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America should eat more chicken. But how many is too many?
“The 1992–1993 Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak” sounds like a randomly generated target article for a round of the Wikipedia Game. But it goes a long way to explaining, well, me.
I was two months old when Washington State health officials informed the public about a massive E. coli contamination associated with hamburgers from Jack in the Box, and 3 months old when President Bill Clinton addressed the crisis on national television. My mom swore our family off eating red meat in response — understandably, since the outbreak largely affected, and killed, children within a few miles of our hometown in the Pacific Northwest. Her steadfastness was reinforced after my brother was born in the mid-1990s, just as another beef-borne illness was making international headlines: mad cow disease, a.k.a. the “United Kingdom BSE outbreak.”
As a result, I grew up not eating red meat, though by the time I was in middle school, this elaborate explanation for why I wasn’t touching my pepperoni pizza at a friend’s Skate King birthday party was beginning to draw odd looks (E. coli and mad cow disease long having faded from everyone else’s memories, Boston Legal fans not included). Things became much simpler to explain after I made the switch to full vegetarianism in high school, though I’d still occasionally get the disbelieving “you mean you’ve NEVER had BACON?!” response whenever someone got nosy about my dietary history and if I was abstaining “for animal cruelty reasons, or what?”
It turns out, though, that my weirdo childhood diet is now frequently touted as one of the best ways to eat for the sake of the planet (take that, Jennifer). Sometimes referred to as “pollotarianism” — which is incredibly confusing to try to pronounce if you speak any Spanish — the act of replacing red meat in your diet with poultry has been characterized by Gidon Eshel, a research professor of environmental physics at Bard College, as “the most impactful change” you can make for the climate “save going all-out vegan.”
I admit I was pleasantly surprised — okay, fine, smug — upon discovering that this would mean I’ve eaten positively for the planet my whole life (even if the aforementioned pollotarianism, and subsequent teenage conversion to vegetarianism, had nothing to do with the environment at the time). I could proselytize giving up beef as an accessible way of trying “to eat in the manner that takes note of the finality of Earth,” as Eshel so elegantly phrased it to me. After all, I’ve actually lived that chicken nugg life!
Recent climate activism has focused on pressuring big polluters and governments and moved away from the emphasis on individual responsibility, but one place you actually can feel like you’re making a meaningful difference for the planet is, in fact, in how you eat. “Somewhere between 20 and 35 percent of all emissions come from feeding ourselves,” Eshel explained. Our diets are “one of the few things where we can really take a major chunk out of our total emissions.”
And about a quarter of total greenhouse gas emissions from the food industry can be attributed specifically to beef production, which requires 28 times more land, six times more fertilizer, and 11 times more water than other animal products like chicken, dairy, or eggs. By one frequently cited estimate, replacing beef on your plate with chicken could cut your dietary carbon footprint in half.
That’s not insignificant: To become carbon neutral by 2050, every person on the planet would need to limit their emissions to an annual 2 tons of carbon dioxide equivalents or less, Germany’s Deutsche Welle reports; meat consumption alone “accounts for [a] … staggering 4.1 carbon dioxide equivalents in North America.” Beef is so significantly worse than other protein sources that if just 20 percent of the Americans who currently eat beef switched to anything else, it would “reduce the overall carbon footprint of all U.S. diets by 9.6 percent,” according to one study. Put another way, “people eating the same number of calories and the same number of grams of protein can have a vastly different impact,” Eshel told me. “Much more so than choices of car, much more — like tenfold or more.”
Sure, we could all just become vegetarians and vegans, but judging by how many people I’ve offended by confirming no, I’ve never had bacon, that reality is a long way off. And according to Eshel, it doesn’t even have to be aspirational: “There is only one thing that I can think of where, each time you avail yourself of it, you’re doing a significant damage to your overall diet: that would be beef,” he said. “Everything else is kind of, let’s call it negotiable.”
Eat chicken to save the planet seems like a simple enough sell. But emissions notwithstanding, there’s an ethical problem with this solution.
Standing in my kitchen, visualizing the production chains, something horrible and obvious started to dawn on me. Cows are big. Chickens are small. If we replace beef with poultry, we’re only shifting the barreling, destructive forces of man onto a track aimed straight at an unthinkable number of hens.
“Oh my god,” I blurted to my husband in horror as he was making us dinner. “I think I’ve created the trolley problem, with chickens.”
Because here’s the thing: The meat from one slaughtered cow is roughly the equivalent of meat from something like 100 to 150 chickens. “Globally we slaughter 320 million cows for meat each year,” Wired U.K. has written. “If we sourced all of that meat from chicken instead, we’d be killing an extra 41 billion animals.” There are some animal activists who are so alarmed by that math that they actually urge eating anything but chicken. As Matt Ball, whose organization One Step for Animals endorses this view, explained to me over email, “The only reason to care about the climate is how it impacts sentient beings. The only ethical stance is to promote choices that lead to less suffering.”
