GeoLawWatch Open Legislation 11
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Rhode Island

2026 Regular Session

2 bills · Adjourned 30 Jun 2026
H7422 Held for further study

Creates "the Rhode Island clean air preservation act."

Rhode Island's "Clean Air Preservation Act" builds a muscular enforcement regime around its geoengineering ban -- authorising Air National Guard aircraft interdiction, mandating dual citizen reporting portals from two separate agencies, and classifying violations as felonies with per-day stacking penalties -- while also venturing into unusual territory by listing artificial intelligence as a prosecutable "entity" and defining pollutants broadly enough to encompass electromagnetic pulses, smart dust, and sound waves.

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S2220 Died for lack of action

Establishes the Rhode Island Clean Air Preservation Act that establishes a regulatory process to prohibit polluting atmospheric experimentation.

Rhode Island's Senate version of the "Clean Air Preservation Act" pairs its geoengineering ban with a $500,000-per-violation penalty floor, mandatory citizen deputization by state police, and -- reaching well beyond atmospheric modification -- imposes specific RF signal strength limits on all wireless telecommunications infrastructure and requires statewide fiber-optic deployment to homes, schools, and businesses, effectively bundling telecommunications regulation into an atmospheric pollution bill.

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2025 Regular Session

2 bills · Adjourned 20 Jun 2025
H5217 Held for further study

Establishes the Rhode Island Clean Air Preservation Act that establishes a regulatory process to prohibit polluting atmospheric experimentation.

H 5217 is the House companion to S 0405, introduced nearly a month earlier with bipartisan sponsorship—the House version has already been held for further study, suggesting legislative scepticism about the bill's expansive scope, combining geoengineering bans with wireless infrastructure regulation.

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S0405 Died for lack of action

Establishes the Rhode Island Clean Air Preservation Act that establishes a regulatory process to prohibit polluting atmospheric experimentation.

This Rhode Island bill starts as a geoengineering prohibition but rapidly expands into wireless infrastructure regulation, requiring citizen deputization for enforcement, the formation of a state guard to defend the airspace from federal activities, and treating artificial intelligence as a legal entity capable of committing felonies.

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2024 Regular Session

2 bills · Adjourned sine die
H7295 Held for further study

Establishes regulations to prohibit stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), solar radiation modification (SRM) experimentation, and other hazardous weather engineering activities.

This House version of Rhode Island's 2024 Clean Air Preservation Act assigns enforcement to the Department of Environmental Management rather than the State Police, embedding a prohibition on geoengineering within an environmental regulatory framework while still combining it with extensive restrictions on wireless infrastructure.

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S2540 Held for further study

Establishes regulations to prohibit stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), solar radiation modification (SRM) experimentation, and other hazardous weather engineering activities.

Rhode Island's 2024 Clean Air Preservation Act combines a prohibition on geoengineering with regulation of electromagnetic radiation, requiring State Police to respond within 2 hours to citizen reports while explicitly invoking states' rights to override federal weather modification programs.

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