This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The world’s biggest climate case begins at The Hague in the Netherlands today. Oral arguments will be heard by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which will consider what obligations United Nations member states have under international law to protect the planet from greenhouse gas emissions for future generations.

The case begins less than two weeks after negotiations collapsed at the UN’s annual international climate conference, COP29, in Azerbaijan, resulting in a climate finance agreement that’s been widely criticized as inadequate. It also marks the end of the hottest year on record, punctuated by numerous extreme weather events including deadly floods and hurricanes driven by climate change.

“The stakes are not high, they’re devastatingly high,” said Julian Aguon, an attorney representing Vanuatu, the Pacific country leading the case. “It’s an opportunity to finally bring the promise of climate justice closer within reach.” 

The ICJ was established after World War II as a judicial mechanism for mitigating conflicts between United Nations member states and continues to arbitrate disputes issuing advisory opinions interpreting and clarifying international law. Such opinions are non-binding, but are still meaningful because they clarify binding law, such as the meaning of international treaties including the 2015 Paris Agreement that sought to cap the severity of global warming. In 1994, a judgment from the court on war between Libya and Chad over disputed territory prompted Libya to withdraw from Chad, and helped lead to a peace agreement. 

“We have the opportunity to leave behind a more capable international legal regime than we inherited.” 

But the court’s rulings are not always effective. Earlier this year, the ICJ ruled that Israel should end its occupation of the Palestinian territories immediately and make reparations to affected peoples. The occupation has continued, illustrating the limits of the ICJ’s power. In addition, big polluters like China and the US have rejected the court’s compulsory jurisdiction, and so a ruling may apply to them more narrowly.

The court will now decide what if any legal consequences such countries should face for contributing to climate change, both from what they’ve done and what they haven’t done. That could include affirming that big polluters have a legal obligation to pay reparations.

The campaign to bring the case to the ICJ was initiated in 2019 by 27 law students at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. It has now grown to be the largest case in the 77-year history of the ICJ and will consist of oral arguments from 98 countries and 12 international nongovernmental organizations.

In order to get on the ICJ’s docket, the students who began the case first had to convince Vanuatu’s government to back their campaign for an advisory opinion, then get other Pacific states on board by bringing the issue before the Pacific Forum, the premier diplomatic body in the Oceanic region. 

The pandemic in 2020 interrupted their campaign, preventing the youth from traveling to United Nations’ climate conferences to advocate for their agenda. But the group moved online and managed to drum up support from Pacific island states, Caribbean nations, countries in Africa and Latin America, and dozens more. Slowly the group built enough diplomatic support to get on the agenda at the UN General Assembly, and later, built such a widespread backing that the Assembly approved the resolution calling for an ICJ advisory opinion on climate change by consensus.

“How the law is shaped from here on depends on this moment, depends on the ICJ,” said Vidal Prashad, one of the student campaigners based in Fiji. “We have the opportunity to leave behind a more capable international legal regime than we inherited.” 

Ahead of this week’s oral arguments, young people have continued their campaigning, helping to collect witness testimonies from Indigenous Pacific peoples on how they’re currently being harmed by rising seas and climate change-fueled extreme weather events. They are also helping the governments who plan to present at the ICJ to craft their arguments and ensure they put forth the strongest, most progressive case. Prashad flew from Fiji to The Hague, where the youth’s five-year grassroots effort is finally reaching its conclusion. 

“It will have moral weight…We are doing this for the benefit of the global community.”

Joie Chowdhury, a senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law, which has provided legal support for the case, said a favorable ruling from ICJ would help climate activists hold polluting countries accountable. Youth activists could cite the ruling in future climate litigation against their governments. Politicians could use the ICJ’s opinion to push for sanctions against countries who fail to comply, and diplomats could point to the document as a minimum standard in next year’s global climate change negotiations. “Failure to comply with legal consequences in the face of such devastating climate harm, that’s not just being in contravention of the law, it’s unconscionable,” Chowdhury said. 

She noted that a lot of countries talk big about climate action, but this week’s oral arguments could illuminate what big polluters really think about the idea of being legally liable for their greenhouse gas emissions, something that could provide more clarity on what the barriers to climate action are. And even if it’s not in large countries’ interest to put up money for climate reparations, it is in their interest to appear to respect the treaties that they’ve already agreed to, which the ICJ ruling could help clarify. 

“Climate justice is about accountability,” Chowdhury said. “Climate harm has been done, there was knowledge about this, and there must be redress for frontline communities. And for this court to really clarify that there is a right to remedy and reparation for climate harm, that is really important.”

“It will have moral weight,” said Arnold Kiel Loughman, the attorney general of Vanuatu, who plans to address the court. “We are doing this for the benefit of the global community.”

Climate change witness testimonials from across the Pacific underscore the cost of doing nothing. One village in Papua New Guinea has been forced to move four times due to sea level rise, and is in the midst of its fifth and final relocation. “I say final, because there are simply no more inland (places) to go,” Aguon said. 

Such climate impacts have been existential for Indigenous Pacific peoples whose cultures are intimately connected to the food they grow, the waters they fish, and the lands they call home.

“We have so much to lose,” said Prashad from the University of the South Pacific. “Whole countries are standing to lose their whole identities.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

President-elect Donald Trump’s vow to kill offshore wind energy development “on day one” of his second term is already triggering project slowdowns on the East Coast, but the biggest wind farm proposed in the Gulf of Mexico will likely stay on track. 

That’s because the project is on such a long development timeline that Trump’s four-year term will be over before permitting and construction begin, according to RWE, the German energy giant that plans to build a 2,000-megawatt wind farm about 40 miles south of Lake Charles, Louisiana. The project, which could power more than 350,000 homes, isn’t expected to be operational for about a decade. 

“The project has a long-lead development timeline that is longer than any one federal administration, and with a planned operational date in the mid-2030s,” RWE spokesman Ryan Ferguson said. 

RWE, the world’s second-largest offshore wind developer, and other key players in the renewable energy industry announced shifts in funding priorities and warned of project delays and possible derailments after Trump was elected president this month. 

“The change of administration in the US entails risks for the timely implementation of offshore wind projects,” RWE Chief Financial Officer Michael Muller said at a press conference earlier this month. “The new Republican administration could delay specific projects. The realization of our Community Offshore Wind project near New York, for example, depends on outstanding permits from US federal authorities.”

The “higher risks and delays” in the US offshore wind market prompted RWE to initiate a $1.6 billion share buyback, RWE CEO Markus Krebber said during a call with investors. The buyback signaled a significant shift in the company’s short-term spending priorities but not waning confidence in the durability of US demand for renewables, Muller said, noting that a growing number of states are setting goals for solar and wind energy. 

RWE’s recalibration makes sense, said Jenny Netherton, the Southeastern Wind Coalition’s Louisiana program manager. “That was not unexpected,” she said. “Companies are always trying to find the best way forward in an uncertain environment.”

“Nationally, there’s very little control over what happens, but in Louisiana, offshore wind has a very clear path forward.”

Trump’s opposition to offshore wind began in 2006, when he initiated a decade-long fight against the Scottish government over a proposed wind farm the future US president said would spoil the view from a golf course he hoped to build. Trump lost the battle and was ordered to pay Scotland nearly $300,000 in legal fees. In recent speeches, Trump has said wind farms harm property values and wildlife. More outlandishly, he has claimed wind energy causes cancer, increases food prices, and prevents people from watching TV when the wind isn’t blowing. 

During his first term, Trump was accused of “slow walking” the permits for some of the first offshore wind farms in federal waters. RWE and other companies say wind farms already under construction will likely move forward, but projects slated to break ground over the next couple years may face setbacks. 

Of the 30 states with offshore wind potential, nine have statewide wind energy mandates. Two states—Massachusetts and Rhode Island—have deadlines to reach wind energy targets in the 2020s and four states—New York, Connecticut, Maryland, and Virginia—have deadlines in the 2030s. 

These goals and the US’s ever-rising electricity needs are signs that Trump may slow but not kill wind energy development, Muller said. 

“We still believe US offshore wind [energy] is still needed,” he said, noting New York in particular. “If they are going to keep up with demand, they need offshore wind.”

Louisiana set a goal of developing the capacity for 5,000 megawatts of offshore wind energy by 2035, but the target wasn’t legally binding. Proposed in 2021 during the administration of Governor John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, the goal appears to have been abandoned by Governor Jeff Landry, who took office in January. The Republican governor has said little publicly about offshore wind development and has not responded to requests seeking his position on the matter. 

Many other Louisiana Republicans strongly back offshore wind, seeing it as an economic boon for the state. Louisiana companies that long served the offshore oil and gas industry have seen business flag in recent years. Several of them, including shipbuilders, engineering firms, and metal fabricators, have easily transitioned to helping plan and build offshore projects on the East Coast, including the US’s first offshore wind farm.

Bipartisan legislation in Louisiana paved the way for a fast-tracked approval process for wind projects in state-managed waters, which extend 3 miles from the coast. Louisiana has approved agreements with two companies to build small-scale wind farms near Cameron Parish and Port Fourchon, the Gulf’s largest oil and gas port. The two projects will likely be built years before the RWE wind farm. 

The last federal lease auction in the Gulf was canceled in July due to weak interest from bidders, but two companies recently offered competing plans for a 142,000-acre area near Galveston, Texas. It’s unclear how Trump’s victory will affect those proposals. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is waiting to see if there’s more developer interest in the area and will likely initiate a competitive lease sale in the coming months. 

While Trump may cause uncertainty at the federal level, Louisiana isn’t likely to waver in its support for offshore wind energy, Netherton said. 

“It still enjoys broad support here,” she said. “Nationally, there’s very little control over what happens, but in Louisiana, offshore wind has a very clear path forward.”

This coverage was made possible through a partnership between Grist and Deep South Today, a nonprofit network of local newsrooms providing essential journalism in underserved communities and ensuring its long-term growth and sustainability.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As President-elect Donald Trump puts together a team that will ramp up fossil fuel production in a country that is already pumping out more crude oil than any nation in history, critics are beginning to use a term once reserved for reviled foes.

Specifically, they are asking: Is the United States on its way to becoming a petrostate?

Jean Su, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s energy justice program, raised the question after Trump tapped Chris Wright, CEO of the Denver fracking company Liberty Energy, to lead the Department of Energy. Wright accepts that carbon emissions make the planet warmer, but contrary to the scientific consensus, he argues that the financial and quality-of-life benefits of increased fossil fuel production outweigh the risks. 

“Picking someone like Chris Wright is a clear sign that Trump wants to turn the US into a pariah petrostate,” Su said in an emailed statement. “He’s damning frontline communities and our planet to climate hell just to pad the already bloated pockets of fossil fuel tycoons.”

Climate scientist Michael Mann offered the same view in an essay soon after the election. “The United States is now poised to become an authoritarian state ruled by plutocrats and fossil fuel interests,” he wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “It is now, in short, a petrostate.”

Economists and political scientists point out that the United States does not fit the classical definition of a petrostate. Its economy is far more diverse than those of nations that are hamstrung by dependence on oil and natural gas. Moreover, the vast majority of the wealth generated by fossil fuel production here goes to private parties—not into government coffers.

And yet, experts concede that the United States behaves like a petrostate at times: for example, in its long-time inaction on climate change and, more recently, in the way it conducts foreign policy as the world’s leading oil and gas exporter. The fossil fuel industry’s influence is bound to be amplified under Trump, who does not view climate change as a serious problem and who describes “energy dominance” as a policy imperative. 

“The United States is acting a bit like, I wouldn’t necessarily say a petrostate, but like a state in which the hydrocarbon industry is a huge domestic constituency and source of employment and private sector revenues and now exports,” said Cullen Hendrix, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

The oil and gas industry—even by its own reckoning—currently accounts for just 8 percent of the US economy. Trump’s presidency will test whether competing interests—including businesses, states, and citizens that favor a clean energy transition—can exert enough influence to prevent the United States from going down the path that has hobbled the governance and economies of nations that are reliant on a single commodity.

Trump was not successful in permanently quashing the drive for clean energy in his first term. President Joe Biden was able to restore the US’s place in the Paris Agreement negotiations, reverse most of Trump’s deregulatory decisions and pass the nation’s first comprehensive climate legislation.

But Mann, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, argues that the risks are greater in Trump’s second term that wealthy fossil fuel interests will gain a durable advantage in the US political system.

“This time polluters and plutocrats have made sure they’re ready to hit the ground running,” Mann wrote in an email, pointing to the conservative policy roadmap, Project 2025, written by former Trump administration officials and supporters to guide his agenda. “They won’t waste any time at all eliminating the obstacles to a fossil fuel industry-driven agenda.”

True petrostates typically have state-owned oil companies and seek to maximize revenue as a matter of policy. In Azerbaijan, for example—the country where this year’s international climate talks took place—oil and gas output accounts for more than 90 percent of export revenue and over half of its national budget.

“I think it’s worth remembering that this is not that abnormal for the United States.”

In the United States, private and publicly traded oil and gas companies seek to influence the political process through lobbying and campaign contributions. In 2024, oil and gas industry political giving reached a record $219 million, overwhelmingly favoring Republicans and conservative groups, according to the watchdog group Open Secrets.

But the fossil fuel industry is also woven into the U.S. political fabric in ways that resemble the structure of petrostates. More than 60 percent of the $138 billion in taxes that the fossil fuel industry pays annually goes to state, local and tribal governments, according to a study by the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Resources for the Future, or RFF.

Wyoming gets 59 percent of its state budget from fossil fuel revenue; North Dakota, 29 percent; and Alaska, 21 percent. Other states, though less reliant, take in staggering sums, led by Texas, at $14.6 billion annually; California, $7.8 billion; and Pennsylvania, $4.4 billion. And the money going into state coffers reflects the far larger impact the industry is having on state economies and jobs.

Because institutions like the Electoral College and the US Senate give states outsized power compared to their populations, fossil fuel-reliant regions can hold considerable sway over national politics and policy. For example, political observers say that part of the reason Vice President Kamala Harris talked little about the climate accomplishments of her administration during her presidential campaign, and instead repeated her pledge not to ban fracking, was a vain effort to win the swing state of Pennsylvania, the nation’s No. 2 natural gas producer.

The shape of current US climate policy was dictated by the political realities of the Senate, where it would be impossible to get the 66 votes needed to ratify a conventional climate treaty or 60 votes to pass substantive climate legislation. The Obama administration helped design a Paris agreement that contained no binding legal obligations, and therefore would not require Senate ratification. And the Biden administration’s climate legislation was an incentives package wrapped in a spending bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, which required only a bare majority for passage (and got one only with Harris’ tie-breaking vote). 

