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Life cycle analysis has some problems.
About six months ago, a climate scientist from Arizona State University, Stephanie Arcusa, emailed me a provocative new paper she had published that warned against our growing reliance on life cycle analysis. This practice of measuring all of the emissions related to a given product or service throughout every phase of its life — from the time raw materials are extracted to eventual disposal — was going to hinder our ability to achieve net-zero emissions, she wrote. It was a busy time, and I let the message drift to the bottom of my inbox. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Life cycle analysis permeates the climate economy. Businesses rely on it to understand their emissions so they can work toward reducing them. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s climate risk disclosure rule, which requires companies to report their emissions to investors, hinges on it. The clean hydrogen tax credit requires hydrogen producers to do a version of life cycle analysis to prove their eligibility. It is central to carbon markets, and carbon removal companies are now developing standards based on life cycle analysis to “certify” their services as carbon offset developers did before them.
At the same time, many of the fiercest debates in climate change are really debates about life cycle analysis. Should companies be held responsible for the emissions that are indirectly related to their businesses, and if so then which ones? Are carbon offsets a sham? Does using corn ethanol as a gasoline substitute reduce emissions or increase them? Scientists have repeatedly reached opposite conclusions on that one depending on how they accounted for the land required to grow corn and what it might have been used for had ethanol not been an option. Though the debate plays out in calculations, it’s really a philosophical brawl.
Everybody, for the most part, knows that life cycle analysis is difficult and thorny and imprecise. But over and over, experts and critics alike assert that it can be improved. Arcusa disagrees. Life cycle analysis, she says, is fundamentally broken. “It’s a problematic and uncomfortable conclusion to arrive at,” Arcusa wrote in her email. “On the one hand, it has been the only tool we have had to make any progress on climate. On the other, carbon accounting is captured by academia and vested interests and will jeopardize global climate goals.”
When I recently revisited the paper, I learned that Arcusa and her co-authors didn’t just critique life cycle analysis, they proposed a bold alternative. Their idea is not economically or politically easy, but it also doesn’t suffer from the problems of trying to track carbon throughout the supply chain. I recently called her up to talk through it. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.
Can you walk me through what the biggest issues with life cycle analysis are?
So, life cycle analysis is a qualitative tool —
It seems kind of counterintuitive or even controversial to call it a qualitative tool because it’s specifically trying to quantify something.
I think the best analogy for LCA is that it’s a back-of-the-envelope tool. If you really could measure everything, then sure, LCA is this wonderful idea. The problem is in the practicality of being able to collect all of that data. We can’t, and that leads us to use emissions factors and average numbers, and we model this and we model that, and we get so far away from reality that we actually can’t tell if something is positive or negative in the end.
The other problem is that it’s almost entirely subjective, which makes one LCA incomparable to another LCA depending on the context, depending on the technology. And yes, there are some standardization efforts that have been going on for decades. But if you have a ruler, no matter how much you try, it’s not going to become a screwdriver. We’re trying to use this tool to quantify things and make them the same for comparison, and we can’t because of that subjectivity.
In this space where there is a lot of money to be made, it’s very easy to manipulate things one way or another to make it look a little bit better because the method is not robust. That’s really the gist of the problems here.
One of the things you talk about in the paper is the way life cycle analysis is subject to different worldviews. Can you explain that?
It’s mostly seen in what to include or exclude in the LCA — it can have enormous impacts on the results. I think corn ethanol is the perfect example of how tedious this can be because we still don’t have an answer, precisely for that reason. The uncertainty range of the results has shrunk and gotten bigger and shrunk and gotten bigger, and it’s like, well, we still don’t know. And now, this exact same worldview debate is playing into what should be included and not included in certification for things [like carbon removal] that are going to be sold under the guise of climate action, and that just can’t be. We’ll be forever debating whether something is true.
Is this one of those things that scientists have been debating for ever, or is this argument that we should stop using life cycle analysis more of a fringe idea?
I guess I would call it a fringe idea today. There’s been plenty of criticism throughout the years, even from the very beginning when it was first created. What I have seen is that there is criticism, and then there is, “But here’s how we can solve it and continue using LCA!” I’ve only come across one other publication that specifically said, “This is not working. This is not the right tool,” and that’s from Michael Gillenwater. He’s at the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute. He was like, “What are we doing?” There might be other folks, I just haven’t come across them.
Okay, so what is the alternative to LCA that you’ve proposed in this paper?
