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There will not be one type of cultured chicken. There will be kosher cultured chicken, halal cultured chicken, and ... vegan cultured chicken?
When you’re a vegetarian, you get used to dealing with sneering, horrified, nosy, and bewildered questions of “...but why?!”
My own well-practiced answer — designed to minimize confrontation — goes something like this: I was raised not eating red meat and then when I was a teenager, I became obsessed with our cultural disconnect from our food and decided that if I couldn’t stomach killing and preparing an animal myself, then I had no right to eat it. But don’t worry, my husband eats meat! I’m not judgmental!
The truth is actually much more complicated and nuanced (my “long version” includes anecdotes about my stint at a wildlife rehabilitation center, my father’s heart attack, and an explanation of why I eat meat when I travel abroad), but I usually don’t get that far when talking with strangers. That’s because what we eat and why are deeply personal questions that can touch on everything from one’s religious beliefs to their code of ethics, cultural and philosophical values, health, and concerns about environmental impact. Every person who observes dietary restrictions around meat has spent at least some time — perhaps very little, maybe every single day — privately weighing these considerations.
Then earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture threw all of that carefully considered reasoning out the window by approving the sale of lab-grown chicken.
Don’t get me wrong: This is incredible news. Around 15% of global emissions come from livestock farming (including dairy and eggs), and it would likely be impossible to get everyone on the planet to switch to a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle. Indeed, for animal rights activists, “cell-cultivated” or “cultured” meat has long been akin to cold fusion for food — that is, a science-fiction solution that theoretically fixes everything.
But now, using cells harvested from live animals, companies like Upside Foods and Good Meat are able to safely grow animal fat and muscle tissue in stainless steel tanks, resulting in what is essentially slaughter-free animal protein for human consumption. When I spoke with the influential animal welfare philosopher Peter Singer a few months ago about the ethical quandaries of eating meat during the climate crisis, he’d cited such advancements in cultured meat (at the time, only available in Singapore) as an exciting, if far-off, opportunity, telling me “if we can get that economically competitive, maybe that’ll be a solution to the problem.”
The widespread proliferation of cultured meat is admittedly still a long way off. For the time being, lab-grown chicken will only be sold in select U.S. restaurants and an enormous amount of scaling is required for cultured meat to begin to replace industrial farming. There are also concerns that current production methods are not actually more sustainable than live-animal farming. Plus, there is a squeamish factor of “meat grown in tanks” to be cleared.
But the USDA approval is still nothing short of a game-changer. “I’m vegan for ethical reasons, and so if people can enjoy the familiar tastes of meat and textures of chicken and whatever else without animals dying, then that’s a huge win in my book,” Nisha Vora, a vegan recipe developer and cookbook author who runs the YouTube channel and blog Rainbow Plant Life, told me. Still, “it will be weird to eat chicken!” she admitted.
Vora isn’t sure yet how much lab-grown meat will factor into her future recipes, explaining that many of her followers are interested in whole foods and cooking that is meat-adjacent, “so I don’t think I have a huge swath of my audience that’s really like, ‘oh, I can’t wait for meat,’ you know?” She observed, though, that lab-grown meat could potentially make labor-intensive parts of some of her recipes, like her popular vegan Crunchwrap Supreme dupe, easier and quicker, albeit not quite as healthy. “If you are vegan for health reasons, or you’re plant-based for health reasons … then maybe that’s not what you want to be eating,” she pointed out.
Omnivores might be scratching their heads at these fine nuances, wondering why they’re a big deal: No animals are killed, can’t you people ever be happy? But it’s actually the fact that the animals aren’t killed that might prevent a quarter of the world’s population from eating lab-grown meat.
Many religions have customs regarding meat consumption, including Judaism, Hinduism, certain denominations of Christianity, and Islam — groups that together make up approximately half of the global population. That means there is a lot of confusion and theological debate when it comes to cultured meat. As The Washington Post once memorably put it, “If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, tastes like a duck, but you’re not supposed to eat a duck, does God consider this ‘cheating’?”
The answer is, it depends.
Take halal, the Islamic laws governing food. A number of rules must be met for meat to be considered permissible to eat, including proper slaughtering of the animal. It is, for example, forbidden to eat an animal that dies naturally and becomes a carcass. This is an essential technicality for the 25% of people globally who keep halal.
“Any severed part of a surviving (land) livestock animal can become a carcass” — including its cells, one recent Malaysian study explained. As such, lab-grown meat would only be halal if the animal the cells were collected from was “slaughtered according to the Shariah law.” Such an interpretation has been echoed by religious authorities in Pakistan and Indonesia, the two countries with the largest Muslim populations. (Kosher-slaughtered origin animals may be acceptable in the eyes of rabbis, too, although Jewish authorities have gone back and forth on the matter).
