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Vermont was a warning for American agriculture.
As floods inched towards Diggers’ Mirth Collective Farm in Burlington, Vermont earlier this month, a small army of volunteers from the region descended upon the farm for three days with one goal: Get as many of the farm’s organic vegetables out of the ground as quickly as possible.
At noon on July 11, when the waters finally reached the farm, co-owner Dylan Zeitlyn and the farm’s other owners and employees departed for safety. A few hours later, Zeitlyn and a number of other farmers from the Intervale — a floodplain on the Winooski river in Burlington that boasts seven farms — gathered for a group canoe trip into the fields to assess the damage. Zeitlyn estimated that his farm’s last-ditch efforts salvaged $10,000 worth of vegetables. Underwater, he was canoeing over $200,000 in lost crops that could not be harvested.
“We got wiped out,” he told me. “There’s no recovery for any plant that’s in the ground.” The farm’s five owners do not expect to be paid this year; its five employees have all lost their jobs for the season. Once floodwater touches a crop, the FDA forbids it from being sold for consumption, as the waters tend to be contaminated by sewage or industrial runoff. And while the farm has crop insurance, the farm has never used it before and does not know what to expect.
The flood was devastating for farms like Diggers’ Mirth, but it was also a reminder: Climate change-driven floods are set to disrupt America’s food supply and there’s not that much farmers can do about it.
The total impact of the flooding on Vermont’s agricultural sector — a small but critical piece of the state’s economy — is unknown at this point. As of last week, the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont has heard from 85 farms that were damaged by the waters.
Catastrophic flooding is not a new risk for farmers. Vermont’s farms are particularly exposed to floods due to the state’s hilly terrain — in 2011, Tropical Storm Irene destroyed tens of thousands of acres of crops. And flooding can happen anywhere, as it did in Nebraska and Iowa in 2019.
Any farmland on floodplains, or low-lying terrain in general, is at risk, said Jason Otkin, a professor at the University of Wisconsin who studies agriculture and meteorology. (One EPA map shows that in large chunks of the country, farmland dominates floodplains.)
What’s new, though, is the frequency of such heavy rain, especially in New England — a clear sign of a warming climate.
“This … is one of the predictive consequences of climate change,” said Molly Anderson, a professor of food studies at Middlebury College in Vermont. “More water falling less predictably, but more in surges.”
Vegetable farms have it the worst in a flood, losing their harvest for a year, noted Joshua Faulkner, a University of Vermont professor researching climate change and agriculture.
Vermont’s agriculture is dominated by dairy, but that sector was hit too. Dairy farms lost hay and corn for feedstock, while the floods closed roads for milk deliveries. (The state’s maple industry will largely emerge unscathed, it seems.)
As floods become more common across the country, they will likely lead to increased food costs for consumers, Faulkner added. And the people who suffer the most from those price increases will be low-income people who receive food assistance, Anderson explained.
Look at the issue for long enough, and it becomes clear that it’s within everyone’s interest to mitigate the impacts of flooding on farms. The only problem: Nobody really knows how to do it.
Otkin explained that tilling soil less often will make it more resilient to both heat and moisture. But in the event of a severe flood, “it really doesn’t matter how much you build your soil health,” Faulkner explained.
And crop insurance, which is both subsidized and regulated by the federal government, could be expanded in spite of it becoming a worse bet for insurers, but that still wouldn’t solve the problem of a dearth of food production. (Crop insurance payments due to flooding increased by nearly 300 percent from 1995 to 2020, the Conservation Finance Network found.)
Other strategies are out there. Farms can move to higher ground, implement emergency plans to harvest crops before floods as Zeitlyn’s farm did, or invest in different types of buffers. But at the end of the day, nothing can prevent floods themselves, Faulkner said: “There’s lots of strategies we talk about for climate change impacts, but of all the impacts, flooding is the most difficult.”
The road forward for farms is unclear, but farmers will have to be involved in charting the path ahead, Anderson said.
“They are hugely resistant to being told what to do,” Anderson explained, pointing to a protest in the Netherlands last year after the country demanded its farmers make a sharp cut in their livestock supply. “They tend to be very independent people.”