“The US has always had a hard time enacting climate policy,” said Daniel Raimi, a fellow at RFF who led its fossil fuel revenue study. “The Inflation Reduction Act was the exception rather than the rule, and it’s also a very unusual kind of climate policy. Most of the rest of the world use carbon pricing or regulatory tools. We couldn’t do any of that because of the political dynamics, so we went for the subsidy-based approach.”

But now, the Trump administration is intent on unraveling those policies. Trump’s job is made easier because the policies weren’t the product of a bipartisan consensus for climate action.

“I think it’s worth remembering that this is not that abnormal for the United States,” Raimi said. “Unfortunately, this is kind of where we have been for most of the last few decades.”

Fracking, which unleashed a flood of oil and gas on the US market beginning in 2010, laid the groundwork for Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda.

Trump liked to say that the United States became energy independent on his watch, surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia in oil production in 2018 and the following year, becoming a net exporter of energy for the first time in more than 60 years. But those trends began under Obama and have accelerated under Biden, with the United States producing 12.9 million barrels per day of crude oil in 2023, more than any other nation in history.

Mammoth facilities have been built in recent years to export liquefied natural gas, or LNG. And in 2015, Congress lifted a four-decade-old ban on US exports of crude oil, responding to the oil industry’s plea that it needed to be able to compete with petrostates for the nation’s own welfare. “Today’s vote starts us down the path to a new era of energy security,” American Petroleum Institute CEO Jack Gerrard said at the time. American producers, he said, “would be able to compete on a level playing field with countries like Iran and Russia, providing security to our allies.”

Biden put that concept into action after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, increasing LNG shipments to the European Union to undercut Russia’s role as a crucial energy supplier to the continent. For the past three years, the United States has provided half of the EU’s LNG supplies, a cushion that has helped allies cope with a precipitous fall in the energy supply from Russia.

Early this year, Biden paused approval of new LNG ports pending a study of their greenhouse gas impact—but a federal judge lifted that moratorium and Trump plans to end it altogether, potentially clearing the way for 20 proposed new LNG terminals. LNG could play a bigger foreign policy role, even if Trump should succeed in ending the Ukraine war “in 24 hours,” as he has promised.

“It seems clear that the second Trump administration is going to want to use this energy leverage to exact concessions from Europe on a variety of fronts,” Hendrix said. “It might be increasing military spending, or more military spending earmarked for U.S. arms exports, or more guarantees to purchase more U.S. exports generally.”

The EU may be ready to deal. The day after the election, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed that the EU might be able to head off Trump tariffs by agreeing to buy more LNG from the United States. 

A number of forces may work against the oil and gas industry’s interests during the new Trump administration.

Other industries may succeed in holding off some of the planned regulatory rollbacks, like auto manufacturers, who have invested billions of dollars in electric vehicle and battery plants in anticipation of the clean energy transition they see taking place globally.

States that have new clean energy projects or a long-term commitment to fighting climate change will make their voices heard. “We are going to move forward in the United States, state by state, county by county, city by city, in continuing our tremendous dynamic growth of our clean energy economy,” said Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington in a news conference after the election.

Environmentalists, landowners and fishing operations already are in court fighting the construction of new LNG terminals. Judges have ruled against three LNG projects so far this year, indicating Trump will not be able to make new ports appear on the Gulf Coast overnight.

And finally, some experts rightly acknowledge that Trump’s own energy policy vision may be at odds with itself. Trump frequently said he wanted to return to the “beautiful number” of $1.87 per gallon gasoline—where prices bottomed out during his final year in office.

Gasoline prices were so low in 2020, however, because the global economy had ground to a standstill due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Crude oil prices, now more than $74 per barrel, would have to plummet to $20 per barrel—as they did in 2020—to bring pump prices so low, experts say. That could stop “drill, baby, drill” in its tracks. Exxon Mobil has said its break-even point—the oil price at which it can cover its costs of production—is $35 per barrel; and Wells Fargo estimated last year that break-even for companies that frack in US shale basins is $54 per barrel.

The realities of the free market, as well as democratic institutions, may yet prevent the United States from slipping into the realm of petrostates. Nevertheless, the 2024 election has driven home to many how fossil fuel abundance has made the road to climate action harder in the United States.

“Imagine a United States that was as oil-starved as China,” Hendrix said. “You’d see a lot more sustained emphasis on renewables, going back to the 1990s, if not the 1980s.

“Instead, what we have is this kind of domestic political competition between a coalition that supports renewable energy and a coalition that supports fossil fuels,” he said. “And Trump’s election suggests to me that fossil fuels are the winners in the short term.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On Monday, Senator Debbie Stabenow, a longtime champion of programs that support farmers and increase access to nutritious foods, introduced a new version of the farm bill, a key piece of legislation typically renewed every five years that governs much of how the agricultural industry in the US operates. 

Stabenow, who is retiring next month after representing Michigan in the Senate for 24 years, has staked her career on her vision for a robust, progressive farm bill, one that, among other things, paves the way for farmers to endure the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

The text of her bill comes almost two months after the 2018 farm bill, which initially expired last year and was revived thanks to a one-year extension, expired for a second time on September 30. And it comes mere weeks before the end of the year, when funding for several programs included in the farm bill will run out. 

But more importantly, the bill comes after many months of infighting between Democratic and Republican lawmakers over what matters most in the next farm bill—and just weeks before the current congressional term ends. In order to pass the bill, Stabenow would need to gain the support of Republicans in the Senate agriculture committee and the House of Representatives, where Democrats lack the votes necessary to pass their own version of the legislation. 

It’s likely, even expected, that that won’t happen. Sen. John Boozman, a Republican from Arkansas who is likely to chair the Senate agriculture committee after Stabenow’s retirement, criticized her bill on X, calling it an “insulting 11th hour partisan proposal.” Meanwhile, in the House, Republicans are reportedly hoping instead to pass another one-year extension of the farm bill, pushing negotiations over the new bill into next year, according to Politico.

There’s virtually no reason for Republicans not to prolong the process of hammering out the next farm bill, as starting in January they will have majority control over the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of the federal government.

By proposing legislation that’s all but doomed, Stabenow may be vying to secure her legacy as an environmental steward who understands how climate change is already impacting agricultural production, and why there should be more investment in climate initiatives that safeguard farmers now. 

In a speech presenting the details of her bill to the Senate on Monday, Stabenow said, “For more than two years I’ve been working with colleagues on both sides of the aisle to pass my sixth Farm Bill, the third one that I’ve either been chair or ranking member of…the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry.” 

She emphasized that farming is a risky business given its dependence on the weather. “But it’s getting even riskier now, because [of] what’s happening with the climate crisis, and we know that,” she said. “How many once-in-a-generation storms or droughts need to hit our farmers over the head before we take this crisis seriously?”

Certain advocacy groups have praised Stabenow’s farm bill. Rebecca Riley, the managing director for food and agriculture at the National Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, said the bill reflects Stabenow’s “decades of leadership and dedication to strengthening America’s farmers and rural communities.” But other groups were slower to respond. In a statement, the American Farm Bureau Federation, an agricultural industry group, said simply: “We’re reviewing Chairwoman Stabenow’s newly released 1,300 pages of farm bill text,” adding that it’s “unfortunate that only a few legislative working days remain for Congress to act.” (Stabenow’s office did not reply to Grist’s requests for comment.)

One of the key features of Stabenow’s farm bill is funding for so-called “climate-smart” agriculture practices, an umbrella term that broadly refers to techniques that help farmers sequester carbon in the soil rather than emit more of it into the atmosphere, where it contributes to global warming. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act allocated nearly $20 billion in funding for these practices, such as crop rotation and no-till farming. And in the spring, Stabenow introduced a framework that rolled over the leftover money from the IRA for “climate-smart” practices into a new farm bill. (Shortly afterwards, Senate Republicans put forward another draft of the farm bill without this provision.)

Climate is hardly the only focus of the text Stabenow introduced earlier this week, which, like all farm bills, seeks to address a dizzying array of agricultural and nutritional priorities. Chief among the provisions in her bill, titled the Rural Prosperity and Food Security Act, are policies that aim to increase access to crop insurance and make coverage more affordable by boosting premium subsidies. The bill also seeks to invest $4.3 billion in rural communities, seeking to improve their access to health care, childcare, education, and broadband internet. 

But other provisions indicate that Stabenow has long been thinking of how to further protect farmers from climate impacts such as extreme weather—and also make the US food system more diversified and resilient. She proposes creating a permanent disaster program that would establish a consistent process for providing farmers with assistance after floods, wildfires, and other calamities. Stabenow also seeks to strengthen support for specialty crops—better known as fruits, nuts, vegetables, and herbs—and reminds the Senate during her press briefing that these crops “are almost half of what we grow.” 

hese details represent some of the divisions that run deep through congressional negotiations. Senator John Hoeven, the Republican congressman from North Dakota, was quick to dismiss Stabenow’s vision, writing on X, “Unfortunately, the Senate bill released today does not meet the needs of farm country and fails to keep farm in the Farm Bill.” Boozman has signaled he fully intends to ignore Stabenow’s last-minute bill, telling reporters that Congress must push for another extension of the 2018 farm bill and meeting with agriculture industry groups to discuss their priorities.

Boozman’s and other Republicans’ concerns with the new farm bill text likely stem, at least in part, from lobbying groups representing large-scale, industrial farmers who wish to see fewer restrictions placed on how they do business. The National Pork Producers Council, or NPPC, for example, issued an instant rejection of Stabenow’s farm bill text, calling it “simply not a viable bill” for “fail[ing] to provide a solution to California Prop. 12.”

That proposition prohibits the sale of veal, pork, and egg products by farm owners and operators who knowingly house animals “in a cruel manner.” The NPPC has followed this issue closely, arguing that forcing pork producers to comply with “arbitrary” animal housing specifications would wildly increase their costs (and prices for consumers). The group successfully lobbied for a provision in the House farm bill that essentially takes away California’s power to enforce such a law—by blocking state and local government from imposing conditions on the production of livestock sold in their jurisdiction (unless the livestock is actually produced within the state or local community).  

Stabenow seems highly aware of the zero-sum framework with which many different actors view the farm bill. When addressing the Senate, she mentioned that the version of the Farm Bill released by the House in May would have put “immense” resources into a small number of commodity farmers in the South. “I’m not saying that these farmers don’t need support. They do,” she said. “But it can’t be at the expense of millions of other farmers and ranchers in this country,” including those who run smaller, diversified operations or who grow fruits and vegetables. 

In her speech, Stabenow repeatedly framed the text of her bill as a bipartisan project, and projected an urgency to secure wider resources for more farmers now. Her vision, she says, “can pass and should pass.” But whether that’s true or not will depend an awful lot on her colleagues, who currently have no incentive to negotiate with her and other Democrats and could simply wait to push forward their own agenda. How long they wait remains to be seen. 

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

For decades they have been working underground, establishing mycorrhizal-like networks of commerce and influence, taking root in academia and institutions, and even extending their tendrils into supranational governance.

Their goal is to transform the diets of people across the world, to spark a revolution in food production and consumption. They call themselves the leguminati.

“When you rediscover beans, it’s something we’ve all taken for granted, and then you realize—oh my God—these are really great; it’s like a secret,” says Steve Sando, the founder of the California-based bean company, Rancho Gordo, who is, for many, the godfather of this cult. “The secret’s been revealed to them and they tend not to be able to shut up about it, because they feel they’ve discovered the world.”

Beans are enjoying a culinary renaissance and, say their advocates, it is not a moment too soon. Long thought of as bland, fiddly to cook, or poverty food, in recent years there has been growing recognition that beans are not only delicious, but that eating more of them could help solve a host of planetary and human health problems.

Food production is a big cause of climate breakdown, amounting to about a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Three-fifths of those emissions come from meat production, leading many to argue for a shift towards a plant-based diet.

But that does not take plants off the hook entirely. The “green revolution” of the 20th century led to an exponential increase in agricultural output, but it was via the widespread use of nitrogen-based fertilizers, a byproduct of the petrochemical industry that emit nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas with a heating effect 300 times that of carbon dioxide.

Added to that, poorly applied fertiliser runs off into rivers and waterways leading to pollution and algal blooms that kill fish and other wildlife.

It was issues such as these that Josiah Meldrum, the cofounder with Nick Saltmarsh of the UK bean company Hodmedod’s, had in mind in the early 2000s when he was asked by climate campaigners in Norwich how a city such as theirs, with a population of about 122,000 then (144,000 now), could feed itself without exceeding planetary boundaries.

“It was that climate project that led us to realize quite how fantastic pulses are,” he says. “The impact of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers on global climate is massive, because they’re about 2.5-4.5 percent of global manmade emissions.

“Beans are not just nutritious, affordable and delicious, they are a force for good, a symbol of hope, a catalyst for change.”

“So if we could move away from some of those inputs and produce those field-scale crops in a low-input way, we could really make a difference, we could really start to transform things. That’s really when we began getting interested broadly in leguminous plants.”

Pulses, which include beans and also lentils and chickpeas, are the dried seeds of the legume family of plants, which also counts among its members oil-seeds, such as peanuts and soya beans, and varieties more commonly eaten fresh, such as broad beans, green peas and snap peas.

From a food production perspective, legumes have some remarkable properties. Perhaps most crucially, they can produce their own nitrogen.

“Because of a symbiotic relationship that bacteria in the root nodules have with the plants, they are able to take atmospheric nitrogen and convert it into plant-usable form,” says Chelsea Didinger, a beans researcher.

That nitrogen is not just taken up and exploited by the plants themselves, they also leave a significant amount behind, meaning that including legumes in a rotation significantly reduces the amount of fertilizer needed for subsequent crops.

“That crop rotation is really important because by not growing the same crop on the same ground every year, you’re also breaking any cycles for pests or disease,” says Didinger.

Importantly, in a world adapting to changing climate conditions that are leading to droughts in many areas, they also have a low water footprint compared with many other crops, and certainly compared with meat. On average it takes 15,400 liters of water to make 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of beef, but about 5,000 liters for the same amount of beans.

But are they really comparable? No, and yes. “When we’re talking about nutrition they are really unique, because they are high in protein [and] people love protein, protein is very hot these days,” says Didinger.

“If you’re looking for a source of protein coming from plants, they are one of the best, they’re packed with protein. But it doesn’t stop there. They are also super rich in fiber, they are basically the richest natural source of dietary fiber that there is.”

But all these beany benefits are for nought if no one can be persuaded to eat the things, and consumption of this miracle crop has been in long-term decline, particularly in the global north, but increasingly in developing countries where, as people become more affluent, they want to imitate western diets.

The UN reports declines in bean consumption in countries that traditionally have pulse-rich diets, such as India and Mexico.

