How the ‘Chemtrails’ Conspiracy Theory Is Sabotaging One Company

0:04Did you know that it's possible to artificially create rain? I didn't. But the technology has actually been around for decades. It's called cloud seeding. Cloud seeding was invented in 1946 by General Electric scientists in upstate New York. And what they were trying to do was to find a solution to the icing on airplane wings. That's our colleague Chris Marr. And they discovered that when they put dry ice into clouds and a simulated experiment, It produced ice crystals like snow. So it really was a way to squeeze more water, more moisture out of clouds than would traditionally be falling naturally.

0:48Typically, the way it works is an airplane flies into a bunch of clouds and releases a type of salt called silver iodide. The water particles attach to the tiny bit of salt and form rain or snow. What I discovered in kind of looking back through the history of the cloud seeding was that in the 70s, that was kind of considered the heyday. It was used much more commonly, but the usage fell off. That's because it was hard to measure how well cloud seeding was working. The technology still had a ways to go. And it also seemed a little unnatural to some people. It does have that sort of mysterious element to it that you can affect, you know, natural weather systems, things in nature.

1:29Also, people have questions about whether people should interfere with nature, whether we should try to influence it or to what degree. Today, thanks to new technology, cloud seeding has seen somewhat of a comeback, especially in states where droughts have gotten dramatically worse. States like Utah, Nevada, California, western states that tend to be dry. They've had a lot of droughts in the past few decades. There's hope that cloud seeding can help solve the massive water crisis out west. Except the misgivings about the technology won't go away. And now cloud seeding is caught up in full-blown conspiracy theories.

2:08Cloud seeding has gotten mixed into some of these weather conspiracies. And they've sort of accelerated because of social media, because of fears, anxieties over climate change, making these conspiracies even more prevalent today. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Wednesday, December 17th.

2:39Coming up on the show, the push to make more rain and the conspiracy theories getting in the way.

3:00When Chris started looking at cloud seeding efforts across the country, he zoomed in on Utah, which last month kicked off the largest cloud seeding project in U.S. history. Why is Utah a good testing ground for modern cloud seeding efforts? Yeah, there's a number of reasons. And, you know, one of them is just that the state is desperate for water. It has been going through droughts. The Great Salt Lake is in trouble, and everyone kind of recognizes that from the governor on down. The Salt Lake in 2022 reached its lowest recorded level. It's been kind of shrinking, and I got to fly over the lake a bit and kind of skim over the surface, and you can see all the flat, you know, dried-out areas, which is pretty incredible.

3:48Maybe this is an obvious question, but the drying up of the Great Salt Lake, What is the issue? Is it like, what's the concern primarily? Yeah, so the Great Salt Lake is important on so many levels. It's important ecologically. It would be really an ecological disaster if the lake were to dry out. It supports a lot of industry, about$2 billion worth of industry annually, recreation, mineral mining, different things. And even now there is also sort of a health risk too, because as the lake dries out, more dust is being created from that dry lake bed. It's laden with arsenic. There's risks to people's health, asthma, a variety of other concerns.

4:31Some state officials in Utah are hoping that cloud seeding could be an important tool in reviving the Great Salt Lake. Here's the head of the state's Department of Natural Resources on a local Fox station. We're going to have cloud seeding station up and down the entire, not just the Wasatch, but the entire range of the Rockies through the state of Utah. They believe that cloud seeding can increase precipitation by about 10 percent. On a day-to-day basis, that may not be that much, but over decades, it's pretty significant. And they increased their budget from$350 ,000 a year to$5 million a year, which is a pretty huge increase.

5:10Another thing the state of Utah did to amp up its cloud seeding efforts is team up with a startup called Rainmaker. So Rainmaker, it's formed in 2023, so a very new company. Its CEO is 25 years old. There's about 120 employees right now, and they're really trying to develop this technology to upgrade something that was done for decades and kind of bring it into the 21st century. Rainmaker's cloud seeding operation has grown quickly. It got off the ground thanks to a big name in Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel, who was an early backer of Rainmaker's CEO. And the company does things differently than old-school cloud seeding.

5:49Instead of using planes, it uses drones and AI-enhanced weather modeling. In the past, the silver iodide would come out of a flare that was attached to an airplane. And that did work, but it was not very precise, and you had pilots who had to fly into dangerous weather. So Rainmaker, you know, in using drones, They also give themselves a lot more flexibility in terms of targeting specific areas. And also they have sensors on the drone, so they're getting real-time information from the drone itself. The question is how much rain Rainmaker can actually make. The Great Salt Lake needs an enormous amount of water per year to stop drying up.

