Trump's EPA wades into "weather modification" debate after Texas floods

The Trump administration is working carefully to stamp out conspiracy theories about "weather modification," wading into a viral, recurring debate that reignited in the wake of Texas' deadly flooding.Why it matters: Some Trump allies have amplified baseless claims that cloud-seeding or geoengineering caused the disaster, complicating the government's efforts to reassert scientific facts without alienating the MAGA base.Geoengineering involves large-scale — and often controversial — attempts to counteract the effects of climate change, such as reflecting sunlight or enhancing rainfall.The industry has attracted significant investment in recent years, but there's no evidence that human technology played any role in the Texas floods.The intrigue: EPA administrator Lee Zeldin released a set of online resources Tuesday that claim to cover "everything the agency knows about the latest science, research and other information regarding contrails and geoengineering."The materials directly debunk common myths, including the idea that aircraft contrails are secretly dispersing chemicals ("chemtrails") and that the government is manipulating weather events.But they do so in a way that echoes the language of skeptics — emphasizing transparency and public concern, rather than outright dismissal.What they're saying: "Americans have legitimate questions about contrails and geoengineering, and they deserve straight answers," Zeldin said in a statement, stressing the EPA's commitment to "total transparency.""The enthusiasm for experiments that would pump pollutants into the high atmosphere has set off alarm bells here at the Trump EPA," he added, referring to geoengineering projects that seek to combat climate change."This is what it looks like when government actually listens to the will of the people and doesn't try to squash it."Driving the news: The release comes just days after Rainmaker, a California-based startup, was falsely accused of using cloud-seeding drones to trigger the Texas floods that have killed more than 120 people.Rainmaker, which raised $25 million last month to expand its drought-fighting operations in Texas and other Western states, found itself at the center of the storm after former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn promoted the claims on social media."I suddenly got thousands of notifications on my phone," CEO Augustus Doricko told Axios. "It was because [retired] General Mike Flynn jumped in and insinuated that cloud-seeding was responsible."What it does: Rainmaker uses drones to enhance rain, with contracts in such drought-vulnerable states as Texas, Utah, Colorado, and California.It's a next-generation take on decades-old weather-modification techniques — with Rainmaker also designing drones capable of flying in conditions too dangerous for human pilots.What happened: Texas regulators have specific weather-based thresholds for suspending cloud-seeding operations to reduce the risk of flooding.Doricko said those thresholds were met on July 3, but that Rainmaker stopped operations in the region on July 2 because of what its own meteorologists were seeing. He added that such pauses occur "tens of times" per year.The Guadalupe River began flooding late in the evening of July 3 into the early hours of July 4.Independent climatologists say the scale of the rainfall far exceeded what cloud seeding could produce, attributing the disaster instead to remnants of Tropical Storm Barry.Between the lines: Flynn's tweet calling for transparency from Rainmaker has more than one million views on X.Flynn never posted the company's response, nor even seems to have acknowledged it. But he later replied to another post about the supposed threat of "weather modification."Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), meanwhile, said one day after the floods that she'll introduce a bill that would make any "weather modification" a felony.The bottom line: The Trump administration is walking a careful tightrope, trying to counter misinformation without alienating a political movement that increasingly distrusts science.Climate tech startups like Rainmaker are the latest to get caught in the crossfire.

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