“We hardly eat any in the UK,” says Meldrum. “We’re really low global per capita consumers of pulses, and yet we have a really good climate for growing particularly peas, which historically would have been a subsistence food. They would have been really core to our diet.”

Things are slowly changing. Over the past two decades, Sando has almost singlehandedly repopularized beans in the US, building Rancho Gordo from a small farmer’s market stall to a multimillion-dollar business.

His beans are not like the pale, soggy things you tip out of a tin and rinse off in a colander. They are heirloom beans, native to the Americas, the kind the Mayans and Aztecs would have built their empires on, but which had all but fallen off the food map.

Now top chefs are queueing up to include them in their recipes, and Sando’s own recipe book has been on the New York Times bestseller list. “They’ve been bred for flavor, and often for the way they look, whereas modern beans are bred for convenience for industrial farming,” he says.

Meldrum is trying to do a similar job in the UK, but with beans generally needing a warmer climate than soggy Norfolk, he has had to be experimental. “We knew that the pulse crops—the beans, peas, chickpeas and lentils that people wanted to eat—were all imported and they were varieties that don’t grow well here,” he says.

“So the first thing we realized is that we needed to encourage people to eat what could be grown here, which is peas and fava beans, which are small, dried broad beans.”

They have some heavy-hitters on their side. Paul Newnham, the executive director of the UN Sustainability Goal 2 advocacy hub for ending hunger, writes in a recent report: “Beans are not just nutritious, affordable and delicious, they are a force for good, a symbol of hope, a catalyst for change.”

Yes, like all good global food conspiracies, the leguminati is backed by the UN. But unlike intermittent calls over the years to include more insects in our diets, this one is rather more appetizing.

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

At an upscale sushi bar in New York last week, a smattering of media and policy types chowed down on a menu of sushi rolls, Peking duck tapas, and mushroom salad. But what made this menu unusual was the one ingredient that ran through the dishes—foie gras made from quail cells brewed in a bioreactor. The event, catered by the sushi chef Masa Takayama, was a launch party for Australian cultivated meat firm Vow, which will sell its foie gras at a handful of restaurants in Singapore and Hong Kong.

The meal was decadent—one course featured a mountain of black truffle—but that was mostly the point. Vow and its CEO, George Peppou, are angling cultivated meat as a luxury product—an unusual positioning for an industry where many founders are motivated by animal welfare and going toe-to-toe with mass-produced meat. But while growing meat in the lab still remains eye-wateringly expensive, Peppou is trying to turn the technology’s Achilles’ heel into his advantage.

“I feel like the obituary has already been written for our industry,” he says. “But just because Californians can’t do something doesn’t mean something can’t be done.”

It’s for venues that want “to use ingredients to distinguish themselves,” or “that have removed foie gras from their menus due to cruelty.”

That something is making cultivated meat while turning a profit. The big challenge facing the industry—along with the bans and the lack of venture capital cash—is that it costs a lot to grow animal cells in bioreactors. Reliable figures are hard to come by, but one research paper with data provided by companies in 2021 put the cost of cultivated meat between $68 and $10,000 per pound, depending on production methods. A lot of startups say they have drastically cut production costs since their early experiments, but prices are still way higher than factory farmed chicken at around $2.67 per pound.

The two best-funded startups in the space—Eat Just and Upside Foods—have both brought out cultivated chicken products. But Peppou, who leans into his reputation in the industry as something of a provocateur, says that approach doesn’t make sense. “Making chicken was always a terrible idea,” he says.

The fundamentals of cultivated meat are pricey. The business of growing animal cells outside of their bodies is usually the domain of medical researchers and pharmaceutical companies. Animal cells grown in culture are used to make vaccines and medicines, which are sold in tiny volumes for sky-high prices. The cultivated meat industry needs some of the same ingredients to grow the cells it wants to sell as meat, but unlike the pharma industry, it needs to grow huge volumes of cells and sell them at grocery store prices.

The major cost right now is what’s called cell media—the broth of liquid, nutrients, amino acids, and growth factors fed to cells while they’re growing. The off-the-shelf standard cell media for growing stem cells is called Essential 8, and it costs upwards of $400 per liter. That’s fine if you’re a scientist growing a few cells in a petri dish, but growing a single kilogram of cultivated meat might require 10 of liters of media, quickly sending costs sky-rocketing. Cultivated meat companies need to find cheaper sources for their ingredients and buy them in bulk in order to drive their costs down.

“Ultimately the industry needs to prove that it can scale,” says Elliot Swartz, principal scientist for cultivated meat at the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit focused on advancing alternative proteins. Just a few crucial ingredients in cell media are a major factor pushing up costs for cultivated meat companies, most of which are still operating at a tiny scale, producing kilograms of meat per production cycle rather than the tons they are aiming for.

“My biggest concern is always the scalability and the ability to industrialize something,” says Ido Savir, CEO of Israeli cultivated meat company SuperMeat. His company has just released a report estimating that—if produced at scale—it could grow chicken meat at $11.80 per pound, close to the price for pasture-raised chicken in the US. But this assumes production in bioreactors up to 25,000 liters—several orders of magnitude higher than the 10-liter scale the company is currently working at. “We’re improving every month,” he says.

Savir is aiming at a much lower price point than Peppou, and hopes to partner with food manufacturers who might license his technology to add cultivated meat into their mix of options. “We’re more interested in the mass market,” he says. Dutch company Meatable has indicated it wants to follow a similar approach—licensing its technology to the handful of firms that already produce much of the US’s meat. Other cultivated meat companies want to sell to consumers under their own brands, but are still targeting the mass meat industry.

Peppou is skewing decidedly in the opposite direction. He declines to name a price, but says his foie gras is at the “higher end” of the market—somewhere in the region of hundreds of dollars per pound. The foie gras is 51 percent Japanese quail cells—which also make up the parfait that Vow has sold in Singapore since April—plus a plant-based fat mix and corn husk flavorings. “It’s either for a venue that wants to use ingredients to distinguish themselves,” says Peppou, or it’s for “large hotels or caterers that have removed foie gras from their menus due to cruelty.”

Conventional foie gras is made by force-feeding ducks or geese until their livers swell with fatty deposits. Production is banned in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and California among other places. Another cultivated meat company, France-based Gourmey, also makes foie gras, although its product is not currently on sale anywhere.

“If you look at a lot of deep technology companies, it’s kind of a game of just not dying.”

Vow’s quail parfait is on the menu at around six restaurants in Singapore, including being sold as a $15 (USD) bar snack and as part of a $185 tasting menu. In Peppou’s telling, going high-end is a way to spin cultivated meat’s high costs and low production volumes as a luxury proposition. “I believe the biggest challenge we have is how to shape consumer sentiment around this category. And the most efficient way to do that in my mind is to be in the most influential places with the relatively limited volume we have available.”

SuperMeat’s Savir says that luxury cultivated meat products “have a place,” but that he is more interested in the mass market where he can complement the current production of meat. That will mean continuing to drive production costs down. One option is to mix cultivated meat with much cheaper plant-based ingredients. Savir says that they’re aiming at products that are around 30 percent cultivated meat cells and 70 percent plant-based ingredients. Several other firms are taking a similar strategy. In Singapore, Eat Just sells cultivated chicken strips that are only 3 percent chicken cells.

The industry is also hoping that customers will pay premium prices because of the potential environmental benefits of making meat outside of animal bodies. Savir says he has spoken with a “very big” pizza company that says replacing just 5 to 10 percent of its chicken toppings with cultivated chicken would make a substantial dent in its carbon footprint.

Even replacing a fraction of a percent of the $50 billion broiler chicken industry in the US would require a monumental scaling-up of cultivated meat production. “If you’re competing against chicken, which is the lowest-cost meat product, then you either have to go to very large scales or create hybrid products that have lower inclusion rates,” says Swartz of the Good Food Institute. But with investor dollars in short supply, companies are having to get creative about how they plan to get products into the world and achieve many founders’ ultimate goal of displacing at least some conventional meat production.

Even though he’s targeting the luxury market, Peppou says he still isn’t turning a profit on his cultured quail parfait or foie gras, although his margin is much better than it would be if he were competing with factory-farmed chicken. “If you look at a lot of deep technology companies, it’s kind of a game of just not dying,” he says. “And it’s figuring out ways to not die long enough to get good enough to win in a market which probably doesn’t exist yet.”

That means the route ahead for Vow might not look totally different from other cultivated meat companies. “The volumes are going to be low, it’s mostly going to be in restaurants. They’re going to be iterating on these products over time before they get any sort of mass market entry point,” says Swartz. “In the short term, what I’m looking forward to is getting more people that are trying this for the first time, not trying it because they’re excited about cultivated meat, but generally because they’re interested.”

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As President-elect Donald Trump puts together a team that will ramp up fossil fuel production in a country that is already pumping out more crude oil than any nation in history, critics are beginning to use a term once reserved for reviled foes.

Specifically, they are asking: Is the United States on its way to becoming a petrostate?

Jean Su, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s energy justice program, raised the question after Trump tapped Chris Wright, CEO of the Denver fracking company Liberty Energy, to lead the Department of Energy. Wright accepts that carbon emissions make the planet warmer, but contrary to the scientific consensus, he argues that the financial and quality-of-life benefits of increased fossil fuel production outweigh the risks. 

“Picking someone like Chris Wright is a clear sign that Trump wants to turn the US into a pariah petrostate,” Su said in an emailed statement. “He’s damning frontline communities and our planet to climate hell just to pad the already bloated pockets of fossil fuel tycoons.”

Climate scientist Michael Mann offered the same view in an essay soon after the election. “The United States is now poised to become an authoritarian state ruled by plutocrats and fossil fuel interests,” he wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “It is now, in short, a petrostate.”

Economists and political scientists point out that the United States does not fit the classical definition of a petrostate. Its economy is far more diverse than those of nations that are hamstrung by dependence on oil and natural gas. Moreover, the vast majority of the wealth generated by fossil fuel production here goes to private parties—not into government coffers.

And yet, experts concede that the United States behaves like a petrostate at times: for example, in its long-time inaction on climate change and, more recently, in the way it conducts foreign policy as the world’s leading oil and gas exporter. The fossil fuel industry’s influence is bound to be amplified under Trump, who does not view climate change as a serious problem and who describes “energy dominance” as a policy imperative. 

“The United States is acting a bit like, I wouldn’t necessarily say a petrostate, but like a state in which the hydrocarbon industry is a huge domestic constituency and source of employment and private sector revenues and now exports,” said Cullen Hendrix, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

The oil and gas industry—even by its own reckoning—currently accounts for just 8 percent of the US economy. Trump’s presidency will test whether competing interests—including businesses, states, and citizens that favor a clean energy transition—can exert enough influence to prevent the United States from going down the path that has hobbled the governance and economies of nations that are reliant on a single commodity.

Trump was not successful in permanently quashing the drive for clean energy in his first term. President Joe Biden was able to restore the US’s place in the Paris Agreement negotiations, reverse most of Trump’s deregulatory decisions and pass the nation’s first comprehensive climate legislation.

But Mann, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, argues that the risks are greater in Trump’s second term that wealthy fossil fuel interests will gain a durable advantage in the US political system.

“This time polluters and plutocrats have made sure they’re ready to hit the ground running,” Mann wrote in an email, pointing to the conservative policy roadmap, Project 2025, written by former Trump administration officials and supporters to guide his agenda. “They won’t waste any time at all eliminating the obstacles to a fossil fuel industry-driven agenda.”

True petrostates typically have state-owned oil companies and seek to maximize revenue as a matter of policy. In Azerbaijan, for example—the country where this year’s international climate talks took place—oil and gas output accounts for more than 90 percent of export revenue and over half of its national budget.

“I think it’s worth remembering that this is not that abnormal for the United States.”

In the United States, private and publicly traded oil and gas companies seek to influence the political process through lobbying and campaign contributions. In 2024, oil and gas industry political giving reached a record $219 million, overwhelmingly favoring Republicans and conservative groups, according to the watchdog group Open Secrets.

But the fossil fuel industry is also woven into the U.S. political fabric in ways that resemble the structure of petrostates. More than 60 percent of the $138 billion in taxes that the fossil fuel industry pays annually goes to state, local and tribal governments, according to a study by the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Resources for the Future, or RFF.

Wyoming gets 59 percent of its state budget from fossil fuel revenue; North Dakota, 29 percent; and Alaska, 21 percent. Other states, though less reliant, take in staggering sums, led by Texas, at $14.6 billion annually; California, $7.8 billion; and Pennsylvania, $4.4 billion. And the money going into state coffers reflects the far larger impact the industry is having on state economies and jobs.

Because institutions like the Electoral College and the US Senate give states outsized power compared to their populations, fossil fuel-reliant regions can hold considerable sway over national politics and policy. For example, political observers say that part of the reason Vice President Kamala Harris talked little about the climate accomplishments of her administration during her presidential campaign, and instead repeated her pledge not to ban fracking, was a vain effort to win the swing state of Pennsylvania, the nation’s No. 2 natural gas producer.

The shape of current US climate policy was dictated by the political realities of the Senate, where it would be impossible to get the 66 votes needed to ratify a conventional climate treaty or 60 votes to pass substantive climate legislation. The Obama administration helped design a Paris agreement that contained no binding legal obligations, and therefore would not require Senate ratification. And the Biden administration’s climate legislation was an incentives package wrapped in a spending bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, which required only a bare majority for passage (and got one only with Harris’ tie-breaking vote). 

“The US has always had a hard time enacting climate policy,” said Daniel Raimi, a fellow at RFF who led its fossil fuel revenue study. “The Inflation Reduction Act was the exception rather than the rule, and it’s also a very unusual kind of climate policy. Most of the rest of the world use carbon pricing or regulatory tools. We couldn’t do any of that because of the political dynamics, so we went for the subsidy-based approach.”

But now, the Trump administration is intent on unraveling those policies. Trump’s job is made easier because the policies weren’t the product of a bipartisan consensus for climate action.

“I think it’s worth remembering that this is not that abnormal for the United States,” Raimi said. “Unfortunately, this is kind of where we have been for most of the last few decades.”

Fracking, which unleashed a flood of oil and gas on the US market beginning in 2010, laid the groundwork for Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda.

Trump liked to say that the United States became energy independent on his watch, surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia in oil production in 2018 and the following year, becoming a net exporter of energy for the first time in more than 60 years. But those trends began under Obama and have accelerated under Biden, with the United States producing 12.9 million barrels per day of crude oil in 2023, more than any other nation in history.

