Landmark Petition Filed: Federal Accountability and Concrete Action Sought for What Is Really Happening in America’s Skies
A groundbreaking federal petition brings clarity to two decades of unanswered questions, and demands the government respond with binding action
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A coalition of researchers, legal advocates, and public health organizations today filed a landmark federal Petition for Rulemaking with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the first legal action of its kind to formally document, on the federal record, what is actually happening in America’s skies and demand that the government respond.
The petition represents a groundbreaking achievement in atmospheric accountability, two years of peer-reviewed scientific research, government data, and legal analysis that has never before been assembled in a single federal regulatory filing. It establishes, for the first time on the federal record, the documented atmospheric effects of operations occurring daily in America’s skies, including their impact on cloud formation, regional weather patterns, solar irradiance, public health, agricultural soils, and watersheds, and requests that the EPA make a formal endangerment determination and initiate rulemaking accordingly.
Reinette Senum, Lead Petitioner and Founder of GenSeven and SaveOurSkies.org, put it plainly: “The EPA has known. The EPA has misled. And now the EPA must answer.”
For two decades, Americans have looked up at the streaks crossing their skies and asked questions that have gone unanswered, or worse, been answered incompletely. This petition addresses those questions with documented evidence, draws a clear scientific and legal distinction between two distinct atmospheric phenomena that have been widely conflated, and lays out the regulatory path to addressing both.
James Franklin Lee Jr., Lead Petitioner and Founder of ClimateViewer News, LLC, was equally direct: “The EPA cannot acknowledge the mechanism and deny the harm. That contradiction is precisely what this petition forces them to answer.”
Under the Administrative Procedure Act, the EPA is required to respond within a reasonable timeframe. Should the agency fail to act or delay unreasonably, petitioners intend to seek judicial review in federal court.
The coalition will present the complete findings, the legal framework, and the path forward at a public webinar tonight, open to all, free of charge. For the first time, the full picture will be presented publicly.
Leslie Manookian, Co-Petitioner and President of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, spoke to what is ultimately at stake: “Our children deserve to inherit skies that are clear, air that is clean, and a regulatory system that kept its promise to protect them.”