6:29Rainmaker is trying to prove that they can make about 10 billion gallons of water by April. That's still a fraction of what the lake ultimately needs, but Utah state officials think cloud seeding could help. And it's a whole lot cheaper than other methods, like desalination. I got on a call with Rainmaker's CEO, Augustus DiRico, last week. Hi. Hi, Jess. How are you? Good. How are you? I am blessed. I am blessed. Augustus has blonde hair cut into a mullet. He showed up to the studio in a big brown jacket and drank his coffee black. I asked Augustus what about cloud seeding technology has changed enough to make his project work.

7:08In 2017, in the United States, some researchers realized if you have the right kind of radar and you fly in a zigzag or a spiral or a specific pattern, you can use that radar to differentiate between liquid and ice. That is the fundamental innovation that enables Rainmaker to exist, that enables cloud seeding to work. Was that sort of your pitch for the company? The pitch for—it's funny you say that. But the, yeah, basically, long story short, yes, I was like, with these new radar technologies, with these new drones, with all this new software, we can revolutionize cloud seeding and bring water to the West and to the rest of the Earth's deserts in an unprecedented way.

7:48Augustus says that he and his team spend a lot of time outdoors, getting drones out and refining their rainmaking process. A lot of life is on mountaintops, in snowy valleys, actually deploying these drones and seeding these clouds. We drive out into the field, we launch these drones, we seed the clouds with silver iodide, and we'll do that for 6, 8, 12, 16 hours max at a time and bring snow down thereafter. Beyond the challenges with the technology, Augustus has a consistent problem to deal with, trying to put concerns to rest about the science behind his work. That's because you can only modify the weather for so long before the conspiracy theory starts swirling.

8:32Cloud seeding and weather modification, it's very frontier. It has to do with modifying the sky, and people have this sort of intuitive notion that, like, that's God's domain or something. I mean, the words weather modification sound sci-fi. Yeah, yeah. And to some, that's really exciting. To others, if you're not exposed to technology, if you're not interested in sci-fi and you're just trying to go about your life, yeah, I am super empathetic to why people would be concerned about that. We have to make this really esoteric atmospheric science information digestible so that they understand what we're doing and that it's not some sort of malevolent conspiracy theory by a supervillain kid that wants to control the weather.

9:18After the break, Rainmaker gets pulled into a major weather conspiracy theory.

10:09In July, Texas suffered a major natural disaster. A massive storm made its way through the central part of the state. Water levels rose along the Guadalupe River and turned into deadly floods. It is a heartbreaking scene in the beloved Texas Hill Country tonight. Catastrophic flooding in central Texas, overwhelming a Christian summer camp for girls along the Guadalupe River. A month's worth of rain falling in just a matter of hours. That camp saying that they have been hit with catastrophic damage. They say they do not have power, Wi-Fi or water. And again, at least 20 campers are believed to be missing right now.

10:47Here's my colleague Chris again. In the end, you know, more than 130 people were killed. Just an incredibly tragic story. And pretty quickly, people started to tweet about Rainmaker because someone had figured out that Rainmaker had operations in Texas. Two days before the flood, Rainmaker had seeded clouds 150 miles from the site of the tragic summer camp fatalities. And people online started to wonder if the two events were connected. They started asking, you know, is it possible this cloud seeding company could have caused this tragedy, all this flooding and these deaths? Everyone is searching for answers amid this tragedy and still searching for people in Texas.

11:30What we're also seeing is people latching onto a conspiracy that cloud seeding is what has caused the deadly floods that we saw play out last Friday. Retired General Michael Flynn asked for an accounting of the company's Texas operations. And Marjorie Taylor Greene, soon after that, you know, within a day or two, she said she was going to introduce a bill to ban all weather modification across the entire United States. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is targeting weather modification. She actually posted a photograph of Augustus DiRico, the CEO of Rainmaker. The high-profile tweets fanned the flames of a conspiracy theory that cloud seeding can cause natural disasters.

