Climate Conspiracies and Lies

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | July 12, 2025

We can’t seem to move away from magical thinking when it comes to doubting climate change reality. Never mind the overwhelming science now decades in the making, and never mind the evidence piling up before our very eyes with one catastrophic weather event after another.

Even those denials are not the most distressing rhetoric of the science-deniers. No, that would be their conspiracy theories about nearly everything and outright lies concerning renewable energy.

Let’s start with the latest conspiracy idiocy, courtesy of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia. She is a strong believer in nearly all things conspiratorial, and you might remember she theorized California’s devastating wildfires might have been started by space lasers or “blue lights from space” controlled by some unnamed Jewish cabal. We all sort of laughed at the preposterous notion but only lightly condemned the overt antisemitism.

Undeterred by that flight of fancy, Greene now intends to introduce legislation to ban the creation and use of “weather modification, weather manipulation and geoengineering” negatively impacting our day-to-day weather. What in the world is she talking about? Glad you asked, because Rep. Greene is out to pass laws that ban “chemtrails,” which already don't exist.

The theory here is that those white streaks we occasionally see in the sky are not just contrails caused when the hot gas of a jet engine exhaust hits the extremely cold air at altitude causing condensation which freezes and becomes visible. (It’s the same process at play that lets us see our breath on cold winter days.) No, those are some kind of chemicals being released into the air for some undefined but clearly nefarious purpose, according to the conspiracy theorists.

This is, they claim, an attempt by the government or some less obvious entity to exercise mind or behavior control or create disease or cause climate change or…something. It’s not exactly clear who would benefit from this conspiracy, but surely it’s somebody.

Where all those chemicals end up as they are tumbling through the air is unknown, and we’ll just ignore that while the “conspiracy” seems to be pretty new, contrails have been around since aircraft started flying at altitude. And, really, since these contrails are clearly visible in old WWII newsreel films, it’s a mystery why we didn't use chemtrails on the enemy back then.

It should be noted that contrails can minimally impact weather in certain circumstances. Enough of them in the same area can reduce sunlight but at the same time trap heat, either of which can impact temperatures. They can even turn into a form of wispy cirrus clouds, but chemicals are not involved.

(As an aside, yes, there are some western drought-plagued states, nine of them altogether, still attempting to utilize cloud seeding to generate more rain. That might seem absurd given recent flooding events, but in some regions rain is more valuable than gold. Moisture-laden clouds must already exist, then usually tiny silver iodide particles are dropped or “seeded” into the clouds around which the moisture can condense and fall as rain or snow. There is no consensus on whether this technique actually works.)

Which moves us into the realm of blatant untruths. They generally go like this: environmental damage caused by the creation of solar panels is worse than the benefit, and wind turbines are even worse. Our current president is especially fond of these lies.

There is no perfectly clean energy production method or system. Both solar and wind have issues in manufacturing and end-of-life phases of their existence, but they do not pollute while generating energy. Fossil fuels pollute at every stage.

We are getting better at cleaner manufacturing of solar panels, which now are the cheapest producers of electricity. In fact, the International Energy Agency says solar is now the “cheapest electricity in history.” Even better, a company in New Zealand has developed a system to successfully recycle 90 percent of solar panels by weight.

Then there are wind turbines. Donald Trump, at various times, has claimed wind turbines cause cancer, migraines, and autism and are responsible for “billions and billions” of bird deaths every year. Most recently, he claimed China doesn’t even have any wind farms of their own. The truth is China manufactures 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines, according to the Global Wind Energy Council, and uses half the wind power on the planet including one wind farm alone, producing enough electricity to power 2.4 million homes.

The birds? Alas, according to the American Bird Conservancy the leading cause of bird death, by miles, are domestic cats, which kill 3.4 billion birds annually.

There are no chemtrails, and the economic and environmental benefits of both solar and wind power far outweigh any disadvantages and are exponentially cleaner and far more responsible than filthy fossil fuels. And that’s not a lie or a conspiracy.