BATON ROUGE — State Sen. Mike Fesi (R-Houma) has convinced lawmakers to pass his bill that aims to ban weather modification in Louisiana.

The bill seeks to prohibit acts such as cloud seeding, which includes dispersing silver iodine into clouds to make precipitation. The bill has come to be associated with what some people call contrails and others call chemtrails - white streaks people on the ground can see after jets fly overhead.

Fesi believes someone is spraying sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. He told the Louisiana Illuminator that streaks across the sky were proof of cloud seeding.

Scientists have debunked the theory that contrails are evidence of a government conspiracy.

"What we're looking at are condensation trails, not chemtrails. These are not effluents coming out of the plane purposely defined to pollute or to toxify the atmosphere," State Climatologist Jay Grymes said.

Scientists say the streaks behind jets flying thousands of feet in the air are created by the release of hot exhaust into a freezing-cold atmosphere – much like when people can see their own breath in frigid weather.

However, unsubstantiated theories have been suggested over the years, including that the streaks are evidence of government efforts to alter the weather or control the population.

Cloud seeding is a real process, but Grymes said it's not always effective.

"It works, but not so well. There have been issues where seeders have seeded the atmosphere and it rained in the wrong places and of course, there are places where it just doesn't work at all," he said.

Louisiana lawmakers approved cloud seeding seventy years ago. Fesi's bill would stop the practice entirely. Cropdusters would still be able to operate, and the forestry department would still be able to fight wildfires from the air.

Fesi sent WBRZ a statement Tuesday saying that the bill was intended to protect the people of Louisiana and document what's done to the environment.

"The DEQ will keep the records of all the calls. They're getting the calls anyway, so they're going to keep all of the calls for this particular information, so we can get some good reports . . .," Fesi said.

Rather than being a part of state law governing agriculture, the new law would go into an existing section on pollution, right above the part that allows bonfires along the Mississippi River levee on Christmas Eve.

Gov. Jeff Landry hasn't said whether he will sign the bill.