Lindsey Brand, marketing and communications coordinator for NOFA-VT, added that many farmers in Vermont are already working hard to sequester carbon, making the blow of the floods even more crushing for the farmers “working a really difficult job often for the betterment of our shared environment.”
Zeitlyn has already started asking existential questions about the business he co-owns.
“I feel like in a certain way, it’s crazy to continue to keep trying to grow vegetables here,” he said. “Flooding is part of the natural history of this place, but the frequency and severity of the floods is making it from something that happens once in a long while to — I’m wondering if this is going to start happening every year.”
“You can think, ‘Yeah, this is crazy, why am I doing this?’” he wondered. “I’m growing food, and we need to grow food, and we’re trying to do it in a sustainable way as well. There’s a conundrum there.”
Anderson pointed to the possibility that farmers could (and, in dairy-reliant states like Vermont, should) diversify their crops — berries can get moldy, but turkeys are perhaps more resilient to rain.
Her advice illustrates a thorny problem: Even as climate change demands we shift our consumption towards plants, the incentive to grow vegetables in places like Vermont might actually be waning.
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I wanted to update you on some very exciting news — our Decarbonize Your Life section just won the National Magazine Award for Service Journalism. It’s a huge honor for a publication that just turned two years old last month and a testament to the outstanding journalism our small but mighty newsroom does every day guiding our readers through the great energy transition.
A huge shout out, in particular, to our deputy editor Jillian Goodman for making the section so smart and helpful, to Robinson Meyer for dreaming up the idea, and to all the writers — Jeva, Katie, Emily, Charu, Taylor, and Andrew — who reported so insightfully for it. Tackling a complex but consequential subject like how to make better personal decisions around climate changewas a massive undertaking, but a labor of love.
If you missed this special section, you can check it out here.
And thank you, as always, for reading us and making our work possible.
Nico
Founder & Editor in chief
Much may depend on the Senate’s tolerance for fuzzy math.
House Republicans passed a budget blueprint Thursday morning that lays the groundwork for the party to begin drafting legislation to enact President Trump’s agenda. Now the fight over the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits begins in earnest.
The blueprint is merely a set of instructions for writing the eventual budget bill, laying out topline numbers for tax cuts and spending reductions — it doesn’t contain any actual policies. Trump’s biggest priorities are to extend the tax cuts he enacted in 2017, pass new tax cuts on tips and overtime pay, and to boost spending on immigration control and defense.
The resolution that Republicans passed allows for all of the above. In total, it enables Congress to craft a bill that would increase the national debt over the next decade by more than $5 trillion.
The good news for the IRA tax credits is that the framework only requires lawmakers to craft legislation that would produce $4 billion in savings. The bad news is that Senate Republicans have given their word to budget hawks in the House that they will aim to produce a minimum $1.5 trillion in savings. House Republicans are eager to find at least $2 trillion in deficit reductions.
According to a “menu” of budget proposals that made its way around the Hill earlier this year, Republicans estimate they could save anywhere from $3 billion to $800 billion by repealing IRA tax credits, depending on how many and which ones survive.
Lawmakers could also go after other climate-related policies, like cutting grant programs from the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Agency. “Most of the funds have been obligated,” meaning they’re legally committed to grantees, “so there’s not much left to rescind,” Alex McDonough, a lobbyist with Pioneer Public Affairs, told me in an email. “We’ll see what they do with a possible rescission package, but even that would be a drop in the bucket compared to the trillions they want for offsetting tax cuts.”
Lobbyists on Capitol Hill and other experts I’ve spoken with over the past two weeks disagree about how much the numbers matter when it comes to whether and how much of the IRA will be repealed. Some felt the budget math would take priority, while others told me that if any of the tax credits were killed or saved, it would be for political reasons over anything else.
Though the electric vehicle tax credits have been the most loudly targeted by Trump and Republicans, “anything with a price tag is at least somewhat vulnerable,” McDonough said. Lawmakers could also opt to make them more difficult to access or phase them out earlier rather than fully repeal them.