Mammoth facilities have been built in recent years to export liquefied natural gas, or LNG. And in 2015, Congress lifted a four-decade-old ban on US exports of crude oil, responding to the oil industry’s plea that it needed to be able to compete with petrostates for the nation’s own welfare. “Today’s vote starts us down the path to a new era of energy security,” American Petroleum Institute CEO Jack Gerrard said at the time. American producers, he said, “would be able to compete on a level playing field with countries like Iran and Russia, providing security to our allies.”

Biden put that concept into action after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, increasing LNG shipments to the European Union to undercut Russia’s role as a crucial energy supplier to the continent. For the past three years, the United States has provided half of the EU’s LNG supplies, a cushion that has helped allies cope with a precipitous fall in the energy supply from Russia.

Early this year, Biden paused approval of new LNG ports pending a study of their greenhouse gas impact—but a federal judge lifted that moratorium and Trump plans to end it altogether, potentially clearing the way for 20 proposed new LNG terminals. LNG could play a bigger foreign policy role, even if Trump should succeed in ending the Ukraine war “in 24 hours,” as he has promised.

“It seems clear that the second Trump administration is going to want to use this energy leverage to exact concessions from Europe on a variety of fronts,” Hendrix said. “It might be increasing military spending, or more military spending earmarked for U.S. arms exports, or more guarantees to purchase more U.S. exports generally.”

The EU may be ready to deal. The day after the election, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proposed that the EU might be able to head off Trump tariffs by agreeing to buy more LNG from the United States. 

A number of forces may work against the oil and gas industry’s interests during the new Trump administration.

Other industries may succeed in holding off some of the planned regulatory rollbacks, like auto manufacturers, who have invested billions of dollars in electric vehicle and battery plants in anticipation of the clean energy transition they see taking place globally.

States that have new clean energy projects or a long-term commitment to fighting climate change will make their voices heard. “We are going to move forward in the United States, state by state, county by county, city by city, in continuing our tremendous dynamic growth of our clean energy economy,” said Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington in a news conference after the election.

Environmentalists, landowners and fishing operations already are in court fighting the construction of new LNG terminals. Judges have ruled against three LNG projects so far this year, indicating Trump will not be able to make new ports appear on the Gulf Coast overnight.

And finally, some experts rightly acknowledge that Trump’s own energy policy vision may be at odds with itself. Trump frequently said he wanted to return to the “beautiful number” of $1.87 per gallon gasoline—where prices bottomed out during his final year in office.

Gasoline prices were so low in 2020, however, because the global economy had ground to a standstill due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Crude oil prices, now more than $74 per barrel, would have to plummet to $20 per barrel—as they did in 2020—to bring pump prices so low, experts say. That could stop “drill, baby, drill” in its tracks. Exxon Mobil has said its break-even point—the oil price at which it can cover its costs of production—is $35 per barrel; and Wells Fargo estimated last year that break-even for companies that frack in US shale basins is $54 per barrel.

The realities of the free market, as well as democratic institutions, may yet prevent the United States from slipping into the realm of petrostates. Nevertheless, the 2024 election has driven home to many how fossil fuel abundance has made the road to climate action harder in the United States.

“Imagine a United States that was as oil-starved as China,” Hendrix said. “You’d see a lot more sustained emphasis on renewables, going back to the 1990s, if not the 1980s.

“Instead, what we have is this kind of domestic political competition between a coalition that supports renewable energy and a coalition that supports fossil fuels,” he said. “And Trump’s election suggests to me that fossil fuels are the winners in the short term.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On Monday, Senator Debbie Stabenow, a longtime champion of programs that support farmers and increase access to nutritious foods, introduced a new version of the farm bill, a key piece of legislation typically renewed every five years that governs much of how the agricultural industry in the US operates. 

Stabenow, who is retiring next month after representing Michigan in the Senate for 24 years, has staked her career on her vision for a robust, progressive farm bill, one that, among other things, paves the way for farmers to endure the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

The text of her bill comes almost two months after the 2018 farm bill, which initially expired last year and was revived thanks to a one-year extension, expired for a second time on September 30. And it comes mere weeks before the end of the year, when funding for several programs included in the farm bill will run out. 

But more importantly, the bill comes after many months of infighting between Democratic and Republican lawmakers over what matters most in the next farm bill—and just weeks before the current congressional term ends. In order to pass the bill, Stabenow would need to gain the support of Republicans in the Senate agriculture committee and the House of Representatives, where Democrats lack the votes necessary to pass their own version of the legislation. 

It’s likely, even expected, that that won’t happen. Sen. John Boozman, a Republican from Arkansas who is likely to chair the Senate agriculture committee after Stabenow’s retirement, criticized her bill on X, calling it an “insulting 11th hour partisan proposal.” Meanwhile, in the House, Republicans are reportedly hoping instead to pass another one-year extension of the farm bill, pushing negotiations over the new bill into next year, according to Politico.

There’s virtually no reason for Republicans not to prolong the process of hammering out the next farm bill, as starting in January they will have majority control over the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of the federal government.

By proposing legislation that’s all but doomed, Stabenow may be vying to secure her legacy as an environmental steward who understands how climate change is already impacting agricultural production, and why there should be more investment in climate initiatives that safeguard farmers now. 

In a speech presenting the details of her bill to the Senate on Monday, Stabenow said, “For more than two years I’ve been working with colleagues on both sides of the aisle to pass my sixth Farm Bill, the third one that I’ve either been chair or ranking member of…the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry.” 

She emphasized that farming is a risky business given its dependence on the weather. “But it’s getting even riskier now, because [of] what’s happening with the climate crisis, and we know that,” she said. “How many once-in-a-generation storms or droughts need to hit our farmers over the head before we take this crisis seriously?”

Certain advocacy groups have praised Stabenow’s farm bill. Rebecca Riley, the managing director for food and agriculture at the National Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, said the bill reflects Stabenow’s “decades of leadership and dedication to strengthening America’s farmers and rural communities.” But other groups were slower to respond. In a statement, the American Farm Bureau Federation, an agricultural industry group, said simply: “We’re reviewing Chairwoman Stabenow’s newly released 1,300 pages of farm bill text,” adding that it’s “unfortunate that only a few legislative working days remain for Congress to act.” (Stabenow’s office did not reply to Grist’s requests for comment.)

One of the key features of Stabenow’s farm bill is funding for so-called “climate-smart” agriculture practices, an umbrella term that broadly refers to techniques that help farmers sequester carbon in the soil rather than emit more of it into the atmosphere, where it contributes to global warming. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act allocated nearly $20 billion in funding for these practices, such as crop rotation and no-till farming. And in the spring, Stabenow introduced a framework that rolled over the leftover money from the IRA for “climate-smart” practices into a new farm bill. (Shortly afterwards, Senate Republicans put forward another draft of the farm bill without this provision.)

Climate is hardly the only focus of the text Stabenow introduced earlier this week, which, like all farm bills, seeks to address a dizzying array of agricultural and nutritional priorities. Chief among the provisions in her bill, titled the Rural Prosperity and Food Security Act, are policies that aim to increase access to crop insurance and make coverage more affordable by boosting premium subsidies. The bill also seeks to invest $4.3 billion in rural communities, seeking to improve their access to health care, childcare, education, and broadband internet. 

But other provisions indicate that Stabenow has long been thinking of how to further protect farmers from climate impacts such as extreme weather—and also make the US food system more diversified and resilient. She proposes creating a permanent disaster program that would establish a consistent process for providing farmers with assistance after floods, wildfires, and other calamities. Stabenow also seeks to strengthen support for specialty crops—better known as fruits, nuts, vegetables, and herbs—and reminds the Senate during her press briefing that these crops “are almost half of what we grow.” 

hese details represent some of the divisions that run deep through congressional negotiations. Senator John Hoeven, the Republican congressman from North Dakota, was quick to dismiss Stabenow’s vision, writing on X, “Unfortunately, the Senate bill released today does not meet the needs of farm country and fails to keep farm in the Farm Bill.” Boozman has signaled he fully intends to ignore Stabenow’s last-minute bill, telling reporters that Congress must push for another extension of the 2018 farm bill and meeting with agriculture industry groups to discuss their priorities.

Boozman’s and other Republicans’ concerns with the new farm bill text likely stem, at least in part, from lobbying groups representing large-scale, industrial farmers who wish to see fewer restrictions placed on how they do business. The National Pork Producers Council, or NPPC, for example, issued an instant rejection of Stabenow’s farm bill text, calling it “simply not a viable bill” for “fail[ing] to provide a solution to California Prop. 12.”

That proposition prohibits the sale of veal, pork, and egg products by farm owners and operators who knowingly house animals “in a cruel manner.” The NPPC has followed this issue closely, arguing that forcing pork producers to comply with “arbitrary” animal housing specifications would wildly increase their costs (and prices for consumers). The group successfully lobbied for a provision in the House farm bill that essentially takes away California’s power to enforce such a law—by blocking state and local government from imposing conditions on the production of livestock sold in their jurisdiction (unless the livestock is actually produced within the state or local community).  

Stabenow seems highly aware of the zero-sum framework with which many different actors view the farm bill. When addressing the Senate, she mentioned that the version of the Farm Bill released by the House in May would have put “immense” resources into a small number of commodity farmers in the South. “I’m not saying that these farmers don’t need support. They do,” she said. “But it can’t be at the expense of millions of other farmers and ranchers in this country,” including those who run smaller, diversified operations or who grow fruits and vegetables. 

In her speech, Stabenow repeatedly framed the text of her bill as a bipartisan project, and projected an urgency to secure wider resources for more farmers now. Her vision, she says, “can pass and should pass.” But whether that’s true or not will depend an awful lot on her colleagues, who currently have no incentive to negotiate with her and other Democrats and could simply wait to push forward their own agenda. How long they wait remains to be seen. 

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

For decades they have been working underground, establishing mycorrhizal-like networks of commerce and influence, taking root in academia and institutions, and even extending their tendrils into supranational governance.

Their goal is to transform the diets of people across the world, to spark a revolution in food production and consumption. They call themselves the leguminati.

“When you rediscover beans, it’s something we’ve all taken for granted, and then you realize—oh my God—these are really great; it’s like a secret,” says Steve Sando, the founder of the California-based bean company, Rancho Gordo, who is, for many, the godfather of this cult. “The secret’s been revealed to them and they tend not to be able to shut up about it, because they feel they’ve discovered the world.”

Beans are enjoying a culinary renaissance and, say their advocates, it is not a moment too soon. Long thought of as bland, fiddly to cook, or poverty food, in recent years there has been growing recognition that beans are not only delicious, but that eating more of them could help solve a host of planetary and human health problems.

Food production is a big cause of climate breakdown, amounting to about a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Three-fifths of those emissions come from meat production, leading many to argue for a shift towards a plant-based diet.

But that does not take plants off the hook entirely. The “green revolution” of the 20th century led to an exponential increase in agricultural output, but it was via the widespread use of nitrogen-based fertilizers, a byproduct of the petrochemical industry that emit nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas with a heating effect 300 times that of carbon dioxide.

Added to that, poorly applied fertiliser runs off into rivers and waterways leading to pollution and algal blooms that kill fish and other wildlife.

It was issues such as these that Josiah Meldrum, the cofounder with Nick Saltmarsh of the UK bean company Hodmedod’s, had in mind in the early 2000s when he was asked by climate campaigners in Norwich how a city such as theirs, with a population of about 122,000 then (144,000 now), could feed itself without exceeding planetary boundaries.

“It was that climate project that led us to realize quite how fantastic pulses are,” he says. “The impact of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers on global climate is massive, because they’re about 2.5-4.5 percent of global manmade emissions.

“Beans are not just nutritious, affordable and delicious, they are a force for good, a symbol of hope, a catalyst for change.”

“So if we could move away from some of those inputs and produce those field-scale crops in a low-input way, we could really make a difference, we could really start to transform things. That’s really when we began getting interested broadly in leguminous plants.”

Pulses, which include beans and also lentils and chickpeas, are the dried seeds of the legume family of plants, which also counts among its members oil-seeds, such as peanuts and soya beans, and varieties more commonly eaten fresh, such as broad beans, green peas and snap peas.

From a food production perspective, legumes have some remarkable properties. Perhaps most crucially, they can produce their own nitrogen.

“Because of a symbiotic relationship that bacteria in the root nodules have with the plants, they are able to take atmospheric nitrogen and convert it into plant-usable form,” says Chelsea Didinger, a beans researcher.

That nitrogen is not just taken up and exploited by the plants themselves, they also leave a significant amount behind, meaning that including legumes in a rotation significantly reduces the amount of fertilizer needed for subsequent crops.

“That crop rotation is really important because by not growing the same crop on the same ground every year, you’re also breaking any cycles for pests or disease,” says Didinger.

Importantly, in a world adapting to changing climate conditions that are leading to droughts in many areas, they also have a low water footprint compared with many other crops, and certainly compared with meat. On average it takes 15,400 liters of water to make 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of beef, but about 5,000 liters for the same amount of beans.

But are they really comparable? No, and yes. “When we’re talking about nutrition they are really unique, because they are high in protein [and] people love protein, protein is very hot these days,” says Didinger.

“If you’re looking for a source of protein coming from plants, they are one of the best, they’re packed with protein. But it doesn’t stop there. They are also super rich in fiber, they are basically the richest natural source of dietary fiber that there is.”

But all these beany benefits are for nought if no one can be persuaded to eat the things, and consumption of this miracle crop has been in long-term decline, particularly in the global north, but increasingly in developing countries where, as people become more affluent, they want to imitate western diets.

The UN reports declines in bean consumption in countries that traditionally have pulse-rich diets, such as India and Mexico.

“We hardly eat any in the UK,” says Meldrum. “We’re really low global per capita consumers of pulses, and yet we have a really good climate for growing particularly peas, which historically would have been a subsistence food. They would have been really core to our diet.”

Things are slowly changing. Over the past two decades, Sando has almost singlehandedly repopularized beans in the US, building Rancho Gordo from a small farmer’s market stall to a multimillion-dollar business.

His beans are not like the pale, soggy things you tip out of a tin and rinse off in a colander. They are heirloom beans, native to the Americas, the kind the Mayans and Aztecs would have built their empires on, but which had all but fallen off the food map.

Now top chefs are queueing up to include them in their recipes, and Sando’s own recipe book has been on the New York Times bestseller list. “They’ve been bred for flavor, and often for the way they look, whereas modern beans are bred for convenience for industrial farming,” he says.

Meldrum is trying to do a similar job in the UK, but with beans generally needing a warmer climate than soggy Norfolk, he has had to be experimental. “We knew that the pulse crops—the beans, peas, chickpeas and lentils that people wanted to eat—were all imported and they were varieties that don’t grow well here,” he says.

“So the first thing we realized is that we needed to encourage people to eat what could be grown here, which is peas and fava beans, which are small, dried broad beans.”

