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Plus cheese and eggs, if you want to go all the way.
It was burrito night — I had some tortillas, salsa, guacamole and red onion in my refrigerator, but all our meat was still frozen, and I didn’t have any beans handy. So I did what any climate reporter with an interest in food systems would do and grabbed a pack of meatless “carne asada” I’d picked up out of curiosity and threw it into the mix. The end result was more “huh” than “wow,” but it held its own — with a little help from some hot sauce.
Growing, raising, processing and transporting food is responsible for roughly a quarter of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, nearly 60% of which comes from meat production, according to one estimation. If you're concerned about your personal carbon impact, eating less meat is probably on your to-do list. But what if you still like a carne asada burrito? Thankfully, there are plenty of companies working on satisfying your cravings, no animals involved.
There are lots of other food system concerns that won’t make it into this guide — things like agricultural livelihoods, water use, and animal well-being. But if you’re curious about how fake meats work, what they taste like, and their emissions impact, here’s what you’ll want to know.
Ben Kelley, owner and proprietor of Kelley Farms Kitchen, a vegan restaurant in Harpers Ferry, WV. Ben and his wife Sondra started Kelley Farms after going vegan themselves more than a decade ago. The cafe offers a mix of housemade and commercially available meat alternatives.
Ismael Montanez, the program manager at University of California Berkeley’s Alt Meat Lab, where he’s focused on food and sustainability broadly. He is co-founder and former CTO of plant-based lamb company Black Sheep Foods and eats both meat and plant-based replacements.
Andrea Cecchin, senior agriculture and carbon researcher at HowGood, a sustainability ratings company. Cecchin told me he and his family limit the amount of meat they eat but are focused on a wider plant based diet.
It’s a multi-trillion dollar question, frankly. While the worldwide food system is far more complex than individual consumer choices, shifts in demand for food products, especially among higher-income individuals, have created changes, such tripling the price of quinoa during a boom in its popularity in mid-2010s. The U.S. and China’s growing middle classes also drove a spike in pork demand, only to have that growth slow and reverse in the past few years over health concerns.
The plant-based meat alternatives currently available at your grocery store may be highly processed, but they’re different from the cultivated or “lab-grown” meat coming from a new batch of food companies that seek to “grow” meat from scratch on the cellular level. In theory, this would create direct replacements for things like steaks or fish without actually requiring us to raise actual animals. Almost all of these products are still in the research and development stage, however, and none are currently commercially available in the U.S.
Let’s not mince words: There is no such thing as carbon-neutral beef. How to reduce cattle’s climate impact is an area of active research, encompassing supplements and dietary changes, breeding programs to create animals that process food more efficiently, and even methane-sucking gas masks. There are also ranchers committed to using specific grazing techniques that encourage extra retention of soil carbon, thereby offsetting emissions from cows, but “the science is not there yet” on the scale of sequestration needed for fully carbon-neutral meat, Cecchin says. “Climate-friendly” or “low-carbon” meat labels have been criticized for a lack of data transparency and only represent a 10% reduction in beef emissions overall.
The process of making plant-based mock meats is basically the reverse of their animal version, Montanez explained. While meat is made by processing animals into specific cuts or parts, plant-based replacements use protein-packed flours and other ingredients to build the “meat” back up.
Almost all fake red meat products will have a smaller greenhouse gas impact than their animal versions, Cecchin explained. Compared to a beef burger, the alternatives “really bring down the carbon footprint — the amount of water we need to use, and the amount of land that we use” per unit of food. But for other products, the savings are less clear. Chicken, for instance, has a much lower footprint, meaning replacements have to compete against a “very efficient industry and a very efficient meat.”
Processing details are rarely public, making it difficult to declare other meat replacements automatic emissions winners. “It’s really company by company, and could even be year by year as processing efficiencies change,” Cecchin said, adding that he hopes more companies will show clear evidence of their total emissions, including being specific about what they are comparing against.
Fake animal products are also not the same nutritionally as actual animal products, in ways that can be positive or negative depending on your specific dietary needs. An allergy to soy or wheat gluten would immediately knock out a good portion of these options, and my carne asada came with a warning to anyone “sensitive” to fungi.
There are generally more carbs, less fat, and more fiber in substitutes compared to meat, but protein levels can vary widely, and sodium levels can be high (e.g. Impossible burgers have just as much fat and more salt than a 80% lean beef burger of the same size, though zero cholesterol). As with any processed or prepared food, a look at the nutritional label is well worth it.
