Geoengineering is “probably as dangerous to us as climate change itself,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stated on his podcast last year. His guest was Dane Wigington, creator of The Dimming, a documentary that purports to show that the governments have been covertly conducting toxic climate engineering operations to dim the sun for years, as a last-ditch effort to keep business as usual running in the face of ecological collapse. RFK’s openness to theories about chemical atmospheric manipulation is probably not the weirdest of the beliefs he might bring to public service, if he is confirmed as Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services. Indeed, many mainstream environmentalists share his and Wigington’s worries about geoengineering, although they start from somewhat different premises. It’s perhaps the clearest illustration of where he converges with and diverges from the green movement, in which he was a leading figure until recently.
Kennedy’s rightward trajectory and new position within the MAGA movement are the latest indication that ideas that were once a core part of environmentalism are veering in a strange direction. Call it para-environmentalism. Like other para-phenomena, such as paramilitaries or the paranormal, para-environmentalism exists outside of the realm of official institutions and structures—at least for now. It may end up eating the environmental movement. Simply dismissing the ideas that comprise it as “misinformation,” as the media have been doing and will continue to do, fails to offer any insight into why they have gained traction—perhaps enough traction to elevate RFK to one of the most important scientific roles in the nation.
Para-environmentalism has many strands. Some feel quite benign. There’s the hope that “the soil will save us,” that regenerative agriculture is capable of taking up all carbon emissions since the industrial revolution—an idea RFK alluded to during his appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show earlier this year. There are also exaggerations of things environmentalists are rightfully concerned about, such as the plight of the bees or poisoning by Monsanto.
Others are more sinister. Take the theories that circulated in September in the wake of Hurricane Helene’s devastation of North Carolina, where some weather stations measured more than two feet of rain within a few days. Many accounts online claimed the storm had been deliberately engineered by the government. The most prominent figure endorsing this idea was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a prominent MAGA figure, who stated: “Yes, they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”
The anxieties about vaccine safety that RFK has long promoted also fall under the para-environmental heading. They are closely related to concerns that propelled the environmental movement since its origins: a fear of what chemistry and industrial technology have wrought, under the auspices of big pharmaceutical, agricultural, and tech corporations. I saw this firsthand when I talked with moms at my kid’s crunchy alternative preschool in Santa Monica, Calif. The other moms were above all concerned about wellness and not manipulating nature, a worldview that informed their choice not to vaccinate their kids.
“Geoengineering is sometimes a point of convergence between the mainstream and the fringes.”
Worries about ongoing, covert geoengineering—which Greene was tapping into with her claim that “they” control the weather—are perhaps the most revealing example of para-environmentalism. This is because of its strange resemblance—think of Naomi Klein’s “mirror world”—to mainstream environmentalism’s driving concern at present: anthropogenic climate change. Like climate activists, para-environmentalists see human agency behind extreme weather events. Moreover, geoengineering is sometimes a point of convergence between the mainstream and the fringes. Environmentalists worry about it, too, arguing it will be used to avoid taking action on carbon emissions and warning about its unintended consequences. Para-environmental discussions of geoengineering draw on environmentalist ones, and vice versa.
‘Chemtrails” used to be the core conspiracy theory about weather modification. In this telling, the government or other shadowy elite actors were spraying undetermined chemicals using airplanes, with jet contrails taken as visual evidence of this. The idea emerged in the late 1990s and spread on late-night radio but was dismissed as a “hoax” or “urban legend.” Nevertheless, the chemtrails theory got enough traction that the Environmental Protection Agency in 2000 was motivated to put out an “Aircraft Contrails Factsheet.”
Chemtrails were initially not a right-coded idea, but one associated with the fringes of the green movement. The Space Preservation Act of 2001, introduced by then-Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), attempted to ban space-based “exotic weapons” like “chemtrails” as well as psychotronic, plasma, and climate weapons. In 2002, the environmentalist Earth Island Journal published an article headlined “Stolen Skies: The Chemtrail Mystery,” with the subheading: “Jet Trails in the Sky Used to Disappear. Now they Linger.” But even through the 2010s, as the idea grew in popularity, it stayed mostly on the internet, as a curiosity or a belief rather than a social movement. It was only during the pandemic, when anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine social networks formed in many areas, that weather modification became another galvanizing concern for many involved in these groups.
“In recent years, anxiety about geoengineering has evolved away from chemtrails.”
