PA State Senator Piles Into The Chemtrail Ban Clown Car, Announces Dumbass Bill Of His Own

Earlier this week, we covered a truly insane and insane bill being pushed by the Tennessee State Senate that vowed to ban something that actually isn’t happening and, indeed, has never happened.

Stapled to rote effort to ensure the state’s Air Pollution Control Board didn’t remain understaffed for more than 30 days was some batshit crazy performative horseshit. The rider attached to this bill was an amendment to the state code to basically ban any form of altering the atmosphere over Tennessee via chemicals emitted by airplanes.

SECTION 1. Tennessee Code Annotated, Title 68, Chapter 201, Part 1, is amended by adding the following as a new section:

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 is prohibited.

This is the result of two things: people seeing contrails and being convinced these are part of a nationwide conspiracy to engage in mind control or mass sterilization or whatever, and 25 Tennessee senators deciding it would be best to get out in front of any efforts to combat climate change via atmospheric, um, interference by airplanes.

To date, there have been no attempts, much less successful efforts, to counteract the negative effects of greenhouse gases by introducing other substances to the atmosphere. There has also never been any attempt to negatively affect people on the ground by deliberately introducing other chemicals to the atmosphere. “Chemtrails” have never existed. Condensation naturally formed by the movement of hot engines through cold air has been a fact of life since the introduction of aircraft capable of flying high enough to create this phenomenon.

But it’s not as though this was a serious effort to do anything more than allow certain politicians to beclown themselves for the short-lived adulation of the most ignorant members of their voting bases.

And so it is in Pennsylvania, where state senator Doug Mastriano has decided the government should be in the business of performatively blocking something that isn’t happening and, in fact, does not exist. (h/t Techdirt reader mvario)

His statement pretends it’s mostly interested in protecting residents from unintended side effects of cloud seeding efforts.

Soon, I will introduce legislation amending the PA Cloud Seeding Licensure Law to ensure the skies over Pennsylvania are protected well into the future.

Enshrined in Article 1, Section 27 of the Constitution of Pennsylvania is the people’s “right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment.”

In 1967, the General Assembly passed the PA Cloud Seeding Licensing Law to regulate weather modification experiments and create a Weather Modification Board within the Department of Agriculture. The law was inspired by unauthorized weather modification by the Blue Ridge Weather Modification Association in 1963 which used planes and ground generators to emit silver iodide into the air to suppress hail in Fulton and Franklin counties.

Recent developments and new technology have brought forward the need to modernize the 1967 law. According to the U.S Patent and Trade Office, over 100 new weather modification patents now exist that are owned by combination of Federal Government Agencies, Non-Governmental Organizations, and large multinational corporations.

Seems sensible until you actually start looking at what he’s saying and who Doug Mastriano actually is.

That’s what Peter Hall at the Pennsylvania Capital-Star did. Mastriano doesn’t care one way or another about cloud seeding efforts. He does, however, entertain chemtrail conspiracy theories and likely wishes to appear opposed to efforts designed to combat climate change because that plays well to the climate change deniers in his voter base.

The legislation would ban the release of substances within the borders of Pennsylvania to affect the temperature, weather or intensity of sunlight. It would mirror legislation that passed in the Tennessee Senate on Wednesday. 

Mastriano, an election denier who lost his 2022 gubernatorial bid to Gov. Josh Shapiro, has made repeated references to the chemtrail conspiracy theory on social media. 

In a November Facebook post with a photo of condensation trails in the sky above Chambersburg, Mastriano wrote, “I have legislation to stop this … Normal contrails dissolve / evaporate within 30-90 seconds.”

Shortly after his loss to Shapiro in 2022 Mastriano posted on Twitter — now called “X” — four photos of condensation trails above his district. In a reply to his own tweet, he linked to an article detailing a proposal to distribute reflective material in the atmosphere to reflect more of the sun’s energy back into space, implying the two are linked.

As for the supposed latent threat posed by unregulated use of… stuff… in the atmosphere for cloud seeding efforts, there’s nothing there to work with. Mastriano claims he wants to head off potentially dangerous “weather modification” efforts, something already overseen by the state’s Weather Modification Board and regulated by existing statutes. So far, this regulatory board has yet to regulate anything.

The department’s Weather Modification Board has never received a license application and has never investigated unauthorized cloud seeding, Deputy Press Secretary Jay Losiewicz said in an email.

And that makes Mastriano’s closing proclamation even more meaningless than it would be in the context of chemtrail conspiracy theorizing.

My legislation will amend the Cloud Seeding Licensure law to ban the injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals, chemical compounds, or substances within the borders of Pennsylvania into the atmosphere for purposes of affecting temperature, weather, or intensity of sunlight.

OK, election denier. Let’s make sure something that isn’t happening continues to not happen. And while Mastriano quotes (but does not link to) a Wall Street Journal article about “Solar Radiation Mitigation” efforts being conducted in two other countries (Israel and Australia), his refusal to quote the article directly (much less give readers of his statement a chance to read it for themselves) conveniently leaves out the fact that the substances used were not “chemicals or chemical compounds” (although, really pretty much everything is a “chemical compound”), but rather smoke and sea water.

Of course, none of this matters to Senator Mastriano and it certainly won’t matter to many of the people who elected him. It’s a voter bloc well-stocked with conspiracy theorists and people who’d rather see the entire world burn than share the road with bicyclists or hybrid owners without dragging their Truck Nutz and/or rolling their coal.