The experts all enjoyed the big-name beef replacements — Cecchin even said he has chosen Impossible and Beyond patties over regular burgers while eating out. If you have a little more time, though, Kelley said to skip the fast food fake burgers and make them yourself. Making good tasting meat replacements isn’t all that different from cooking meat itself: spices, technique and how it integrates into a meal makes all the difference. This is the case whether he’s using Impossible beef on the restaurant griddle or hand-making a black bean and chickpea patty. “Just like a raw piece of chicken,” he said, “it's about how you cook it.”
Everyone I spoke to said most breaded chicken replacements match their animal versions pretty well — Montanez even called them “most consistently tasty” than their actual meat equivalents, which for him was enough to justify the slight additional cost. He said he thinks Impossible’s chicken nuggets are the “most convincing” — although he also cautioned that he doesn’t eat a lot of breaded meat products in the first place.
Morningstar Farms’ Chik Patty has been a go-to at-home lunch in my house for nearly three decades, primarily because of that consistency and ease of preparation. (The “buffalo” flavor is by far the best, in my opinion.) Kelley uses Gardein’s Chick’n on one of their most popular sandwiches at the restaurant — they’re a big fan of the company and product.
Don’t expect a lot of options for raw chicken alternatives, however. Montanez suspects the economics of competing with relatively cheap meat isn’t attractive to companies, especially when prepared breaded versions, both animal and plant-based, are already popular.
“Emulating the flavor of American chicken is relatively easy and shouldn't be seen as a significant achievement,” Montanez said. “What’s truly interesting is creating a versatile analog that can withstand the same cooking conditions as real chicken.”
Kelley’s favorite meat replacement is Beyond’s bratwurst sausage, made with pea protein and avocado oil. He uses it in a variety of meals at his cafe, as well as to grill up at home, sometimes adding it to pasta.
Steak and other meats that include marbled fats have been a particularly tricky nut to crack for fake meat producers because the traditional extrusion process makes it difficult to capture fat alongside protein. Montanez told me Juicy Marbles has developed a process capable of doing both, which it’s used to create filet and loin products.
Montanez’s favorite fake bacon is only available in a vegan deli in Berkeley, California, but generally both he and Kelley haven’t found full bacon strips that really match the experience of eating bacon. “There's no way to hold it after you cook it without it drying out,” Kelley said. Instead, he likes using soy [bacon] crumbles in various dishes, including in his potato salad.
The pepperoni and other fermented charcuterie from Prime Roots is “quite impressive, even from a meat eater’s perspective,” Montanez told me. The company starts its process with koji, a strain of fungus that has been part of Japanese cuisine for hundreds of years, including in the product of soy sauces and sake.
The deli slices Kelley uses in sandwiches like reubens or Italian hoagies are made with seitan or a mix of seitan and soy, from a variety of companies. But the Tofurky brand (not just turkey) is one of their favorites. “We are always testing new recipes of our own and using reliable and ethical companies that we grew up loving,” he said.
Kelley has yet to be convinced by most seafood replacements, he told me. “All the seafood is kind of just the same as the chicken replacements,” he said. Instead, he uses unripe jackfruit – a common meat replacement with a stringy texture – hearts of palm, and spices to replicate crab cakes. Having an exact match isn’t always a priority for Kelley, who’d rather highlight an ingredient that serves as a replacement rather than calling it by its faux name. His lobster roll replacement is made with hearts of palm, but it’s not “vegan lobster” on his menu, it’s a “hearts of palm” roll.
Texture is a “very difficult thing in seafood,” Montanez said. “I haven't seen anything myself where it is 100% convincing,” but he points out companies like Impact Food that are making plant-based sushi without extrusion or fermentation, currently available in some New York and California restaurants.
Montanez also called out vegan cheese as a category that struggles to match its original, citing texture, not flavor, as the sticking point, especially when it needs to work in a multitude of different recipes. “You might see a vegan cheese that’s okay applied in pieces,” he said, “but it's only as good if you put it in pizza oven temperatures.” An exception to the rule for him is Climax Foods’ blue cheese, which almost pulled off a Judgment of Paris-like upset in a food competition this year before being removed from the running.
Montanez identified Quorn as a brand that’s not trying to replicate meat exactly, but tastes good on its own. The British company has a wide range of no-meat products that feel like they could have a home in a Tesco, from a vegan Yorkshire ham to mini sausage rolls to “picnic eggs.”
