Remember when Tennessee lawmakers passed a bizarre bill that banned chemtrails?

Tennessee state lawmakers made news headlines around the world when they passed a bill that aimed to ban chemtrails, the visible trail of clouds left behind by planes that widely believed conspiracy theories hold are a government plot to geoengineer weather or control the world population.

On April 1st, the Tennessee House of Representatives passed a bizarre bill that had previously been passed by the Senate banning geoengineering over the state. But the bill was no joke and it was eventually signed into law by Tennessee Governor Bill Lee.

Tennessee lawmakers voted to ban something that really isn't real in a very weird case that saw any geoengineering in the skies above the state banned. This is how legislation got passed based on a conspiracy theory. 

Senate Bill 2691 and House Bill 2063 were two pieces of legislation aimed at banning the weird phenomenon known as chemtrails from the skies of Tennessee. If you don’t know what chemtrails are, that’s okay. They’re just an unlikely conspiracy theory that's took the world by storm. 

According to experts at Harvard University, the chemtrails conspiracy theory states that governments and other powerful entities are secretly working to release toxic chemicals into the planet’s atmosphere using planes for their schemes. 

This could make a lot of sense if you’ve ever looked up into the sky and seen the plume of what looks to be smoke coming from the engines of an airplane. However, there is an easier explanation for what’s coming out of the back of a plane. 

Those clouds of what you might think is smoke coming from planes are in reality clouds of water vapor. They have a name, it’s contrails, and they also have an explanation that is a lot more reasonable than governments poisoning the us. 

Photo by Jan Antonin Kolar on Unsplash

“Contrails are clouds that form when water vapor condenses and freezes around small particles (aerosols) in aircraft exhaust,” wrote the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. But there’s a little more to the explanation of contrails. 

The water vapor that forms the contrails behind a plane comes from the air around it as well as from the exhaust and you can think of what forms as human-made cirrus clouds that can last for long periods depending on the water in the air. 

Photo by Mark Valentine on Unsplash

Contrails aren’t sinister but a surprising amount of Americans don’t believe in the reality of these natural vapor clouds according to a study published in 2017. Of the 1,000 people surveyed by researchers, 10 percent believed that the chemtrails conspiracy was completely true. 

Another 30 percent of people thought that chemtrails were somewhat true, which is only a little concerning since explanations for why the government would be doing this range from sterilization and mind, population, or weather control…

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons By Olivier Cleynen - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

All of this context helps to explain what happened in Tennessee in early 2024 and the bills to ban chemtrails in the skies over the state, which were sponsored by Representative Monty Fritts and Senator Steve Southerland—both of whom are Republicans. 

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons By Antony-22 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

The bills claimed that it was documented that the “federal government or other entities acting on the federal government's behalf or at the federal government's request may conduct geoengineering experiments by intentionally dispersing chemicals into the atmosphere.”

In effect, SB 2691 and HB 2063 would essentially ban “intentional injection, release, or dispersion, by any means, of chemicals, chemical compounds, substances” inside the state's borders aimed at affecting “temperature, weather, or the intensity of the sunlight.”

Photo by Jake Melara on Unsplash

SB 2691 passed on March 18th according to The Tennessean, and HB 2063 was set to go to the state's House Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee on March 25th. 

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons By Roger Schultz, CC BY 2.0

HB 2063 was later passed by the Tennessee House of Representatives on April 1st... no, this wasn't an April Fool's joke but rather an interesting and important look into the state of American politics. Mostly because creating legislation around a conspiracy theory seems quite absurd. 

The experts from Harvard University, who study theoretical proposals for reducing global warming through geoengineering and limiting sunlight to Earth, found that there was no evidence that chemtrails actually exist anywhere in the world. 

Photo by Rae Galatas on Unsplash

"We have not seen any credible evidence that chemtrails exist. If we did see any evidence that governments were endangering their own citizens in the manner alleged in the chemtrails conspiracy, we would be eager to expose and stop any such activities", the experts wrote. 

Photo by Vlad Hilitanu on Unsplash

So why ban chemtrails if they aren’t real? The answer is nobody knows. It could have just been a politically popular move or the sponsors of the bill and those who voted in favor of it really may have believed that chemtrails were real, which would say a lot about the state's political representatives. 

On April 12th, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed the bill banning geoengineering over the state into law according to the Tennessee General Assembly's website. Substack author and commentator Jon Fleetwood called the signing an "unprecedented move to protect human health and the environment."