You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
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.”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Paradise, California, is snatching up high-risk properties to create a defensive perimeter and prevent the town from burning again.
The 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, wiping out 90% of the structures in the mountain town of Paradise and killing at least 85 people in a matter of hours. Investigations afterward found that Paradise’s town planners had ignored warnings of the fire risk to its residents and forgone common-sense preparations that would have saved lives. In the years since, the Camp Fire has consequently become a cautionary tale for similar communities in high-risk wildfire areas — places like Chinese Camp, a small historic landmark in the Sierra Nevada foothills that dramatically burned to the ground last week as part of the nearly 14,000-acre TCU September Lightning Complex.
More recently, Paradise has also become a model for how a town can rebuild wisely after a wildfire. At least some of that is due to the work of Dan Efseaff, the director of the Paradise Recreation and Park District, who has launched a program to identify and acquire some of the highest-risk, hardest-to-access properties in the Camp Fire burn scar. Though he has a limited total operating budget of around $5.5 million and relies heavily on the charity of local property owners (he’s currently in the process of applying for a $15 million grant with a $5 million match for the program) Efseaff has nevertheless managed to build the beginning of a defensible buffer of managed parkland around Paradise that could potentially buy the town time in the case of a future wildfire.
In order to better understand how communities can build back smarter after — or, ideally, before — a catastrophic fire, I spoke with Efseaff about his work in Paradise and how other communities might be able to replicate it. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Do you live in Paradise? Were you there during the Camp Fire?
I actually live in Chico. We’ve lived here since the mid-‘90s, but I have a long connection to Paradise; I’ve worked for the district since 2017. I’m also a sea kayak instructor and during the Camp Fire, I was in South Carolina for a training. I was away from the phone until I got back at the end of the day and saw it blowing up with everything.
I have triplet daughters who were attending Butte College at the time, and they needed to be evacuated. There was a lot of uncertainty that day. But it gave me some perspective, because I couldn’t get back for two days. It gave me a chance to think, “Okay, what’s our response going to be?” Looking two days out, it was like: That would have been payroll, let’s get people together, and then let’s figure out what we’re going to do two weeks and two months from now.
It also got my mind thinking about what we would have done going backwards. If you’d had two weeks to prepare, you would have gotten your go-bag together, you’d have come up with your evacuation route — that type of thing. But when you run the movie backwards on what you would have done differently if you had two years or two decades, it would include prepping the landscape, making some safer community defensible space. That’s what got me started.
Was it your idea to buy up the high-risk properties in the burn scar?
I would say I adapted it. Everyone wants to say it was their idea, but I’ll tell you where it came from: Pre-fire, the thinking was that it would make sense for the town to have a perimeter trail from a recreation standpoint. But I was also trying to pitch it as a good idea from a fuel standpoint, so that if there was a wildfire, you could respond to it. Certainly, the idea took on a whole other dimension after the Camp Fire.
I’m a restoration ecologist, so I’ve done a lot of river floodplain work. There are a lot of analogies there. The trend has been to give nature a little bit more room: You’re not going to stop a flood, but you can minimize damage to human infrastructure. Putting levees too close to the river makes them more prone to failing and puts people at risk — but if you can set the levee back a little bit, it gives the flood waters room to go through. That’s why I thought we need a little bit of a buffer in Paradise and some protection around the community. We need a transition between an area that is going to burn, and that we can let burn, but not in a way that is catastrophic.
How hard has it been to find willing sellers? Do most people in the area want to rebuild — or need to because of their mortgages?
Ironically, the biggest challenge for us is finding adequate funding. A lot of the property we have so far has been donated to us. It’s probably upwards of — oh, let’s see, at least half a dozen properties have been donated, probably close to 200 acres at this point.
