Beyond the Ban: A New Model for US State SRM Bills

Bans or nothing

In the United States, essentially the only legislative efforts to govern or regulate SRM activities have come in the form of bans. Republican politicians in dozens of states and at the federal level have proposed bills that would prohibit both weather modification in the form of cloud seeding – which has been conducted in the hopes of enhancing rain and snowfall in several US states and dozens of countries for many decades – as well as anything resembling solar geoengineering – which would affect global temperatures and has never been deployed at scale. Most of those bills have stalled or died somewhere along their legislative pathways, but three have passed, in Florida, Tennessee, and Louisiana. A new report from two legal scholars asks: What if there were another way?

“Lawmakers do not need to choose between an outright ban and no oversight at all”, said Tracy Hester, a law professor at the University of Houston who co-wrote the new paper with Craig Segall, an honorary fellow at the University of Edinburgh Law School, according to a press release. “They can pursue a legislative framework that allows carefully governed research to continue while maintaining strict limits on deployment.”

Hester and Segall argue that the bans – which they write have grown out of a combination of governmental distrust, concerns over personal liberty and privacy, and conspiratorial beliefs – create a number of problems, including fiscal and administrative waste as well as the potential to under-regulate a growing technology and exert a chilling effect on legitimate research. They suggest that a “narrow permit-based statute” would offer a better way forward while still addressing reasonable concerns.

Model legislation

The report includes a piece of model legislation that in theory could be modified to fit any given state’s specific needs. Only actual release of material into atmosphere would be regulated: states would issue permits based on the amounts of that material, beginning only when they exceed a threshold “defined with regard to substantial environmental impacts”, according to the report.

This could allow legitimate cloud seeding activity aimed at aiding agriculture or water availability to continue, as well as potentially regulating any forthcoming academic or other efforts to conduct SRM-related outdoor experiments.

“This is a necessary, constructive, and well-reasoned proposal”, said Edward Parson, a professor of environmental law at UCLA, in an email to SRM360. “It addresses seriously the legitimate concerns many people have about premature or reckless pursuit of SAI without hindering needed research, tripping up innocuous productive activity already widespread in many precipitation-challenged regions, or wasting state resources creating onerous compliance and reporting burdens chasing after phantoms.”

The bill would prohibit unpermitted commercial SRM or weather modification activity, and apply civil or potentially criminal penalties to any violations. It also would stress transparency, mandating the creation of a publicly available docket of permit applications and decisions.

“This model bill gives states a concrete way to start building the technical and institutional capacity they’ll need as questions about climate stabilization become more urgent”, Segall said, according to the press release. “Rather than legislating in the dark, states can bolster their research efforts by putting in place the permitting, monitoring and public engagement processes that let lawmakers engage thoughtfully as the science develops.”

“A constructive step”

Of course, model legislation proposed in an academic report is only a first step in an uphill climb, given the widespread efforts to ban SRM outright.

“I think this is a very constructive step”, said Michael Gerrard, the founder and director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, who told SRM360 that he offered comments to the authors on an earlier version of the report. “We’ve seen an onslaught of bills barring or even criminalizing SRM research, based largely on the spread of misinformation. This paper creates an alternative framework for rational, science-based decision-making. It’s an important counterweight, and I hope that some state legislators take it up.”

Our US state SRM bans tracker follows the latest legislative efforts around the country. Explore those bills here.

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