Trump’s EPA Just Released an Infomercial for Conspiracy Theorists
EPA administrator Lee Zeldin. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images You’d be forgiven if you mistook Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin’s new three-minute video released Thursday as an infomercial for some obscure science fiction literature. Shared on social media and touted as proof of the Trump administration’s “total transparency,” Zeldin’s video gives a heavy nod to conspiracy theorists, even as misinformation is fueling death threats over flooding in Texas that some extremists claim was caused by a “weather weapon.” Directing viewers to new EPA resources on “geoengineering” and “contrails,” Zeldin encourages the public to ask questions, even if those questions have already been answered over and over again. “Concerned Americans have urgent and important questions about geoengineering and contrails,” Zeldin insists, lamenting that “for years” people asking such questions were “vilified” by both the media and the government. “That era is over,” he says. “Instead of simply dismissing these questions and concerns as ‘baseless conspiracies,’ we’re meeting them head-on.” “To anyone who’s ever looked up to the streaks in the sky and asked, ‘What the heck is going on?’ Or seen headlines about private actors and even governments looking to ‘blot out the sun’ in the name of stopping global warming, we’ve endeavored to answer all of your questions,” Zeldin says. “In fact, EPA shares many of the same concerns.” In a bait-and-switch likely to frustrate any devout conspiracy theorists, however, one of the new EPA webpages actually debunks the “chemtrails” theory Zeldin appears to wink at in the video, stressing that condensation is a “normal effect” of air travel and not a result of any malicious, weather-related shenanigans. The page on geoengineering is not so unequivocal, however, listing a series of techniques meant to “cool the Earth by intentionally modifying the amount of sunlight” but mentioning only briefly that these ideas are “being studied” and not widely practiced. Solar Geoengineering has been studied by scientists for years as a way to potentially counter climate change, but it’s still largely conceptual. “Solar geoengineering, a theoretical practice which would modify the atmosphere to shade Earth’s surface by reflecting sunlight back into space, is not taking place at scale anywhere in the world,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said last fall. Zeldin’s announcement seems only to have emboldened some fringe voices who had linked weather modification to the Texas floods. Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of “Jewish space lasers” fame was among the controversial figures to suggest the disaster was caused by geoengineering. She welcomed Zeldin’s announcement on Thursday and used it to push for legislation making weather modifications a “felony offense.” The CEO of Rainmaker, a California-based cloud-seeding company that had done work in Texas prior to the storms, said the company has received “in excess of 100 explicit death threats” after being falsely blamed for the disaster. Cloud seeding, which involves adding aerosols to clouds in order to clear fog or trigger precipitation, is not capable of creating storms, experts have said. Sign Up for the Intelligencer Newsletter Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.
“To anyone who’s ever looked up to the streaks in the sky and asked, ‘What the heck is going on?’” Lee Zeldin has an answer for you.
EPA administrator Lee Zeldin. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
You’d be forgiven if you mistook Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin’s new three-minute video released Thursday as an infomercial for some obscure science fiction literature.
Shared on social media and touted as proof of the Trump administration’s “total transparency,” Zeldin’s video gives a heavy nod to conspiracy theorists, even as misinformation is fueling death threats over flooding in Texas that some extremists claim was caused by a “weather weapon.”
Directing viewers to new EPA resources on “geoengineering” and “contrails,” Zeldin encourages the public to ask questions, even if those questions have already been answered over and over again.
“Concerned Americans have urgent and important questions about geoengineering and contrails,” Zeldin insists, lamenting that “for years” people asking such questions were “vilified” by both the media and the government.
“That era is over,” he says. “Instead of simply dismissing these questions and concerns as ‘baseless conspiracies,’ we’re meeting them head-on.”
“To anyone who’s ever looked up to the streaks in the sky and asked, ‘What the heck is going on?’ Or seen headlines about private actors and even governments looking to ‘blot out the sun’ in the name of stopping global warming, we’ve endeavored to answer all of your questions,” Zeldin says. “In fact, EPA shares many of the same concerns.”
In a bait-and-switch likely to frustrate any devout conspiracy theorists, however, one of the new EPA webpages actually debunks the “chemtrails” theory Zeldin appears to wink at in the video, stressing that condensation is a “normal effect” of air travel and not a result of any malicious, weather-related shenanigans.
The page on geoengineering is not so unequivocal, however, listing a series of techniques meant to “cool the Earth by intentionally modifying the amount of sunlight” but mentioning only briefly that these ideas are “being studied” and not widely practiced. Solar Geoengineering has been studied by scientists for years as a way to potentially counter climate change, but it’s still largely conceptual.
“Solar geoengineering, a theoretical practice which would modify the atmosphere to shade Earth’s surface by reflecting sunlight back into space, is not taking place at scale anywhere in the world,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said last fall.
Zeldin’s announcement seems only to have emboldened some fringe voices who had linked weather modification to the Texas floods. Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of “Jewish space lasers” fame was among the controversial figures to suggest the disaster was caused by geoengineering. She welcomed Zeldin’s announcement on Thursday and used it to push for legislation making weather modifications a “felony offense.”
The CEO of Rainmaker, a California-based cloud-seeding company that had done work in Texas prior to the storms, said the company has received “in excess of 100 explicit death threats” after being falsely blamed for the disaster. Cloud seeding, which involves adding aerosols to clouds in order to clear fog or trigger precipitation, is not capable of creating storms, experts have said.