12:13Rainmaker and Augustus responded quickly and said that the company's cloud seeding efforts in Texas could not have made the amount of water that caused the flooding. I mean, it's not possible scientifically or with the laws of physics for the company to have produced the quantities of water that came down from this storm system. The National Weather Service had said that about 20 inches of rain fell in certain areas, and Rainmaker has said that its cloud-seeing emissions can only produce a fraction of an inch. So it wasn't really physically possible for the company to have done it. And the company also ceased its operations when its own meteorologist noticed that there was a storm system coming into the area.

12:55I asked Augustus about this idea that Rainmaker could have contributed to the flooding. Did you see that coming? That you were going to get caught up in this as—in getting blamed for some of this? You know, first of all, I think it's important to acknowledge, like, the natural disaster was a tragedy. And in any talk about the conspiracy theories surrounding it or Rainmaker's alleged involvement and subsequent, like, exoneration from any responsibility for those floods, like, I would be remiss to be glib about it and, like, talk about conspiracy theories casually. But Augustus says he wasn't completely caught off guard by these conspiracy theories.

13:38I sort of thought that it would inevitably come, especially as we scaled. But I had no idea that Congress people would be posting my face on their Twitter and that former American generals would be tweeting about cloud seeding and indicating that they thought cloud seeding was responsible for floods. That was—it was very acute in that moment, for sure. Since the floods, Augustus has had to fight off other conspiracy theories around weather modification, including one that's been around for a long time, associated with the white streams of vapor that airplanes leave behind in the sky. Some people think that those vapor streams are toxic chemicals that the government is purposely releasing to poison people.

14:26They call them chemtrails. There's been no evidence that any of this is true. But some prominent government officials, like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have also amplified the theory. And it's picked up believers online. Look, all of this, look how much it spreads. It looks like that, skinny. And then it spreads like that. And then guess what? It falls on us. They say it's water vapor and it has no harm to us. I call BS. There's no way that this has nothing to do with emitting chemicals on us and weather control. — Chemical trails don't exist. They are the condensation trails that come out from jets as they burn fuel and that hits the very cold atmosphere.

15:13And basically you're seeing a trail of ice crystals in the sky. — Still, three states have passed laws banning weather modification. Louisiana, Tennessee, and Florida. Here's Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. People got a lot of kooky ideas that they can get in and put things in the atmosphere to block the sun and save us from climate change. We're not playing that game in Florida.

15:40More than 30 other states have introduced similar legislation. Scientists overwhelmingly say that this is a growing effort to police something that isn't happening. For his part, Augustus has testified at several state legislatures about the reality of cloud seeding. It is a uniquely American dynamic to be concerned about these kind of conspiracy theories and chemtrails. you know i think in like the last five ten years you could call a specific point i won't but like the united states was always this very yeoman independent society self-governing society make decisions for yourselves type people like a large protestant influence which means that we do a lot of like our own interpretation of facts information um and uh we don't trust our institutions anymore, right?

16:33And so like, our unique distrust in institutions as a country means that relative to any prior time in our history, I think, and any other country on the planet are liable to conspiracy theories and their consequences. And so insofar as Rainmaker will become an institution with time and grow larger, like I would like to help reset the standard of transparency and deserve to earn trust.

17:03Regardless of conspiracy theories, our colleague Chris says that Rainmaker's cloud seeding technology has a long way to go before it achieves its ultimate goal of someday turning deserts green. They've been building the drones, figuring out how high they can fly, what kind of wind conditions, how to, you know, orient the propellers so that they can fly into different conditions. I mean, it's a lot of technology development. I mean, is this technology ready to seed clouds effectively at that scale? I don't believe it is at that scale, no. But it's an iterative process. They have drones that sometimes fall out of the sky.

17:40And there's a lot of figuring out how to keep the drone itself from icing over and failing. But I'm just really curious to see, you know, are they going to be successful? And, you know, is that going to cause others to take notice of this? Is that going to cause Utah to invest more money if they see good results that they can verify? you could, in theory, in the future, get paid to produce 100 million gallons of water. You know, if you can verify that persuasively, that could become a whole new kind of business in the world. What does this story say about the challenges of using technology to solve these big intractable problems, especially in this moment?

18:21It's a great example of trying to take an old technology, something that's been around, but kind of dormant almost, not very exciting. and to really bring in AI and drones, and to create something that's kind of brand new in that way, to address a very real problem in the world, but at the same time running into these very unscientific ways of thinking, and the two are really colliding right here in this story.

18:56That's all for today, Wednesday, December 17th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.