You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
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.”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Imagine for a moment that you’re an aerial firefighter pilot. You have one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, and now you’ve been called in to fight the devastating fires burning in Los Angeles County’s famously tricky, hilly terrain. You’re working long hours — not as long as your colleagues on the ground due to flight time limitations, but the maximum scheduling allows — not to mention the added external pressures you’re also facing. Even the incoming president recently wondered aloud why the fires aren’t under control yet and insinuated that it’s your and your colleagues’ fault.
You’re on a sortie, getting ready for a particularly white-knuckle drop at a low altitude in poor visibility conditions when an object catches your eye outside the cockpit window: an authorized drone dangerously close to your wing.
Aerial firefighters don’t have to imagine this terrifying scenario; they’ve lived it. Last week, a drone punched a hole in the wing of a Québécois “super soaker” plane that had traveled down from Canada to fight the fires, grounding Palisades firefighting operations for an agonizing half-hour. Thirty minutes might not seem like much, but it is precious time lost when the Santa Ana winds have already curtailed aerial operations.
“I am shocked by what happened in Los Angeles with the drone,” Anna Lau, a forestry communication coordinator with the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, told me. The Montana DNRC has also had to contend with unauthorized drones grounding its firefighting planes. “We’re following what’s going on very closely, and it’s shocking to us,” Lau went on. Leaving the skies clear so that firefighters can get on with their work “just seems like a no-brainer, especially when people are actively trying to tackle the situation at hand and fighting to save homes, property, and lives.”
Courtesy of U.S. Forest Service
Although the super soaker collision was by far the most egregious case, according to authorities there have been at least 40 “incidents involving drones” in the airspace around L.A. since the fires started. (Notably, the Federal Aviation Administration has not granted any waivers for the air space around Palisades, meaning any drone images you see of the region, including on the news, were “probably shot illegally,” Intelligencer reports.) So far, law enforcement has arrested three people connected to drones flying near the L.A. fires, and the FBI is seeking information regarding the super soaker collision.
Such a problem is hardly isolated to these fires, though. The Forest Service reports that drones led to the suspension of or interfered with at least 172 fire responses between 2015 and 2020. Some people, including Mike Fraietta, an FAA-certified drone pilot and the founder of the drone-detection company Gargoyle Systems, believe the true number of interferences is much higher — closer to 400.
Law enforcement likes to say that unauthorized drone use falls into three buckets — clueless, criminal, or careless — and Fraietta was inclined to believe that it’s mostly the former in L.A. Hobbyists and other casual drone operators “don’t know the regulations or that this is a danger,” he said. “There’s a lot of ignorance.” To raise awareness, he suggested law enforcement and the media highlight the steep penalties for flying drones in wildfire no-fly zones, which is punishable by up to 12 months in prison or a fine of $75,000.
“What we’re seeing, particularly in California, is TikTok and Instagram influencers trying to get a shot and get likes,” Fraietta conjectured. In the case of the drone that hit the super soaker, it “might have been a case of citizen journalism, like, Well, I have the ability to get this shot and share what’s going on.”
Emergency management teams are waking up, too. Many technologies are on the horizon for drone detection, identification, and deflection, including Wi-Fi jamming, which was used to ground climate activists’ drones at Heathrow Airport in 2019. Jamming is less practical in an emergency situation like the one in L.A., though, where lives could be at stake if people can’t communicate.
Still, the fact of the matter is that firefighters waste precious time dealing with drones when there are far more pressing issues that need their attention. Lau, in Montana, described how even just a 12-minute interruption to firefighting efforts can put a community at risk. “The biggest public awareness message we put out is, ‘If you fly, we can’t,’” she said.
Fraietta, though, noted that drone technology could be used positively in the future, including on wildfire detection and monitoring, prescribed burns, and communicating with firefighters or victims on the ground.
“We don’t want to see this turn into the FAA saying, ‘Hey everyone, no more drones in the United States because of this incident,’” Fraietta said. “You don’t shut down I-95 because a few people are running drugs up and down it, right? Drones are going to be super beneficial to the country long term.”
But critically, in the case of a wildfire, such tools belong in the right hands — not the hands of your neighbor who got a DJI Mini 3 for Christmas. “Their one shot isn’t worth it,” Lau said.
