Grain Passage, 46th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Helios): Following the disastrous and tragic flooding that occurred along the Guadalupe River in Texas Hill Country, baseless conspiracy theories have emerged that the floods were caused by chemtrails or geoengineering. Republican lawmakers have amplified the chemtrails conspiracy theory, and RFK, Jr. has suggested that the Defense Department’s research arm is spraying Americans with harmful chemicals that have been added to jet fuel. “I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it,” he said in a television interview last May. “Find out who’s doing it and holding them accountable.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene, always a good source for bat-shit crazy, far-right lunacy, has spread the claim for years that the government controls the weather. On Saturday, she announced that she will introduce a bill that “prohibits the injection, release or dispersion of chemicals or substances into the atmosphere for the express purpose of altering weather, temperature, climate or sunlight intensity. It will be a felony offense.”

Climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe points out the irony that the same people who reject the overwhelming evidence on how human-induced climate change is making weather conditions worse are the loudest to claim that the weather extremes are created by top secret and technologically impossible weather modification experiments. They flat-out deny that human activity can affect global weathr, and then turn around and say that extreme weather events are caused by nefarious and secretive human activities.  

Hayhoe reminds us that if we accept responsibility for climate change, then it's up to us to have to fix it. However, if we're not responsible, but some nameless, faceless  "them" are the cause, then there's nothing for us to do, other than to blame others.

Ninety-nine percent of climate denial, she proposes, is solution aversion, including claims that weather modification technology, from chemtrails to cloud seeding to Jewish space lasers are super-sizing our wildfires, floods and storms. Their underlying fear is that the solutions to climate change pose a greater threat than the risks, so they come up with creative alternatives to blame others and avoid taking any accountability for having to change their lifestyles to fix the problem. 

It sounds terrible to say, "sure it's real, and it's affecting the most vulnerable and marginalized people who've done the least to cause it, but I don't want to fix it." That would make us a bad person - and most of us don't want to feel like bad people! So instead, our brains engage in "motivated reasoning" - looking for reasons to explain why we must be right, rather than looking for what's right and then making up our minds afterwards.

As Jonathan Haidt might put it, the elephant of our subconscious mind doesn't want to give up our gasoline-powered cars, doesn't want mass transit in our suburban neighborhoods, doesn't want to change our investment in petro-chemical industries. So our conscious monkey mind comes up with rationales for denying the well-established climate science and either fixes the blame on others or denies that there's a problem at all. If there's no problem or nothing I can do about it, then it's fine for me to go on use gasoline to drive my car from the distant suburbs to the city, to burn fossil fuels for electricity, and to use massive amounts of plastic products.

The Buddha called these subconscious assumptions samskara. Philosophers and psychologists refer to them as mental maps or mental models. Some have called then schema. But by any name, they control more of our behavior than we consciously realize.