In recent years, anxiety about geoengineering has evolved away from chemtrails in important ways. First, the imputed motivation behind the aerial manipulation is now less about mind control or population culling. Instead, it is often claimed, its purpose is to mask the horrors of climate change. As explained in a statement signed by the “Concerned Citizens of Saskatchewan,” one of many random emails I and other academics regularly receive on the topic, the idea is that that we’ve “long exceeded Earth’s carrying capacity,” “the Controllers” “know that we are about to hit the wall at full velocity, and they aim to be the last ones standing”; geoengineering is “a last ditch effort to keep the masses from panicking by sowing doubt as to the true extent of the damage already done to the planet.”
The geoengineering narrative has also merged with the “Great Reset” narrative, according to which the World Economic Forum and other elite actors used the pandemic as a pretext to take authoritarian control. Climate lockdowns, it is argued, will be the next justification for imposing restrictions on the masses. This might not seem at first glance to have much to do with geoengineering, but the throughline is the loss of national and individual sovereignty.
Part of what propels all of this forward is the fact geoengineering isn’t just a conspiracy theory: It is a real area of research debated by scientists and policymakers. There have been people speculating about planetary-scale interventions to cool the Earth for decades, but the field started to get more serious about 15 years ago, when Britain’s main scientific body, the Royal Society, published the landmark report Geoengineering the Climate: Science, Governance, and Uncertainty. Since then, both the UK and German governments modestly funded research aimed at better understanding the risks, and hundreds of modeling studies have been done, as well as reports by scientific and governance bodies like the UN Environment Program and the US National Academies of Sciences. Britain’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (a new funding agency similar to America’s DARPA) and a host of private philanthropies are devoting funds to outdoor experiments and to supercharging the volume of research. All of this potentially paves the way for even more backlash.
Anti-geoengineering activists keep up with developments in this space and often cite scientific literature and policy documents. Last year, I went to a crowded town hall in rural Northern California, where geoengineering, 5G, sovereignty, and the potential reopening of a gold mine were the agenda items. In an impassioned talk, the White House’s congressionally mandated report on geoengineering was referenced, as well as the application a company called Make Sunsets had cheekily filed with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in which “all of Earth” was scrawled as the location and the year 2223 listed as the “expected termination date of weather-modification activities.” (The founder of Make Sunsets, a startup that has released several weather balloons into the atmosphere more as a stunt than as a systematic geoengineering enterprise, jokingly describes it as “partly a company and partly a cult.”) These sorts of details get folded into the storyline, making it more believable.
Anti-geoengineering activism also often gets close to the arguments being made by mainstream academics and environmentalists. One flier I received at the town hall advertised the “Solar Geoengineering Non-Use Agreement,” a proposition put forth by a group of academics; I was a peer reviewer on their academic journal article. On the other side of the paper was an advertisement for “Save Our Skies,” a group raising funds to mount legal challenges against geoengineering, which contends that “these aerosol spraying programs are underway without the knowledge or consent of citizens worldwide.” You could forgive someone who picked up this flier for not being able to tell that one side is inspired by an organization of professors, and the other from a grassroots network that suggests, among other things, that Hurricane Helene was deliberately engineered.
All this is undeniably awkward for the mainstream environmentalists who have been trying to raise awareness about the dangers of geoengineering for decades, who now have to append notes to their advocacy explaining that anti-chemtrails advocates aren’t aligned with their views. Still, there may be some mutual benefit in the arrangement. The conspiracy-minded folks get the legitimacy that comes from citing academic sources, while the academics and activists can share articles with stock images of anti-geoengineering crowds to conjure images of mass public opinion being against geoengineering.
There is also some overlap between these circles. Consider the trajectory of writer Charles Eisenstein, who ended up being a senior campaign adviser to RFK Jr. In 2015, he published a commentary in The Guardian headlined “We Need Regenerative Farming, Not Geoengineering.” It was very normal Guardian content: “Geoengineering is a technological fix that leaves the economic and industrial system causing climate change untouched … a global solution that feeds the logic of centralization and the economics of globalism.” But as the years went by, Eisenstein moved from an environmental to a para-environmental perspective. In a video from November 2022, for instance, he reported: “I saw one time, and this is what really tripped me over the edge, I saw like a plane whose like chemtrail generator was malfunctioning, and it was going on and off, making like a perfect line with dashed regularity.… I am agnostic on it, leaning toward I think there’s something really going on.”
There are plenty of plausible arguments for opposing actual geoengineering deployment. But our ability to have a substantive discussion about the prospect of geoengineering is eroded by the growing prevalence of the idea that it is ongoing right now. Such epistemic erosion is likely to happen on other fronts, as well.