Approaches to fake meat taste fall on a spectrum. On one end are companies that try to replicate as closely as possible the taste, texture, and smell of some specific meat product — say, a chicken nugget. (Your personal mileage may vary when it comes to replicas of more complicated meat cuts such as steaks or pork chops.) On the other end are brands that offer a functional, hopefully flavorful replacement for meat in a meal but otherwise aren’t trying to fool anyone.
The former approach involves more materials science and chemistry, Montanez told me. For example, Impossible makes a soy version of a key molecule in meat known as heme and combines it with a carefully calibrated proportion of sugars, fats, and water to induce the Maillard reaction, the process that makes meat brown and form a crust. It’s possible to create a similar meaty flavor profile without heme (Impossible has a patent on their version), but they have their own complications.
“It’s those sugars reacting with the proteins and creating these molecules that ultimately result in a meaty aroma or flavor,” Montanez said.
Kelley Farm’s menu is a good example of the wider ingredient possibilities of meat replacements beyond this approach. In addition to Impossible patties, Beyond brats, and Gardein’s Chick’n, the restaurant also serves deli meat replacements made with seitan (basically textured wheat gluten); folded eggs made from mung beans; BBQ pulled pork made from jackfruit, which mimics that stringy texture naturally (I’ve had both Kelley Farms’ barbeque sandwich and commercial jackfruit BBQ versions and would happily eat either again); and a burger patty that’s their own mix of chickpeas and black beans.
It’s also worth noting that there is a more literal approach to eating a plant-based diet that’s already the standard in many other countries — that is, rather than replacing meat products with fake meat products, just eat more plants. If you feel like you’re missing out on protein, beans, lentils, tofu, and certain grains like quinoa, farro or teff, have high amounts.
Highly engineered meat substitutes are often more expensive than the animal products they are replacing, so if you’re struggling with hunger, have specific dietary requirements, anxiety around food, or an eating disorder, concerns about emissions shouldn’t even enter the picture.
For that matter, just reorienting your approach to eating meat saves a lot of carbon on its own. Kelley told me he reaches for meat replacements when he’s craving something specific, while Cecchin prefers meat alternatives when he’s eating out.
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The widely circulating document lists more than 68 activities newly subject to upper-level review.
The federal government is poised to put solar and wind projects through strict new reviews that may delay projects across the country, according to a widely circulating document reviewed by Heatmap.
The secretarial order authored by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Gregory Wischer is dated July 15 and states that “all decisions, actions, consultations, and other undertakings” that are “related to wind and solar energy facilities” will now be required to go through multiple layers of political review from Burgum’s office and Interior’s Office of the Deputy Secretary.
This new layer of review would span essentially anything Interior and its many subagencies would ordinarily be consulted on before construction on a project can commence — a milestone crucial for being able to qualify for federal renewable energy tax credits under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The order lists more than 68 different activities newly subject to higher-level review, including some basic determinations as to whether projects conform with federal environmental and conservation laws, as well as consultations on compliance with wildlife protection laws such as the Endangered Species Act. The final item in the list sweeps “any other similar or related decisions, actions, consultations, or undertakings” under the order’s purview, in case there was any grey area there.
In other words, this order is so drastic it would impact projects on state and private lands, as well as federal acreage. In some cases, agency staff may now need political sign-offs simply to tell renewables developers whether they need a permit at all.
“This is the way you stall and kill projects. Intentionally red-tape projects to death,” former Biden White House clean energy adviser Avi Zevin wrote on Bluesky in a post with a screenshot of the order.
The department has yet to release the document and it’s unclear whether or when it will be made public. The order’s existence was first reported by Politico; in a statement to that news outlet, the department did not deny the document’s existence but attacked leakers. “Let’s be clear: leaking internal documents to the media is cowardly, dishonest, and a blatant violation of professional standards,” the statement said.
Interior’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Heatmap about when this document may be made public. We also asked whether this would also apply to transmission connected to solar and wind. You had better believe I’ll be following up with the department to find out, and we’ll update this story if we hear back from them.
Two former Microsoft employees have turned their frustration into an awareness campaign to hold tech companies accountable.
When the clean energy world considers the consequences of the artificial intelligence boom, rising data center electricity demand and the strain it’s putting on the grid is typically top of mind — even if that’s weighed against the litany of potential positive impacts, which includes improved weather forecasting, grid optimization, wildfire risk mitigation, critical minerals discovery, and geothermal development.
