it.

Coates warned skeptics to “start looking up,” and added, “I’m really worried about what is going on above us and what is happening, and we as Louisiana citizens did not give anyone the right to do this above us.”

Conspiracy lore has it that chemtrails—reportedly distinct from normal contrails left by airplanes due to their color, crisscrossing pattern, and the length of time they linger—are used by government agencies for weather modification, solar radiation management, population control, various psyops, biological and chemical warfare, and the testing of biological and chemical agents on humans. Believers in chemtrails posit that they are responsible for causing a variety of respiratory illnesses and other health problems.

“There’s no such thing as chemtrails,” Alan Robock, a climate science professor at Rutgers university, told The Guardian last year. “If you look at the sky, sometimes you see contrails from airplanes—condensation trails—and they’re just made out of water. It’s the same thing that happens in the winter when you breathe out and you see a little cloud in front of your mouth. It’s a mixture of warm, humid air with cold, dry air.”

“There’s no evidence that anybody is pumping chemicals into airplanes. If this was a huge [government] conspiracy to do those things, do you think nobody would sort of, tell on them?” he added.

Despite attempts to debunk chemtrails, a YouGov/Statista survey from 2019 found that 8% of Americans still "strongly believe" that "the government is using chemicals to control the population [through chemtrails]." Beyond that, another 11% of people asked said that they "somewhat believe" in chemtrails.

Similar to other states’ legislation, the Louisiana bill focuses on the environmental impact of so-called chemtrails.

According to the bill, no person shall "Intentionally inject, release, apply, or disperse, by any means, a chemical, chemical compound, substance, or apparatus into the atmosphere within the borders of this state for the express purpose of affecting the temperature, weather, climate, or intensity of sunlight."

This focus on "solar geoengineering" ostensibly refers to proposed approaches to combat climate change by reflecting solar radiation back into space, although some suspect that this is merely an attempt by legislators to avoid being labeled conspiracy theorists; nonetheless, the connections between solar geoengineering and chemtrail conspiracy theories are clear.

These connections were addressed directly in an article entitled “Chemtrails Conspiracy Theory,” published by David Keith's Research Group for Harvard University, which stated, “Because of the apparent similarities between the proposed implementation methods for [solar geoengineering] (such as injecting reflective particles into the stratosphere), and the alleged methods for producing chemtrails, some people have linked the notion of chemtrails to the study of [solar geoengineering].”

However, the researchers said, “We are confident that there is no currently active program to actually test or implement [solar geoengineering],” and furthermore, “We have not seen any credible evidence that chemtrails exist. If we did see any evidence that governments were endangering their own citizens in the manner alleged in the chemtrails conspiracy, we would be eager to expose and stop any such activities.”