LCA targets the middle of the supply chain, and tries to attribute responsibility there. But if you think about where on the supply chain the carbon is the most well-known, it is actually at the source, at the point of origin, before it becomes an emission. At the point where it is created out of the ground is where we know how much carbon there is. If we focus on that source through a policy that requires mandatory sequestration — for every ton of carbon that is now produced, there is a ton of carbon that’s been put away through carbon removal, and the accounting happens there, before it is sold to anybody —anybody who’s now downstream of that supply chain is already carbon neutral. There is no need to track carbon all the way down to the consumer.
We know this is accurate because that is where governments already collect royalties and taxes — they want to know exactly how much is being sold. So we already do this. The big difference is that the policy would be required there instead of taxing everybody downstream.
You’re saying that fossil fuel producers should be required to remove a ton of carbon from the atmosphere for every ton of carbon in the fuels they sell?
Yeah, and maybe I should be more specific. They should pay for an equal amount of carbon to be removed from the atmosphere. In no way are we implying that a fossil carbon producer needs to also be doing the sequestration themselves.
What would be the biggest challenges of implementing something like this?
The ultimate challenge is convincing people that we need to be managing carbon and that this is a waste management type of system. Nobody really wants to pay for waste management, and so it needs to be regulated and demanded by some authority.
What about the fact that we don’t really have the ability to remove carbon or store carbon at scale today, and may not for some time?
Yes, we need to build capacity so that eventually we can match the carbon production to the carbon removal, which is why we also proposed that the liability needs to start today, not in the future. That liability is as good as a credit card debt — you actually have to pay it. It can be paid little by little every year, but the liability is here now, and not in the future.
The risk in the system that I’m describing, or even the system that is currently being deployed, is that you have counterproductive technologies that are being developed. And by counterproductive, I mean [carbon removal] technologies that are producing more emissions than they are storing, and so they’re net-positive. You can create a technology that has no intention of removing more carbon than its sequesters. The intention is just to earn money.
Do you mean, like, the things that are supposed to be removing carbon from the atmosphere and sequestering it, they are using fossil fuels to do that, and end up releasing more carbon in the process?
Yeah, so basically, what we show in the paper is that when we get to full carbon neutrality, the market forces alone will eliminate those kinds of technologies that are counterproductive. The problem is during the transition, these technologies can be economically viable because they are cheaper than they would be if 100% of the fossil fuel they used was carbon neutral through carbon removal. And so in order to prevent those technologies from gaming the system, we need a way to artificially make the price of fossil carbon as expensive as it would be if 100% of that fossil carbon was covered by carbon removal.
That’s where the idea of permits comes in. For every amount that I produce, I now have an instant liability, which is a permit. Each of those permits has to be matched by carbon removal. And since we don’t have enough carbon removal, we have futures and these futures represent the promise of actually doing carbon removal.
What if we burn through the remaining carbon budget and we still don’t have the capacity to sequester enough carbon?
Well, then we’re going into very unchartered territory. Right now we’re just mindlessly going through this thinking that if we just reduce emissions it will be good. It won’t be good.
In the paper, you also argue against mitigating greenhouse gases other than carbon, and that seems pretty controversial to me. Why is that?
We’re not arguing against mitigating, per se. We’re arguing against lumping everything under the same carbon accounting framework because lumping hides the difficulty in actually doing something about it. It’s not that we shouldn’t mitigate other greenhouse gases — we must. It’s just that if we separate the problem of carbon away from the problem of methane, away from the problem of nitrous oxide, or CFCs, we can tackle them more effectively. Because right now, we’re trying to do everything under the same umbrella, and that doesn’t work. We don’t tackle drinking and driving by sponsoring better tires. That’s just silly, right? We wouldn’t do that. We would tackle drinking and driving on its own, and then we would tackle better tires in a different policy.
So the argument is: Most of climate change is caused by carbon; let’s tackle that separately from the others and leave tackling methane and nitrous oxide to purposefully created programs to tackle those things. Let’s not lump the calculations altogether, hiding all the differences and hiding meaningful action.
Is there still a role for life cycle analysis?
You don’t want to be regulating carbon using life cycle analysis. So you can use the life cycle analysis for qualitative purposes, but we’re pretending that it is a tool that can deliver accurate results, and it just doesn’t.
What has the response been like to this paper? What kind of feedback have you gotten?
Stunned silence!
Nobody has said anything?
