Tucker Carlson promotes chemtrail conspiracy theoryPublished at 16:11 GMT
Marco Silva
BBC Verified Senior Journalist
image source, ReutersUS conservative commentator Tucker Carlson falsely claimed that “the government has finally admitted that chemtrails are real.”
“It’s called geoengineering, and it’s far worse than anything you could have imagined,” the former Fox News host wrote to promote an episode of his podcast.
The post, which has been viewed more than 5 million times, confuses terms that are “often used inaccurately as synonyms,” according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The term “chemtrails” refers to a widely debunked conspiracy theory that chemicals are being sprayed into the atmosphere for shady reasons such as population control.
“Obviously something is going on,” Carlson said during the episode. And without providing any evidence, he claimed that the intelligence community “doesn’t want anyone to talk about this.”
The long thin cloud lines in the sky are actually traces of condensation, or contrails.
They are formed when water vapor and soot particles produced by the combustion of fuel freeze and form a trail of ice crystals when an airplane flies at high altitude.
Geoengineering refers to attempts to manipulate the environment with the aim of changing the climate. This includes a wide range of activities, from cooling the Earth by reflecting solar radiation back into space, to removing global warming gases from the atmosphere by planting trees.
The EPA said it was “not aware” of contrails being intentionally formed over the United States for geoengineering purposes.
We reached out to Carlson for comment.