We are applying for some federal grants right now, and we’ll see how that goes. What’s evolved quite a bit on this in recent years, though, is that — because we’ve done some modeling — instead of thinking of the buffer as areas that are managed uniformly around the community, we’re much more strategic. These fire events are wind-driven, and there are only a couple of directions where the wind blows sufficiently long enough and powerful enough for the other conditions to fall into play. That’s not to say other events couldn’t happen, but we’re going after the most likely events that would cause catastrophic fires, and that would be from the Diablo winds, or north winds, that come through our area. That was what happened in the Camp Fire scenario, and another one our models caught what sure looked a lot like the [2024] Park Fire.
One thing that I want to make clear is that some people think, “Oh, this is a fire break. It’s devoid of vegetation.” No, what we’re talking about is a well-managed habitat. These are shaded fuel breaks. You maintain the big trees, you get rid of the ladder fuels, and you get rid of the dead wood that’s on the ground. We have good examples with our partners, like the Butte Fire Safe Council, on how this works, and it looks like it helped protect the community of Cohasset during the Park Fire. They did some work on some strips there, and the fire essentially dropped to the ground before it came to Paradise Lake. You didn’t have an aerial tanker dropping retardant, you didn’t have a $2-million-per-day fire crew out there doing work. It was modest work done early and in the right place that actually changed the behavior of the fire.
Tell me a little more about the modeling you’ve been doing.
We looked at fire pathways with a group called XyloPlan out of the Bay Area. The concept is that you simulate a series of ignitions with certain wind conditions, terrain, and vegetation. The model looked very much like a Camp Fire scenario; it followed the same pathway, going towards the community in a little gulch that channeled high winds. You need to interrupt that pathway — and that doesn’t necessarily mean creating an area devoid of vegetation, but if you have these areas where the fire behavior changes and drops down to the ground, then it slows the travel. I found this hard to believe, but in the modeling results, in a scenario like the Camp Fire, it could buy you up to eight hours. With modern California firefighting, you could empty out the community in a systematic way in that time. You could have a vigorous fire response. You could have aircraft potentially ready. It’s a game-changing situation, rather than the 30 minutes Paradise had when the Camp Fire started.
How does this work when you’re dealing with private property owners, though? How do you convince them to move or donate their land?
We’re a Park and Recreation District so we don’t have regulatory authority. We are just trying to run with a good idea with the properties that we have so far — those from willing donors mostly, but there have been a couple of sales. If we’re unable to get federal funding or state support, though, I ultimately think this idea will still have to be here — whether it’s five, 10, 15, or 50 years from now. We have to manage this area in a comprehensive way.
Private property rights are very important, and we don’t want to impinge on that. And yet, what a person does on their property has a huge impact on the 30,000 people who may be downwind of them. It’s an unusual situation: In a hurricane, if you have a hurricane-rated roof and your neighbor doesn’t, and theirs blows off, you feel sorry for your neighbor but it’s probably not going to harm your property much. In a wildfire, what your neighbor has done with the wood, or how they treat vegetation, has a significant impact on your home and whether your family is going to survive. It’s a fundamentally different kind of event than some of the other disasters we look at.
Do you have any advice for community leaders who might want to consider creating buffer zones or something similar to what you’re doing in Paradise?
Start today. You have to think about these things with some urgency, but they’re not something people think about until it happens. Paradise, for many decades, did not have a single escaped wildfire make it into the community. Then, overnight, the community is essentially wiped out. But in so many places, these events are foreseeable; we’re just not wired to think about them or prepare for them.
Buffers around communities make a lot of sense, even from a road network standpoint. Even from a trash pickup standpoint. You don’t think about this, but if your community is really strung out, making it a little more thoughtfully laid out also makes it more economically viable to provide services to people. Some things we look for now are long roads that don’t have any connections — that were one-way in and no way out. I don’t think [the traffic jams and deaths in] Paradise would have happened with what we know now, but I kind of think [authorities] did know better beforehand. It just wasn’t economically viable at the time; they didn’t think it was a big deal, but they built the roads anyway. We can be doing a lot of things smarter.
A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.