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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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A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.
A conversation with Jeff Seidman, a professor at Vassar College.
This week’s conversation is with Jeff Seidman, a professor at Vassar College and an avid Heatmap News reader. Last week Seidman claimed a personal victory: he successfully led an effort to overturn a moratorium on battery storage development in the town of Poughkeepsie in Hudson Valley, New York. After reading a thread about the effort he posted to BlueSky, I reached out to chat about what my readers might learn from his endeavors – and how they could replicate them, should they want to.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So how did you decide to fight against a battery storage ban? What was your process here?
First of all, I’m not a professional in this area, but I’ve been learning about climate stuff for a long time. I date my education back to when Vox started and I read my first David Roberts column there. But I just happened to hear from someone I know that in the town of Poughkeepsie where I live that a developer made a proposal and local residents who live nearby were up in arms about it. And I heard the town was about to impose a moratorium – this was back in March 2024.
I actually personally know some of the town board members, and we have a Democratic majority who absolutely care about climate change but didn’t particularly know that battery power was important to the energy transition and decarbonizing the grid. So I organized five or six people to go to the town board meeting, wrote a letter, and in that initial board meeting we characterized the reason we were there as being about climate.
There were a lot more people on the other side. They were very angry. So we said do a short moratorium because every day we’re delaying this, peaker plants nearby are spewing SOx and NOx into the air. The status quo has a cost.
But then the other side, they were clearly triggered by the climate stuff and said renewables make the grid more expensive. We’d clearly pressed a button in the culture wars. And then we realized the mistake, because we lost that one.
When you were approaching getting this overturned, what considerations did you make?
After that initial meeting and seeing how those mentions of climate or even renewables had triggered a portion of the board, and the audience, I really course-corrected. I realized we had to make this all about local benefits. So that’s what I tried to do going forward.
Even for people who were climate concerned, it was really clear that what they perceived as a present risk in their neighborhood was way more salient than an abstract thing like contributing to the fight against climate change globally. So even for people potentially on your side, you have to make it about local benefits.
The other thing we did was we called a two-hour forum for the county supervisors and mayor’s association because we realized talking to them in a polarized environment was not a way to have a conversation. I spoke and so did Paul Rogers, a former New York Fire Department lieutenant who is now in fire safety consulting – he sounds like a firefighter and can speak with a credibility that I could never match in front of, for example, local fire chiefs. Winning them over was important. And we took more than an hour of questions.
Stage one was to convince them of why batteries were important. Stage two was to show that a large number of constituents were angry about the moratorium, but that Republicans were putting on a unified front against this – an issue to win votes. So there was a period where Democrats on the Poughkeepsie board were convinced but it was politically difficult for them.
But stage three became helping them do the right thing, even with the risk of there being a political cost.
What would you say to those in other parts of the country who want to do what you did?
If possible, get a zoning law in place before there is any developer with a specific proposal because all of the opposition to this project came from people directly next to the proposed project. Get in there before there’s a specific project site.
Even if you’re in a very blue city, don’t make it primarily about climate. Abstract climate loses to non-abstract perceived risk every time. Make it about local benefits.
To the extent you can, read and educate yourself about what good batteries provide to the grid. There’s a lot of local economic benefits there.
I am trying to put together some of the resources I used into a packet, a tool kit, so that people elsewhere can learn from it and draw from those resources.
Also, the more you know, the better. All those years of reading David Roberts and Heatmap gave me enough knowledge to actually answer questions here. It works especially when you have board members who may be sympathetic but need to be reassured.