This week, ICAN, through its attorneys, submitted a powerful public comment to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) taking a strong stand against weather modification and geoengineering. ICAN calls for NOAA, absent a ban on geoengineering, to implement a policy that discourages research, field experiments, and deployment of any weather modification or climate intervention technologies without the informed consent of the American people. Submit your own comment by November 19.
NOAA is currently soliciting public comments on whether it should grant a petition to amend its reporting regulations so that they apply to private solar radiation modification (SRM) activities, which is a form of climate intervention known as solar geoengineering—i.e., manipulating the amount of sunlight reaching the earth.
ICAN opposes the amendment as written because it would normalize geoengineering by allowing individuals who want to inject chemicals into the stratosphere to simply fill out a form and report the activities to NOAA. We don’t need regulation of geoengineering (thereby allowing it). Instead, we need an outright ban. Until we have a ban at the federal level, ICAN’s comment encourages NOAA to implement policies discouraging research, field experiments, and deployment of SRM.
The federal government has been ramping up SRM research across federal agencies under the current administration since at least 2022, focusing on stratospheric aerosol injection which would inject chemicals into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight back into space in an effort to cool the earth.
But this technology may come at great cost to our weather, agriculture, natural ecosystems, and human health. According to SRM researchers, there are potentially catastrophic risks to SRM deployment, including drought, flooding, disruption of the monsoon cycle, air pollution, temperature extremes, acid rain, food shortages, ozone layer depletion, diminution of solar power, and geopolitical conflict. Worse yet, scientists predict that once we start SRM, we will become dependent on it and won’t be able to stop. Read ICAN’s comment to learn more about these risks.
ICAN encourages supporters to review the petition and submit a public comment sharing why you oppose geoengineering, as well as the petition’s attempt to normalize such potentially dangerous technology. You can submit your comment to NOAA by following the instructions here.
Act fast! The deadline to submit comments is November 19, 2024. We will keep you updated as ICAN closely monitors NOAA as well as any geoengineering activity of any kind.
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