The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Thursday launched a new website to address the public’s growing concerns about geoengineering and contrails.

The EPA’s resource on geoengineering details the potentially negative impacts it can have on the environment, “including depleting the ozone layer, harming crops, altering weather patterns and creating acid rain.” Solar geoengineering activities can also lead to adverse respiratory health impacts, according to the report.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the agency released the resource to be totally transparent with the American people about “the latest science, research and other information” regarding these these topics.

“Americans have legitimate questions about contrails and geoengineering, and they deserve straight answers,”  Zeldin said in a video posted on social media. “We’re publishing everything EPA knows about these topics on these websites.”

Zeldin acknowledged that the “EPA shares the significant reservations many Americans have when it comes to geoengineering activities.”

Climate science encompasses “a broad range of activities,” including attempts “to cool the Earth or remove certain gases from the atmosphere,” the resource explains.

Gases that trap heat in the atmosphere are often referred to as greenhouse gases, which include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and fluorinated gases. For example, geoengineering includes the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (also called Carbon Dioxide Removal – CDR) through methods such as direct air capture and storage, ocean iron fertilization, or ocean alkalinity enhancement.

The EPA resource maintains that a subset of geoengineering known as Solar Geoengineering or Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) has not been studied enough to determine whether its safe for human beings.

SRM activities are meant to cool the Earth by intentionally modifying the amount of sunlight that reaches the Earth’s surface, according to the resource. This is done by reflecting more sunlight back to space, usually through injecting gases, like sulfur dioxide, into the upper atmosphere where they form reflective particles.

These activities are referred to as Solar Geoengineering or Solar Radiation Modification (SRM). Most proposed solar radiation modification techniques involve adding material to the atmosphere to increase the amount of incoming sunlight reflected back to space. While some of these approaches are currently being studied, not enough information exists to fully understand the viability, risks, and benefits of each approach.

The types of solar geoengineering techniques include:

Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) – adding small reflective particles to the upper atmosphere (stratosphere) to reflect incoming sunlight. Sulfur dioxide (SO2), one of the types of chemicals considered for SAI, can chemically react in the stratosphere to form reflective sulfate aerosols.

Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB) – adding particles, such as sea spray, to the lower atmosphere (near the surface) to increase the reflectivity of clouds over the ocean.

Other techniques, such as Cirrus Cloud Thinning (CCT) or space-based methods have been far less researched due to uncertainty in the processes, high potential costs, and more limited feasibility.

Each of these approaches potentially entail “unintended health and environmental consequences that require careful evaluation,” the EPA report stated.

Potential health and environmental impacts of solar geoengineering reportedly include:

Ozone – adding particles to the stratosphere could lead to stratospheric ozone layer depletion; however, lower temperatures from reduced sunlight may also reduce ozone at ground-level and its negative health impacts.

Ecosystem health and crop yields – adding sulfur to the atmosphere increases the risk of acid rain, deposition of sulfur to the surface, and worsened soil acidity, which could impact food production. Decreased sunlight (i.e., energy) reaching the surface could also impact ecosystem and agricultural productivity.

Rain and snowfall patterns – adding particles to the stratosphere can alter hydrological cycles, leading to changes in the amount of rainfall and drought in specific regions.

Respiratory health – some particles in the stratosphere eventually come down to Earth’s surface where they can contribute to adverse health impacts, including making it difficult to breathe.

A government whistleblower explained how taxpayer-funded geoengineering programs strategically avoid oversight.

Silicon Valley entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan spoke with the whistleblower, who has held high-level security clearances and consulted with government entities, including the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, NOAA, and the Intelligence Community, for over a decade.

“Geoengineering is now commonly called ‘climate intervention,'” Shanahan explained an in depth report posted on X.

SRM is now referred to as ‘solar radiation modification.’ SAI is now ‘stratospheric aerosol intervention.’ These semantic shifts aren’t scientific; they’re strategic. They’re designed to obfuscate the truth and shield these programs from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, media scrutiny, and public opposition.

Shanahan obtained federal grant data from the whistleblower “showing millions of taxpayer dollars flowing to universities under these new labels.”

One organization stood out: the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). This nonprofit consortium of 130 colleges and universities manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research on behalf of the National Science Foundation. UCAR has received more than $230 million in direct federal awards. Yet much of the documentation about their work is inaccessible without an internal login.

Shanahan reported that the fossil fuel industry, including ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP have all lobbied for solar radiation modification and have funded think tanks in an effort to shape narratives that “normalize geoengineering.”

Additionally, she asserted that “elite private foundations like the Simons Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Bill Gates’ Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (FICER)” have all been funneling millions into academic institutions, “where the work proceeds without public engagement or informed consent.”

Bill Gates’ FICER is particularly alarming. The person in charge of disbursing funds there is David Keith, one of geoengineering’s most vocal champions. Keith has appeared on national TV and publicly acknowledged that these activities could result in the premature deaths of at least 10,000 people annually. Still, he continues to advocate for expanding these technologies.

The EPA’s new resource details what the government has done to identify and track private actors potentially engaged in solar geoengineering or solar radiation modification activities in the United States.