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization anticipates 250,000 additional human deaths due to climate change between 2030 and 2050. Though most people value human life over a chicken’s — arguably, in feeding ourselves, this is what we’re actively doing — 41 billion dead animals is a lot of misery. Industrially raised birds have uniquely ghastly existences, even by factory-farmed animal standards; according to John Webster, a veterinarian and leading authority on livestock welfare, the chicken industry is “the single most severe, systematic example of man’s inhumanity to another sentient animal.”
The “climate vs. animal well-being” tradeoff can be extrapolated out even further. Feedlot cows — an animal you don’t especially want to be — are fed greenhouse gas-curbing diets of grain, and thus produce up to 40 percent less methane than comparatively happy, but belchier, grass-fed cattle. Free-range chickens also have higher emissions than those that live in the hellish, windowless sheds exposed in PETA documentaries. There is no way around it: Climate-friendly omnivorous diets, and even climate-friendly vegetarian diets supplemented with eggs and dairy, often come at the expense of the increased suffering of animals.
Reeling in this existential horror, I presented the conundrum to Princeton University professor and renowned bioethicist Peter Singer, whose 1975 book Animal Liberation was foundational in the legitimizing of animal suffering and is considered a cornerstone of the modern animal welfare movement (a revised edition, Animal Liberation Now, will be out in May). The problem with my question, he pointed out, was the entire premise of an “ethical omnivore,” which — while perhaps not entirely impossible — would be very hard to realistically be, given the pervasiveness of inhumane practices in the meat industry. “It’s hard to find what are good choices, both from a humane point of view, not supporting cruelty to animals, and the climate point of view,” he agreed.
But all was not lost! “One thing that anybody can do, of course, is to reduce the consumption of meat and other animal products,” Singer suggested. That way, “you’re then reducing both your greenhouse gas contributions and your support of intensive farming and animal suffering.”
It’s a method Webster, the veterinarian, proposed to me, too. Due to the astonishing production capabilities of modern poultry farms, where hens are bred to grow at monstrous rates and reach slaughter weight around just 6 weeks old, chicken “has become a junk food ... it’s cheaper than dog food, it is grotesque,” he told me. If we’re going to be taking “food from animals, it’s got to be higher quality, less of it,” Webster went on. “And we’ve got to pay more for it, so we don’t eat so much. Which, of course, is incidentally, or coincidentally, entirely good in terms of animal welfare. It’s a win-win situation for the animals.” Of course, it’s not a win-win for the humans always; if meat becomes a luxury good then it will become predominantly a food for the rich, a problematic outcome in different ways.
Still, Americans actually are eating less beef than they used to, but we are also eating more animals, overall, than ever. The year 2022 set a record for meat consumption, and 2023 is projected to set a new one, due mainly to the increased consumption of chicken by U.S. households. “When additional meat choices are offered,” researcher Richard York discovered in a 2021 study, “that additional variety tends to … increase overall meat consumption,” rather than shift Americans from one kind of protein, like beef, to another.
Is the only truly ethical way to eat, then, to be a full vegan? Even that depends on who you ask. In Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence, a forthcoming book by Paco Calvo, a professor of philosophy of science and the principal investigator at the Minimal Intelligence Lab at the Universidad de Murcia in Spain, the author makes the case that it’s “very unlikely that plants are not far more aware than we intuitively assume.” And if that’s true, then “we can no longer turn a blind eye to the ethical implications of our interactions with them,” he writes, since, “if an organism has awareness, then our treatment of it has implications for its suffering.”
Absurd as such a line of thinking might seem — Singer, for one, outright dismisses the possibility that plants feel pain in Animal Liberation, and Calvo will be the first to admit the theories in his book have yet to be accepted by the wider philosophical and biological science communities — I’ve actually found it to be one of the most enlightening ways to think about how we should approach food. Speaking with Calvo, he advised me against connecting climate-conscious eating and animal welfare too tightly, lest we “run the risk of feeling safe.” Just because someone is a vegetarian, for example, doesn’t mean they’re not practicing or supporting intensive agriculture and in doing so, unnecessarily stressing living organisms; that person might even be in a worse ethical position than someone living off of free-range, free-roaming animals. “It has to do not with the intrinsic value, or with the organism, per se, but with the suffering being inflicted unnecessarily, regardless of the kingdom of precedence,” Calvo said.
The argument of Planta Sapiens, after all, isn’t that we shouldn’t eat salads anymore, but that all life is deserving of dignity, even when that means humbling ourselves with the recognition that we might not have a monopoly on behavior, intelligence, and awareness. While I believe Singer is right — that it is difficult to minimize suffering as an omnivore within the parameters of the world most of us actually live in, i.e. one full of Costcos and Price Choppers — the important thing is to mitigate harm whenever and however we can. “I mean, it takes a toll, being alive,” Calvo counseled me. “So we’ve got to be realistic to some extent.”