In private, they have. Not in public. In private, it’s been a little bit like, “I’ve always thought this, but it seemed like there was no other way.” But then in public, think about it. Everything is built on LCA. It’s now in every single climate bill out there. Every single standard. Every single consulting company is doing LCA and doing carbon footprinting for companies. It’s a huge industry, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear nothing publicly.
Yeah, I was gonna ask — I’ve been writing about the SEC rules and this idea that companies should start reporting their emissions to their investors, and that would all be based on LCA. There’s a lot of buy-in for that idea across the climate movement.
Yeah, but there’s definitely a fine line with make-believe. I think in many instances, we kid ourselves thinking that we’re going to have numbers that we can hang our hats on. In many instances we will not, and they will be challenged. And so at that point, what’s the point?
One thing I hear when I talk to people about this is, well, having an estimate is better than not having anything, or, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, or, we can just keep working to make them better and better. Why not?
I mean, I wouldn’t say don’t try. But when it comes to actually enforcing anything, it’s going to be extremely hard to prove a number. You could just be stuck in litigation for a long time and still not have an answer.
I don’t know, to me it just seems like an endless debate while time is ticking and we will just feel good because we’ll have thought we measured everything. But we’re still not doing anything.
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Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.
President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.
Republican candidates won in two House races in Florida on Tuesday, one of which was looking surprisingly tight going into the special elections. The victories by Jimmy Patronis in Florida’s First District and Randy Fine in the Sixth District bolster the party’s slim House majority and could spell trouble for the Inflation Reduction Act as the House Ways and Means Committee mulls which programs to cut to pay for tax cuts. But the result in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election was less rosy for Republicans. Liberal Judge Susan Crawford defeated conservative Brad Schimel despite Schimel’s huge financial backing from Tesla CEO and Trump adviser Elon Musk, who poured some $15 million into the competition. The outcome “could tarnish the billionaire’s political clout and trigger worry for some Republicans about how voters are processing the opening months of Trump’s new administration,” as The Wall Street Journalexplained.
The Trump administration announced mass layoffs across the Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday, part of a larger effort to reduce the agency’s workforce by 25%. The cuts included key staffers with the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which has existed since 1981 and helps some 6.7 million low-income households pay their energy bills. A 2022 white paper calls LIHEAP “one of the most critical components of the social safety net.” The move comes at a time when many U.S. utilities are preparing to raise their energy prices to account for higher costs for materials, labor, and grid upgrades. In a scathing letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy. Jr., Senate Energy and Commerce Democrats call the workforce cuts “reckless” and demand detailed explanations for why roles have been eliminated.
Energy storage startup Energy Vault on Wednesday announced it had closed $28 million in project financing for a hybrid green hydrogen microgrid energy storage facility in California. The firm says its Calistoga Resiliency Center, deployed in partnership with utility company Pacific Gas & Electric, is “specifically designed to address power resiliency given the growing challenges of wildfire risk in California.” The zero-emission system will feature advanced hydrogen fuel cells that are integrated with lithium-ion batteries, which can provide about 48 hours of back-up power via a microgrid to the city of Calistoga during wildfire-related power shutoffs. The site is expected to be commercially operational in the second quarter of 2025.
“The CRC serves as a model for Energy Vault’s future utility-scale hybrid microgrid storage system deployments as the only existing zero-emission solution to address [power shutoff] events that is scalable and ready to be deployed across California and other regions prone to wildfires,” the company said in a press release. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last fall, PG&E has become an important partner for climate and energy tech companies with the potential to reduce risk and improve service on the grid.
China will finalize its first-ever sale of a green sovereign bond Wednesday. The country is expected to issue the bond on the London Stock Exchange and has reportedly received more than $5 billion in bids. “It’s no coincidence that China has chosen to list its debut green bond in London, given European investors’ continued strong demand for environmental products,” Bloombergnoted. Green bonds are investment vehicles that raise money exclusively for projects that benefit the climate or environment. China’s finance ministry wants the bond to “attract international funds to support domestic green and low-carbon development,” and specifically climate change mitigation and adaptation, nature conservation and biodiversity, and pollution prevention and control. Some of the money raised might also go toward China’s EV charging infrastructure, according toReuters.
GE Vernova has now produced more than half of the turbines needed for the SunZia Wind project in New Mexico. When completed in 2026, the 2.4 gigawatt project will be the largest onshore wind farm in the Western Hemisphere.
Rob and Jesse catch up on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with former White House official Kristina Costa.
The Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $27 billion to build a new kind of climate institution in America — a network of national green banks that could lend money to companies, states, schools, churches, and housing developers to build more clean energy and deploy more next-generation energy technology around the country.
It was an innovative and untested program. And the Trump administration is desperately trying to block it. Since February, Trump’s criminal justice appointees — led by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — have tried to use criminal law to undo the program. After failing to get the FBI and Justice Department to block the flow of funds, Trump officials have successfully gotten the program’s bank partner to freeze relevant money. The new green banks have sued to gain access to the money.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Kristina Costa, who has been tracking the effort to bankrupt the green banks. Costa helped lead the Inflation Reduction Act’s implementation in the White House from 2022 to 2025 — and is a previous Shift Key guest. She joins us to discuss how Trump is weaponing criminal law to block a climate program, whether there’s any precedent for his actions, and what could come next in the legal battle. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: There's kind of two lines you hear from the Trump administration about this, two claims made by the Trump administration about the reason for these seizures, and I just wanna talk about them briefly because this is an unprecedented action. We should look at why the government has claimed that it needs to take this unprecedented action.
The first has to do with this video made by Project Veritas, a kind of conservative media organization …
Kristina Costa: A hit squad.
Meyer: A hit squad that recorded, unwittingly, an EPA official who described the EPA’s actions during December 2024, between the loss of the election and the inauguration, as “throwing gold bars off the Titanic.” That the agency was so eager and desperate to spend as much of the IRA down as it could before the Trump administration took office that it was like they were throwing gold bars off the Titanic — you know, a sinking ship.
The EPA administrator has fixated on this line and described it as waste and self-dealing, suggesting reckless financial mismanagement, blatant conflicts of interest, astonishing sums of tax dollars awarded to unqualified recipients and severe deficiencies of regulatory oversight.
You were involved in setting up the IRA. I wonder, first of all, just how do you reflect on this episode? And second of all, was the Biden administration doing the proverbial version of throwing gold bars off the Titanic during the post-election period?
Costa: Yeah, so I mean, it falls apart as any sort of quote-unquote evidence in what's happening with the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund if you just believe in the linear nature of time. So, as I said, we announced EPA made the selections in April of 2024. The funds were fully obligated in August of 2024. Grantees were starting to make announcements about investments in October of 2024 — all dates which precede election day by weeks to months. And so it is just a complete fabrication on the part of Lee Zeldin that there was any sort of inappropriate action on the part of the Biden EPA or any of the other agencies in doing what Congress directed us to do, which was to award and obligate funds to recipients consistent with the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act that authorized and appropriated funds for the programs.
We had also — and I think I might have said this when I was with you guys in December — one of the first things that we did, from the White House implementation team, was to meet with all of our grant agencies and, in September and October of 2022, set targets for them for how much funding we wanted them to try to award and obligate by the end of the administration. And we set a goal, basically, that we would be aiming to have at least 80% of the available funds obligated by the end of 2024. And we hit that. And so the idea that there was some massive acceleration post-election — like, were there some contracts that the agencies obligated in December and January that, in the event of a Kamala Harris administration, they would've maybe obligated in February and March instead? Sure. I'm not going to say otherwise, but those grants had been made already. There wasn't this rush of actual decision-making.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
That trust was hard won — and it won’t be easily regained.
Spring — as even children know — is the season for planting. But across the country, tens of thousands of farmers who bought seeds with the help of Department of Agriculture grants are hesitating over whether or not to put them in the ground. Their contractually owed payments, processed through programs created under the Biden administration, have been put on pause by the Trump administration, leaving the farmers anxious about how to proceed.
Also anxious are staff at the sustainability and conservation-focused nonprofits that provided technical support and enrollment assistance for these grants, many of whom worry that the USDA grant pause could undermine the trust they’ve carefully built with farmers over years of outreach. Though enrollment in the programs was voluntary, the grants were formulated to serve the Biden administration’s Justice40 priority of investing in underserved and minority communities. Those same communities tend to be wary of collaborating with the USDA due to its history of overlooking small and family farms, which make up 90% of the farms in the U.S. and are more likely to be women- or minority-owned, in favor of large operations, as well as its pattern of disproportionately denying loans to Black farmers. The Biden administration had counted on nonprofits to leverage their relationships with farmers in order to bring them onto the projects.