They have some heavy-hitters on their side. Paul Newnham, the executive director of the UN Sustainability Goal 2 advocacy hub for ending hunger, writes in a recent report: “Beans are not just nutritious, affordable and delicious, they are a force for good, a symbol of hope, a catalyst for change.”

Yes, like all good global food conspiracies, the leguminati is backed by the UN. But unlike intermittent calls over the years to include more insects in our diets, this one is rather more appetizing.

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

At an upscale sushi bar in New York last week, a smattering of media and policy types chowed down on a menu of sushi rolls, Peking duck tapas, and mushroom salad. But what made this menu unusual was the one ingredient that ran through the dishes—foie gras made from quail cells brewed in a bioreactor. The event, catered by the sushi chef Masa Takayama, was a launch party for Australian cultivated meat firm Vow, which will sell its foie gras at a handful of restaurants in Singapore and Hong Kong.

The meal was decadent—one course featured a mountain of black truffle—but that was mostly the point. Vow and its CEO, George Peppou, are angling cultivated meat as a luxury product—an unusual positioning for an industry where many founders are motivated by animal welfare and going toe-to-toe with mass-produced meat. But while growing meat in the lab still remains eye-wateringly expensive, Peppou is trying to turn the technology’s Achilles’ heel into his advantage.

“I feel like the obituary has already been written for our industry,” he says. “But just because Californians can’t do something doesn’t mean something can’t be done.”

It’s for venues that want “to use ingredients to distinguish themselves,” or “that have removed foie gras from their menus due to cruelty.”

That something is making cultivated meat while turning a profit. The big challenge facing the industry—along with the bans and the lack of venture capital cash—is that it costs a lot to grow animal cells in bioreactors. Reliable figures are hard to come by, but one research paper with data provided by companies in 2021 put the cost of cultivated meat between $68 and $10,000 per pound, depending on production methods. A lot of startups say they have drastically cut production costs since their early experiments, but prices are still way higher than factory farmed chicken at around $2.67 per pound.

The two best-funded startups in the space—Eat Just and Upside Foods—have both brought out cultivated chicken products. But Peppou, who leans into his reputation in the industry as something of a provocateur, says that approach doesn’t make sense. “Making chicken was always a terrible idea,” he says.

The fundamentals of cultivated meat are pricey. The business of growing animal cells outside of their bodies is usually the domain of medical researchers and pharmaceutical companies. Animal cells grown in culture are used to make vaccines and medicines, which are sold in tiny volumes for sky-high prices. The cultivated meat industry needs some of the same ingredients to grow the cells it wants to sell as meat, but unlike the pharma industry, it needs to grow huge volumes of cells and sell them at grocery store prices.

The major cost right now is what’s called cell media—the broth of liquid, nutrients, amino acids, and growth factors fed to cells while they’re growing. The off-the-shelf standard cell media for growing stem cells is called Essential 8, and it costs upwards of $400 per liter. That’s fine if you’re a scientist growing a few cells in a petri dish, but growing a single kilogram of cultivated meat might require 10 of liters of media, quickly sending costs sky-rocketing. Cultivated meat companies need to find cheaper sources for their ingredients and buy them in bulk in order to drive their costs down.

“Ultimately the industry needs to prove that it can scale,” says Elliot Swartz, principal scientist for cultivated meat at the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit focused on advancing alternative proteins. Just a few crucial ingredients in cell media are a major factor pushing up costs for cultivated meat companies, most of which are still operating at a tiny scale, producing kilograms of meat per production cycle rather than the tons they are aiming for.

“My biggest concern is always the scalability and the ability to industrialize something,” says Ido Savir, CEO of Israeli cultivated meat company SuperMeat. His company has just released a report estimating that—if produced at scale—it could grow chicken meat at $11.80 per pound, close to the price for pasture-raised chicken in the US. But this assumes production in bioreactors up to 25,000 liters—several orders of magnitude higher than the 10-liter scale the company is currently working at. “We’re improving every month,” he says.

Savir is aiming at a much lower price point than Peppou, and hopes to partner with food manufacturers who might license his technology to add cultivated meat into their mix of options. “We’re more interested in the mass market,” he says. Dutch company Meatable has indicated it wants to follow a similar approach—licensing its technology to the handful of firms that already produce much of the US’s meat. Other cultivated meat companies want to sell to consumers under their own brands, but are still targeting the mass meat industry.

Peppou is skewing decidedly in the opposite direction. He declines to name a price, but says his foie gras is at the “higher end” of the market—somewhere in the region of hundreds of dollars per pound. The foie gras is 51 percent Japanese quail cells—which also make up the parfait that Vow has sold in Singapore since April—plus a plant-based fat mix and corn husk flavorings. “It’s either for a venue that wants to use ingredients to distinguish themselves,” says Peppou, or it’s for “large hotels or caterers that have removed foie gras from their menus due to cruelty.”

Conventional foie gras is made by force-feeding ducks or geese until their livers swell with fatty deposits. Production is banned in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and California among other places. Another cultivated meat company, France-based Gourmey, also makes foie gras, although its product is not currently on sale anywhere.

“If you look at a lot of deep technology companies, it’s kind of a game of just not dying.”

Vow’s quail parfait is on the menu at around six restaurants in Singapore, including being sold as a $15 (USD) bar snack and as part of a $185 tasting menu. In Peppou’s telling, going high-end is a way to spin cultivated meat’s high costs and low production volumes as a luxury proposition. “I believe the biggest challenge we have is how to shape consumer sentiment around this category. And the most efficient way to do that in my mind is to be in the most influential places with the relatively limited volume we have available.”

SuperMeat’s Savir says that luxury cultivated meat products “have a place,” but that he is more interested in the mass market where he can complement the current production of meat. That will mean continuing to drive production costs down. One option is to mix cultivated meat with much cheaper plant-based ingredients. Savir says that they’re aiming at products that are around 30 percent cultivated meat cells and 70 percent plant-based ingredients. Several other firms are taking a similar strategy. In Singapore, Eat Just sells cultivated chicken strips that are only 3 percent chicken cells.

The industry is also hoping that customers will pay premium prices because of the potential environmental benefits of making meat outside of animal bodies. Savir says he has spoken with a “very big” pizza company that says replacing just 5 to 10 percent of its chicken toppings with cultivated chicken would make a substantial dent in its carbon footprint.

Even replacing a fraction of a percent of the $50 billion broiler chicken industry in the US would require a monumental scaling-up of cultivated meat production. “If you’re competing against chicken, which is the lowest-cost meat product, then you either have to go to very large scales or create hybrid products that have lower inclusion rates,” says Swartz of the Good Food Institute. But with investor dollars in short supply, companies are having to get creative about how they plan to get products into the world and achieve many founders’ ultimate goal of displacing at least some conventional meat production.

Even though he’s targeting the luxury market, Peppou says he still isn’t turning a profit on his cultured quail parfait or foie gras, although his margin is much better than it would be if he were competing with factory-farmed chicken. “If you look at a lot of deep technology companies, it’s kind of a game of just not dying,” he says. “And it’s figuring out ways to not die long enough to get good enough to win in a market which probably doesn’t exist yet.”

That means the route ahead for Vow might not look totally different from other cultivated meat companies. “The volumes are going to be low, it’s mostly going to be in restaurants. They’re going to be iterating on these products over time before they get any sort of mass market entry point,” says Swartz. “In the short term, what I’m looking forward to is getting more people that are trying this for the first time, not trying it because they’re excited about cultivated meat, but generally because they’re interested.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The world’s largest cruise line company is responsible for producing more carbon dioxide in Europe than the city of Glasgow, a report has found.

An analysis by the Transport and Environment (T&E) campaign group, provided to the Guardian, found Carnival to be the most climate-polluting cruise company sailing in Europe in 2023.

The data covered all Europe-bound cruise ships last year, including 53 that belonged to Carnival. The second most climate-polluting cruise company in Europe was MSC, followed by Norwegian Cruise Line, the group found.

Carbon emissions for Carnival’s Europe-bound ships totalled 2.6 million metric tons of CO2 last year. The latest emissions figures for the city of Glasgow, from 2021, with a population of 620,700, were 2.43 million metric tons, according to the city council. MSC emitted 1.4 million and Norwegian 0.84 million. Analysts from T&E used official data on carbon emissions supplied by vessels sailing in the European Economic Area, as required by EU law.

“Scrubbers allow ships to convert their air pollution into toxic water pollution, and they can use bunker fuel which is dirty and cheap.”

“The larger companies have more vessels and bigger ships,” said Jacob Armstrong, shipping policy manager at T&E. “But bigger isn’t better when it comes to emissions.”

Cruising is one of tourism’s fastest-growing sectors. The number of cruise vessels has grown significantly, from 21 in the 1970s to 515 today, and T&E research shows the world’s biggest cruise ships have doubled in size since 2000.

Carnival Corporation plc, a Miami-based British and US company, made $2 billion profit in 2023, after losses of $4.4 billion and $7.1 billion in 2022 and 2021, during the Covid pandemic. In 2023, 12.5 million passengers travelled on its 92 ships.

In a separate ranking of environmental harm by cruise companies in 2024, by Friends of the Earth (FoE) US, Carnival and its subsidiaries also emerged lowest among 21 cruise lines.

An annual “cruise ship report card” awarded five of Carnival’s nine lines—Costa Cruises, P&O Cruises, Carnival Cruise Line, Cunard, and Seabourn—the grade of F overall. Four factors taken into account were air pollution reduction, sewage treatment, water quality and transparency.

Marcie Keever, ocean and vessels programme director at FoE, said Carnival’s continued use of “scrubbers” in its fleet, which, while approved by the International Maritime Organization, allows the use of dirtier fuel and causes water pollution. “Scrubbers allow ships to convert their air pollution into toxic water pollution, and they can use bunker fuel which is dirty and cheap,” she said.

This factor, along with a lack of transparency, and not all ships being equipped for shore power, resulted in the F grade, the lowest ranking.

FoE awarded expedition cruise lines Hurtigruten and Hurtigruten Expeditions a B+, the highest score, while Disney Cruise line got a B. Hurtigruten vessels plug into shore power instead of running their engines, thus reducing air pollution at shore power-enabled ports. Neither Hurtigruten nor Disney use scrubbers on vessels, and all three were awarded A for transparency.

“There are more cruise companies getting higher grades than in previous years, so we are seeing some progress,” Keever said.

A Carnival Corp and plc spokesperson said: “We’ve invested hundreds of millions of dollars in environmental technologies and solutions, which together with our other decisive climate actions are yielding strong results.”

Carnival’s 2023 total greenhouse gas emissions were 9.7 million metric tons, compared with 10.9 million in 2011. The spokesperson said it was on track to cut its emissions per passenger-equivalent by 40 percent by 2026, compared with 2008 levels.

An MSC cruise spokesperson said improving the environmental performance of its fleet was of “crucial” importance. “We have already made significant progress, and our ships are 40 percent more efficient than they were 10 years ago.”

A spokesperson for Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings said: “We are proud of the progress we are making towards our goal of reducing greenhouse gas intensity per capacity day by 10 percent by 2026 and 25 percent by 2030, using a 2019 baseline.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The world’s largest cruise line company is responsible for producing more carbon dioxide in Europe than the city of Glasgow, a report has found.

An analysis by the Transport and Environment (T&E) campaign group, provided to the Guardian, found Carnival to be the most climate-polluting cruise company sailing in Europe in 2023.

The data covered all Europe-bound cruise ships last year, including 53 that belonged to Carnival. The second most climate-polluting cruise company in Europe was MSC, followed by Norwegian Cruise Line, the group found.

Carbon emissions for Carnival’s Europe-bound ships totalled 2.6 million metric tons of CO2 last year. The latest emissions figures for the city of Glasgow, from 2021, with a population of 620,700, were 2.43 million metric tons, according to the city council. MSC emitted 1.4 million and Norwegian 0.84 million. Analysts from T&E used official data on carbon emissions supplied by vessels sailing in the European Economic Area, as required by EU law.

“Scrubbers allow ships to convert their air pollution into toxic water pollution, and they can use bunker fuel which is dirty and cheap.”

“The larger companies have more vessels and bigger ships,” said Jacob Armstrong, shipping policy manager at T&E. “But bigger isn’t better when it comes to emissions.”

Cruising is one of tourism’s fastest-growing sectors. The number of cruise vessels has grown significantly, from 21 in the 1970s to 515 today, and T&E research shows the world’s biggest cruise ships have doubled in size since 2000.

Carnival Corporation plc, a Miami-based British and US company, made $2 billion profit in 2023, after losses of $4.4 billion and $7.1 billion in 2022 and 2021, during the Covid pandemic. In 2023, 12.5 million passengers travelled on its 92 ships.

In a separate ranking of environmental harm by cruise companies in 2024, by Friends of the Earth (FoE) US, Carnival and its subsidiaries also emerged lowest among 21 cruise lines.

An annual “cruise ship report card” awarded five of Carnival’s nine lines—Costa Cruises, P&O Cruises, Carnival Cruise Line, Cunard, and Seabourn—the grade of F overall. Four factors taken into account were air pollution reduction, sewage treatment, water quality and transparency.

Marcie Keever, ocean and vessels programme director at FoE, said Carnival’s continued use of “scrubbers” in its fleet, which, while approved by the International Maritime Organization, allows the use of dirtier fuel and causes water pollution. “Scrubbers allow ships to convert their air pollution into toxic water pollution, and they can use bunker fuel which is dirty and cheap,” she said.

This factor, along with a lack of transparency, and not all ships being equipped for shore power, resulted in the F grade, the lowest ranking.

FoE awarded expedition cruise lines Hurtigruten and Hurtigruten Expeditions a B+, the highest score, while Disney Cruise line got a B. Hurtigruten vessels plug into shore power instead of running their engines, thus reducing air pollution at shore power-enabled ports. Neither Hurtigruten nor Disney use scrubbers on vessels, and all three were awarded A for transparency.

“There are more cruise companies getting higher grades than in previous years, so we are seeing some progress,” Keever said.

A Carnival Corp and plc spokesperson said: “We’ve invested hundreds of millions of dollars in environmental technologies and solutions, which together with our other decisive climate actions are yielding strong results.”

Carnival’s 2023 total greenhouse gas emissions were 9.7 million metric tons, compared with 10.9 million in 2011. The spokesperson said it was on track to cut its emissions per passenger-equivalent by 40 percent by 2026, compared with 2008 levels.

An MSC cruise spokesperson said improving the environmental performance of its fleet was of “crucial” importance. “We have already made significant progress, and our ships are 40 percent more efficient than they were 10 years ago.”

A spokesperson for Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings said: “We are proud of the progress we are making towards our goal of reducing greenhouse gas intensity per capacity day by 10 percent by 2026 and 25 percent by 2030, using a 2019 baseline.”