I’ve written about a bunch of it. But the not-so-secret flip side is that naturally, any AI-fueled improvements in efficiency, data analytics, and predictive capabilities will benefit well-capitalized fossil fuel giants just as much — if not significantly more — than plucky climate tech startups or cash-strapped utilities.
“The narrative is a net impact equation that only includes the positive use cases of AI as compared to the operational impacts, which we believe is apples to oranges,” Holly Alpine, co-founder of the Enabled Emissions Campaign, told me. “We need to expand that conversation and include the negative applications in that scoreboard.”
Alpine founded the campaign alongside her partner, Will Alpine, in February of last year, with the goal of holding tech giants accountable for the ways users leverage their products to accelerate fossil fuel production. Both formerly worked for Microsoft on sustainability initiatives related to data centers and AI, but quit after what they told me amounted to a string of unfulfilled promises by the company and a realization that internal pressure alone couldn’t move the needle as far as they’d hoped.
While at Microsoft, they were dismayed to learn that the company had contracts for its cloud services and suite of AI tools with some of the largest fossil fuel corporations in the world — including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell — and that the partnerships were formed with the explicit intent to expand oil and gas production. Other hyperscalers such as Google and Amazon have also formed similar cloud and AI service partnerships with oil and gas giants, though Google burnished its sustainability bona fides in 2020 by announcing that it would no longer build custom AI tools for the fossil fuel industry. (In response to my request for comment, Microsoft directed me to its energy principles, which were written in 2022, while the Alpines were still with the company, and to its 2025 sustainability report. Neither addresses the Alpines’ concerns directly, which is perhaps telling in its own right.)
AI can help fossil fuel companies accelerate and expand fossil fuel production throughout all stages of the process, from exploration and reservoir modeling to predictive maintenance, transport and logistics optimization, demand forecasting, and revenue modeling. And while partnerships with AI hyperscalers can be extremely beneficial, oil and gas companies are also building out their own AI-focused teams and capabilities in-house.
“As a lot of the low-hanging fruit in the oil reserve space has been plucked, companies have been increasingly relying on things like fracking and offshore drilling to stay competitive,” Will told me. “So using AI is now allowing those operations to continue in a way that they previously could not.”
Exxon, for example, boasts on its website that it’s “the first in our industry to leverage autonomous drilling in deep water,” thanks to its AI-powered systems that can determine drilling parameters and control the whole process sans human intervention. Likewise, BP notes that its "Optimization Genie” AI tool has helped it increase production by about 2,000 oil-equivalent barrels per day in the Gulf of Mexico, and that between 2022 and 2024, AI and advanced analytics allowed the company to increase production by 4% overall.
In general, however, the degree to which AI-enabled systems help expand production is not something companies speak about publicly. For instance, when Microsoft inked a contract with Exxon six years ago, it predicted that its suite of digital products would enable the oil giant to grow production in the Permian Basin by up to 50,000 barrels by 2025. And while output in the Permian has boomed, it’s unclear how much Microsoft is to thank for that as neither company has released any figures.
Either way, many of the climate impacts of using AI for oil and gas production are likely to go unquantified. That’s because the so-called “enabled emissions” from the tech sector are not captured by the standard emissions accounting framework, which categorizes direct emissions from a company’s operations as scope 1, indirect emissions from the generation of purchased energy as scope 2, and all other emissions across the value chain as scope 3. So while tailpipe emissions, for example, would fall into Exxon’s scope 3 bucket — thus requiring disclosure — they’re outside Microsoft’s reporting boundaries.
According to the Alpines’ calculations, though, Microsoft’s deal with Exxon plus another contract with Chevron totalled “over 300% of Microsoft’s entire carbon footprint, including data centers.” So it’s really no surprise that hyperscalers have largely fallen silent when it comes to citing specific numbers, given the history of employee blowback and media furor over the friction between tech companies’ sustainability targets and their fossil fuel contracts.
As such, the tech industry often ends up wrapping these deals in broad language highlighting operational efficiency, digital transformation, and even sustainability benefits —- think waste reduction and decreasing methane leakage rates — while glossing over the fact that at their core, these partnerships are primarily designed to increase oil and gas output.