Plus 3 more outstanding questions about this ongoing emergency.
As Los Angeles continued to battle multiple big blazes ripping through some of the most beloved (and expensive) areas of the city on Friday, a question lingered in the background: What caused the fires in the first place?
Though fires are less common in California during this time of the year, they aren’t unheard of. In early December 2017, power lines sparked the Thomas Fire near Ventura, California, which burned through to mid-January. At the time it was the largest fire in the state since at least the 1930s. Now it’s the ninth-largest. Although that fire was in a more rural area, it ignited for some of the same reasons we’re seeing fires this week.
Read on for everything we know so far about how the fires started.
Six major fires started during the Santa Ana wind event last week:
Officials are investigating the cause of the fires and have not made any public statements yet. Early eyewitness accounts suggest that the Eaton Fire may have started at the base of a transmission tower owned by Southern California Edison. So far, the company has maintained that an analysis of its equipment showed “no interruptions or electrical or operational anomalies until more than one hour after the reported start time of the fire.” A Washington Post investigation found that the Palisades Fire could have risen from the remnants of a fire that burned on New Year’s Eve and reignited.
On Thursday morning, Edward Nordskog, a retired fire investigator from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, told me it was unlikely they had even begun looking into the root of the biggest and most destructive of the fires in the Pacific Palisades. “They don't start an investigation until it's safe to go into the area where the fire started, and it just hasn't been safe until probably today,” he said.
It can take years to determine the cause of a fire. Investigators did not pinpoint the cause of the Thomas Fire until March 2019, more than two years after it started.
But Nordskog doesn’t think it will take very long this time. It’s easier to narrow down the possibilities for an urban fire because there are typically both witnesses and surveillance footage, he told me. He said the most common causes of wildfires in Los Angeles are power lines and those started by unhoused people. They can also be caused by sparks from vehicles or equipment.
At more than 40,000 acres burned total, these fires are unlikely to make the charts for the largest in California history. But because they are burning in urban, densely populated, and expensive areas, they could be some of the most devastating. With an estimated 9,000 structures damaged as of Friday morning, the Eaton and Palisades fires are likely to make the list for most destructive wildfire events in the state.
And they will certainly be at the top for costliest. The Palisades Fire has already been declared a likely contender for the most expensive wildfire in U.S. history. It has destroyed more than 5,000 structures in some of the most expensive zip codes in the country. Between that and the Eaton Fire, Accuweather estimates the damages could reach $57 billion.
While we don’t know the root causes of the ignitions, several factors came together to create perfect fire conditions in Southern California this week.
First, there’s the Santa Ana winds, an annual phenomenon in Southern California, when very dry, high-pressure air gets trapped in the Great Basin and begins escaping westward through mountain passes to lower-pressure areas along the coast. Most of the time, the wind in Los Angeles blows eastward from the ocean, but during a Santa Ana event, it changes direction, picking up speed as it rushes toward the sea.
Jon Keeley, a research scientist with the US Geological Survey and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles told me that Santa Ana winds typically blow at maybe 30 to 40 miles per hour, while the winds this week hit upwards of 60 to 70 miles per hour. “More severe than is normal, but not unique,” he said. “We had similar severe winds in 2017 with the Thomas Fire.”
Second, Southern California is currently in the midst of extreme drought. Winter is typically a rainier season, but Los Angeles has seen less than half an inch of rain since July. That means that all the shrubland vegetation in the area is bone-dry. Again, Keeley said, this was not usual, but not unique. Some years are drier than others.
These fires were also not a question of fuel management, Keeley told me. “The fuels are not really the issue in these big fires. It's the extreme winds,” he said. “You can do prescription burning in chaparral and have essentially no impact on Santa Ana wind-driven fires.” As far as he can tell, based on information from CalFire, the Eaton Fire started on an urban street.
While it’s likely that climate change played a role in amplifying the drought, it’s hard to say how big a factor it was. Patrick Brown, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, published a long post on X outlining the factors contributing to the fires, including a chart of historic rainfall during the winter in Los Angeles that shows oscillations between wet and dry years over the past eight decades.