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

India and Pakistan are losing ground to a common deadly enemy. Vast clouds of dense, toxic smog have once again shrouded metropolises in South Asia. Air pollution regularly spikes in November in the subcontinent, but this year’s dirty air has still been breathtaking in its scale and severity. The gray, smoky pollution is even visible to satellites, and it’s fueling a public health crisis.

Last week, officials in the Punjab province in Pakistan imposed lockdowns on the cities of Multan, population 2.1 million, and Lahore, population 13.7 million, after reaching record-high pollution levels. “Smog is currently a national disaster,” senior Punjab provincial minister Marriyum Aurangzeb said during a press conference last week. Schools shut down, restaurants closed, construction halted, highways sat empty, and medical staff were recalled to hospitals and clinics.

Across the border in India, the 33 million residents of Delhi this week are breathing air pollution that’s 50 times higher than the safe limit outlined by the World Health Organization (WHO). The choking haze caused 15 aircraft to divert to nearby airports and caused hundreds of delays. Students and workers were told to stay home.

Global health authorities say air pollution has reduced the average life expectancy by 2.3 years, and contributes to almost 7 million deaths annually.

Despite all the disruption, air pollution continues to spike year after year after year.

Why? The dirty air arises from a confluence of human and natural factors. Construction, cooking fires, brick kilns, vehicles, and burning leftovers from crop harvests are all feeding into the toxic clouds. The Himalaya and Hindu Kush mountains to the north of lower-lying areas like Lahore and Delhi hold the smog in place. In the winter, the region experiences thermal inversions, where a layer of warm air pushes down on cool winter air, holding the pollution closer to the ground.

As populations grow in South Asia, so will the need for food, energy, housing, and transportation. Without a course correction, that will mean even more pollution. Yet history shows that air pollution is a solvable problem. Cities like Los Angeles and Beijing that were once notorious for dirty air have managed to clean it up. The process took years, drawing on economic development and new technologies. But it also required good governance and incentives to cut pollution, something local officials in India and Pakistan have already demonstrated can clear the air. The task now is to scale it up to higher levels of government.

There’s no shortage of science showing how terrible air pollution is for you. It aggravates asthma, worsens heart disease, triggers inflammation, and increases infection risk. It hampers brain development in children and can contribute to dementia in adults.

On average, air pollution has reduced life expectancies around the world by 2.3 years, more than tobacco. It contributes to almost 7 million deaths per year, according to WHO, about one in nine deaths annually. It sucks trillions of dollars out of the global economy.

The toll is especially acute in South Asia. Air pollution drains 3.9 years of life in Pakistan. In India, it steals 5.3 years. For workers who spend their days outdoors—delivery drivers, construction crews, farm laborers—the damage is even higher. Many residents report constant fevers, coughs, and headaches.

Despite the well-known dangers and the mounting threat, it remains a persistent problem.

Part of the challenge of improving air quality is that air pollution isn’t just one thing; it’s a combination of hazardous chemicals and particles that arise in teeming metropolises in developing countries.

One of the most popular metrics around the world for tracking pollution is the Air Quality Index, developed by the US Environmental Protection Agency. The index is not a measurement of any one pollutant, but rather the risk from a combination of pollutants based on US air quality standards. The main villains are ground-level ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and particles. The particles are subcategorized into those smaller than 10 microns (PM10) and smaller than 2.5 microns (PM2.5). (Earlier this year, the EPA modified the way it calculates the AQI, so numbers from this year are not an apples-to-apples comparison to levels from previous years.) The tiny particles are pernicious because they penetrate deep into the lungs and trigger breathing problems.

“I think the most surprising, interesting, and scary thing, honestly, is seeing the levels of pollution in areas that haven’t been monitored before.”

An AQI below 50 is considered safe to breathe. Above 200, the air is considered a health threat for everyone. At 300, it’s an emergency. In Delhi, the AQI this last week reached 1,185. Lahore reached 1,900 this month. If a person breathes this air for over 24 hours, the exposure is roughly equivalent to smoking 90 cigarettes in a day.

However, air pollution poses a threat long before it’s visible. “Your eye is not a good detector of air pollution in general,” said Christi Chester Schroeder, the air quality science manager at IQAir, a company that builds air quality monitoring instruments and collects pollution data. “The pollutant that you have to be really careful about in terms of not being able to see it but experiencing it is ozone. Ozone levels can be extremely high on sunny days.”

IQAir has a network of air quality sensors across South Asia, including regions like Lahore and Delhi. The company tracks pollution in real time using its own sensors as well as monitors bought by schools, businesses, and ordinary people. Their professional-grade air monitors can cost more than $20,000 but they also sell consumer air quality trackers that cost $300. Both sources help paint a picture of pollution.

Many schools and businesses across South Asia have installed their own pollution monitors. The US maintains its own air quality instruments at its consulates and embassies in India and Pakistan as well.

Schroeder noted, however, that IQAir’s instruments are geared toward monitoring particles like PM2.5 and don’t easily allow a user to make inferences about concentrations of other pollutants like sulfur oxides and where they’re coming from. “When you’re looking at places that have a really big mixture of sources—like you have a mixture of transportation and fires and climate inversion conditions—then it gets to be much murkier and you can’t really sort of pull it apart that way,” Schroeder said.

Air quality monitors in India and Pakistan show that air pollution can vary over short distances—between neighborhoods or even street by street—and that it can change rapidly through the day. Nearby bus terminals, power plants, or cooking fires contribute a lot to local pollution, but without tracking systems in the vicinity, it can be hard to realize how bad the situation has become.

“I think the most surprising, interesting, and scary thing, honestly, is seeing the levels of pollution in areas that haven’t been monitored before,” Schroeder said.

Another complication is that people also experience pollution far away from where it’s produced. “This automatically creates a big governance challenge because the administrator who is responsible for providing you clean air in your jurisdiction is not actually the administrator who is governing over the polluting action,” said Saad Gulzar, an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University.

Take crop stubble burning, which accounts for up to 60 percent of the air pollution in the region this time of year. In late fall, farmers in northern India and Pakistan harvest rice and plant wheat. With little time between the reaping and sowing, the fastest and cheapest way for many farmers to clear their fields of leftover stems, leaves, and roots is to burn it. The resulting smoke then wafts from rural areas into urban centers.

Motivating officials to act at local, regional, and national levels is a key step in reducing air pollution.

The challenge is that farmers and urbanites are different political constituencies, and it’s hard to demand concessions from the former to benefit the latter. It has led to bitter political fights in both countries and between them. Farmers also point out that the reason they have so little time between crops is because of water conservation laws: To cope with groundwater depletion, officials in India imposed regulations to limit rice planting until after monsoon rains arrive in the early summer to top up reservoirs. Delaying planting means delaying harvest, hence the rush to clear their fields.

Both India and Pakistan have even gone as far as to arrest farmers who burn crop stubble, but there are millions of farmers spread out over a vast area, stretching enforcement thin. However, local efforts to control smoke from crop burning have proven effective when local officials are motivated to act.

Gulzar co-authored a study published in October in the journal Nature, looking at air pollution and its impacts across India and Pakistan. Examining satellite data and health records over the past decade, the paper found that who is in charge of a jurisdiction plays a key role in air pollution—and could also be the key to solving it.

When a district is likely to experience pollution from a fire within its own boundaries, bureaucrats and local officials take more aggressive action to mitigate it, whether that’s paying farmers not to burn stubble, providing them with tools to clear fields without fires, or threatening them with fines and arrest. That led fires within a district to drop by 14.5 percent and future burning to decline by 13 percent. These air pollution reductions led to measurable drops in childhood mortality. On the other hand, if the wind is poised to push pollution from crop burning over an adjacent district, fires increase by 15 percent.

The results show that simply motivating officials to act at local, regional, and national levels is a key step in reducing air pollution and that progress can begin right away.

But further air quality improvements will require a transition toward cleaner energy. Besides crop burning, the other major source of air pollution across India and Pakistan is fossil fuel combustion, whether that’s coal in furnaces, gas in factories, or diesel in trucks. These fuels also contribute to climate change, which is already contributing to devastating heat waves and flooding from torrential monsoons in the region. Both countries have made major investments in renewable energy, but they are also poised to burn more coal to feed their growing economies.

At the COP29 climate change conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, India was asking wealthier nations to contribute more money to finance clean energy within its borders and to share technologies that will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance air quality.

Solving the air pollution crisis in India and Pakistan will take years, and it’s likely to get worse before it gets better. But there are lifesaving measures both countries can take now.

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

India and Pakistan are losing ground to a common deadly enemy. Vast clouds of dense, toxic smog have once again shrouded metropolises in South Asia. Air pollution regularly spikes in November in the subcontinent, but this year’s dirty air has still been breathtaking in its scale and severity. The gray, smoky pollution is even visible to satellites, and it’s fueling a public health crisis.

Last week, officials in the Punjab province in Pakistan imposed lockdowns on the cities of Multan, population 2.1 million, and Lahore, population 13.7 million, after reaching record-high pollution levels. “Smog is currently a national disaster,” senior Punjab provincial minister Marriyum Aurangzeb said during a press conference last week. Schools shut down, restaurants closed, construction halted, highways sat empty, and medical staff were recalled to hospitals and clinics.

Across the border in India, the 33 million residents of Delhi this week are breathing air pollution that’s 50 times higher than the safe limit outlined by the World Health Organization (WHO). The choking haze caused 15 aircraft to divert to nearby airports and caused hundreds of delays. Students and workers were told to stay home.

Global health authorities say air pollution has reduced the average life expectancy by 2.3 years, and contributes to almost 7 million deaths annually.

Despite all the disruption, air pollution continues to spike year after year after year.

Why? The dirty air arises from a confluence of human and natural factors. Construction, cooking fires, brick kilns, vehicles, and burning leftovers from crop harvests are all feeding into the toxic clouds. The Himalaya and Hindu Kush mountains to the north of lower-lying areas like Lahore and Delhi hold the smog in place. In the winter, the region experiences thermal inversions, where a layer of warm air pushes down on cool winter air, holding the pollution closer to the ground.

As populations grow in South Asia, so will the need for food, energy, housing, and transportation. Without a course correction, that will mean even more pollution. Yet history shows that air pollution is a solvable problem. Cities like Los Angeles and Beijing that were once notorious for dirty air have managed to clean it up. The process took years, drawing on economic development and new technologies. But it also required good governance and incentives to cut pollution, something local officials in India and Pakistan have already demonstrated can clear the air. The task now is to scale it up to higher levels of government.

There’s no shortage of science showing how terrible air pollution is for you. It aggravates asthma, worsens heart disease, triggers inflammation, and increases infection risk. It hampers brain development in children and can contribute to dementia in adults.

On average, air pollution has reduced life expectancies around the world by 2.3 years, more than tobacco. It contributes to almost 7 million deaths per year, according to WHO, about one in nine deaths annually. It sucks trillions of dollars out of the global economy.

The toll is especially acute in South Asia. Air pollution drains 3.9 years of life in Pakistan. In India, it steals 5.3 years. For workers who spend their days outdoors—delivery drivers, construction crews, farm laborers—the damage is even higher. Many residents report constant fevers, coughs, and headaches.

Despite the well-known dangers and the mounting threat, it remains a persistent problem.

Part of the challenge of improving air quality is that air pollution isn’t just one thing; it’s a combination of hazardous chemicals and particles that arise in teeming metropolises in developing countries.

One of the most popular metrics around the world for tracking pollution is the Air Quality Index, developed by the US Environmental Protection Agency. The index is not a measurement of any one pollutant, but rather the risk from a combination of pollutants based on US air quality standards. The main villains are ground-level ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and particles. The particles are subcategorized into those smaller than 10 microns (PM10) and smaller than 2.5 microns (PM2.5). (Earlier this year, the EPA modified the way it calculates the AQI, so numbers from this year are not an apples-to-apples comparison to levels from previous years.) The tiny particles are pernicious because they penetrate deep into the lungs and trigger breathing problems.

“I think the most surprising, interesting, and scary thing, honestly, is seeing the levels of pollution in areas that haven’t been monitored before.”

An AQI below 50 is considered safe to breathe. Above 200, the air is considered a health threat for everyone. At 300, it’s an emergency. In Delhi, the AQI this last week reached 1,185. Lahore reached 1,900 this month. If a person breathes this air for over 24 hours, the exposure is roughly equivalent to smoking 90 cigarettes in a day.

However, air pollution poses a threat long before it’s visible. “Your eye is not a good detector of air pollution in general,” said Christi Chester Schroeder, the air quality science manager at IQAir, a company that builds air quality monitoring instruments and collects pollution data. “The pollutant that you have to be really careful about in terms of not being able to see it but experiencing it is ozone. Ozone levels can be extremely high on sunny days.”

IQAir has a network of air quality sensors across South Asia, including regions like Lahore and Delhi. The company tracks pollution in real time using its own sensors as well as monitors bought by schools, businesses, and ordinary people. Their professional-grade air monitors can cost more than $20,000 but they also sell consumer air quality trackers that cost $300. Both sources help paint a picture of pollution.

Many schools and businesses across South Asia have installed their own pollution monitors. The US maintains its own air quality instruments at its consulates and embassies in India and Pakistan as well.

Schroeder noted, however, that IQAir’s instruments are geared toward monitoring particles like PM2.5 and don’t easily allow a user to make inferences about concentrations of other pollutants like sulfur oxides and where they’re coming from. “When you’re looking at places that have a really big mixture of sources—like you have a mixture of transportation and fires and climate inversion conditions—then it gets to be much murkier and you can’t really sort of pull it apart that way,” Schroeder said.

Air quality monitors in India and Pakistan show that air pollution can vary over short distances—between neighborhoods or even street by street—and that it can change rapidly through the day. Nearby bus terminals, power plants, or cooking fires contribute a lot to local pollution, but without tracking systems in the vicinity, it can be hard to realize how bad the situation has become.

“I think the most surprising, interesting, and scary thing, honestly, is seeing the levels of pollution in areas that haven’t been monitored before,” Schroeder said.

Another complication is that people also experience pollution far away from where it’s produced. “This automatically creates a big governance challenge because the administrator who is responsible for providing you clean air in your jurisdiction is not actually the administrator who is governing over the polluting action,” said Saad Gulzar, an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University.

Take crop stubble burning, which accounts for up to 60 percent of the air pollution in the region this time of year. In late fall, farmers in northern India and Pakistan harvest rice and plant wheat. With little time between the reaping and sowing, the fastest and cheapest way for many farmers to clear their fields of leftover stems, leaves, and roots is to burn it. The resulting smoke then wafts from rural areas into urban centers.

