The Fight Against Geoengineering Has Missed the Target — So We Took It to the EPA

A landmark Petition for Rulemaking is now on the federal record. Here’s what it says, why it matters, and what you can do in the next five minutes.

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For twenty years, Americans have looked up at the streaks crossing their skies and asked questions that went unanswered. They were told it was harmless water vapor. They were told to stop asking.

On May 11, 2026, those questions were formally placed on the federal record for the first time in American history.

The American Clean Air Coalition — a coalition of researchers, legal advocates, and public health organizations including GenSeven, ClimateViewer News, Health Freedom Defense Fund, Missouri Clean Skies, Stand for Health Freedom, and Global Wellness Forum — filed a Petition for Rulemaking with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It is the first legal action of its kind: nearly two years of research, peer-reviewed science, and the EPA’s own contradictory documents, assembled into a single administrative demand that the agency fulfill its legal obligation under the Clean Air Act.

You can read the full petition here. And you can add your name to it here.

The target everyone missed

Here’s the uncomfortable truth the petition confronts head-on: the fight against geoengineering has been aimed at the wrong thing.

Thirty-seven states have introduced or enacted legislation targeting atmospheric modification. H.R. 7452 seeks to criminalize weather modification nationally. And yet the largest, most continuous injection of aerosols into our atmosphere isn’t coming from rogue startups with weather balloons. It’s coming from commercial aviation — every single day, on a scale that dwarfs anything else.

Consider the double standard the petition documents. In April 2025, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin publicly condemned Make Sunsets, a venture-backed startup, for releasing roughly 220 pounds of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere via balloon. The EPA launched an internal review over 220 pounds.

Meanwhile, according to the petition’s sulfur audit, commercial aviation injected approximately 747 million pounds of sulfur dioxide into the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere in 2024 alone. The EPA’s response? Silence — and a fact sheet claiming jet fuel contains no metal-based compounds, a claim contradicted by the government’s own toxicological profiles and by peer-reviewed measurements that found chromium, iron, aluminum, lead, nickel, copper, and a dozen other metals in aircraft exhaust.

As geoengineering scientist Dr. David Keith once observed,

“you can’t ban putting sulfur in the stratosphere when every commercial flight already does it.”

That’s precisely the regulatory vacuum this petition exists to close.

What the petition documents

This is not a speculative document. It relies on measured, peer-reviewed, climate-model-independent evidence spanning four decades — much of it from NASA, NOAA, and the EPA’s own record. Among its findings:

A chemically altered stratosphere. NASA’s ATom mission found the Northern Hemisphere’s stratosphere is now chemically distinct from the Southern Hemisphere’s — and commercial aviation, concentrated overwhelmingly in the north, is the consistent explanation. Black carbon from aircraft has been measured at altitudes up to 18 kilometers, where it provides catalytic surfaces for the same ozone-destroying chemistry the Montreal Protocol was written to stop.

Skies that are no longer natural. Aviation-Induced Cloudiness — persistent contrails spreading into vast artificial cirrus shields — now covers up to 10% of the sky in high-traffic corridors like the eastern United States. In 2015, NOAA scientist Dr. Charles Long described a sub-visual ice haze from aircraft giving the blue sky “a whitish tint” and concluded we might be conducting unintentional geoengineering. That finding appears nowhere on the EPA’s public contrail pages.

Weather modification, admitted on the record. The petition compiles statements from ICAO, the FAA’s own climate research lead, and the Royal Aeronautical Society showing that contrail formation is treated within the industry as a controllable variable — including proposals to deliberately create “cooling contrails,” which industry participants themselves acknowledged could be considered geoengineering. Google’s AI contrail forecasting is already integrated into American Airlines’ flight planning software.

A human toll. The petition cites a 2024 high-resolution global assessment attributing roughly 74,300 premature deaths per year worldwide to aviation-related particulate matter and ozone — with 1,610 annual U.S. deaths from PM2.5 alone. Ultrafine particle concentrations spike 100–900% up to 18 kilometers downwind of major airports, penetrating homes and lungs. Airport-adjacent soils show heavy metal contamination well above background levels. These numbers do not account for the (likely) millions of health problems caused by breathing nanoparticles that are never attributed to aviation emissions.

Economic harm to the “sunshine economy.” Solar dimming from aviation haze cuts photovoltaic output, degrades agricultural light conditions, and threatens tourism economies built on clear skies — a complaint that goes back to Palm Springs officials in 1958.

What the petition demands

Under Section 231 of the Clean Air Act, the EPA Administrator shall issue emission standards for aircraft pollutants that may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare. The word is “shall,” not “may.” The petition asks the EPA to:

1. Issue a formal Endangerment Finding for non-CO₂ aviation emissions — sulfur oxides, black carbon, metallic aerosols, ultrafine particles, and Aviation-Induced Cloudiness.

2. Slash jet fuel sulfur to 15 parts per million — the same standard the EPA already imposes on diesel fuel for cars and trucks. Today’s jet fuel is allowed up to 200 times more sulfur. A transition to 15 ppm would cut the stratospheric sulfur load by over 99% and, by the petition’s estimate, prevent roughly 1,000 U.S. deaths annually.

3. Mandate contrail avoidance — real, binding requirements including onboard humidity sensors to detect and divert around ice-supersaturated regions, regardless of whether industry labels a given contrail “warming” or “cooling.” The Clean Air Act contains no exemption for pollution someone claims is beneficial.

4. Create a National Aerosol Registry — public monitoring at major hub airports expanding to a nationwide dashboard, so Americans can finally see what is being put into their air.

The legal hook is one the EPA cannot easily escape: the agency has already found that lead from piston-engine aircraft endangers public health, and already regulated non-volatile particulate matter from jet engines. Having conceded that roughly 1% of the aviation particle burden endangers the public, it has no coherent basis for ignoring the other 99%. If the agency fails to act within 180 days, the petitioners intend to seek judicial review.

What you can do right now

This petition put the evidence on the federal record. What happens next depends on whether the EPA sees that Americans are paying attention.

1. Sign the petition. Every signature strengthens the public record and demonstrates that this is not a fringe concern — it is a mainstream demand for clean air, clear skies, and honest regulation.

2. Read the petition yourself. Don’t take our word for it. Every claim is footnoted to peer-reviewed science, federal documents, and the EPA’s own publications.

3. Support the legal fund. If the EPA stalls, this goes to court. Litigation takes resources.

4. Share this article. The regulatory vacuum has survived for decades because most Americans never knew it existed. That ends when enough of us look up — and then look into the record.

Our children, and their children for seven generations, deserve to inherit skies that are clear, air that is clean, and a government that keeps its promise to protect them.

The evidence is filed. The law is clear. What’s missing is regulatory will — and that’s where you come in.

Sign the petition at americancleanaircoalition.org →

LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR PETITION

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