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Trump’s first administration supported it. But now there’s a new crowd coming into town.
The first Trump administration helped advance the dream of cultivated meat grown from animal cells. The second Trump administration might try to kill the dream.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who could control the fate of cultivated meat in America as President-elect Trump’s nominee for health secretary, has suggested that it’s an unsafe and unnatural corporate science experiment designed to enrich techno-billionaires. Vice President-elect JD Vance has called cultivated meat “disgusting,” Donald Trump, Jr. has proposed banning it, and Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump’s rumored backup choice for Pentagon secretary, has already banned it in Florida.
The timing is brutal for a potentially climate-friendly new industry that had hoped to start competing with conventional meat in 2025. Cultivated meat executives are trying to project optimism about the next four years, pointing out that President Trump’s aides created a constructive regulatory framework for their products during his first term. Republicans who support innovation, competition, and economic nationalism, they argue, ought to support high-tech manufacturing startups in the U.S. Trump ally Elon Musk’s own startup, SpaceX, has flown cultivated meat into space, while his brother Kimbal, an investor in the cultivated meat venture Upside Foods, once cooked its slaughter-free chicken on stage at a CNN event.
Still, the industry is clearly nervous. Trumpworld is divided on food issues between “Make America Healthy Again” techno-skeptics like Kennedy and conventional Republicans aligned with traditional livestock industries, but there’s opposition to cultivated meat on both sides of that divide. Cultivated meat executives met with their regulators from the Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture last month at Tufts University, and while several attendees told me the discussion focused on how to get safe cultivated products to market, everyone in the room knew that road might get blocked on January 20.
San Francisco-based Mission Barns is waiting for FDA approval to blend its cultivated pork fat into plant-based meatballs and bacon; it already has photos on its website of the boxes it intends to sell in supermarkets. But its leaders are keenly aware that Kennedy may soon oversee the FDA — and that he’s expressed the same kind of doubts about “lab-grown meat” that he’s expressed about food dyes, genetically modified grain, and heavily processed foods in general.
“The election really shouldn’t affect our safety review. We know these folks care about protecting the American economy and ensuring American self-sufficiency,” Bianca Lê, the head of external affairs for Mission Barns, told me. “Obviously, though, anything can happen.”
One source close to Kennedy told me he probably wouldn’t propose banning what he calls “lab-grown meat,” but he’s likely to create regulatory hurdles that could keep startups like Mission Barns in perpetual limbo. When I asked if that meant making applicants for FDA approval jump through a million hoops, the Kennedy ally replied: “Maybe half a million.”
Growing meat from animal cells without killing animals was just a science-fiction fantasy until 2013, when the Dutch scientist Mark Post unveiled a burger patty he grew in his lab from bovine cells. That single burger cost $330,000 to produce, but investors poured more than $3 billion into hundreds of cultivated meat and seafood ventures over the next decade. Since then, they’ve brought down their costs per pound by about 99.99%.
Culturing cells into meat is still not as cheap as growing meat inside animals, but the startups are only making tiny quantities, and they’re confident they can approach price parity with animal products once they can scale up their production. The Israeli firm Believer Meats is building America’s first commercial-scale cultivated meat plant in North Carolina, and several other startups are planning to build U.S. factories once they receive regulatory approval.
But that’s been a slow process.
Trump’s first-term FDA head, Scott Gottlieb, and Agriculture Secretary, Sonny Perdue, worked with cultivated meat startups as well as conventional meat interests to create a joint regulatory process that almost everyone liked. In 2023, the Biden administration gave the Bay Area startups Upside (with investors including Cargill and Tyson as well as Kimbal Musk and Bill Gates) and Good Meat (the cultivated spin-off of the plant-based egg company Eat Just) the go-ahead to sell cultivated chicken filets.
But both companies envisioned the filets as proof-of-concept marketing plays to demonstrate that slaughter-free animal meat was real, not mass-market products they could take to commercial scale. Both sold their chicken to a limited number of diners in just one restaurant, and both ended the promotions this year.
So cultivated meat is currently unavailable in America. It’s illegal in Florida and Alabama, which both enacted bans in May. That leaves more than two dozen companies, including Upside and Good Meat, waiting for FDA approval for less expensive products they can take to market. Upside hopes to sell a product mixing cultivated chicken shreds with plant proteins at a price point competitive with organic chicken. Startups like Blue Nalu, which is cultivating bluefin tuna toro in San Diego, and Wildtype, which is cultivating salmon nigiri in San Francisco, believe they’ll be able to compete with high-end seafood as soon as they can get the federal go-ahead and build commercial factories.
The industry’s party line is that its products are safe, it’s been cooperative with regulators, and it has no reason to expect political meddling by the new political appointees.
“I don’t see the Trump administration doing bold nanny-state policy that interferes with consumer freedom,” Suzi Gerber, a nutrition scientist who leads the Association for Meat, Poultry and Seafood Innovation, an industry trade group, told me. “I think they’re going to end up on the side of American businesses and innovators, supporting the American dream.”
Globally, the strongest arguments for cultivated meat have usually emphasized the downsides of animal agriculture. Livestock operations use about a third of the land on Earth, driving much of the world’s deforestation, and cattle are a leading source of planet-warming methane. Cultivated meat would avoid those problems — as well as concerns about the mistreatment of animals and slaughterhouse workers, the overuse of antibiotics, and the fouling of rivers and lakes with manure.
But Trump doesn’t seem concerned about any of those problems, and even tech icon Musk, who used to talk a lot about climate change when his main focus was Tesla’s electric cars, falsely claimed on Joe Rogan’s podcast that the idea that animal agriculture contributes to global warming is “hot bullshit.” So the alternative protein sector, like the clean energy sector, is learning to speak the MAGA language of economic nationalism, arguing that if the U.S. regulatory process bogs down, nations like Singapore, Israel, and China will dominate the future of literal factory farming.
“The first Trump administration was very clear that it wanted this kind of innovation to stay in this country,” Upside founder and CEO Uma Valeti told me. “This isn’t about getting rid of animal meat. It’s about creating the next great American industry.”
The second Trump administration seems more likely to pick on any industry associated with the kind of climate concerns aired by Democrats. It doesn’t help that cultivated meat is also considered a threat by cattlemen and other livestock interests who reliably support Republicans. And then, of course, there’s RFK.
“I can’t remember ever seeing this level of uncertainty,” Eric Schulze, a molecular biologist and former FDA regulator who consults for several cultivated meat startups, told me. “The new team will have to decide if it supports typical Republican values of free enterprise and entrepreneurship, or if they want to create an over-regulatory environment that would be a first for the FDA under conservative leadership. The honest answer is we don’t know.”
The Biden administration isn’t rushing to approve applications before leaving office, and there’s not much the companies can do except wait. After the frenzy of interest and venture funding around cultivated meat several years ago, some once-promising startups have shut down, including New Age Eats and Sci-Fi Foods.
Wildtype raised more than $120 million during the initial burst, and it’s got a nice story to tell about producing nutritious salmon without pesticides, antibiotics, or microplastics in the U.S., instead of depleting wild salmon stocks or relying on environmentally damaging fish farms overseas. CEO Justin Kolbeck is confident that once it reaches commercial scale, growing fish filets from cells in a brewery will be more efficient and cheaper than feeding fish that have to swim, poop, and grow guts, tails, and bones that people don’t eat. But he’s got 85 employees, and he’s burning through his cash.
“How long can we wait? Not forever, that’s for sure,” Kolbeck told me. “But we try not to get too spun up about stuff we can’t control. Startups have a million ways to die, and regulatory delays are just one of them.”
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.