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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 industrythat had hoped to start competing with conventional meat in 2025. Cultivated meat executives are tryingto 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 roadmight 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 poundby 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’sfirst-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 hopesto 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 seafoodas 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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The Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees U.S. wetlands, has halted processing on 168 pending wind and solar actions, a spokesperson confirmed to Heatmap.
The Army Corps of Engineers confirmed that it has paused all permitting for well over 100 actions related to renewable energy projects across the country — information that raises more questions than it answers about how government permitting offices are behaving right now.
On Tuesday, I reported that the Trump administration had all but paralyzed environmental permitting decisions on solar and wind projects, even for facilities constructed away from federal lands. According to an internal American Clean Power Association memo sent to the trade association’s members and dated the previous day, the Army Corps of Engineers apparatus for approving projects on federally shielded wetlands had come to a standstill. Officials in some parts of the agency have refused even to let staff make a formal determination as to whether proposed projects touch protected wetlands, I reported.
In a statement to me, the Army Corps has confirmed it has “temporarily paused evaluation on” 168 pending permit actions “focused on regulated activities associated with renewable energy projects.” According to the statement, the Army Corps froze work on those permitting actions “pending feedback from the Administration on the applicability” of an executive order Trump issued on his first day in office, “Unleashing American Energy,” and that the agency “anticipates feedback on or about” February 7 from administration officials.
While the statement demonstrates how vast the potential impacts to the renewables sector may be, it also leaves several important questions unanswered. It’s unclear whether each pending permit action that has been frozen applies to its own individual project, or whether some projects have more than one permit pending before the Army Corps, so it is still fuzzy precisely how many projects may be impacted. The Army Corps did not say whether that feedback would lead to the lifting of holds on permitting activity, nor did it explain why the holds were enacted in the first place.
Finally, there’s one big question that still needs answering: The executive order in question focuses on fossil fuel projects and says nothing about renewable energy — no mentions of “renewable,” no “solar,” no “wind.” Why did this order trigger a permitting freeze in the first place? This level of confusion and ambiguity is part and parcel with other statements in the ACP memo, including that guidance and agency perspectives have varied widely in recent weeks depending on who in the government is being asked.
Climate advocates are already pressing the panic button. “This is a 5 alarm fire alert. This could decimate all the clean energy we worked to pass under Biden,” Nick Abraham, state communications director for League of Conservation Voters, wrote on Bluesky in response to my reporting.
I asked the Army Corps for clarity on how the executive order led to a pause on their permitting activity, and we’ll update this story if we hear back.
Current conditions: San Francisco received a record-breaking amount of rain yesterday • Madagascar has been struck by two tropical cyclones in the span of a week • Scientists are warning of an “extreme winter warming event” unfolding at the north pole.
Climate scientist James Hansen has published a new study concluding the world is on track for more than 2 degrees Celsius in warming by 2045. Hansen has been saying for some time that current climate models underestimate the rate at which global temperatures are rising. The new research, published in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, says that we have been artificially cooling the planet with aerosol pollution for years. With new shipping regulations limiting these aerosols, this cooling effect is waning and warming will ramp up rapidly – probably by about 0.2 or 0.3 degrees Celsius per decade. “Unless actions are taken to reduce global warming,” the study warns, “shutdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is likely within the next 20-30 years.”
Hansen has a long history of presenting alarming climate studies that divide the scientific community. But much of his work has proven to be remarkably prescient. In 1988 he famously warned Congress that human activity was changing the climate. In 2023, Hansen published controversial work projecting that the world would breach 1.5 degrees Celsius in warming much sooner than expected. “In the next several months,” he said, “we’re going to go well above 1.5C on a 12-month average.” Last year was indeed the first full calendar year during which the 1.5 Celsius threshold was broken. In fact the average temperature for the whole of last year was 1.6 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial times. This year is already confounding scientists who were expecting things to cool down a little bit: Last month was the hottest January on record, with temperatures 1.75 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial years.
Government websites are being scrubbed of references to climate change. So far climate pages have stopped working on websites for the Departments of Defense, State, Agriculture, and Transportation. A “climate change” landing page for the White House does not load. Climate scientist David Ho noted that a page charting CO2 atmospheric trends has also been removed from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website.
Meanwhile, President Trump this week nominated Neil Jacobs to lead NOAA. Jacobs was acting NOAA head in 2019 when Trump infamously used a Sharpie to draw the path of Hurricane Dorian to suggest the storm would hit Alabama, contradicting weather forecasts. NOAA backed the president’s statements, prompting an investigation that concluded Jacobs violated scientific integrity policy.
