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Last summer was the hottest in two millennia. We won’t get any relief this year.
An overwhelming majority of Americans will experience above-average heat this summer, and temperatures in more than half of the contiguous United States are expected to top the historical average by at least 2 degrees Fahrenheit, according to AccuWeather. New York is expected to endure twice as many 90-plus-degree days as last year; Boston could experience up to four times as many.
Americans got a taste of what’s to come this week, with a blistering heat wave that began in the Southwest and has scorched the East Coast for the past three days. That heat may have come early based on the historical averages, but considering more recent trends, it’s right on track.
“The biggest changes that we have seen in recent decades is that the heat wave season has been expanding, starting earlier in the late spring and ending later into early fall, on average,” AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Brett Anderson told Heatmap.
The northern Rockies, Great Lakes, and the Northeast are areas of particular concern, Paul Pastelok, AccuWeather’s Lead Long-Range Forecaster, told Heatmap. Those regions will likely experience less precipitation and more intense heat this summer compared to their historical average. “The Northern Plains and Upper Midwest are tricky,” Pastelok said. “Right now, this area is getting rain, but this could cut off by the very end of June into July, and turn around to dryness with the heat following.”
While temperatures will most likely peak in the interior Southwest — Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico — by early July, the region can expect temperatures between 112 and 118 degrees until then. Monsoon season, which brings warm winds and rainfall inland, will likely arrive in late July instead of the usual late June, Pastelok said. Peak heat could come much later — anytime between July and September — for those in the Great Lakes, the Ohio Valley, and the Northeast.
The biggest “warm anomalies” are expected in the Southwest and central Rockies, the Great Lakes, the Ohio Valley and the Northeast, according Tom Kines, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather. “We are looking at anomalies for the entire summer of +4 degrees (F) which is pretty significant over a 3 month period,” Kines wrote in an email to Heatmap.
Heat won’t be the only extreme weather this season. Drought could be severe, particularly in the Southwest — including parts of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, where rainfall could come in below 50% of the historical average. That dry spell could intensify over the northern Plains, Great Lakes, and the Northeast later in the summer. The Gulf Coast, meanwhile, can anticipate a staggering 22 to 36 inches of rain this season — compared to its usual 15 to 24 inches — which will likely make flooding an issue.
After a wetter winter, meteorologists anticipated a slow start to the wildfire season in California and the Southwest. In fact, the number of wildfires this year is expected to come in below average: AccuWeather meteorologists predict 35,000 to 50,000 wildfires this year, compared to a historical average of about 69,000. Yet the fires in California also seem to have picked up speed a little earlier than normal. Last week saw more than two dozen fires in the state, perhaps heralding increased fire activity to come.
So how will we deal with all this? Northern cities, especially, tend to be less equipped to deal with extreme summer heat. In Boston, temperatures reached a record-breaking 98 degrees on Wednesday, a day after Mayor Michelle Wu declared a heat emergency. The city opened cooling centers this week in an attempt to minimize the number of heat-related medical emergencies.
Boston Green New Deal Director Oliver Sellers-Garcia told Heatmap that the city is bringing more government agencies into the heat management effort. The Fire and Parks departments plan to set up misting stations, and the city will continue to provide extra pop-up cooling centers in coordination with Boston’s Centers for Youth and Families. Those strategies, Sellers-Garcia said, “can have an instant benefit for someone, whether it’s just a super hot day and they have to get to work or it’s a declared heat wave.”
In Florida, people are used to chronic heat, Miami-Dade County’s Chief Heat Officer Jane Gilbert told Heatmap. Last year the county had 42 heat advisories (which happens when the thermometer reaches 105) and 70 warnings (110), Gilbert said, and this season is already proving more intense: May was the warmest ever on record in the state. To protect residents, the county has established a comprehensive public awareness campaign that targets those most affected by the heat, including outdoor workers, children, pregnant women, the elderly, and people with chronic illnesses. It also runs more than 30 cooling centers.
According to Gilbert, the goal is to educate people about the extent of heat impacts so they can make better choices — drink more water, find shade, limit physical activity — and protect their health. “We haven’t fully appreciated, historically as a community, how it impacts our lives,” she said.
Here’s what’s happened so far ...
June 24: On Juneteenth, over 82 million Americans were under active National Weather Service extreme heat alerts — but, due to the national holiday, many publicly operated cooling centers were closed. While Boston had opened 14 new facilities in partnership with the Centers for Youth and Families, for instance, none of them stayed open Wednesday.
The same thing happened in New York, where more than 200 cooling centers were closed for the holiday, most of them libraries. While other heat preparedness measures were still in place — Gov. Kathy Hochul announced free admission for state parks — residents counting on a facility near home had to change plans last minute. On Sunday, New York turned 45 public schools into cooling centers, this time because the public libraries were closed due to budget cuts.
In Chicago, only one cooling center was open during the holiday. The lack of cooling spaces available sparked action from homelessness advocates, who are urging the city to offer more cooling centers that are open 24/7 and also to make those facilities available when the heat index is above 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
Because cooling centers are often multi-purpose spaces, data on their usage is limited. In Boston, 245 people visited cooling centers from June 18 to 20, the mayor’s office told me. New York City’s Department of Emergency Management could only say that six people visited four of the schools open Sunday.