Okay, so maybe I don’t have the moral high ground I thought I did on my hamburger-munching elementary school classmates who are now DIYing candles and chronicling their composting efforts on Instagram. The answer to “What is the best and most realistic diet for most people?” continues to be reflected well in the old Michael Pollanism: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
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While you were watching Florida and Wisconsin, voters in Naperville, Illinois were showing up to fight coal.
It’s probably fair to say that not that many people paid close attention to last night’s city council election in Naperville, Illinois. A far western suburb of Chicago, the city is known for its good schools, small-town charm, and lovely brick-paved path along the DuPage River. Its residents tend to vote for Democrats. It’s not what you would consider a national bellwether.
Instead, much of the nation’s attention on Tuesday night focused on the outcomes of races in Wisconsin and Florida — considered the first electoral tests of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s popularity. Outside of the 80,000 or so voters who cast ballots in Naperville, there weren’t likely many outsiders watching the suburb’s returns.
But for clean energy and environmental advocates, the Naperville city council results represent an encouraging, if overlooked, victory. On Tuesday, voters in the suburb elected four candidates — incumbents Benjamin White and Ian Holzhauer, and newcomers Mary Gibson and Ashfaq Syed — all of whom oppose the city signing a new contract with the Prairie State Generating Station, the state’s largest and youngest coal-fired plant and the seventh-dirtiest electricity provider in the country.
Naperville is one of 30 municipal investors in the Prairie State plant whose contract with the Illinois Municipal Electric Agency, a public power agency and one of the nine partial owners of Prairie State, has it locked into coal through 2035. Recently, IMEA approached the municipal investors with the promise of favorable terms on a new contract if the cities and towns were willing to re-sign a decade early — by April 30 — and commit to another 20 years of coal power. Most municipalities took the deal, which will run through 2055; Naperville, along with the towns of St. Charles and Winnetka, are still debating the decision, with the deadline looming.
“IMEA’s proposition for communities is, ‘Hey, instead of paying Wall Street and shareholder dividends, we don’t have any of that because we’re a nonprofit, so you get lower energy costs,’” Fernando Arriola, the community relations chair for Naperville Environment and Sustainability Task Force, which opposes the deal with IMEA, told me. “But the way I look at it is, it’s a deal with the devil because you’re locked in for 30 years. And it’s like Hotel California — you can check in anytime you like, but you can never leave.”
In a statement to Heatmap, Staci Wilson, the vice president of government affairs and member services at IMEA, told me that the contract it offered to Naperville is “designed to help … secure more future green resources to serve our member communities for the long term. IMEA is the only power supplier to allow the city to have a direct voice in procuring their wholesale power supply and make reliable, economical, and sustainable resource decisions for the future.”
While it’s true that IMEA allows its municipal members a voice in its future planning, those in Naperville who oppose the new contract point out that the community has just one vote in the process despite making up 35% of the utility’s market.
The pending contract decision became one of the major themes of the city council race in Naperville — attention that caused some locals to grumble about the injection of partisan politics and outside interest in the campaigns. But Syed, a newly elected city council member and a recent immigrant from Dubai, told me that learning that his city relied on coal for 80% of its energy needs was what ultimately galvanized him into running. “Naperville has been a leader in many things, but in this area, we were not doing good,” he said. “So I stepped up.”
Illinois has one of the nation’s most aggressive decarbonization timelines, requiring coal and gas plants to close by 2030. But there is a carve-out for plants owned by public entities like municipal utilities or rural electric cooperatives, and Prairie State fits that bill. Instead, the power plant has to reduce emissions by 45% by 2038, a goal IMEA says it can reach by installing multi-billion dollar carbon capture and storage technologies. Energy experts have been widely skeptical of the proposal. “The people I’ve talked to say that’s unproven and it doesn’t necessarily work, and it’s a high price,” Arriola said.
Still, cost concerns related to transitioning away from coal had “definitely been a conversation in town” leading up to Tuesday’s election, Arriola told me. “A lot of people are seriously concerned about pricing, and there are also concerns about the reliability.” Syed told me that was one of the objections he heard the most when talking to constituents during his campaign. “Some of the Republicans who were against [exporing alternative energy options] were trying to influence people, saying we need to think about the cost,” he said. “My standard answer to these people was that I am not going to compromise clean energy just for the cost purpose.”