But using cells from a slaughtered animal might be a non-starter for some hardcore animal rights activists since the shift makes the lab-grown cells ever so slightly less cruelty-free. PETA has long been a proponent and backer of cultivated meat, although on the grounds that “no animal died for it.” As PETA’s Catie Cryar clarified for me, “It is our hope that the original process used to obtain cells will be superseded by scientific advances, but at the very least, our goal would be to have no additional animals slaughtered after the original cell lines were obtained.” That means there is potentially a world in which even cultured meat gets labels distinguishing it as either “vegan friendly” or “halal and kosher” (currently, most cultivated meats are made from live-animal cells).
Hindus, meanwhile, may not eat cultured beef regardless of its origin due to the sacred status of cows, one 2020 survey found, although overall Hinduism was “the only religious group who were … more willing to eat cultured meat than conventional meat … perhaps highlighting the motivation to avoid harming animals.” And of course, all of this generalizes the positions of enormously diverse world religions — every worshipper will have their own perspective.
Then there is a whole other sect of non-meat-eaters that we’ve largely ignored: those who abstain for health reasons. While meat substitutes on the market today are made from plants, lab-grown meat is still animal meat. But that also means eating cultured steaks isn’t any better for you than eating real steaks. Even if cellular meat does eventually take off, there will be plenty of people who avoid it simply because they don’t want to include meat in their diet, no matter what its animal or, uh, tank of origin is.
Now let me guess, you nosy Nelly — you’re wondering at this point what I am going to do? I admit my thinking has been all over the place. Sure, when it comes to my animal-ethics-forward viewpoints, there should be nothing stopping me from eating lab-grown meat. I’m a big believer in open-mindedness and adaption and I fully support lab-grown meat being available on the wider market. But I also enjoy the health benefits of eating plant-based, and it’s conceptually just strange to think of myself eating chicken protein even if no chickens were harmed in the making of my meal.
Mostly I just think it’s funny how one little USDA stamp of approval has the potential to unmoor my entire identity as a vegetarian — whatever that even means anymore. We’ll probably need to come up with new terms to distinguish between people who don’t eat animal proteins, period, and people who don’t eat slaughtered animals.
I’m sure, also, that there will eventually be a need for a term to describe meat purists who avoid tank-grown proteins. Then at last it’ll be my turn to snort and ask, “...but why?!”
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On a late-night House vote, Tesla’s slump, and carbon credits
Current conditions: Tropical storm Chantal has a 40% chance of developing this weekend and may threaten Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas • French far-right leader Marine Le Pen is campaigning on a “grand plan for air conditioning” amid the ongoing record-breaking heatwave in Europe • Great fireworks-watching weather is in store tomorrow for much of the East and West Coasts.
The House moved closer to a final vote on President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after passing a key procedural vote around 3 a.m. ET on Thursday morning. “We have the votes,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters after the rule vote, adding, “We’re still going to meet” Trump’s self-imposed July 4 deadline to pass the megabill. A floor vote on the legislation is expected as soon as Thursday morning.
GOP leadership had worked through the evening to convince holdouts, with my colleagues Katie Brigham and Jael Holzman reporting last night that House Freedom Caucus member Ralph Norman of North Carolina said he planned to advance the legislation after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits, particularly for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version phases out more slowly than House Republicans wanted. “It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally ‘deal with’ tax credits already codified into law,” Brigham and Holzman write, although another Republican holdout, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, made similar allusions to reporters on Wednesday.
Tesla delivered just 384,122 cars in the second quarter of 2025, a 13.5% slump from the 444,000 delivered in the same quarter of 2024, marking the worst quarterly decline in the company’s history, Barron’s reports. The slump follows a similarly disappointing Q1, down 13% year-over-year, after the company’s sales had “flatlined for the first time in over a decade” in 2024, InsideEVs adds.
Despite the drop, Tesla stock rose 5% on Wednesday, with Wedbush analyst Dan Ives calling the Q2 results better than some had expected. “Fireworks came early for Tesla,” he wrote, although Barron’s notes that “estimates for the second quarter of 2025 started at about 500,000 vehicles. They started to drop precipitously after first-quarter deliveries fell 13% year over year, missing Wall Street estimates by some 40,000 vehicles.”
The European Commission proposed its 2040 climate target on Wednesday, which, for the first time, would allow some countries to use carbon credits to meet their emissions goals. EU Commissioner for Climate, Net Zero, and Clean Growth Wopke Hoekstra defended the decision during an appearance on Euronews on Wednesday, saying the plan — which allows developing nations to meet a limited portion of their emissions goals with the credits — was a chance to “build bridges” with countries in Africa and Latin America. “The planet doesn’t care about where we take emissions out of the air,” he separately told The Guardian. “You need to take action everywhere.” Green groups, which are critical of the use of carbon credits, slammed the proposal, which “if agreed [to] by member states and passed by the EU parliament … is then supposed to be translated into an international target,” The Guardian writes.
