The Greene revolution: How politicians benefit from conspiracies about cloud seeding and weather control

On summer nights as a child at my grandmother’s house in rural west Texas, I’d sometimes stay up, in defiance of my bedtime, for Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM, the radio show that made “chemtrails” a household word. So-called “chemtrails”—actually contrails—are the long white plumes of ice crystals that form behind passenger jetliners when hot engine exhaust meets sub-zero air in the upper atmosphere, a well-understood physical process. But “chemtrail” conspiracists believe they are chemicals dispersed as part of a secret government weather-control program. Back then, the idea felt fringe; by 2016, polls found nearly one in six Americans buy into it.

Conspiracy theories are on the rise everywhere, and last month’s Texas Hill Country floods, which caused more than 130 deaths, were no exception. On July 4, heavy precipitation caused the Guadalupe River to rise more than 25 feet in less than an hour. In addition to the death toll, the storm is estimated to have caused at least $18 billion in damages. Even before the water had stopped rising, rumors about the storm’s origins began swirling online. Many conspiracy theorists blamed a small California-based startup called Rainmaker Technology, which acknowledged having conducting cloud-seeding operations in Texas two days prior.

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), a longtime promulgator of weather control conspiracy theories, was quick to latch onto the allegations. As fatalities continued to climb on July 5, Greene posted a photo of Rainmaker’s CEO, Augustus Dorick, and called for national legislation to make weather modification a felony offense. Anticipating blowback, the Texas Department of Agriculture quickly released a statement disclaiming any government involvement, and the Environmental Protection Agency launched two websites to counter weather control disinformation. However, in a public address on July 10, EPA head Lee Zeldin implied that Greene’s suspicions were “legitimate,” stating that the EPA “shares the significant reservations many Americans have [about] geoengineering activities.”

While tragic, the floods were hardly suspicious. For outsiders, Texas often conjures images of cacti and tumbleweeds. But Texas is no stranger to flooding. Often called “Flash Flood Alley,” Central Texas has had more flood fatalities since 1959 than any other US state. The July 2025 floods were caused by the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry off southeastern Mexico, as was conclusively shown by radar imagery. Rainmaker Technology’s cloud-seeding operations took place about 150 miles away from ground zero and lasted only 20 minutes. Flight logs released by the company show that Rainmaker suspended operations on July 2, two days before the first flood alert. These activities, meteorologists agree, could not have caused the devastating floods.

In fact, scientists are still divided over whether modern weather modification technologies, namely cloud-seeding, even work. These technologies largely consist of canisters filled with silver iodide, dropped by light aircraft or fired skyward by small rockets or artillery shells. The “workhorse” technique—static (glaciogenic) seeding—is over 80 years old. Other proposed techniques, such as dynamic or hygroscopic seeding, while slightly more promising, are still too difficult to deploy at scale. Static seeding works by injecting crystals into clouds around which moisture can condense, accelerating the formation of rain droplets. The idea is that more rainfall could be released early over certain areas to improve crop yields, or before reaching areas where precipitation is unwanted, such as an Olympic opening ceremony. The obvious utility of such a technology makes it attractive enough to spur research, but actual data on its effectiveness is at best mixed. Even the most optimistic estimates are that rainmaking techniques can coax “up to 20 percent” more precipitation out of existing clouds, far less than what affected Kerr County.

Just days after the worst of the Texas flooding, while search and rescue teams were still combing through the destruction and bracing for more rain, an Oklahoma man was arrested for sabotaging a radar system operated by a local news channel. Once limited to even wilder conspiracy theories about a particular radar in Alaska, all weather radar now appears to be implicated. Video shows the man breaking into the radar facility and destroying a control panel under cover a darkness. The morning after, the leader of a little-known far-right extremist group from Arizona, “Veterans on Patrol,” claimed responsibility, boasting that “We intend to take as many NexRads offline as possible.” The group has previously claimed that the US Air Force is intentionally seeding the air with chemicals and that Hurricane Helene was created by the US military to kill “thousands” of Americans. The group had also previously vowed to destroy other radars. If online rumors can incite physical attacks on weather warning infrastructure, the job of forecasters—already in short supply after National Weather Service jobs were slashed by DOGE—will become exponentially more difficult, threatening lives the next time a big storm hits.

So why have old-school weather control myths suddenly gone mainstream?

The first reason is that there is profit to be gained. In a world where floods, wildfires, and hurricanes are increasingly common but no less unpredictable, conspiracy theories offer a seemingly straightforward explanation—along with someone to blame. Taking the “man versus nature” storyline and replacing it with a narrative about “man versus man” helps turn helplessness into agency: find the villain, stop the storms. There has long been a market for this craving, which is how many conspiracy theories get started in the first place. Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich made money in the 1940s by selling “cloudbuster” devices, which he claimed could make rain by manipulating psychic energy in the atmosphere. Convicted of fraud, Reich later died in prison. But in the modern “attention economy,” clicks are the product. Greene has dominated headlines—and likely raised significant money—for spearheading a bill criminalizing weather modification.