Motivating officials to act at local, regional, and national levels is a key step in reducing air pollution.

The challenge is that farmers and urbanites are different political constituencies, and it’s hard to demand concessions from the former to benefit the latter. It has led to bitter political fights in both countries and between them. Farmers also point out that the reason they have so little time between crops is because of water conservation laws: To cope with groundwater depletion, officials in India imposed regulations to limit rice planting until after monsoon rains arrive in the early summer to top up reservoirs. Delaying planting means delaying harvest, hence the rush to clear their fields.

Both India and Pakistan have even gone as far as to arrest farmers who burn crop stubble, but there are millions of farmers spread out over a vast area, stretching enforcement thin. However, local efforts to control smoke from crop burning have proven effective when local officials are motivated to act.

Gulzar co-authored a study published in October in the journal Nature, looking at air pollution and its impacts across India and Pakistan. Examining satellite data and health records over the past decade, the paper found that who is in charge of a jurisdiction plays a key role in air pollution—and could also be the key to solving it.

When a district is likely to experience pollution from a fire within its own boundaries, bureaucrats and local officials take more aggressive action to mitigate it, whether that’s paying farmers not to burn stubble, providing them with tools to clear fields without fires, or threatening them with fines and arrest. That led fires within a district to drop by 14.5 percent and future burning to decline by 13 percent. These air pollution reductions led to measurable drops in childhood mortality. On the other hand, if the wind is poised to push pollution from crop burning over an adjacent district, fires increase by 15 percent.

The results show that simply motivating officials to act at local, regional, and national levels is a key step in reducing air pollution and that progress can begin right away.

But further air quality improvements will require a transition toward cleaner energy. Besides crop burning, the other major source of air pollution across India and Pakistan is fossil fuel combustion, whether that’s coal in furnaces, gas in factories, or diesel in trucks. These fuels also contribute to climate change, which is already contributing to devastating heat waves and flooding from torrential monsoons in the region. Both countries have made major investments in renewable energy, but they are also poised to burn more coal to feed their growing economies.

At the COP29 climate change conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, India was asking wealthier nations to contribute more money to finance clean energy within its borders and to share technologies that will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and enhance air quality.

Solving the air pollution crisis in India and Pakistan will take years, and it’s likely to get worse before it gets better. But there are lifesaving measures both countries can take now.

This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In the fall of 2023, the Biden administration announced $7 billion in funding for seven hydrogen hubs, slated to be built across the country over the next eight to 12 years. If all goes as planned, one of those hubs, the Mid-Atlantic Clean Hydrogen Hub (MACH2)—a network of more than a dozen interconnected hydrogen production centers, storage facilities, pipelines, and new solar farms that will power these operations—will stretch from southeastern Pennsylvania and neighboring southern New Jersey into Delaware. Expected to receive $750 million in federal funding, MACH2 is projected to create roughly 20,800 jobs in the Delaware Valley region, of which 6,400 will be permanent.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) says that a sufficiently robust buildout of hydrogen production could power steelmaking, cement production, and other energy-intensive heavy industries, which account for more than a fifth of national carbon emissions and have been notoriously hard to decarbonize, as well as fueling ships, airplanes, and trucks. But some environmentalists and energy experts question whether investing so much money in hydrogen could siphon funding from more effective decarbonization strategies. Even a so-called “green” hub, which runs entirely on renewable energy, they say, might not provide the promised carbon-reduction benefits and could potentially even increase emissions.

And residents of potential host communities—particularly the hard-pressed city of Chester, Pennsylvania, where some of the MACH2 facilities are planned—are concerned that they will bear the brunt of the potential risks and health hazards that hydrogen production and transport could bring.

“Safety knowledge and best practices for the production and transportation of hydrogen are well-established and mature.”

Scientists discovered how to extract usable hydrogen from water molecules using electrolysis in the 1800s, and as far back as 1874, novelist Jules Verne predicted it would someday be “the coal of the future.” Hydrogen is, after all, the most abundant element on the planet, and it produces no carbon emissions when burned. The United States already produces 10 million metric tons of hydrogen a year—but most of it is derived from natural gas and is largely used in petroleum refining and in making ammonia for manufacturing fertilizer. Every ton of ammonia produced generates 2.6 tons of lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions, according to a report published in Green Chemistry.

Still, scaling up low- or zero-carbon hydrogen production wasn’t considered financially viable until passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, which offer substantial tax credits to producers of clean hydrogen.

Today, some proposed hubs are planning on producing “blue” hydrogen—that is, hydrogen created using natural gas but with the resulting carbon emissions captured and stored underground. Representatives of the MACH2 hub say that 82 percent of their production will be “green,” meaning powered by solar and wind; 15 percent will be “pink”—powered by the Salem and Hope Creek nuclear plants, in southern New Jersey; and the remaining 3 percent will be “orange”—powered by biogas, which is produced when organic matter decomposes in an anaerobic environment.

Despite MACH2’s commitment to using green energy, some environmental advocates and local residents have reservations. Will the production facilities and pipelines pose threats to the environment and human health? Will the development process be transparent? Will jobs for community members materialize?

A year after the official announcement, the hub has shared few details with the public—locations of facilities, potential environmental impacts, how the project would benefit communities—saying plans have not yet been finalized pending permit approvals from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), commitments from private investors, and contract negotiations between the DOE and the companies that will operate as part of the hub, who are expected to provide investments to match their government-awarded funds. More information will be released in the project’s next phase, expected to begin in the coming year.

The lack of specificity has unnerved environmental and community groups. The Delaware Riverkeeper Network, an environmental advocacy nonprofit, is alarmed by what it sees as a lack of proper safety precautions. Part of MACH2’s plan involves repurposing old fossil fuel infrastructure to carry hydrogen. Like many aspects of the project, what that means isn’t yet clear.

“These projects are often placed in areas that have less political power and representation. We should have the right of refusal.”

MACH2 officials are currently creating an inventory of underutilized infrastructure, according to Matt Krayton, the communications lead for the hub. He says the hub would likely repurpose existing pipeline rights of way—every pipeline needs approval from landowners whose property would be crossed—and possibly the pipelines themselves, which would be re-sleeved with a hydrogen-safe polymer to prevent leaks.

Some 1,600 miles of hydrogen pipelines are already operating across the US, and Nick Barilo, executive director of the Center for Hydrogen Safety at the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, noted that all combustible fuels carry a certain amount of risk, and hydrogen is no more dangerous than natural gas. “The US industry has been using hydrogen for over a century,” Barilo said. “Safety knowledge and best practices for the production and transportation of hydrogen are well-established and mature.”

In some potential host communities, like Chester, Pennsylvania, assurances like Barilo’s fall flat. Fifteen miles outside of Philadelphia, the city once bustled with manufacturing and heavy industry. But after World War II, plants began to shutter, and the city entered a long decline. By 2020, its population was half its 1950 peak.

Today, a third of Chester residents live in poverty, and the city, which declared bankruptcy in 2022, is host to 11 industries classified by the DEP as hazardous, including one of the largest incinerators in the nation. Chester’s asthma rate is double the state level, according to an analysis conducted by the Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology, at the University of Pennsylvania. “These [industries] assault us every day,” said Zulene Mayfield of Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living. “And it is sanctioned by the state.”

“These projects are often placed in areas that have less political power and representation,” said Kearni Warren, a local outreach coordinator for the Clean Air Council, an environmental health advocacy organization. “We should have the right of refusal when it comes to projects that put our health and safety at risk.”

When MACH2 finalizes its arrangements with the DEP and formally begins Phase 1 of the project, which includes a community engagement plan and detailed plans for building sites, residents may start to see if their skepticism is warranted. But the industry still faces headwinds over its potential costs and benefits.

Although burning hydrogen produces no direct greenhouse gas emissions, hydrogen that leaks into the atmosphere, according to a 2022 research paper published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, increases concentrations of other greenhouse gases, like methane, ozone, and water vapor. “Any time you’re handling [hydrogen], producing it, transporting it, storing it — [the molecule] is so small that the risk of leaks is significant,” said Talor Musil, a field manager at the Pennsylvania-based nonprofit Environmental Health Project.

And according to a recent report published by Energy Innovation Policy & Technology, an energy and climate policy think tank, making green hydrogen to power short-haul planes and heavy-duty vehicles—two sectors often touted as ripe for adopting hydrogen—is neither economical nor efficient. Roughly 20 to 30 percent of hydrogen’s energy value is lost in the process of splitting water molecules, the report said, and another 15 percent may be lost during compression and storage. The Energy Innovation report ranked the potential end uses for hydrogen by their long-term viability and determined that it made the most financial and environmental sense for refining oil and producing ammonia for fertilizer, while also having value in steelmaking and long-haul aviation and marine shipping.

Energy experts agree on these high-value uses for hydrogren, but the Inflation Reduction Act guarantees a tax credit for the fuel, no matter what its end use, for 10 years. Given rapid advances in battery technology, said the Energy Innovations report, it will be hard to justify hydrogen’s expense in industries like trucking—which can operate far more cheaply using electricity—when the credit ends.

A recent study by a group of Harvard researchers estimated that depending on what it’s ultimately used for, green hydrogen may wind up being even less cost effective at fighting climate change than direct air capture of CO2, which the International Energy Agency estimated would have an operating cost, when scaled up, of between $230 and $630 per metric ton of CO2 captured.

And then there’s the matter of impact. The seven hubs combined are projected to reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions by 25 million metric tons of CO2 a year (not counting the emissions linked with hydrogen production). The total tonnage is not significant, some experts say—it amounts to less than half of one percent of total US CO2 emissions—considering the $7 billion in taxpayer support. But the Energy Department considers the hubs a catalyst, a way to “kickstart a national network of clean hydrogen producers, consumers, and connective infrastructure”; presumably, costs of hydrogen production will drop as the industry develops.

Unless the federal government implements strict rules on carbon capture and the use of green energy for the hubs, the industry could actually increase overall emissions, according to the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Last November, Rachel Fakhry, the NRDC’s policy director for emerging technologies, testified before the House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee that, for hydrogen to be truly sustainable, green hubs would need to abide by three main tenets: buying electricity from newly built renewable energy sources, rather than pulling existing renewables from the grid (a requirement known as “additionality”); matching their hourly use with the availability of green energy, which prevents hubs from dipping into fossil fuels and buying clean energy credits after the fact; and using clean energy that’s produced close to the hubs, ensuring that its delivery doesn’t lead to increased emissions. Legislators and industry groups are already indicating they will challenge a proposed additionality requirement.

As the federal government works to finalize how it will regulate the hydrogen tax credits, energy experts continue to grapple with the potential significance, and value, of the proposed hubs. “One of the big challenges in the broader field of serious, big systems decarbonization is we’re sort of talking about various imaginaries,” said Danny Cullenward, a climate economist and senior fellow at University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. “We’re throwing money at the hubs. We’re throwing money through this tax credit at the production of hydrogen. But there isn’t really anything resembling a coordinated strategy for what’s the right use of hydrogen,” he said. “It’s actually a really weird thing, if you think about it.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Oil and chemical companies who created a high-profile alliance to end plastic pollution have produced 1,000 times more new plastic in five years than the waste they diverted from the environment, according to new data obtained by Greenpeace.

The Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW) was set up in 2019 by a group of companies which include ExxonMobil, Dow, Shell, TotalEnergies, and ChevronPhillips, some of the world’s biggest producers of plastic. They promised to divert 15 million metric tons of plastic waste from the environment in five years to the end of 2023, by improving collection and recycling, and creating a circular economy.

Documents from a PR company that were obtained by Greenpeace’s Unearthed team and shared with the Guardian, suggest a key aim of the AEPW was to “change the conversation” away from “simplistic bans of plastic” that were being proposed in 2019 amid an outcry over the scale of plastic pollution leaching into rivers and harming public health.

Early last year the alliance target of clearing 15 million metric tons of waste plastic was quietly scrapped as “just too ambitious”.

The new analysis by energy consultants Wood Mackenzie looked at the plastics output of the five alliance companies; chemical company Dow, which holds the AEPW’s chairmanship; the oil companies ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies; and ChevronPhillips, a joint venture of the US oil giants Chevron and Phillips 66.

“It’s hard to imagine a clearer example of greenwashing in this world. The oil and gas industry…has been at this for decades.”

The data reveals the five companies alone produced 132 million metric tons of two types of plastic, polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), in five years—more than 1,000 times the weight of the waste plastic the alliance has removed from the environment in the same period. The waste plastic was diverted mostly by mechanical or chemical recycling, the use of landfill, or waste to fuel, AEPW documents state.

The amount of plastic produced is likely to be an underestimate as it only covers two of the most widely used polymers: polyethylene, which is used for plastic bottles and bags; and polypropylene, used for food packaging. It does not include other major plastics such as polystyrene.

The new data was revealed as delegates prepared to meet in Busan, South Korea, to hammer out the world’s first treaty to cut plastic pollution. The treaty has a mandate to agree on a legally binding global agreement to tackle plastic pollution across the entire plastics life cycle.

But the talks, which have been subject to heavy lobbying by the alliance and fossil fuel companies, are on a knife-edge in a row over whether caps to global plastic production will be included in the final treaty.

Will McCallum, a co-executive director at Greenpeace UK, said the revelations had stripped off the thin layer of greenwash hiding the growing mountain of plastic waste oil companies were producing.

“The recycling schemes they’re promoting can barely make a dent in all the plastic these companies are pumping out,” he said. “They’re letting the running tap flood the house while trying to scoop up the water with a teaspoon. The only solution is to cut the amount of plastic produced in the first place.”

Bill McKibben, a US environmentalist, said: “It’s hard to imagine a clearer example of greenwashing in this world. The oil and gas industry—which is pretty much the same thing as the plastics industry—has been at this for decades.”

In response to the allegations, a spokesperson for the AEPW said it “respectfully disagrees with the allegations and inferences, including that the organization’s purpose is to greenwash the reputation of its members…The alliance aims to accelerate innovation and channel capital into the development of effective scalable solutions to help end plastic waste and pollution.”

The AEPW has had a significant lobbying presence at the UN plastic waste talks, which entered their final stages on Monday. Its representatives have consistently argued that reductions in plastic production should not be included in the treaty.

The UK’s new Labour government has shifted the country’s stance and signed a ministerial declaration calling for the inclusion of reductions in production and consumption of primary plastic polymers to sustainable levels in the treaty. The United States under President Biden also shifted its position this summer to support caps on global production. It is not known yet the position of the incoming Trump administration.

A UK government source said: “The government supports an effective treaty which covers the full life cycle of plastics including reducing the production and consumption of plastics to sustainable levels.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Oil and chemical companies who created a high-profile alliance to end plastic pollution have produced 1,000 times more new plastic in five years than the waste they diverted from the environment, according to new data obtained by Greenpeace.

The Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW) was set up in 2019 by a group of companies which include ExxonMobil, Dow, Shell, TotalEnergies, and ChevronPhillips, some of the world’s biggest producers of plastic. They promised to divert 15 million metric tons of plastic waste from the environment in five years to the end of 2023, by improving collection and recycling, and creating a circular economy.

Documents from a PR company that were obtained by Greenpeace’s Unearthed team and shared with the Guardian, suggest a key aim of the AEPW was to “change the conversation” away from “simplistic bans of plastic” that were being proposed in 2019 amid an outcry over the scale of plastic pollution leaching into rivers and harming public health.

Early last year the alliance target of clearing 15 million metric tons of waste plastic was quietly scrapped as “just too ambitious”.

The new analysis by energy consultants Wood Mackenzie looked at the plastics output of the five alliance companies; chemical company Dow, which holds the AEPW’s chairmanship; the oil companies ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies; and ChevronPhillips, a joint venture of the US oil giants Chevron and Phillips 66.

“It’s hard to imagine a clearer example of greenwashing in this world. The oil and gas industry…has been at this for decades.”

The data reveals the five companies alone produced 132 million metric tons of two types of plastic, polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), in five years—more than 1,000 times the weight of the waste plastic the alliance has removed from the environment in the same period. The waste plastic was diverted mostly by mechanical or chemical recycling, the use of landfill, or waste to fuel, AEPW documents state.

The amount of plastic produced is likely to be an underestimate as it only covers two of the most widely used polymers: polyethylene, which is used for plastic bottles and bags; and polypropylene, used for food packaging. It does not include other major plastics such as polystyrene.

The new data was revealed as delegates prepared to meet in Busan, South Korea, to hammer out the world’s first treaty to cut plastic pollution. The treaty has a mandate to agree on a legally binding global agreement to tackle plastic pollution across the entire plastics life cycle.

But the talks, which have been subject to heavy lobbying by the alliance and fossil fuel companies, are on a knife-edge in a row over whether caps to global plastic production will be included in the final treaty.

Will McCallum, a co-executive director at Greenpeace UK, said the revelations had stripped off the thin layer of greenwash hiding the growing mountain of plastic waste oil companies were producing.

“The recycling schemes they’re promoting can barely make a dent in all the plastic these companies are pumping out,” he said. “They’re letting the running tap flood the house while trying to scoop up the water with a teaspoon. The only solution is to cut the amount of plastic produced in the first place.”

Bill McKibben, a US environmentalist, said: “It’s hard to imagine a clearer example of greenwashing in this world. The oil and gas industry—which is pretty much the same thing as the plastics industry—has been at this for decades.”

In response to the allegations, a spokesperson for the AEPW said it “respectfully disagrees with the allegations and inferences, including that the organization’s purpose is to greenwash the reputation of its members…The alliance aims to accelerate innovation and channel capital into the development of effective scalable solutions to help end plastic waste and pollution.”

The AEPW has had a significant lobbying presence at the UN plastic waste talks, which entered their final stages on Monday. Its representatives have consistently argued that reductions in plastic production should not be included in the treaty.

The UK’s new Labour government has shifted the country’s stance and signed a ministerial declaration calling for the inclusion of reductions in production and consumption of primary plastic polymers to sustainable levels in the treaty. The United States under President Biden also shifted its position this summer to support caps on global production. It is not known yet the position of the incoming Trump administration.

A UK government source said: “The government supports an effective treaty which covers the full life cycle of plastics including reducing the production and consumption of plastics to sustainable levels.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Biden administration has backtracked from supporting a cap on plastic production as part of the United Nations’ global plastics treaty.

According to representatives from five environmental organizations, White House staffers told representatives of advocacy groups in a closed-door meeting last week that they did not see mandatory production caps as a viable “landing zone” for INC-5, the name for the fifth and final round of plastics treaty negotiations set to take place later this month in Busan, South Korea. Instead, the staffers reportedly said United States delegates would support a “flexible” approach in which countries set their own voluntary targets for reducing plastic production.

This represents a reversal of what the same groups were told at a similar briefing held in August, when Biden administration representatives raised hopes that the US would join countries like Norway, Peru, and the United Kingdom in supporting limits on plastic production. 

Following the August meeting, Reuters reported that the US “will support a global treaty calling for a reduction in how much new plastic is produced each year,” and the Biden administration confirmed that Reuters’ reporting was “accurate.” 

“If there was a misunderstanding, then it should have been corrected a long time ago.”

After the more recent briefing, a spokesperson for the White House Council on Environmental Quality told Grist that, while US negotiators have endorsed the idea of a “‘North Star’ aspirational global goal” to reduce plastic production, they “do not see this as a production cap and do not support such a cap.”

“We believe there are different paths available for achieving reductions in plastic production and consumption,” the spokesperson said. “We will be flexible going into INC-5 on how to achieve that and are optimistic that we can prevail with a strong instrument that sends these market signals for change.” 

Jo Banner, co-founder and co-director of The Descendants Project, a nonprofit advocating for fenceline communities in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” said the announcement was a “jolt.”

“I thought we were on the same page in terms of capping plastic and reducing production,” she said. “But it was clear that we just weren’t.”

Frankie Orona, executive director of the nonprofit Society of Native Nations, which advocates for environmental justice and the preservation of Indigenous cultures, described the news as “absolutely devastating.” He added, “Two hours in that meeting felt like it was taking two days of my life.”

The situation speaks to a central conflict that has emerged from talks over the treaty, which the UN agreed to negotiate two years ago to “end plastic pollution.” Delegates haven’t agreed on whether the pact should focus on managing plastic waste—through things like ocean cleanups and higher recycling rates—or on tamping down the growing rate of plastic production.

Nearly 70 countries, along with scientists and environmental groups, support the latter. They say it’s futile to mop up plastic litter while more and more of it keeps getting made. But a vocal contingent of oil-exporting countries has pushed for a lower-ambition treaty, using a consensus-based voting norm to slow-walk the negotiations. Besides leaving out production limits, those countries also want the treaty to allow for voluntary national targets, rather than binding global rules.

“It just made you want to grab a pillow and scream into the pillow and shed a few tears for your community.”

Exactly which policies the US will now support isn’t entirely clear. While the White House spokesperson told Grist that it wants to ensure the treaty addresses “the supply of primary plastic polymers,” this could mean a whole host of things, including a tax on plastic production or bans on individual plastic products. These kinds of so-called market instruments could drive down demand for more plastic, but with far less certainty than a quantitative production limit.

Bjorn Beeler, executive director of the nonprofit International Pollutants Elimination Network, noted that the US could technically “address” the supply of plastics by reducing the industry’s projected growth rates—which would still allow the amount of manufactured plastic to continue increasing every year. “What the US has said is extremely vague,” he said. “They have not been a leading actor to move the treaty into something meaningful.”

To the extent that the White House’s latest announcement was a clarification and not an outright reversal—as staffers reportedly insisted was the case—Banner said the Biden administration should have made their position clearer months ago, right after the August meeting. “In August, we were definitely saying ‘capping,’ and it was never corrected,” she said. “If there was a misunderstanding, then it should have been corrected a long time ago.”

Another apparent change in the US’s strategy is on chemicals used in plastics. Back in August, the White House confirmed via Reuters’ reporting that it supported creating lists of plastic-related chemicals to be banned or restricted. Now, negotiators will back lists that include plastic products containing those chemicals. Environmental groups see this approach as less effective, since there are so many kinds of plastic products and because product manufacturers do not always have complete information about the chemicals used by their suppliers.

Orona said focusing on products would push the conversation downstream, away from petrochemical refineries and plastics manufacturing facilities that disproportionately pollute poor communities of color. “It’s so dismissive, it’s so disrespectful,” he said. “It just made you want to grab a pillow and scream into the pillow and shed a few tears for your community.”

At the next round of treaty talks, environmental groups told Grist that the US should “step aside.” Given the high likelihood that the incoming Trump administration will not support the treaty and that the Republican-controlled Senate will not ratify it, some advocates would like to see the high-ambition countries focus less on winning over US support and more on advancing the most ambitious version of the treaty possible. “We hope that the rest of the world moves on,” said a spokesperson for the nonprofit Break Free From Plastic, vesting hope in the EU, small island developing states, and a coalition of African countries, among others. 

Viola Waghiyi, environmental health and justice program director for the nonprofit Alaska Community Action on Toxics, is a tribal citizen of the Native Village of Savoonga, on the island of Sivuqaq off the state’s western coast. She connected a weak plastics treaty to the direct impacts her island community is facing, including climate change (to which plastics production contributes), microplastic pollution in the Arctic Ocean that affects its marine life, and atmospheric dynamics that dump hazardous plastic chemicals in the far northern hemisphere.

The US “should be making sure that measures are in place to protect the voices of the most vulnerable,” she said, including Indigenous peoples, workers, waste pickers, and future generations. As a Native grandmother, she specifically raised concerns about endocrine-disrupting plastic chemicals that could affect children’s neurological development. “How can we pass on our language, our creation stories, our songs and dances, our traditions and cultures, if our children can’t learn?”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Biden administration has backtracked from supporting a cap on plastic production as part of the United Nations’ global plastics treaty.

According to representatives from five environmental organizations, White House staffers told representatives of advocacy groups in a closed-door meeting last week that they did not see mandatory production caps as a viable “landing zone” for INC-5, the name for the fifth and final round of plastics treaty negotiations set to take place later this month in Busan, South Korea. Instead, the staffers reportedly said United States delegates would support a “flexible” approach in which countries set their own voluntary targets for reducing plastic production.

This represents a reversal of what the same groups were told at a similar briefing held in August, when Biden administration representatives raised hopes that the US would join countries like Norway, Peru, and the United Kingdom in supporting limits on plastic production. 

Following the August meeting, Reuters reported that the US “will support a global treaty calling for a reduction in how much new plastic is produced each year,” and the Biden administration confirmed that Reuters’ reporting was “accurate.” 

“If there was a misunderstanding, then it should have been corrected a long time ago.”

After the more recent briefing, a spokesperson for the White House Council on Environmental Quality told Grist that, while US negotiators have endorsed the idea of a “‘North Star’ aspirational global goal” to reduce plastic production, they “do not see this as a production cap and do not support such a cap.”

“We believe there are different paths available for achieving reductions in plastic production and consumption,” the spokesperson said. “We will be flexible going into INC-5 on how to achieve that and are optimistic that we can prevail with a strong instrument that sends these market signals for change.” 

Jo Banner, co-founder and co-director of The Descendants Project, a nonprofit advocating for fenceline communities in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” said the announcement was a “jolt.”

“I thought we were on the same page in terms of capping plastic and reducing production,” she said. “But it was clear that we just weren’t.”

Frankie Orona, executive director of the nonprofit Society of Native Nations, which advocates for environmental justice and the preservation of Indigenous cultures, described the news as “absolutely devastating.” He added, “Two hours in that meeting felt like it was taking two days of my life.”

The situation speaks to a central conflict that has emerged from talks over the treaty, which the UN agreed to negotiate two years ago to “end plastic pollution.” Delegates haven’t agreed on whether the pact should focus on managing plastic waste—through things like ocean cleanups and higher recycling rates—or on tamping down the growing rate of plastic production.

Nearly 70 countries, along with scientists and environmental groups, support the latter. They say it’s futile to mop up plastic litter while more and more of it keeps getting made. But a vocal contingent of oil-exporting countries has pushed for a lower-ambition treaty, using a consensus-based voting norm to slow-walk the negotiations. Besides leaving out production limits, those countries also want the treaty to allow for voluntary national targets, rather than binding global rules.

“It just made you want to grab a pillow and scream into the pillow and shed a few tears for your community.”

Exactly which policies the US will now support isn’t entirely clear. While the White House spokesperson told Grist that it wants to ensure the treaty addresses “the supply of primary plastic polymers,” this could mean a whole host of things, including a tax on plastic production or bans on individual plastic products. These kinds of so-called market instruments could drive down demand for more plastic, but with far less certainty than a quantitative production limit.

Bjorn Beeler, executive director of the nonprofit International Pollutants Elimination Network, noted that the US could technically “address” the supply of plastics by reducing the industry’s projected growth rates—which would still allow the amount of manufactured plastic to continue increasing every year. “What the US has said is extremely vague,” he said. “They have not been a leading actor to move the treaty into something meaningful.”

To the extent that the White House’s latest announcement was a clarification and not an outright reversal—as staffers reportedly insisted was the case—Banner said the Biden administration should have made their position clearer months ago, right after the August meeting. “In August, we were definitely saying ‘capping,’ and it was never corrected,” she said. “If there was a misunderstanding, then it should have been corrected a long time ago.”

Another apparent change in the US’s strategy is on chemicals used in plastics. Back in August, the White House confirmed via Reuters’ reporting that it supported creating lists of plastic-related chemicals to be banned or restricted. Now, negotiators will back lists that include plastic products containing those chemicals. Environmental groups see this approach as less effective, since there are so many kinds of plastic products and because product manufacturers do not always have complete information about the chemicals used by their suppliers.

Orona said focusing on products would push the conversation downstream, away from petrochemical refineries and plastics manufacturing facilities that disproportionately pollute poor communities of color. “It’s so dismissive, it’s so disrespectful,” he said. “It just made you want to grab a pillow and scream into the pillow and shed a few tears for your community.”

At the next round of treaty talks, environmental groups told Grist that the US should “step aside.” Given the high likelihood that the incoming Trump administration will not support the treaty and that the Republican-controlled Senate will not ratify it, some advocates would like to see the high-ambition countries focus less on winning over US support and more on advancing the most ambitious version of the treaty possible. “We hope that the rest of the world moves on,” said a spokesperson for the nonprofit Break Free From Plastic, vesting hope in the EU, small island developing states, and a coalition of African countries, among others. 

Viola Waghiyi, environmental health and justice program director for the nonprofit Alaska Community Action on Toxics, is a tribal citizen of the Native Village of Savoonga, on the island of Sivuqaq off the state’s western coast. She connected a weak plastics treaty to the direct impacts her island community is facing, including climate change (to which plastics production contributes), microplastic pollution in the Arctic Ocean that affects its marine life, and atmospheric dynamics that dump hazardous plastic chemicals in the far northern hemisphere.

The US “should be making sure that measures are in place to protect the voices of the most vulnerable,” she said, including Indigenous peoples, workers, waste pickers, and future generations. As a Native grandmother, she specifically raised concerns about endocrine-disrupting plastic chemicals that could affect children’s neurological development. “How can we pass on our language, our creation stories, our songs and dances, our traditions and cultures, if our children can’t learn?”