“This was an opportunity to repair some of that trust, through this project,” Emily Moose, the executive director of the sustainable agriculture organization A Greener World, told me in an email. Moore and her teammates spent years recruiting farmers from the group’s Oregon community, and eventually got 77 of them to sign up to create certified regenerative farm management plans. A Greener World was notified in January that its reimbursements were being suspended, and now risks losing $10,000 in incentive payments, meaning the farmers in the program “are now having to weigh paying for certification out of pocket or dropping the certification process entirely and losing market opportunities.”
Nicole Delcogliano, director of programs at the Organic Growers School, a farmer training organization in North Carolina, and a small farmer herself had similar hopes for a grant the group received to help mentor and educate early-stage farmers. The department had “finally started to build back a little bit of trust,” she told me. With the funding pause, she said, “I think that is going to be lost.”
Affected grants include billions set aside for the USDA through the Inflation Reduction Act for soil and water conservation projects, as well as more than $820 million earmarked for the Rural Energy for America Program, or REAP, which incentivized agricultural producers to make energy-efficiency improvements on their land. Grants issued through the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program for farm innovations that have greenhouse gas and carbon sequestration benefits — funded through the USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation, a Dust Bowl-era entity more typically leveraged to protect farm income and prices during disasters — are also on pause. Original plans for the program under Biden would have seen it eventually scaled to 60,000 farms, reducing an estimated 50,000 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent.
Though the Trump administration eventually released about 1% of the IRA-related USDA grant money in late February, much remains out of reach, with no timeline for payout. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition assumes that the “majority” of the $2.3 billion allocated to farmers on IRA-funded contracts is “likely still in USDA’s coffers.” Additionally, more than half of the $3.1 billion allocated to the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program had not yet been paid out by the end of February, according to The Hagstrom Report, an agricultural news service. (The Trump administration has said it would reconsider REAP grants if applicants rewrite them to “remove harmful [diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility] and far-left climate features.”)
All of the affected grant programs work on a reimbursement basis, with the farmers incurring costs upfront protected, in theory, by a contractual guarantee that the government will pay them back. Individual farmers aren’t usually the direct beneficiaries of USDA grants, however. The USDA more commonly awards a grant to nonprofit organizations that, in turn, provide financial and technical support to farmers making sustainable transitions. Many of the nonprofits are now having to furlough or lay off staff. Meanwhile, farmers are still seeking their reimbursements, but there’s no funding there to pay them.
Hannah Smith-Brubaker, the executive director of Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit that was awarded a Climate Smart Commodities grant and a Farm and Food Workers Relief from the USDA, is planning to furlough 60 people — most of her team — due to the pause. Another project director at a Mid-Atlantic sustainability nonprofit told me his organization has “been lending cash” from their own books since January 27, when the pause was announced, and that he anticipated being laid off shortly after our call.
But while the nonprofits are certainly hurting, the farmers are the ones stuck with the final bill. In addition to the USDA’s history of discriminating against Black farmers, many who manage smaller acreages report feeling overlooked by the federal government in favor of powerful agro-business conglomerates. More than 70% of farmers under age 40 reported being unfamiliar with USDA programs that could help them, and nearly half said they’d never received support from the agency, according to polling by the National Young Farmers Coalition published in 2022.
“In the last administration, there was recognition that they didn’t have the trust of a lot of farmers who historically haven't been served, or been underserved, by USDA,” Smith-Brubaker said. With programs like the Climate-Smart Commodities grant, the Biden administration “asked us to leverage the trust that we already have with farmers — to ask them to trust us to enter into this program.”
It worked: Many of the more than 30,000 contracted farms are already a year or two into multi-year projects with nonprofits designed to improve soil health, plant cover crops, or improve farm efficiency. That means they’ve already hired the extra staff for the projects, placed orders for new equipment, and set aside precious land for soil-enrichment projects.
But with no word on the future of their funding, some are now hesitating over whether to spend more money out of pocket on those projects if the government might not uphold its end of the deal. The pause has led many of the farmers I spoke with to reevaluate their trust in future USDA funding. “It’s unsettling because you’re like, ‘Well, if I implement the practices I’m supposed to, but then I don’t get that reimbursement sometime in 2025, what does that look like?’” said Delcogliano, who received one Conservation Stewardship Plan payment in October for her farm, Green Toe Ground, but hasn’t yet heard yet whether future payments will be affected.
Delcogliano also emphasized that despite the commodities grant containing the “buzz word” of “climate,” what it actually encourages are long-established practices that help conserve water and soil. “It’s just smart farming,” she told me. Ed Winebarger, a chef and farmer in North Carolina, told me he participated in the Climate-Smart Commodities program for a year and saw an immediate 20% increase in production. “My crops did better, the system works — period,” he said.