Understanding the appeal of para-environmentalism can help us grasp what has gone awry with climate politics. The standard progressive assumption is that on one side of the debate around climate change and its mitigation, there’s a group of science-believers who care about the planet and want rapid climate action, and on the other, ignorant people who spread and consume climate misinformation and don’t care about climate action. This is incorrect.
Most people care about the environment, support clean energy, and have a moderate position on climate policy. When I’ve done focus groups and interviews, most people like wind and solar and think a move to cleaner energy is good. But they worry about how the cost of upending the energy system will affect them and wonder if it is realistic to do it quickly. This concern arises among moderates of both parties. Only a third of Americans support phasing out fossil fuels altogether, and that includes the half of Democrats who oppose phasing out fossil fuels completely.
But these moderate positions don’t get engagement on digital platforms that drive the discourse around climate. What draws eyeballs and advertising revenues are caricatures of extreme positions. This discursive vortex ends up feeding para-environmentalism.
Climate influencers put forth anti-fossil rhetoric meant to rally the troops, embodied by name-calling tribal leaders such as Michael Mann: “Like vampires and cockroaches, climate deniers and fossil-fuel apologists don’t like it when someone shines a bright light on them.” There’s also the support in green circles for degrowth, which models scenarios where global energy consumption is reduced to 1960s levels. This results in discursive online meltdowns over things like the future of washing machines in energy-constrained futures, as when a graduate student in Europe tweeted that washing clothes by hand would build community and help people keep fit, and the entire internet came together in a rare moment of unity to say that actually, washing machines are pretty great.
This dynamic generates content that para-environmentalists point to as evidence of the plots underway. Most degrowth scholars are not pushing scenarios without washing machines, but they do model a reality where, for instance, your pants have a lifetime of 300 years and are worn 15 days before a wash, and where underwear lasts 125 years and is washed every other day. So when people post memes about how global elites want us to eat bugs and live in pods, it isn’t a total leap from some of the modeling in the peer-reviewed literature. The more strident statements from degrowth researchers, the more opportunities for anti-woke influencers to call degrowth a “gnostic death cult.” The point is that environmentalist academics and intellectuals have played a role in feeding para-environmental beliefs. And some of the scholarship on the influence of fossil-fuel companies has conspiratorial overtones of its own.
But isn’t this all just talk on the internet? Who cares about the small subset of climate influencers or the fraction of the US population that is open to para-environmental rhetoric, if the remaining 80 percent just want more solar power and less pollution? Unfortunately, para-environmentalists and the influencers they are responding to are important for several reasons. National and state-level politics are still shaped by extremely online journalists and NGOs. It’s going to be harder for people to stake out and build a common-sense climate consensus when the space is already taken up by these political positions.
Using algorithms to deplatform “climate denial” or “misinformation” is a misguided response. People aren’t empty vessels infected by misinformation. They may entertain para-environmental beliefs in response to real concerns and legitimate criticisms of elites—some of them quite similar to those of environmentalists. Para-environmentalists are not “anti-science.” On the contrary, they often attempt to draw upon science to support their claims, but they are also wary when scientists act in ways that appear religious or ideologically partisan. This was a core critique of public health during the pandemic: that rather than being rigorous with data, scientists were being manipulative for political and ideological reasons.
These concerns shouldn’t be dismissed. When big companies are taking advantage of you and despoiling your environment, and the government is letting them, of course you’re going to distrust elites. When a pandemic strikes, and there’s not a full accounting of failures in government, public health, science, or journalism to follow evidence-based policy and conduct analyses of tradeoffs, people are also going to be skeptical of how those institutions manage other crises like climate change. These concerns can’t be resolved by algorithmic manipulation and deplatforming, which look like to people like the very censorship and manipulation that stoked their suspicion in the first place, and so make things worse.
“An effective strategy for climate politics would address para-environmental concerns.”
An effective strategy for climate politics would address para-environmental concerns, recognizing the valid reasons people have for distrusting elites and experts. It would avoid using science to score partisan points. This isn’t what the prominent voices in the climate movement are doing—and to an unfortunate extent, they can’t. The climate movement can’t stop following these counterproductive messengers and put forth more broadly appealing leaders because of the perverse incentives described previously. If Mann didn’t exist, digital platforms would elevate someone else to play his role.