June 21: Communities from Kansas to Maine experienced record-breaking temperatures, with heat indices above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in some places. Cities including Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Burlington, Vermont opened cooling centers, and Boston and New York activated heat emergency plans. Schools in Buffalo, New York moved to half-day schedules for the week in response to temperature advisories.
The heat wave was expected to hold into the weekend, increasing the risk of emergencies. But ensuring that at-risk residents are aware of public services and heat mitigation strategies is often more difficult than simply providing amenities like cooling centers and air conditioners, Benjamin Zaitchik, a professor of climate dynamics at Johns Hopkins University, told Heatmap. “Preventing heat deaths — in principle, at least — is easy,” Zaitchik said. “It just requires good planning, good communication, good networks.”
The same heatwave afflicted much of the Southwestern United States the week before. Temperatures in Phoenix and Las Vegas exceeded 110 degrees, breaking records and prompting cities to issue heat advisories covering tens of millions of people. At a Trump rally in Las Vegas, 24 people received treatment for heat-related complications and six were hospitalized, The Guardianreported.
June 14-19:More than 1,000 people died during the sacred Muslim pilgrimage known as the hajj as extreme heat gripped Saudi Arabia in mid-June. In Mecca, where temperatures exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit, worshippers gripped umbrellas and water bottles to combat the heat. A study from 2019 predicted that hajj conditions would exceed an “extreme danger heat threshold” more frequently in the coming decades, especially when the pilgrimage — which is scheduled according to the lunar calendar — coincides with the warmer months of the year.
The death toll was about five times higher than last year, according to CNN.
June 10: Passengers on a Qatar Airways flight passed out from heat as their plane sat on the tarmac at Athens International Airport. Flight 204, which was delayed for three hours with passengers stuck inside, experienced a malfunction in its air conditioning. Two days later, authorities shut down the Acropolis for five hours due to the 102 degree weather, which marked Greece’s earliest heat wave on record. Many schools were also closed for the day, and several air-conditioned spaces were opened to the public. Greece’s Health Ministry advised older people and those with chronic illnesses to stay indoors.
The intense weather continued throughout the weekend, and at least five tourists were reported to have died due to extreme heat.
Other parts of Southern Europe, such as Cyprus and Turk, have also suffered through heat waves this year. During the second week of June, temperatures in Cyprus exceeded 104 degrees every day and classes ended early. On June 14, some areas experienced their hottest June day ever, reaching 113 degrees. That same week, Turkey also battled record temperatures — they were 8 to 12 degrees higher than the average for the season.
May and June: Both Mexico and India faced extreme temperatures during national elections.
Record-breaking heat waves have scorched Mexico since late March, causing blackouts, wildfires, heat strokes, and animal deaths. On May 25, Mexico City set a new heat record, with the temperature there surpassing 94.4 degrees, while other cities in the country registered even higher temperatures — well above 115 degrees. As of June 12, at least 125 deaths had been attributed to the heat, which has been made worse by an intense drought linked to El Niño. With reservoirs at less than 27% capacity, millions could run out of water by the end of this month.
World Weather Attribution, a research group that analyzes the degree to which climate change is causing extreme weather events, estimated that global warming has made extreme temperatures in the region 35 times more likely. “These trends will continue with future warming and events like the one observed in 2024 will be very common” in a world where average temperatures are 2 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels, the group stated in a release.
Despite sweltering conditions, about 100 million voters elected Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female president, on June 2. In her victory speech, Sheinbaum, a climate scientist with a focus on energy engineering, said she will work to maintain the country’s energy sovereignty. While Sheinbaum has vouched to expand the country’s renewable energy, she has also been criticized for her support of Pemex, the state-owned oil company.
Two days later, on June 4, India re-elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a third term during the country’s longest-ever heatwave. By the time the weeks-long voting process wrapped, extreme heat had killed more than 100 people. In Uttar Pradesh, at least 33 poll workers died in a single day, CNN reported. In response, local governments have imposed measures to prevent water waste and protect construction workers. Yet, according to analysis by the Centre for Policy Research found in 2023, most of India’s heatwave policies are underfunded and fail to target the country’s most vulnerable groups.
More extreme weather hammered Mexico beginning June 20 as tropical storm Alberto brought torrential rain and flooding to the country’s east. AccuWeather meteorologists said the storm is just the start of a predicted intense hurricane season in the area. Most of India is still under heatwave alerts, but the weather is set to improve in the next few days as the monsoon finally advances after a week-long delay.
May: Scarce rainfall and soaring heat have led to drought conditions that are threatening China’s food production and water supply. The provinces of Shandong and Henan — crucial to the country’s wheat production — are some of the most affected, and the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters has dispatched two disaster relief guidance teams. New technology, such as multi-functional seeders, and multiple reservoirs have been deployed to ameliorate conditions.
Also on Wednesday, the China Meteorological Administration reported that several regional weather stations recorded the highest temperatures ever in mid-June. Conditions are expected to worsen, as some Chinese provinces are expected to reach 111 degrees this week.
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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.