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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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The agency provided a list to the Sierra Club, which in turn provided the list to Heatmap.
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency remain closed-lipped about which grants they’ve canceled. Earlier this week, however, the office provided a written list to the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, which begins to shed light on some of the agency’s actions.
The document shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7, which is the day the public information office conducted its search in response to the FOIA request. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients.
The numbers don’t quite line up with what the agency has said publicly. The EPA published three press releases between Trump’s inauguration and March 7, announcing that it had canceled a total of 42 grants and “saved” Americans roughly $227 million. In its first such announcement on February 14, the agency said it was canceling a $50 million grant to the Climate Justice Alliance, but the only grant to that organization on the FOIA spreadsheet is listed at $12 million. To make matters more confusing, there are only $185 million worth of EPA grant cuts listed on the Department of Government Efficiency’s website from the same time period. (Zeldin later announced more than 400 additional grant terminations on March 10.)
Nonetheless, the document gives a clearer picture of which grants Administrator Lee Zeldin has targeted. Nearly half of the canceled grants are related to environmental justice initiatives, which is not surprising, given the Trump administration’s directives to root out these types of programs. But nearly as many were funding research into lower-carbon construction materials and better product labeling to prevent greenwashing.
Here’s the full list of grants, by program:
A few more details and observations from this list:
In the original FOIA request, Sierra Club had asked for a lot more information, including communications between EPA and the grant recipients, and explanations for why the grants — which in many cases involved binding contracts between the government and recipients — were being terminated. In its response, EPA said it was still working on the rest of the request and expected to issue a complete response by April 12.
Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.