While none of the fossil fuel companies I contacted — Chevron, Exxon, Shell, and BP — replied to my inquiries about the ways they’re leveraging AI, earnings calls and published corporate materials make it clear that the industry is ready to utilize the technology to its fullest extent.
“We’re looking to leverage knowledge in a different way than we have in the past,” Shell CEO Wael Sawan said on the company’s Q2 earnings call last year, citing AI as one of the tools that he sees as integral to “transform the culture of the company to one that is able to outcompete in the coming years.”
Shell has partnered since 2018 with the enterprise software company C3.ai on AI applications such as predictive maintenance, equipment monitoring, and asset optimization, the latter of which has helped the company increase liquid natural gas production by 1% to 2%. C3.ai CEO Tom Siebel was vague on the company’s 2025 Q1 earnings call, but said that Shell estimates that the partnership has “generated annual benefit to Shell of $2 billion.”
In terms of AI’s ability to get more oil and gas out of the ground, “it’s like getting a Kuwait online,” Rakesh Jaggi, who leads the digital efforts at the oil-services giant SLB, told Barron’s magazine. Kuwait is the third largest crude oil producer in OPEC, producing about 2.9 million barrels per day.
Some oil and gas giants were initially reluctant to get fully aboard the AI hype train — even Exxon CEO Darren Woods noted on the company’s 2024 Q3 earnings call that the oil giant doesn’t “like jumping on bandwagons.” Yet he still sees “good potential” for AI to be a “part of the equation” when it comes to the company’s ambition to slash $15 billion in costs by 2027.
Chevron is similarly looking to AI to cut costs. As the company’s Chief Financial Officer Eimear Bonner explained during its 2024 Q4 earnings call, AI could help Chevron save $2 to $3 billion over the next few years as the company looks towards “using technology to do work completely differently.” Meanwhile, Saudi Aramco’s CEO Amin Nasser told Bloomberg that AI is a core reason it’s been able to keep production costs at $3 per barrel for the past 20 years, despite inflation and other headwinds in the sector.
Of course, it should come as no surprise that fossil fuel companies are taking advantage of the vast opportunities that AI provides. After all, the investors and shareholders these companies are ultimately beholden to would likely revolt if they thought their fiduciaries had failed to capitalize on such an enormous technological breakthrough.
The Alpines are well aware that this is the world we live in, and that we’re not going to overthrow capitalism anytime soon. Right now, they told me they’re primarily running a two-person “awareness campaign,” as the general public and sometimes even former colleagues are largely in the dark when it comes to how AI is being used to boost oil and gas production. While Will said they’re “staying small and lean” for now while they fundraise, the campaign has support from a number of allies including the consumer rights group Public Citizen, the tech worker group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, and the NGO Friends of the Earth.
In the medium term, they’re looking toward policy shifts that would require more disclosure and regulation around AI’s potential for harm in the energy sector. “The only way we believe to really achieve deep change is to raise the floor at an international or national policy level,” Will told me. As an example, he pointed to the EU’s comprehensive regulations that categorize AI use cases by risk level, which then determines the rules these systems are subject to. Police use of facial recognition is considered high risk, for example, while AI spam filters are low risk. Right now, energy sector applications are not categorized as risky at all.
“What we would advocate for would be that AI use in the energy sector falls under a high risk classification system due to its risk for human harm. And then it would go through a governance process, ideally that would align with climate science targets,” Will told me. “So you could use that to uplift positive applications like AI for methane leak detection, but AI for upstream scenarios should be subject to additional scrutiny.”
And realistically, there’s no chance of something like this being implemented in the U.S. under Trump, let alone somewhere like Saudi Arabia. And even if such regulations were eventually enacted in some countries, energy markets are global, meaning governments around the world would ultimately need to align on risk mitigation strategies for reigning in AI’s potential for climate harm.
As Will told me, “that would be a massive uphill battle, but we think it’s one that’s worth fighting.”
A longtime climate messaging strategist is tired of seeing the industry punch below its weight.
The saga of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains at least one clear lesson for the clean energy industry: It must grow a political spine and act like the trillion-dollar behemoth it is. And though the logic is counterintuitive, the new law will likely provide an opportunity to build one.
The coming threat to renewable energy investment became apparent as soon as Trump won the presidency again last fall. The only questions were how much was vulnerable, and through what mechanisms.