Around half of oil executives say they expect to drill fewer wells in 2025 than they’d planned for at the start of the year, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas survey. Of the respondents at firms producing more than 10,000 barrels a day, 42% said they expected a “significant decrease in the number of wells drilled,” Bloomberg adds. The survey further indicates that Republican policy has been at odds with President Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” rhetoric, as tariffs have increased the cost of completing a new well by more than 4%. “It’s hard to imagine how much worse policies and D.C. rhetoric could have been for U.S. E&P companies,” one anonymous executive said in the report. “We were promised by the administration a better environment for producers, but were delivered a world that has benefited OPEC to the detriment of our domestic industry.”
Fine-particulate air pollution is strongly associated with lung cancer-causing DNA mutations that are more traditionally linked to smoking tobacco, a new study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and the National Cancer Institute has found. The researchers looked at the genetic code of 871 non-smokers’ lung tumors in 28 regions across Europe, Africa, and Asia and found that higher levels of local air pollution correlated with more cancer-driving mutations in the respective tumors.
Surprisingly, the researchers did not find a similar genetic correlation among non-smokers exposed to secondhand smoke. George Thurston, a professor of medicine and population health at New York University, told Inside Climate News that a potential reason for this result is that fine-particulate air pollution — which is emitted by cars, industrial activities, and wildfires — is more widespread than exposure to secondhand smoke. “We are engulfed in fossil-fuel-burning pollution every single day of our lives, all day long, night and day,” he said, adding, “I feel like I’m in the Matrix, and I’m the only one that took the red pill. I know what’s going on, and everybody else is walking around thinking, ‘This stuff isn’t bad for your health.’” Today, non-smokers account for up to 25% of lung cancer cases globally, with the worst air quality pollution in the United States primarily concentrated in the Southwest.
EPA
National TV news networks aired a combined 4 hours and 20 minutes of coverage about the record-breaking late-June temperatures in the Midwest and East Coast — but only 4% of those segments mentioned the heat dome’s connection to climate change, a new report by Media Matters found.
“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”
A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.
Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.
It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally “deal with” tax credits already codified into law. Norman declined to answer direct questions from reporters about whether GOP holdouts like himself were seeking an executive order on the matter. But another Republican holdout on the bill, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, told reporters Wednesday that his vote was also conditional on blocking IRA “subsidies.”
“If the subsidies will flow, we’re not gonna be able to get there. If the subsidies are not gonna flow, then there might be a path," he said, according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News.
As of publication, Roy has still not voted on the rule that would allow the bill to proceed to the floor — one of only eight Republicans yet to formally weigh in. House Speaker Mike Johnson says he’ll, “keep the vote open for as long as it takes,” as President Trump aims to sign the giant tax package by the July 4th holiday. Norman voted to let the bill proceed to debate, and will reportedly now vote yes on it too.
Earlier Wednesday, Norman said he was “getting a handle on” whether his various misgivings could be handled by Trump via executive orders or through promises of future legislation. According to CNN, the congressman later said, “We got clarification on what’s going to be enforced. We got clarification on how the IRAs were going to be dealt with. We got clarification on the tax cuts — and still we’ll be meeting tomorrow on the specifics of it.”
Neither Norman nor Roy’s press offices responded to a request for comment.
The foreign entities of concern rules in the One Big Beautiful Bill would place gigantic new burdens on developers.
Trump campaigned on cutting red tape for energy development. At the start of his second term, he signed an executive order titled, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” promising to kill 10 regulations for each new one he enacted.
The order deems federal regulations an “ever-expanding morass” that “imposes massive costs on the lives of millions of Americans, creates a substantial restraint on our economic growth and ability to build and innovate, and hampers our global competitiveness.” It goes on to say that these regulations “are often difficult for the average person or business to understand,” that they are so complicated that they ultimately increase the cost of compliance, as well as the risks of non-compliance.
Reading this now, the passage echoes the comments I’ve heard from industry groups and tax law experts describing the incredibly complex foreign entities of concern rules that Congress — with the full-throated backing of the Trump administration — is about to impose on clean energy projects and manufacturers. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, wind and solar, as well as utility-scale energy storage, geothermal, nuclear, and all kinds of manufacturing projects will have to abide by restrictions on their Chinese material inputs and contractual or financial ties with Chinese entities in order to qualify for tax credits.
“Foreign entity of concern” is a U.S. government term referring to entities that are “owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of” any of four countries — Russia, Iran, North Korea, and most importantly for clean energy technology, China.
