Smart Move, Lee Zeldin

There are several standout figures in the Trump administration this time around, and not all of them are the big names everybody knows, such as RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, or Pete Hegseth, who is currently on shaky ground. 

The people whom I look to are a little bit lower profile, like Susy Wiles or Lee Zeldin, who plug away, accomplishing things that need doing.

Zeldin is doing great work at the EPA, eliminating waste and doing his best to improve public trust in the agency. He's clawing back some of the most outrageous and useless grants that were dished out to Democratic Party pols, and now he is helping to sort out public confusion on issues that have festered due to increasing (and often justified) mistrust of the government. 

🚨 BREAKING: Trump's EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announces the EPA will now compile and release EVERYTHING they know about geoengineering and contrails

"To anyone who's ever looked up to the streaks in the sky and asked, what the heck is going on? Or seen headlines about… pic.twitter.com/WMHbUhS9gM

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) July 10, 2025

BREAKING: Trump's EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announces the EPA will now compile and release EVERYTHING they know about geoengineering and contrails

"To anyone who's ever looked up to the streaks in the sky and asked, what the heck is going on? Or seen headlines about private actors and even governments looking to blot out the sun in the name of stopping global warming? We've endeavored to answer all of your questions."

"For the purpose of releasing it to you now publicly. In other words, I want you to know everything I know about these topics and without any exception."

"Instead of simply dismissing these questions and concerns as baseless conspiracies, we're meeting them head on."

"Everything we know about contrails to solar geoengineering will be in there. That means anyone who reads through this information will know as much about these topics as I do as EPA Administrator."

The people MUST see it all.

Two of those issues around which there is a lot of confusion are geoengineering and so-called "chemtrails." They are not directly related--geoengineering is a real area of study in which people are doing actual experiments, while "chemtrails" are almost certainly an ill-founded conspiracy theory driven by people's misunderstanding of the physics of hot, water-filled gases interacting with thin and frigid air. 

Conservatives are more likely to be freaked out by both--geoengineering with SOME reason and chemtrails based on flimsy and unconvincing evidence. Zeldin's move to ensure transparency and overcome the "expert" tendency to dismiss people's concerns is a smart one. Rather than calling people stupid, Zeldin has decided to take a refreshing approach: release all the evidence and let people evaluate it. 

The page on contrails is great. It lays out the whats and whys of how contrails form, why they do so, and what we know about the effects they have. It also discusses what and why certain chemicals are intentionally released from aircraft, and in what manner they differ from the contrails that a lot of people think are part of a geoengineering or chemical weapons program. 

I have never bought the chemtrail conspiracy theories for a lot of reasons. Civil and commercial aviation are huge industries that have been around for over a hundred years, and contrails have been a known and well-understood phenomenon ever since planes got high enough to create them. Any footage of bomber runs from World War II shows masses of aircraft trailed by contrails generated by the exhaust. 

Is it possible that chemicals are put in the fuels in addition to what is normally in jet fuel? I suppose, although they would have to survive the process of ignition in a jet engine, which seems unlikely. But given the size of the aviation industry and the way that fuel is made and delivered, it would have to be a massive conspiracy. Occam's razor says no. 

Geoengineering, on the other hand, is a real phenomenon, although its costs and benefits are not well understood. Messing around with Mother Nature is quite scary, but its advocates argue that Mother Nature can be quite scary as well, which is the point of finding out how we might manipulate it to our benefit. We do so on the ground every day--arguably, dams are geoengineering, for instance. 

The geoengineering that is controversial centers around efforts to manipulate the atmosphere to cool the Earth down, and is rightly controversial given that we don't understand all the variables. What would the unintended consequences be? Is it necessary? Would cooling the Earth even be a good thing? After all, cool periods are associated with more human misery than warm periods in history. 

Unlike many people, I am not particularly WORRIED by small experiments in geoengineering, although I distrust the people rushing headlong into trying to manipulate the climate due to questionable fears. I think it would be useful to understand the relationship between particulates and climate in more precise ways. 

I'm less scared about, say, Sulfur being released into the air in modest quantities because we already did the UNcontrolled experiment in the 1850s to 1970s--we released massive amounts of sulfur and soot into the atmosphere by using coal, and while the pollution sucked, the Earth survived just fine. In fact, some of the warming that has been measured in recent decades is likely due to the removal of much of the pollution from the atmosphere. 

Call it unintentional geoengineering, if you will. 

I don't think there are mind control chemicals or birth control being sprayed into the air. It would be easy enough to discover as the conspiracy would be so vast as to be impossible to carry off. As with the moon landing--a project that employed millions of people--it would be more difficult to keep it secret than just landing on the moon. Successful conspiracies are generally pretty small. They exist, but the optimal number of people to keep a secret is one. 

Our government does a lot of bad or questionable things. The CIA did mind control experiments, and the intelligence community does some shady stuff. But I think you can be confident that the folks at the EPA, despite all their flaws, are not hiding something like this. 

Shoving money around to politically connected friends or using regulations to manipulate markets are more their speed. Your average EPA bureaucrat isn't engaged in an evil plot to poison us. 

It is a sign of how far trust in our government has fallen that many people worry about such things. The government has earned much of that distrust, of course. But in most cases, you can explain bad outcomes by looking for institutional inertia, ass-covering, following the money, and all the normal human failings. 

Few people are as evil as Anthony Fauci or Randi Weingarten.