McDonough also said that the lobbying companies and trade groups have been doing around the manufacturing and clean electricity tax credits appeared to be working, and will ratchet up even more in May. “Appealing to ‘all of the above’ and ‘energy dominance’ is working because everyone knows how badly we need new generation to meet rapidly rising demand and a lot of the clean energy resources happen to be the quickest to deploy,” he said. “Utilities want it too, which is also very important.”
On Thursday, Republican Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and John Curtis of Utah sent a letter to their party’s leadership asking them to preserve tax credits that spur manufacturing, reduce energy costs for consumers, and give certainty to businesses that have already made investments in the U.S. based on the credits. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Jerry Moran of Kansas also signed the letter. It was the first major show of support for the tax credits in the Senate, following a similar letter signed by 21 Republicans in the House.
Republicans are trying to enact Trump’s agenda using a special process called budget reconciliation, which will enable them to pass it with a simple 51-vote majority rather than the 60 votes required to overcome a filibuster. The party currently has 53 seats, so four Republicans coming out in favor of preserving IRA tax credits is a good sign for the law. Similarly, the Republicans have a seven-seat majority in the House, and so those 21 who like the IRA could have quite a bit of influence.
But the other big open question for the future of the IRA — and frankly, for the future of the Senate — is whether Republicans will proceed with the fuzzy math they are using to calculate the cost of the bill. When the Congressional Budget Office scores the tax cuts, it will use what's called a "current law baseline," and estimate that they will cost the government more than $3 trillion dollars over the next ten years. Senate Republicans, however, have asserted that extending the 2017 tax cuts is free and will have no impact on the deficit, using a different scoring method called a “current policy baseline.”
The reason this matters for the IRA is that the budget reconciliation process has strict rules. If lawmakers were forced to recognize the true cost of the tax cut extensions in drafting the budget bill, they would have to make several trillion dollars’ worth of additional spending cuts in order to align with the blueprint they passed this week. In that scenario, it’s hard to see how any of the IRA could survive.
But if Republicans unify around this fuzzy math and carry it all the way to the final vote on the bill, which would be unprecedented, they could face a showdown with Democrats, who will say the bill doesn’t comply with the reconciliation rules. In that scenario, they’ll be faced with a choice either to go back to the drawing board or take the nuclear option — essentially changing how the Senate operates.
“There will be a majority vote on whether the Senate wants to change its precedents going forward, forever, and basically open up reconciliation to whatever policies the majority wants to enact going forward,” Charlie Ellsworth, another lobbyist for Pioneer Public Affairs, told me.
Expect to hear a lot more about this debate over the cost of the tax cuts once lawmakers return to Washington on April 28 after a two-week recess. Republicans have said they want to get the budget bill to Trump’s desk by Memorial Day. McDonough doesn’t think that’s in the cards, and expects it to happen by the August recess at best. But he expects the House Ways and Means committee to push out a first version of the bill in May, so we’ll see what the first proposal is for the fate of the IRA tax credits then.
More than 2,500 employees have applied for a buyout program. The departures, if approved, could gut the agency’s in-house bank and manufacturing office.
The Trump administration is overseeing a chaotic set of changes at the U.S. Department of Energy that could gut its in-house bank and transform one of the government’s key scientific and technology development agencies.
In the coming days, the department could see thousands of its employees — nearly one-fifth of its staff — resign in one of the largest headcount reductions in memory. At the same time, it could cancel billions of dollars in next-generation energy R&D projects in Ohio and other states.
Some of these changes have been planned for weeks. But in recent days, department officials have appeared to grow anxious behind the scenes about the scale of the transformation. Some Trump officials have reached out to individuals, offering them financial incentives in order to discourage them from taking the buyout, according to administration documents and accounts from multiple department employees who were not authorized to speak publicly.
If the full set of changes goes through, then the Department of Energy may be so depleted that it will be unable to carry out the Trump administration’s goals, such as bolstering the power grid or building new power plants.
The upheaval is a result of two policies coming to a head: the department’s “deferred resignation program,” which offers federal employees the equivalent of a severance deal to stop working immediately; and an internal effort to cancel or hinder major industrial policy projects initiated by the Biden administration.