Still, many clean energy leaders were optimistic that Trump’s “energy abundance” agenda had room for renewables. During the transition, one longtime Republican energy lobbyist told Utility Dive that Trump’s incoming cabinet had a “very aggressive approach towards renewables.” When Democratic Senator John Hickenlooper introduced would-be Secretary of Energy Chris Wright at the fracking executive’s confirmation hearing, he vouched for Wright’s clean energy cred. Even Trump touted Wright’s experience with solar.
At least initially, the argument made sense. After all, energy demand is soaring, and solar, wind, and battery storage account for 95% of new power projects awaiting grid connection in the U.S. In red states like Texas and Oklahoma, clean energy is booming because it’s cheap. Just a few months ago, the Lone Star State achieved record energy generation from solar, wind, and batteries, and consumers there are saving millions of dollars a day because of renewables. The Biden administration funneled clean energy and manufacturing investment into red districts in part to cultivate Republican support for renewables — and to protect those investments no matter who is president.
As a result, for the past six months, clean energy executives have absorbed advice telling them to fly below the radar. Stop using the word “climate” and start using words like “common sense” when you talk to lawmakers. (As a communications and policy strategist who works extensively on climate issues, I’ve given that specific piece of advice.)
But far too many companies and industry groups went much further than tweaking their messaging. They stopped publicly advocating for their interests, and as a result there has been no muscular effort to pressure elected officials where it counts: their reelection campaigns.
This is part of a broader lack of engagement with elected officials on the part of clean energy companies. The oil and gas industry has outspent clean energy on lobbying 2 to 1 this year, despite the fact that oil and gas faces a hugely favorable political environment. In the run up to the last election, the fossil fuel industry spent half a billion dollars to influence candidates; climate and clean energy advocates again spent just a fraction, despite having more on the line. My personal preference is to get money out of politics, but you have to play by the rules as they exist.
Even economically irresistible technologies can be legislated into irrelevance if they don’t have political juice. The last-minute death of the mysterious excise tax on wind and solar that was briefly part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was a glaring sign of weakness, not strength — especially given that even the watered-down provisions in the law will damage the economics of renewable energy. After the law passed, the President directed the Treasury Department to issue the strictest possible guidance for the clean energy projects that remain eligible for tax credits.
The tech industry learned this same lesson over many years. The big tech companies started hiring scores of policy and political staff in the 2010s, when they were already multi-hundred-billion dollar companies, but it wasn’t until 2017 that a tech company became the top lobbying spender. Now the tech industry has a sophisticated influence operation that includes carrots and sticks. Crypto learned this lesson even faster, emerging almost overnight as one of the most aggressive industries shaping Washington.
Clean energy needs to catch up. But lobbying spending isn’t a panacea.
Executives in the clean energy sector sometimes say they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Democrats and the segment of potentially supportive Republicans at the local and federal levels talk and think about clean energy differently. And the dissonance makes it challenging to communicate honestly with both parties, especially in public.
The clean energy industry should recognize that the safest ground is to criticize and cultivate both parties unabashedly. The American political system understands economic self interest, and there are plenty of policy changes that various segments of the clean energy world need from both Democrats and Republicans at the federal and state levels. Democrats need to make it easier to build; Republicans need to support incentives they regularly trumpet for other job-creating industries.
The quality of political engagement from clean energy companies and the growing ecosystem of advocacy groups has improved. The industry, disparate as it is, has gotten smarter. Advocates now bring district-by-district data to policymakers, organize lobby days, and frame clean energy in terms that resonate across the aisle — national security, economic opportunity in rural America, artificial intelligence, and the race with China. That’s progress.
But the tempo is still far too low, and there are too many carrots and too few sticks. The effects of President Trump’s tax law on energy prices might create some leverage. If the law damages renewable energy generation, and thereby raises energy prices as energy demand continues to rise, Americans should know who is responsible. The clean energy sector has to be the messenger, or at least orchestrate the messaging.
The campaigns write themselves: Paid media targeting members of Congress who praised clean energy job growth in their districts and then voted to gut jobs and raise prices; op-eds in local papers calling out that hypocrisy by name; energy workers showing up at town halls demanding their elected officials fight for an industry that’s investing billions in their communities; activating influencers to highlight the bright line between Trump’s law and higher electricity bills; and more.
If renewable energy is going to grow consistently in America, no matter which way the political wind blows, there must be a political cost to crossing the sector. Otherwise it will always be vulnerable to last-minute backroom deals, no matter how “win-win” its technology is.