 For example, on April 15, 2025, EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation (OAR) sent a request to a start-up company called “Make Sunsets,” which claims to be geoengineering the planet by releasing balloons filled with sulfur dioxide (SO2) and selling “cooling credits.” As of May 2025, Make Sunsets reported releasing about 0.1 tons of SO2 into the stratosphere. Even though that amounts to an extraordinarily low amount of SO2, EPA is conducting an internal review of any current authorities that can be utilized to halt this activity, especially if it significantly scales up. Alternatively, it is being determined whether new authorities would be needed from Congress, or whether another agency should take the lead in regulating and enforcing against such activities.

In addition, any persons planning to engage in solar geoengineering activities that may result in the disposition of material into ocean waters or onto sea ice may need to submit a permit application to EPA under the Marine Protection, Research and Sanctuaries Act (MPRSA), based on multiple factors such as the location and type of disposition.

The EPA announced that as of July 2025, the agency has issued one MPRSA permit for a marine carbon dioxide removal research project.

These approaches have the potential to impact marine environments, including:

Toxicity of introduced materials to marine organisms

Decreased ecosystem productivity due to decreased sunlight (i.e., energy) reaching the environment

And other impacts depending on the specific materials or methods used and the scale of the activities, including impacts outside of the immediate geographic area where the activities are conducted

The online resource also discusses weather modification, which modifies regional or local weather patterns, most often through cloud seeding.

Cloud seeding involves introducing artificial particles into clouds with the objective of increasing rain or snow.

The main difference between weather modification and solar geoengineering is that weather modification is intended to have local, short-term effects, whereas solar geoengineering is intended to have larger regional or global effects that persist. Despite the different intended impacts, there can be overlap between the two definitions in regulatory statutes. For example, weather modification activities reported under the Weather Modification Reporting Act (WMRA) also include the intentional modification of solar radiation, and multiple states are considering bans to both intentional weather and sunlight modification.

The EPA’s report goes on to note that the U.S. federal government and various state governments have been involved in cloud seeding operations for many decades.

Scientists at the General Electric Research Laboratory first demonstrated the basis of cloud seeding in a laboratory setting in the 1940s. After this discovery, the U.S. federal government spent the following decades supporting cloud seeding research and field experiments until funding was cut in the 1980s.

The Department of Defense has run several ill-advised “geophysical warfare” weather modification programs that been since been discontinued, according to the EPA report, including:

Project Cirrus: GE Labs, the Naval Research Laboratory, and Army Signal Corps used Air Force aircraft to conduct the first hurricane cloud seeding experiment with dry ice. In October 1947, the project had two military aircraft dump dry ice into a hurricane off Florida’s coast. [4] While results of that experiment were inconclusive, current science indicates that no existing technology can modify hurricanes.

Operation Popeye: A classified military weather modification program carried out during the Vietnam War that attempted to extend monsoon season to disrupt select supply routes in North Vietnam and Laos.

Project Stormfury: Led by NOAA and the U.S. Navy, this program sought to modify hurricane strength through seeding with silver iodide to reduce the most destructive wind speeds. Experiments were carried out on four hurricanes on eight different days between 1961 and 1971. Although the results were considered “positive” at the time, the observed changes were within the expected natural variability of hurricanes. Current science indicates that no existing technology can modify hurricanes.

More recently, the federal government has supported cloud seeding efforts at the state and regional level to combat droughts and megadroughts, according to the EPA.

The online resource also discusses condensation trails, or “contrails,” explains the science behind the aerial phenomenon.

Contrails are line-shaped exhaust clouds or “condensation trails” that are visible behind jet aircraft. Since aircraft typically fly at high altitudes where it is very cold, the very hot exhaust coming out of the jet engine reacts with the very cold air, sometimes causing an exhaust cloud to form that you can see under certain atmospheric conditions.

Jet aircraft form contrails under these atmospheric conditions for the same reason that you can see the exhaust from your vehicle or your own breath on a cold day. The federal government is not aware of there ever being a contrail intentionally formed over the United States for the purpose of geoengineering/weather modification.

Space-weather scientists say that the earth’s ongoing magnetic pole shift and weakened magnetic field has led to jet stream instability, causing jet contrails to become more pronounced and form cirrus homogenitus clouds that span the entire sky.

Several states have passed laws to ban or regulate solar geoengineering and weather modification activities in their domains.

Last month, Florida passed a law “prohibiting certain acts intended to affect the temperature, the weather, or the intensity of sunlight within the atmosphere of this state.” The measure bans both solar geoengineering and traditional weather modification activities.

Tennessee passed a similar law in 2024, banning the intentional modification of sunlight, weather, or temperature.

Over two dozen other states, including Kentucky, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Arizona, Iowa, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Carolina, Utah, Wyoming, Alabama, Idaho, Indiana, Montana, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, Vermont, West Virginia, Missouri, and Maine have introduced similar legislation in 2024 or 2025, and are pending further action.

The Tennessee law went into effect July 1, 2024 and Florida’s legislation took effect on July 1, 2025.