It also arises from agency workers’ confusion and fear over who will ultimately make personnel decisions at the Energy Department, the agency’s own leadership or employees of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
In a statement, an Energy Department spokesperson said the agency was acting in accordance with the president’s executive order creating the government efficiency department.
“The Department of Energy is conducting a department-wide review of its organizational structures to ensure operations are best positioned to accomplish the DOE mission and align with the Trump administration’s priorities,” Andrea Woods, the spokesperson, said. “No final decisions have been made and multiple plans are still being considered.”
The deferred resignation program, which was started by Musk earlier this year, allows employees to resign immediately but receive full pay and benefits through the end of September.
When the resignation program was first made available in February, relatively few department employees took the offer, which resembles a buyout. Many were unsure that they would actually get paid if they accepted the deal.
But employees who took that deal have been getting paid — and at the end of March, Energy Secretary Chris Wright reopened the program and encouraged more employees to accept the resignation deal. He warned that President Donald Trump had ordered the department to conduct a mass “reduction in force” and said that accepting the buyout now could “mitigate the effect of potential involuntary separations.”
This time, the response has been very different. More than 2,700 Energy Department employees have applied for the voluntary resignation program, according to multiple employees who weren’t authorized to speak about the matter publicly. The department recently extended the program’s deadline to this Friday.
If those resignations are accepted, they could reduce the department’s head count by as much as 17%. More resignations are anticipated before the final deadline. The Department of Energy had 15,795 full-time employees as of last year, according to government data.
Some offices have been harder hit than others. The agency’s in-house bank, the Loan Programs Office, could lose half its permanent employees, according to one person who wasn’t authorized to speak about the matter publicly. Analysts have said that the office is essential to countering the low-cost loans that China gives its industrial firms.
Other offices — including those meant to bolster domestic manufacturing and strengthen the power grid — could also lose as much as half their permanent staff.
Many of these cuts are so deep that they could damage the agency’s ability to implement Trump’s agenda. The president has spoken about supporting the nuclear, natural gas, and coal industries — as well as spurring a new mining boom — but he will struggle to meet these goals if the agency is understaffed. The Office of Policy, which directly supports the administration’s agenda, is likely to lose dozens of staff to the program.
Some department leaders have seemingly realized that they may soon manage empty rooms. In some offices, Trump appointees have offered promotions or retention bonuses to career staff to discourage them from leaving, according to employees who weren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The bonuses can run to as much as 25% of an employee’s annual salary, according to an internal email reviewed by Heatmap.
But many employees are worried that a coming round of layoffs led by the Department of Government Efficiency could override the preferences of the Energy Department’s own officials, terminating even favored employees. The Musk-led efficiency department hopes to cut more than half of the loan office’s full-time staff, according to one individual. It has placed commissars inside most federal agency buildings, including the Energy Department headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Woods, the Energy Department spokesperson, declined to comment on the number of employees who have applied for the resignation program because it is still open for applications. The department will review and approve each resignation request individually, she said, and it will retain employees working in “public safety, national security, law enforcement” and other “essential” roles.
Yet it is possible to estimate the number of employees who have asked to resign because the department creates a numbered receipt for each employee who enrolls in the program. The numbers, which have increased sequentially, now exceed 2,700, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the receipts who aren’t authorized to speak publicly.
The resignation turmoil comes as the agency considers making other big changes to its policies. Trump officials are in the process of reviewing more than 30 advanced energy demonstration projects slated to be built nationwide, according to documents obtained by Heatmap News. The 2022 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act spent more than $6 billion to fund demonstration programs focused on carbon capture, clean hydrogen, and re-industrialization.
CNN reported this week that one of the projects on the chopping block is a $500 million grant to build a next-generation steel mill in Middletown, Ohio — the hometown of Vice President JD Vance.
The Energy Department has already been experimenting with revoking contracts that the government had previously signed. It remains unclear whether the department can suspend these contracts legally.
Last week, China announced more than 100 new industrial-scale demonstration projects to support clean steel production and carbon capture. The country created 47 new advanced energy demonstration projects last year.