Trump’s tax bill requires companies to meet increasingly strict limits on the amount of material from China they use in their projects and products. A battery factory starting production next year, for example, would have to ensure that 60% of the value of the materials that make up its products have no connection to China. By 2030, the threshold would rise to 85%. The bill lays out similar benchmarks and timelines for clean electricity projects, as well as other kinds of manufacturing.
But how companies should calculate these percentages is not self-evident. The bill also forbids companies from collecting the tax credits if they have business relationships with “specified foreign entities” or “foreign-influenced entities,” terms with complicated definitions that will likely require guidance from the Treasury for companies to be sure they pass the test.
Regulatory uncertainty could stifle development until further guidance is released, but how long that takes will depend on if and when the Trump administration prioritizes getting it done. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains a lot of other new tax-related provisions that were central to the Trump campaign, including a tax exemption for tips, which are likely much higher on the department’s to-do list.
Tax credit implementation was a top priority for the Biden administration, and even with much higher staffing levels than the department currently has, it took the Treasury 18 months to publish initial guidance on foreign entities of concern rules for the Inflation Reduction Act’s electric vehicle tax credit. “These things are so unbelievably complicated,” Rachel McCleery, a former senior advisor at the Treasury under Biden, told me.
McCleery questioned whether larger, publicly-owned companies would be able to proceed with major investments in things like battery manufacturing plants until that guidance is out. She gave the example of a company planning to pump out 100,000 batteries per year and claim the per-kilowatt-hour advanced manufacturing tax credit. “That’s going to look like a pretty big number in claims, so you have to be able to confidently and assuredly tell your shareholder, Yep, we’re good, we qualify, and that requires a certification” by a tax counsel, she said. To McCleery, there’s an open question as to whether any tax counsel “would even provide a tax opinion for publicly-traded companies to claim credits of this size without guidance.”
John Cornwell, the director of policy at the Good Energy Collective, which conducts research and advocacy for nuclear power, echoed McCleery’s concerns. “Without very clear guidelines from the Treasury and IRS, until those guidelines are in place, that is going to restrict financing and investment,” Cornwell told me.
Understanding what the law requires will be the first challenge. But following it will involve tracking down supply chain data that may not exist, finding alternative suppliers that may not be able to fill the demand, and establishing extensive documentation of the origins of components sourced through webs of suppliers, sub-suppliers, and materials processors.
The Good Energy Collective put out an issue brief this week describing the myriad hurdles nuclear developers will face in trying to adhere to the tax credit rules. Nuclear plants contain thousands of components, and documenting the origin of everything from “steam generators to smaller items like specialized fasteners, gaskets, and electronic components will introduce substantial and costly administrative burdens,” it says. Additionally the critical minerals used in nuclear projects “often pass through multiple processing stages across different countries before final assembly,” and there are no established industry standards for supply chain documentation.
Beyond the documentation headache, even just finding the materials could be an issue. China dominates the market for specialized nuclear-grade materials manufacturing and precision component fabrication, the report says, and alternative suppliers are likely to charge premiums. Establishing new supply chains will take years, but Trump’s bill will begin enforcing the sourcing rules in 2026. The rules will prove even more difficult for companies trying to build first-of-a-kind advanced nuclear projects, as those rely on more highly specialized supply chains dominated by China.
These challenges may be surmountable, but that will depend, again, on what the Treasury decides, and when. The Department’s guidance could limit the types of components companies have to account for and simplify the documentation process, or it could not. But while companies wait for certainty, they may also be racking up interest. “The longer there are delays, that can have a substantial risk of project success,” Cornwell said.
And companies don’t have forever. Each of the credits comes with a phase-out schedule. Wind manufacturers can only claim the credits until 2028. Other manufacturers have until 2030. Credits for clean power projects will start to phase down in 2034. “Given the fact that a lot of these credits start lapsing in the next few years, there’s a very good chance that, because guidance has not yet come out, you’re actually looking at a much smaller time frame than than what is listed in the bill,” Skip Estes, the government affairs director for Securing America’s Energy Future, or SAFE, told me.
Another issue SAFE has raised is that the way these rules are set up, the foreign sourcing requirements will get more expensive and difficult to comply with as the value of the tax credits goes down. “Our concern is that that’s going to encourage companies to forego the credit altogether and just continue buying from the lowest common denominator, which is typically a Chinese state-owned or -influenced monopoly,” Estes said.
McCleery had another prediction — the regulations will be so burdensome that companies will simply set up shop elsewhere. “I think every industry will certainly be rethinking their future U.S. investments, right? They’ll go overseas, they’ll go to Canada, which dumped a ton of carrots and sticks into industry after we passed the IRA,” she said.
“The irony is that Republicans have historically been the party of deregulation, creating business friendly environments. This is completely opposite, right?”