The second reason is that efforts to push back against weather control disinformation face an uphill battle. The most effective conspiracy theories often contain a grain of truth, and weather control myths are no exception. As I’ve previously written in the Bulletin, the superpowers first became interested in weather control technologies for use as a potential weapon in the Cold War. Controversies surrounding their experiments eventually culminated in the 1977 Environmental Modification (ENMOD) Treaty, which preemptively banned “weather warfare.” ENMOD fed myths that governments really could make weather “on demand.” Today, the United States currently spends upwards of $20 million annually on weather modification research across 10 states. Its geopolitical rival, China, reportedly invests at least 70 times that, on the order of $1.4 billion. Chinese authorities were quick to attribute good weather during the 2008 and 2022 Olympics to their weather engineering efforts. In the absence of evidence about what militaries might secretly be doing, technology hype and rumor combine to fill the void.

While governments remain interested in long-term research, today, most if not all practical weather modification operations are conducted by commercial entities, which have economic incentives to hype and overpromise on what these technologies can actually deliver. Rainmaker Technology, the startup at the center of current controversy, is a case in point. Although the purpose of its operations in Texas may have been to encourage rainfall in drier regions, meteorologists have confirmed that the clouds it targeted quickly dissipated.

As conspiracy theories about weather modification swirl, companies like Rainmaker walk a fine line: They must distance themselves from adverse weather events—which are already unpredictable and increasingly common due to climate change—without undermining confidence in the technology they’re selling. This makes pushing back against claims that the weather can be “mastered” exceedingly difficult.

But the biggest reason why weather control conspiracies are now so salient is that some elected representatives have begun to embrace them. Last fall, Congresswoman Greene and the Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist Alex Jones made news for alleging that the Biden administration had somehow modified Hurricanes Helene and Milton to interfere with the 2024 presidential election. In the wake of these allegations, Florida state Sen. Ileana Garcia proposed legislation to ban weather modification in that state. The law has since passed. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier praised the law and followed up by sending threatening letters informing all Florida airports of their duty to report attempts at weather modification. Tennessee has also passed a “weather control” law, a harbinger of what’s to come.

When falsehoods are repeatedly validated by party elites, these falsehoods tend to embed as true beliefs that are difficult to override, even when new facts come to light. Psychologists have understood for decades that people engage in motivated reasoning, unconsciously privileging information that confirms their existing views, especially in defense of group identities such as political ideology. Disinformation campaigns initially spread within shared social or ideological circles. But we also know that because these psychological factors are common to all Americans, not just Americans on the political right, both sides are equally susceptible to disinformation.

My colleague Dan Silverman, an expert in political psychology at the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy and Technology, explains in a new book that the people least likely to buy into conspiracy theories are those who live through the actual events—in this case, survivors in Texas. However, tackling disinformation in weather-related contexts may be especially challenging. On the ground, reporters battle washed-out roads, and electrical lines go down, preventing witnesses from sharing their stories. Online, conspiracists face no such obstacle. In fact, social media algorithms have been shown to reward viral “quackery.” The lack of scientific consensus over whether weather modification even works no doubt muddies the information environment even further.

Given that all political leaders face the same headline-chasing incentives, it is encouraging that not all have so far caved. The holdouts, including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and many other prominent Republicans, continue to discredit the most outlandish weather control claims. But still more have embraced the conspiracy theories. Lawmakers in nearly 20 states have rushed to introduce similar anti-“weather control” bills. The real problem with the Texas floods was far more mundane: the lack of adequate warning—partially because climate change makes nature even more unpredictable, and partly because authorities failed to prepare. Ironically, many “weather control” proposals are worded so broadly that they could potentially be construed as banning carbon emissions, too. If interpreted that way, such efforts could inadvertently undercut President Trump’s ambitions to “reinvigorate” US investment in fossil fuel energies.

“Man versus nature” crises still confront us with a common enemy, and unlike “man versus man” situations, overcoming them will demand cooperation across party lines and political ideologies, even in an era of hyper-politicization. Weather-control myths distract from what can be done to blunt the next catastrophe—including cooperating to fund better weather prediction research, restaffing widespread vacancies at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and boosting disaster relief. Increasing our resilience will require leadership and compromise. On the other hand, if both parties begin to embrace wild myths about weather modification as a way to chase clicks and votes, the United States may be headed for the perfect storm of unpreparedness—just when Americans need clarity the most.