Perhaps most interestingly, unlike many communities that oppose power plants, Naperville is located almost 300 miles north of the Prairie State Generating Station and is unaffected by its immediate pollution. Naperville voters who opposed renewing the contract did so on the merits of finding cleaner energy sources and on the objection to dirty electricity that is otherwise out of sight and out of mind. As Amanda Pankau, the director of energy and community resiliency at the Prairie Rivers Network, an environmental nonprofit in the state, told me, “From a climate perspective, we should all care about the Prairie State coal plant.” She noted that the emissions from the plant — around 12.4 million tons of carbon dioxide a year — are “impacting every single Illinoisan and every single person that lives on planet Earth.”
Despite those existential stakes, it could be tempting to wave away the results in Naperville as being on trend for a relatively affluent and liberal-leaning town. Compared to the Wisconsin supreme court election, where the Democrat-backed candidate overcame enormous spending margins to trounce her Republican-backed opponent, it does not necessarily indicate the same momentum for the party heading into 2026’s midterms. (Nor does it even have the biggest climate-related election headline of the night: Tesla is suing Wisconsin for a law preventing car manufacturers from owning car dealerships, which the state’s high court will likely decide.)
But at a time of little good news in the climate sphere, the Naperville election is an encouraging and invigorating reminder that there are candidates who believe in cleaner technologies, and that the battles can still — or especially — be won at the local level. “Twenty-five or 30 years ago, the IMEA contract we signed for that time was okay,” Syed said. “But it’s not okay today. We cannot have this $2 billion contract until 2055 because the next generation will ask us this question: ‘What have you people done for us this time?’”
The Department of Energy has put together a list of sites and is requesting proposals from developers, Heatmap has learned.
The Department of Energy is moving ahead with plans to allow companies to build AI data centers and new power plants on federal land — and it has put together a list of more than a dozen sites nationwide that could receive the industrial-scale facilities, according to an internal memo obtained by Heatmap News.
The memo lists sites in Texas, Illinois, New Jersey, Colorado, and other locations. The government could even allow new power plants — including nuclear reactors and carbon-capture operations — to be built on the same sites to generate enough electricity to power the data centers, the memo says.
Trump officials hope to start construction on the new data centers by the end of this year and switch them on by the end of 2027, according to the memo.
The agency will request formal feedback from artificial intelligence companies and developers about how best to proceed with its proposal as soon as Thursday, according to an individual who wasn’t authorized to speak about the matter publicly.
The effort, aimed at maintaining America’s “global AI dominance,” represents one of the few points of agreement between the Trump and Biden administrations. In the final days of his term, President Biden ordered the government to identify federal properties where new data centers could be built.
Scarcely a week later, President Trump issued an executive order lifting all Biden-era limits on AI development — but keeping the mandate to move quickly to maintain America’s alleged edge in the new technology. “It is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance,” the Trump order said.
The new memo proposes a list of 16 federal sites that could host AI data centers, new power plants, and other “AI infrastructure.” They include several sites where nuclear weapon components are made, including the Pantex site near Amarillo, Texas, and the Kansas City National Security Campus, which is operated by Honeywell International. The other candidate sites are:
Other sites could still be considered, the memo says, and the current list has no particular ranking or order.
The offer may not be enough to convince developers to work with the federal government, one energy expert told me.
“I think it’s important that the government is thinking about how to help the industry, but you also have to think about it from the perspective of the industry a little bit. Why is doing this on a DOE site better than doing this as a project in Texas?” said Peter Freed, a founding partner at the Near Horizon Group and the former director of energy strategy at Meta.
“Historically, the perspective is that anything involving government land just adds complexity,” Freed told me. “I love Idaho National Lab. It’s a national treasure. But if you want a data center there by the end of 2027 — where is the power going to come from?”
Only if the government were able to guarantee fast-track access to certain kinds of equipment — such as transformers or circuit breakers, which are in a severe shortage — would it make sense for most developers to work with them, he said.
The new memo raises the idea that “innovative energy technologies” including “nuclear reactors, enhanced geothermal systems, fuel cells, carbon capture, energy storage systems, and portfolios of on-site technologies” could be considered to power the new data centers.
The memo asks potential developers, “What information would you need to determine the suitability of various energy storage systems (e.g., subsurface thermal energy storage, flow battery, metal anode battery) as a means for supporting data center cooling or other operations?” It also asks what companies would need to know about a site’s suitability for carbon capture and storage operations. It asks, too, what information might be needed about a site’s topography, physical security, and earthquake risk to build a new nuclear power plant.
The memo doesn’t mention wind turbines or new solar farms, although they could fall under some of the terms it sets out. It also asks companies what information they might need about nearby nuclear power plants or the local power grid — and it inquires whether some data center operations could be turned on and off depending on local power availability.
Although the government could allow new data centers to be built, it won’t accept all liability for them. The memo adds that companies might need to “agree to bear all responsibility for costs and liabilities related to construction and operation of the Al data centers as well as other infrastructure upgrades necessary to support those data centers.”
The Trump administration seems intent on moving quickly on the proposal. Once it publishes the request, companies will have 30 days to respond.
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.