Small farmers who pursued the government grants likely would have been interested in the practices regardless of the financial incentives in many cases; Erin Foster West, the Policy Campaigns Director for the National Young Farmers Coalition, told me the group’s research found nearly 85% of its membership was “motivated by environmental stewardship to farm.” Caroline Anderson Novak, the head of the Professional Dairy Managers of Pennsylvania — which is collaborating with Penn State on its greenhouse-gas-reducing Climate-Smart Commodities program, and which hasn’t received a notification of a pause from the USDA as other organizations have — told me that things like experimental feeds and sharper data assessments represent “operational improvements” that just happen to have attractive climate upsides. “They are things that the farm already wants to do,” she said.
What the grants do is provide the capital necessary for farmers to put these efficiency upgrades into practice. Margins, particularly at small farms, can be razor thin, and the risks of operational experiments can be steep. “A lot of the time, you would need to pursue a loan just to get started with the project,” Emma Jagoz, the owner of Moon Valley Farm in Maryland, who has hundreds of thousands in USDA grants tied up by the pause, told me.
As a result, farmers waiting for clarity on their grants generally have clear eyes about the root of the problem. “The organization that we work with, they can’t help the cuts. It’s not their fault,” Patrick Brown, who enrolled 90% of his North Carolina farm’s acreage in a climate-smart project, told me. “This administration has blatantly stated their approach.”
Kristin Reilly, the executive director of the Choose Clean Water Coalition, a collective of small nonprofits in the Chesapeake Bay watershed that is helping its farming partners navigate the funding freeze, agreed that “the practitioners on the ground are definitely seeing that it’s not the nonprofits who are not paying them; they’re struggling along with them.”
Almost everyone I spoke with was pessimistic that the USDA would honor the grants, even as Earthjustice and other groups have launched lawsuits against the federal government over the freeze. (Pasa has joined a lawsuit with the Southern Environmental Law Center.) “I don’t think [the pause is] going to lift as long as this guy is in power because he’s so disconnected from reality,” Winebarger, the North Carolina chef and farmer, said of President Trump. “He’s never put his hands in dirt in his entire life. He doesn’t understand me. He doesn’t understand my farming neighbors.”
Delcogliano shared a similar sentiment: “The government is incompetent,” she told me. “They’re not in touch with the people that are actually doing the work.”
Perhaps most crucially, while the federal money is paused, the climate continues changing. Any given season could bring a new drought or deluge that wipes out a farm entirely. Though separate from the troubles with the grant pauses, both Delcogliano and Winebarger are also recovering from extensive damage to their farms from Hurricane Helene, a process they told me has been made even more painful due to the lack of emergency funding available from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Farmers will also be particularly vulnerable to the impacts of some of the tariffs the Trump administration plans to enact this week.
“It just feels like I’m driving behind a truck full of hammers that are dumping on me,” Winebarger said of the compounding problems. “And I can’t dodge them — they’re going to hit me. I don’t know how we’re going to get out from underneath this.”
Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture & the Environment, a Maine-based nonprofit that stands to lose a $35 million Climate-Smart Commodities grant, has begun to reformulate how its programs could continue with the support of buyer funds, state funding sources, or philanthropic dollars instead. It had once envisioned working with more than 400 partners over the grant’s lifespan, but that idea has given way to smaller-scale projects it can still afford.
“This is about so much more than climate change,” Ellen Griswold, the director of Wolfe’s Neck, stressed to me about the importance of finding a way forward with or without the government. “It’s about making farmers as resilient and profitable as possible. Without this assistance, there will be impacts to the farming community” — including farmers themselves and their suppliers. That could include a fencing company, nursery, or refrigerated truck dealer farmers can no longer afford to pay, or regional schools or food banks that are now forced to pay more for local, organic produce.
The reverberations of the grant pause will be felt far into the future, too. Even if the contracts are ultimately honored by the Trump administration, some farmers will undoubtedly feel justified in their suspicions of partnering with the federal government. Nonprofits will have more difficulty convincing community partners to take on voluntary climate projects down the line, and common-sense efficiency projects with climate co-benefits will stay dormant.
“If another opportunity comes along like this, I completely understand if farmers say, ‘No, I’m not doing that,’” Smith-Brubaker of Pasa said.