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At a triumphant bill-signing earlier this month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sounded less like the leader of the nation’s third largest state and more like the host of a QAnon podcast. “Today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” he said. DeSantis was there to trumpet a new state law that outlaws the sale of lab-grown meat, also known as cultivated meat.
One might reasonably ask why DeSantis and his Republican allies care about lab-grown meat at all. The technology — in which cells from animals are fed with nutrients and grown until they eventually produce something resembling a cut of actual meat — is still in the experimental stage, and it could be decades before companies are able to produce it on an industrial scale, if ever. So why bother outlawing it?
But DeSantis is not alone. Legislators in Alabama, apparently satisfied that they have solved all the state’s other problems, rushed to pass a similar law, which Gov. Kay Ivey signed on May 7. Similar measures have also been introduced in Arizona, Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia. And it isn’t just Republicans; a few Democrats looking to fortify their carnivorous bona fides have also attacked cultivated meat. Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senator John Fetterman applauded DeSantis’ action, saying he “would never serve that slop to my kids,” and Montana Democrat Sen. Jon Tester — who lost three fingers in a meat grinder as a boy — introduced a bill to ban cultivated meat from school lunches.
So far, Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, has not weighed in on lab-grown meat. But given his taste for outré conspiracy theories and niche culture war issues, no one would be surprised if he began railing against it in his rallies and on Truth Social.
This is fundamentally a fake issue: Not only is there no place you can buy lab-grown meat in Florida or Alabama, there’s no place you can buy it anywhere in the country. Last year the Department of Agriculture gave approval for lab-grown chicken to be sold, and not long after it was featured as a special menu item at the upscale restaurants Bar Crenn in San Francisco and José Andrés’ China Chilcano in Washington (reviews were mixed but mostly positive). But those experiments have ended, and it could be a while before it’s available again even in a restaurant. The technological challenges in recreating both the taste and texture of meat have proven greater than many anticipated; the problem may not be insurmountable, but it hasn’t been surmounted yet, at least not at scale.
But it’s just the kind of issue Republicans (and Democrats in swing states) love, one that casts them as the defenders of the honest, traditional, and manly, while mainstream Democrats are supposedly the advocates of weird and vaguely effeminate ideas. Why would you let some egghead scientist make you a steak? Real men want to know that their meat was killed in the most unpleasant circumstances possible.
Then there’s the climate angle: While Republicans may not exactly be pro-climate change in their rhetoric (policy choices are another matter), they are eagerly anti-anti-climate change, in the same way they’re anti-anti-racism. Just as they wage the culture war by opposing efforts to undo racism, they can do the same by opposing efforts to address climate change, shifting the conversation from the real problem onto the supposedly oppressive efforts to solve it.
And solving climate change is one of the rationales for cultivated meat that has helped attract venture capital to the startups trying to make it a reality. Global demand for meat has risen steadily for decades, and will continue to grow as incomes increase (generally speaking, the wealthier a country is, the more meat its citizens consume). In 2022, humans slaughtered 300 million cows, 1.5 billion pigs, and an incredible 75 billion chickens. Advocates of lab-grown meat sell it as a way to mitigate both that almost unfathomable carnage, with all its attendant animal suffering, and the enormous climate effects of meat production.
And unlike plant-based meat substitutes, lab-grown meat would satisfy the human desire to consume genuine animal flesh. There’s almost certainly a limit on how many people will want to eat Impossible Burgers and “Chick-n” tenders, no matter how good they taste. But since cultivated meat is still meat, advocates say any carnivore should be happy to bite into a lab-grown steak — which is why it’s so important for certain politicians to convince them that doing so would make them some kind of hippie.
I’d submit that politicians like DeSantis don’t actually care whether anyone sells or eats a cultivated pork loin. The point is to convince people that they are under siege from the powerful forces of wokeness, who want to steal your gustatory freedom after they confiscate your guns and force your children to change genders.
The invocation of bug-eating is a key tell. When DeSantis tells people that “the global elite” wants to force you to eat bugs, he’s referencing a conspiracy theory that the average person may not have heard of but is widespread on the right. Bill Gates and other leftist puppetmasters, the theory goes, have a plan to enslave us all and force us to eat bugs for our protein.
One of the benefits of associating bug-eating with a different food you want to discredit is that it produces feelings of disgust, which social psychologists have long known are more powerful for conservatives than for liberals. As Tucker Carlson once said, “Eating insects is repulsive and un-American. And of course, therefore, in the eyes of the left, it must be awesome.”
Here’s the counterpoint, thought: One might also think that this is an issue of basic liberty. Cultivated meat might or might not become widely consumed as an alternate food source, but if it does, as long as it’s safe you should be able to eat it if you want to (and the same ought to go for bugs). We can say with a fair bit of confidence that there will still be old-fashioned lamb chops and roast chickens available for all of our lifetimes.
But as an opportunity to create another front in the culture war and remind voters that politics is all about identity, it’s too good for Republicans in Florida and Alabama, and maybe other states to come, to pass up. If there’s a woke hippie conspiracy afoot to rob you of your testosterone and make you slave to the global elite, they want voters to know they’ll be on it. Even if it’s imaginary.
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.