Chaos within the Trump administration has all but paralyzed environmental permitting decisions on solar and wind projects in crucial government offices, including sign-offs needed for projects on private lands, reported Heatmap’s Jael Holzman. According to an internal memo issued by the American Clean Power Association, the renewables trade association that represents the largest U.S. solar and wind developers, Trump’s Day One executive order putting a 60-day freeze on final decisions for renewable energy projects on federal lands has also ground key pre-decisional work in government offices responsible for wetlands and species protection to a halt. Renewables developers and their representatives in Washington have pressed the government for answers, yet received inconsistent information on its approach to renewables permitting that varies between lower level regional offices. “In other words,” Holzman wrote, “despite years of the Republican Party inching slowly toward ‘all of the above’ energy and climate rhetoric that seemed to leave room for renewables, solar and wind developers have so far found themselves at times shut out of the second Trump administration.”
The deadline for countries to submit new climate targets is fast approaching, and many of the world’s largest polluters are not ready. Under the Paris Agreement, nations have until February 10 to submit their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) outlining 2035 emissions goals and plans for reaching those goals. According to the Financial Times, the European Union, India, Australia, and South Africa will likely miss the deadline. One expert estimated that just one third of G20 economies would submit their plans on time. “Because of the shock of the U.S. presidency and all the other issues, there is not a lot of leader attention on this issue,” said Nick Mabey, co-founder of climate think-tank E3G. There’s no penalty for a late submission, and some say that filing a little late is fine so long as the final plans are robust. “This next round of NDCs may be the most important documents to be produced in a multilateral context so far this century,” UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said last year. “As they add up, they will determine which direction the world will take over the coming decades.”
A California judge on Monday sided with the state in its legal battle with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups by dismissing two claims that California’s climate laws violate the Constitution. The laws in focus require that large companies report their emissions and any climate-related financial risks. The Chamber of Commerce filed its complaint against the laws last year, saying they were in violation of the First Amendment because they “unlawfully attempt to regulate speech.”
A geoengineering project in the Arctic involving using glass beads to try to reflect some of the sunlight has been shut down over concerns that the beads pose a “potential risks to the Arctic food chain.”
Here’s one federal climate program that’s still working — for now.
The first two weeks of the Trump administration have been chaotic for the clean energy industry, to say the least. Offshore wind permitting is on hold and state governments are canceling plans to sign new contracts. Trump’s federal funding freeze was on, then off-but-actually-still-on, and then technically off again. Despite a court injunction on the pause, many grant recipients still seem to be locked out of their funding portals.
But one climate initiative that’s also one of the president’s biggest bugbears has escaped his meddling thus far: The federal tax credit for electric vehicles is still functioning normally.
Former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act created a tax credit of up to $7,500 for new electric vehicles and $4,000 for used vehicles. As of January of this year, about 16 EV and plug-in hybrid models were eligible for the new vehicle credit, which is limited to models that are assembled in North America and meet certain battery sourcing requirements. A loophole in the rules also allows dealers to apply the tax credit to any electric vehicle lease, meaning dealers can offer lessees a discount on a much wider range of options.
Trump attacked the subsidy on the campaign trail, and his transition team was reportedly planning to kill it. One of his first executive orders took aim at a number of electric vehicle-related programs, ordering the Environmental Protection Agency to revoke waivers that allow California and other states to pass stronger emissions standards for vehicles than the federal government’s. His funding review and freeze specifically called out the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, a $5 billion program to fund EV charging infrastructure. But even though EV charger grantees couldn’t access their funding, car dealerships around the country did not have any trouble getting into the Internal Revenue Service’s portal to log their electric vehicle sales and file for reimbursement for the tax credit.
When someone purchases an eligible electric vehicle, the buyer can either claim the tax credit on their own tax return or they can “transfer” it to their dealership, allowing the dealer to take the credit amount off the sale price. Dealers can then file for a direct reimbursement from the Internal Revenue Service.
I reached out to the National Automobile Dealers Association, which represents new car dealers, to ask if they had heard from any of their members about issues with the advanced payment program for the EV tax credit. “We checked into this earlier in the week, both on the dealer end and with Treasury,” Jared Allen, the vice president for public affairs told me on Friday. “Nothing has changed with the availability of advanced payments to dealers for EV tax credits.”
The president does not have the authority to end the EV tax credit program on his own — changes would have to come through Congress. Before Trump’s inauguration, Republicans on the House Budget Committee circulated a long list of potential cost-cutting measures that included eliminating many Inflation Reduction Act programs. One menu item recommended cutting all clean energy tax credits, but a separate proposal explicitly suggested keeping the EV tax credit and closing the leasing loophole. The Committee is aiming to present a first draft of a budget reconciliation bill by the end of this week, according to E&E News, at which point we’ll see what made the cut.