But climate change is expected to make dry years drier and wet years wetter, creating a “hydroclimate whiplash,” as Daniel Swain, a pre-eminent expert on climate change and weather in California puts it. In a thread on Bluesky, Swain wrote that “in 2024, Southern California experienced an exceptional episode of wet-to-dry hydroclimate whiplash.” Last year’s rainy winter fostered abundant plant growth, and the proceeding dryness primed the vegetation for fire.
Get our best story delivered to your inbox every day:
Editor’s note: This story was last update on Monday, January 13, at 10:00 a.m. ET.
On tough questioning from the Senate, LA’s fires, and EV leases
Current conditions: Odd weather has caused broccoli and cauliflower plants to come up far too early in the UK • Another blast of Arctic air is headed for the Midwest • An air quality alert has been issued in Los Angeles due to windblown dust and ash.
Firefighters in Los Angeles are scrambling to make progress against the ongoing wildfires there before dangerous winds return. The Palisades and Eaton fires have now been burning for almost a week, charring nearly 40,000 acres, damaging more than 12,000 structures, and leaving at least 24 people dead. They are 13% and 27% contained, respectively. Residents who lost their homes are desperately trying to find new properties to rent or buy in a tight market, with reports of intense bidding wars as landlords hike rents. The economic toll of this disaster is estimated to be between $135 billion and $150 billion. Red flag warnings are in effect today, with critical fire conditions and extreme wind gusts forecast through Wednesday.
Red fire retardant on pool furniture. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
A few updates on the incoming administration: President-elect Donald Trump tapped Ed Russo to run an advisory environmental task force. Trump said Russo will oversee “initiatives to create great jobs and protect our natural resources, by following my policy of CLEAN AIR and CLEAN WATER. Together, we will achieve American Energy DOMINANCE, rebuild our Economy, and DRILL, BABY, DRILL.” Russo is a longtime Trump loyalist who served as an environmental consultant to the Trump Organization and wrote a book titled “Donald J. Trump: An Environmental Hero”.
Trump also announced his deputies for some key environmental and energy Cabinet positions over the weekend, including:
More than a dozen of Trump’s Cabinet nominees face Senate confirmation hearings this week. Doug Burgum, who is up for interior secretary, has a hearing before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources tomorrow. Energy secretary nominee Chris Wright has one on Wednesday. EPA nominee Lee Zeldin has one with the Environment and Public Works Committee on Thursday.
Affordable EV leases are “the car market’s hottest deal,” according toThe Wall Street Journal. Car companies are changing the way they pitch EVs to buyers, offering short-term leases with low monthly payments. These deals are attractive to first-time EV shoppers who are still a little bit hesitant to commit, as well as people on a tighter budget. Roughly 45% of EV transactions at the end of 2024 were leases, much higher than the auto industry as a whole. And a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act means leased cars can more easily qualify for the government’s $7,500 EV tax credit. “The proliferation of lease deals has made EVs more accessible to buyers who couldn’t afford their higher sticker prices,” the Journal said. “For the automakers, it is helping get more EVs into customers’ hands after a choppy start for their electric-car operations.”
Wind power could overtake coal in Europe for electricity generation for the first time this year, according to the energy think tank Ember. At the end of 2024, wind power was closing in on coal, coming in at just 4% below the fossil fuel in power generation as the continent’s coal plants close. “That output gap could easily be made up over the course of 2025 by an increase in regional wind generation capacity or by higher average wind speeds at turbine level, or by some combination of both,” Reutersreported. Last year wind power accounted for 20% of electricity consumed in the EU, and the goal is to get that up to 50% by 2050. But as Electreknoted, the same problems plaguing projects in the U.S. – permitting delays and connection bottlenecks – are slowing things down. The EU accounts for 4.6% of global power sector emissions.
The World Health Organization’s European Centre for Environment and Health has issued a callout for “examples of interventions to protect and promote mental health in the face of climate change.” The group wants to take stock of these interventions so that it can identify gaps in mental health care and share some best practices. The callout is aimed at Europe only, but it is indicative of a growing awareness of how the worsening climate crisis is taking a toll on mental health worldwide.
“There’s a lot of finger-pointing going around, and I would just try to emphasize that this is a really complex problem. We have lots of different responsible parties. To me, what has happened requires more of a rethink than a blame game.” –Faith Kearns, a water and wildfire researcher at Arizona State University, speaking to Heatmap about the spread of misinformation around the LA fires