They Think They Own the Sky: A Critical-Theoretical Examination of Weaponized Weather, Solar Geoengineering, and Chemtrail Conspiracies

In 1967, the U.S. Federal Government successfully weaponized the weather, using aerosol seeding to increase rainfall strategically over North Vietnam and Laos, miring enemy truck traffic in mud. For decades, a global network of conspiracy theorists has asserted that aircraft are spreading “chemtrails” in the skies, with the sinister if often-vague purpose of depopulating the planet and/or enslaving humanity. More recently, a global network of scholars, with the support of economic and fossil fuel elites, has engaged with a host of technologies called geoengineering, one of which proposes aircraft spreading sulfate particles in the upper atmosphere to cool the planet and mitigate climate change. Bringing these elements into conversation, the proposed paper raises, and attempts to answer, a question: who stewards the sky? With critical theorist Herbert Marcuse’s dialectic, domination is ultimately rooted in the domination of nature. From this follows analysis of three issues raised: first, addressing the risks of unilateral technocratic weather control in the hands of a single nation-state—here, presumably the United States, given its ascendancy in geoengineering research and its infrastructural reliance on fossil fuels. Second, analyzing the connection between imaginary conspiracy theories and real anxieties when even the atmosphere is potentially the property of an elite. Third and more broadly, showing how geoengineering reproduces the logic of a system rooted in technological and market fetishism—the belief that technological progress is inevitable and desirable, which in turn fuels perpetual economic growth. I conclude, using Marcuse’s dialectic, that solar geoengineering fosters new forms of domination while also attempting to elide the political realities and injustices of climate change—the very problem it promises to address. I also sketch some possibilities and concerns that arise from the just, stewardship-based development and deployment of geoengineering in the context of unaddressed climate change and its looming impacts.