The media aren’t the only sensemaking institution failing us. Our universities are stumbling on the education and science-producing fronts, too. Recently, I was at an academic workshop where one of the suggested readings was the article “Cloud Seeding, Wildfire Smoke Emissions, and Solar Geoengineering: Why Is Climate Modification Unregulated?” by Karen Bradshaw and Monika Ehrman, published in the Georgetown Environmental Law Review. The abstract begins: “This article is the first to identify that companies and agencies systemically modify climatic airspaces through wildfire smoke emissions, weather modification (cloud seeding to cause rain), and solar geoengineering.” While no one is doing solar geoengineering in a way that would modify the climate, the aforementioned Make Sunsets does release occasional balloons in what I would call performance art, so the sentence might be technically accurate even though it is also very misleading. The next sentence reads, “Climate modification is not a conspiracy theory or a hypothetical: It is happening, and it is changing weather patterns.” If you read this sentence in a prestigious law journal, what would you think?
Bradshaw has also been quoted in the New York Post stating that “there’s no doubt [weather manipulation] exists. Normal people are just unaware.” She is also in Salon explaining that she grew up near Mt. Shasta, Calif., which attempted to pass a local ordinance to prevent an electrical utility from cloud seeding. “When I began to dig into that story,” she says, “I was so surprised to learn about the history and prevalence of cloud seeding. … How was it possible that even environmental law professors did not understand how widespread it was? When I began mentioning the topic, people brushed it off as a conspiracy akin to chemtrails; very few people were aware that weather and climate modification are real and happening.” This reads as the archetypal journey down the rabbit hole that people take when they learn about chemtrails.
“The conditions of academic production make this extraordinary text possible.”
The conditions of academic production make this extraordinary text possible. One academic who is dedicated to radically reimagining the human relationship with nature, and another who is a former petroleum engineer who has written defenses of fracking and on the board of an oil and gas company, together argue that agencies must do better to regulate the atmosphere, that wildfire is an environmental-justice disaster, that there has been a dramatic incidence of wildfire since Congress began “fixing” it in 2013, and that “efforts to attribute changes in precipitation levels to climate change without considering the effects of intentional weather modification paint an inaccurate picture of anthropocentric climate change.”
Para-environmentalism is no longer fringe; it’s inside the walls of the academy. Something has gone wrong with the ability of paid experts to think, and the corrective systems, like peer review, are under strain. There is a version of this critique from conservatives about how universities are a left-wing monoculture that stifles open, substantive debate. But the problem isn’t merely ideological. The problem is that universities began running their operations like private-equity and real-estate empires with education as a side hustle, and there are too many administrators and not enough tenured teachers. The non-tenured professors and aspiring professors are incentivized to convert social capital into a job by becoming scholar-influencer-activists.
That’s the knowledge-production side of the disaster in the academy. On the instruction side, not only are students not comfortable sharing different opinions, the system is turning out graduates who aren’t adept at synthesizing knowledge from different fields, identifying weaknesses in evidence, or perhaps most importantly, having a constructive disagreement. The government is modifying the weather? Well, that’s your personal belief, I might quietly think it’s weird, but you do you. In response to declining enrollment, colleges create larger classes with more popular subjects, and so there is less room for pedagogies with critical thinking, setting up a doom loop.
The stakes go far beyond the politics of geoengineering, or even climate politics. They implicate our ability to form a consensus about what is real. But the stakes for geoengineering matter, too. Reflecting incoming sunlight by putting aerosols into the stratosphere may be a way to save millions of lives, keep species from going extinct, or preserve the global economy’s capacity to deliver food and water while we remake the energy system. But the current state of the discourse on the topic, in which the line between legitimate scholarship and conspiratorial fever dream has become impossibly blurred, suggests it may be impossible to have a meaningful debate in which research informs democratic deliberation. This is just an extreme example of a problem affecting public perceptions of science more broadly.
Most of the people I know in the academy are in despair about Trump’s re-election, about the prominence of figures like RFK Jr. in his future cabinet, and about the rejection of empirical reality that they believe all this portends. A colleague told me he was setting up to watch rom-coms for the next four years. Settling onto the couch feeling powerless is an understandable initial response. But these events should be a wake-up call for environmentalists. We need a more democratic approach to environmental politics, one that starts by taking seriously the worries about corporate control and technocratic governance that feed para-environmentalism.
Seeing environmental politics through the lens of para-environmentalism actually offers a way of reinitiating the conversation. Because para-environmentalists are constantly reading, paying attention to, and responding to discourses in mainstream climate science and environmental politics, those of us participating in those conversations all have agency in how we speak with each other and the public. The challenges of remaking our sensemaking institutions in higher education and the media are daunting. But listening to people and thinking about how different audiences will hear what we are saying are things that we can do on a daily basis, starting now.