The Republican controlled legislature of Louisiana has passed a bill that bans what they call ‘chemtrails’, the sinister sounding label given to contrails (short for condensation trails) that form, if the atmospheric conditions are right, when hot, humid air from the plane’s jet engines mixes with the cold, dry air of the upper atmosphere, causing the formation of ice crystals.
Louisiana is not alone. Seven other states have passed similar bills.
Believers in chemtrails hold that the aircraft vapor trails that criss-cross skies across the globe every day are deliberately laden with toxins that are using commercial aircraft to spray them on people below, perhaps to enslave them to big pharma, or exert mind control, or sterilize people or even control the weather for nefarious motives.
…Despite the outlandishness of the belief and the complete absence of evidence, a 2016 study showed that the idea is held to be “completely true” by 10% of Americans and “somewhat true” by a further 20%-30% of Americans.
At least eight states, including Florida and Tennessee, have now introduced chemtrail-coded legislation to prohibit “geo-engineering” or “weather modification”. Louisiana’s bill, which must pass through the senate before reaching Governor Jeff Landry’s desk, orders the department of environmental quality to record reported chemtrail sightings and pass complaints on to the Louisiana air national guard.
While there are no penalties for violations, the bill calls for further investigation and documentation. Opponents fear it could be used to force airlines to re-route flights, challenge the location of airports and bring legal action against carriers.
There are many outlandish things that people believe and this may be one of the more harmless ones. But unlike many other wacky conspiracy theories, (like the moon lading being faked or alien spacecraft having crashed to Earth), this one requires a vast number of people to be involved, as this critic notes
In order to undertake such a conspiracy, literally tens of thousands of people across the globe would have to be in on it, including people manufacturing the fictional weather control chemicals and dispersing equipment, the baggage handlers standing there while the fake technicians are loading it into planes, pilots, plane mechanics, air traffic controllers, and political leaders of countries that don’t like each other. That’s not even considering the untold thousands of red-tape loving, approval stamp wielding bureaucrats needed to undertake such a feat.
But once you have swallowed the big idea, all these other things are seen as just minor details.
Most of them aren’t *that* stupid. They’re banning something which they know doesn’t exist as a backdoor legislation with the intent to promote climate denialism. I guess if enough people get really weird about this, and demand that jet planes be banned flying over their state because contrails keep appearing, it might accelerate the development of electric planes?
surely some modern legislators are gagging to ban magic. that isn’t real, but they might believe it, and enough constituents believe it, so… fire up the pyres.
It’s well known that you can get 20-30% of people to agree with more-or-less anything on a survey -- this is known as the “crazification factor“, aka “Keyes constant”.
While one interpretation is that at least 20% of the electorate are completely nuts, an alternative (and rather more generous) interpretation is that a similar proportion just don’t take surveys very seriously, and will pick the obviously crazy option just for shits and giggles.
There is no obvious way to tell which of these interpretations is correct. I suspect it’s a bit of both. But the important thing is to remember that at least some proportion of people almost certainly give deliberately wrong and / or crazy responses when surveyed.
If they can ban chemtrails (which are not real) and mandate surgeons to attempt to reimplant ectopic pregnancies (which has never been done successfully) then what is stopping them from requiring a working “undo” button on all guns in civilian hands?
I know a chemtrail-believer IRL. He gets all his news from radio programs and I suspect he genuinely has a reading disability. He was an airplane mechanic in the military and obviously has seen dashboards of aircraft, yet he persists in believing some are equipped with special levers to flip to discharge the chemtrails into the air for the purpose of controlling people’s minds. I pointed out that spraying a fine mist around isn’t a great way of mass control--what about the people who are indoors when this spraying is going on? What about the people who are elsewhere entirely? What effect does this imaginary spray have on animals and birds? Why aren’t they docile and controlled as well? The questions made him angry.
I asked him once--since everyone’s got a phone with a camera in their pocket at all times, how is it that nobody’s gotten a verifiable picture of this? His answer was incomprehensible.
The saying is true--you can’t rationally argue with someone over a belief they never entered into rationally.
I am surprised no chemtrail believer has gotten a job in commercial aircraft maintenance so they could blow the doors off that story.
Snowberry@1,
I don’t understand: how does banning “chemtrails” promote climate denialism?
@#7 KG
As the evidence for AGW has gotten better and better over the years, the anti side has kept shifting their arguments. From global climate change is impossible, to it’s just natural variability, to the climate is changing but it’s due to volcanoes or some other natural cause, even to accepting it is real and it is mostly humans’ fault, but it’s too late to do anything about it. The one consistent thread through all of this is that we ordinary humans either don’t have to change our behavior, or that changing our behavior won’t do any good. Now, if some dark cabal is changing the weather for who knows what reason, once again we hoi polloi don’t need to do anything except to encourage the FBI or someone to track these evildoers down and throw them in prison.
moarscienceplz@8,
Ah, yes, thanks. That makes… well, not sense, but the expected kind of denialist nonsense!
A more sinister development : The term-limited Republicans in Miami have simply decided to cancel the November elections, and postpone it until 2026!
.
This will of course be contested in court, right up to the supreme court… which will then decide; Yes, Republicans do have the right to cancel elections. Without first asking the voters.
This is a municipal election. The excuse is to have municipal elections in even-numbered years instead of odd-numbered years to increase voter turnout; although the effect, as birgerjohansson pointed out, is to allow term-limitwed republicans more time in office.
The Florida attorney general already sent a letter to the city saying that postponing an election by a vote of the city council only is illegal.
Honestly, ‘the moon landing was faked’ would still require a pretty large number of people to be in on it, considering the Russian space program would have had to be in on it as well; they certainly had no reason to go along with the U.S. beating them if they noticed anything off about the supposed moon launches.
Many of these conspiracy theories show a few things:
-- A lot of people have absolutely no sense of scale. The international airline industry can’t fit everybody that would need to know about such a conspiracy in a single darkened room to conspire.
-- A lot of people have problems with the idea that anybody who isn’t themselves, people they know personally, or one of the conspirators has any actual free will. There’s this underlying assumption that most of the world is just going along with the conspiracy. This is sort of the flip side of the above, the assumption that the conspirators are a small group but the baggage inspectors and the like are just drones following orders rather than active parts of the conspiracy.
-- A lot of Americans in particular have difficulty with the concept that there are other independent governments in the world. See in particular anti-vaxxers that claim the CDC is running the conspiracy, and ignoring the fact that there are many other countries with their own counterpart agencies that look at the same evidence and make similar but different decisions, when if there actually was a conspiracy you would expect other nations to either be in lockstep or to break completely and follow the ‘truth’.
Marcus @6
When they try, they get obliterated by a Jewish Space Laser targeted specifically at them. 😉
I wonder if a consortium of airlines might sue to have this sort of legislation overturned, inasmuch as the legislation is based on chemtrail conspiracism, which is implicitly defamatory on the entire airline industry.
But perhaps defamation has to be explicit and specific in order for the airlines to have standing.
I also wonder if this legislation, if allowed to stand, will be used as the basis for extorting stuff from the airlines: Give free flights to our agenda, or you’ll be investigated and fined for violations of the anti-chemtrails laws