Which state bills explicitly mention stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) and what penalties do they propose?

1. Which state bills explicitly mention SAI — the short list

Legislative coverage compiled by media and advocacy trackers shows Montana’s Senate Bill 473 naming and banning geoengineering practices including stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) ^[1], Rhode Island’s House Bill 5217 framing a ban on geoengineering and weather modification including SAI ^[1], North Carolina’s House Bill 362 proposing to prohibit atmospheric modification including SAI ^[1], and a Kentucky bill introduced in 2025 that explicitly seeks to prohibit SAI among other theoretical geoengineering techniques ^[2]. Tennessee’s earlier 2024 measure and Tennessee reporting likewise targeted solar geoengineering and language commonly associated with SAI ^{[3] [6]}. South Carolina’s 2025 Clean Air Act amendment language criminalizes intentional atmospheric injection or dispersal intended to affect temperature, weather, storms or “dimming of the sunlight,” language that specifically references aerosol injection-style conduct ^[4]. Advocacy and state-tracking entities also flag draft or proposed language in Iowa and other states that lists “stratospheric aerosol injection” by name in pollutant/atmospheric prohibitions ^{[5] [7]}.

2. What the bills say — common definitions and prohibitions

Across the sources, the bills share a pattern: defining “weather modification,” “geoengineering,” or “solar radiation modification” to include deliberate releases or injections of chemicals or aerosols into the atmosphere to alter sunlight, temperature, precipitation, or storms, and then prohibiting those acts — language that maps directly onto the technical definition of SAI used by scientists and lawmakers ^{[8] [4] [5]}. South Carolina’s bill, for example, makes it “unlawful for a person to intentionally inject, release, or disperse… chemicals, chemical compounds, substances, or apparatus” into the state’s airspace to affect climate or dim sunlight and requires public disclosure about harms from such releases ^[4]. Montana’s SB 473 and Rhode Island’s bill are summarized as banning SAI and SRM while carving out narrow exceptions like cloud seeding for water management in some accounts ^[1].

3. Penalties proposed — what the reporting documents (and what they do not)

The assembled reporting and excerpts identify prohibitions but do not uniformly report explicit penalty schedules for the state bills named; summaries cite unlawful acts and bans but the sources consulted here (state summaries and news articles) do not provide systematic, itemized civil fines or criminal penalties tied to each statute in the excerpts provided ^{[1] [4] [5]}. One federal bill excerpt (H.R. 4403) includes a “repeat violations” clause treating each injection/release as a separate violation, suggesting a model for multiple counts, but the congressional text in the supplied snippet is federal and not a state penalty schedule ^[8]. Absent the full bill texts or legislative analyses for each state in the supplied reporting, precise penalty amounts, misdemeanor versus felony designations, and enforcement mechanisms (civil enforcement, criminal prosecution, injunctive relief) cannot be reliably recited from these sources ^{[1] [4] [5]}.

4. Political drivers, framing and misinformation risks

Coverage shows the wave of state bans is politically heterogeneous and sometimes driven by conservative lawmakers anxious about perceived secret aerosol programs and “chemtrails,” a framing that has mixed legitimate governance concerns with conspiracy-driven rhetoric; reporting on Tennessee and commentary about bills flags that lawmakers’ debate sometimes blurred fact and fiction ^{[3] [6]}. Observers including SRM researchers note the surge of state-level proposals—over two dozen to thirty states introduced measures—and question whether the bans reflect precautionary governance or a reaction to misinformation that could foreclose research and federal coordination ^{[7] [9]}.

5. What remains to be sourced and why it matters

To state definitively what penalties each state bill imposes requires consulting the full enrolled bills or official legislative text and fiscal/legal analyses for each named proposal; the summaries and news excerpts here establish which bills explicitly include SAI in their definitions and prohibitions, but they do not consistently include penalty language or enforcement detail in the quoted material ^{[1] [4] [5]}. That enforcement detail matters: a statutory ban carrying civil notice-and-takedown rules differs materially from one that creates criminal liability or authorizes private causes of action — a distinction not resolvable from the provided sources.