THE first few months of the year saw a sharp rise in the number of US states considering proposals to ban solar geoengineering, including cloud seeding as well as solar radiation management. As we’ve previously reported, Tennessee was the first state to adopt a ban (in April 2024), signed into law by Republican Governor Bill Lee. The legislation ‘prohibits the intentional injection, release, or dispersion, by any means, of chemicals, chemical compounds, substances, or apparatus within the borders of this state into the atmosphere with the express purpose of affecting temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight‘.
This year has seen Bills in Arizona and Florida passed by the state senates while proposals to ban weather modification and solar geoengineering (explained in this four-part TCW series) have gathered momentum in a number of others. Another 22 states are reported to have introduced Bills so far in 2025. To date, according to this website, lawmakers of 30 states have now proposed Bills that would impose such bans.
What has driven this sudden surge? This is the question that the Epoch Times’s Roman Balmakov recently put to his colleagues on NTD Primetime. He couched it rather more dramatically, saying that cloud seeding bans were ‘exploding’ across the US. Balmakov opens the studio discussion by setting the wider political scene for this activity: ‘At the federal level you have RFK Jr enacting the MAHA agenda over at the HHS [Department of Health and Human Services]. Meanwhile at the state level, states are doing things by themselves – taking this national wave, putting in real legislation to make law in their state.’
How, he asks, do cloud seeding bans fit into that agenda? The first answer supplied that is that Robert Kennedy Jr has given his imprimatur to such bans. In a tweet on X in March this year the Health Secretary confirmed this: ’24 states move to ban geoengineering our climate by dousing our citizens, our waterways, our landscapes with toxins. This is a movement every MAHA needs to support. HHS will do its part.’ More on this can be found on X, as here by Barron Trump.
What follows is an interesting discussion. Though it tells you no more (in fact a lot less) about the different facets of weather and climate engineering that Jonathon Riley researched and reported for TCW last year, its value is that it is being openly discussed in a way you simply would not see on any British TV channel. It also includes an interesting and additional piece of information – a 1996 research report called Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025. According to one of the programme’s contributors, the US government has denied its proposals ever became policy.
You can watch the discussion here.
