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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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From the Inflation Reduction Act to the Trump mega-law, here are 20 years of changes in one easy-to-read cheat sheet.
The landmark Republican reconciliation bill, which President Trump signed on July 4, has shattered the tax credits that served as the centerpiece of the country’s clean energy and climate policy.
Starting as soon as October, the law — which Trump has dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — will cut off incentives for Americans to install solar panels, purchase electric vehicles, or make energy efficiency improvements to their homes. It’s projected to raise household energy costs while increasing America’s carbon emissions by 190 million metric tons a year by 2030, according to the REPEAT Project at Princeton University.
The loss of these incentives will in part offset the continuation of tax cuts that largely benefit wealthy Americans. But the law as a whole won’t come close to paying for those cuts in their entirety. The legislation is expected to swell federal deficits by nearly $3.8 trillion over the next 10 years, according to the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank. This explosive deficit expansion could make it more difficult for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, possibly further constraining energy development.
President Trump has described the law as ending Democrats’ “green new scam,” and conservative lawmakers have celebrated the termination of Biden-era energy programs. The law is particularly devastating for programs encouraging electric vehicle sales, as well as wind and solar energy deployment.
But the act is more complicated than a simple repeal of Democrats’ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. In one case, Trump’s big law ends a federal energy incentive that has been in place, in some form, since the 1990s. In others, Republicans have tied up existing energy incentives with new restrictions, regulations, and red tape.
Some parts of the IRA have even remained intact. GOP lawmakers opted to preserve Biden’s big expansion of incentives to support nuclear energy and advanced geothermal development. That said, the Trump administration could still gut these tax credits by making them effectively unusable through executive action.
It can be confusing to keep the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s many changes to federal energy law in your head — even for experts. That’s why Heatmap News is excited to publish this new reference “cheat sheet”on the past, present, and future of federal energy tax credits, compiled by an all-star collection of analysts and researchers.
The summary takes each clean energy-related provision in the U.S. tax code and summarizes how (and whether) it existed in the 2000s and 2010s, how the Inflation Reduction Act changed it, and how the new OBBBA will change it again. It was compiled by Shane Londagin, a policy advisor at the think tank Third Way; Luke Bassett, a former Biden administration official and Senate Energy committee staffer; Avi Zevin, a former Biden official and a partner at the energy law firm Roselle LLP; and researchers at the REPEAT Project, an energy analysis group at Princeton University. (Note that I co-host the podcast Shift Key with Jesse Jenkins, who leads the REPEAT Project.)
You can find the full summary below.
On presidential proclamations, Pentagon pollution, and cancelled transmission
Current conditions: Over 1,000 people have evacuated the region of Seosan in South Korea following its heaviest rainfall since 1904 • Forecasts now point toward the “surprising return” of La Niña this fall • More than 30 million people from Louisiana through the Appalachians are at risk of flash flooding this weekend due to an incoming tropical rainstorm.
The Hugh L. Spurlock Generating Station in Maysville, Kentucky.Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
President Trump on Thursday signed four proclamations allowing certain highly polluting industries to bypass regulations established by the Biden administration. In addition to chemical manufacturers that help produce semiconductors and medical device sterilizers, the proclamations singled out coal-fired power plants and taconite iron ore processing facilities for two years of exemptions. Taconite is a low-grade iron ore primarily mined in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and northern Minnesota, which is then processed for use in the production of iron and steel. Trump justified the move by arguing that compliance with the current emissions rule for coal-fired power plants raises the “unacceptable risk” of shutdowns, “eliminating thousands of jobs, placing our electrical grid at risk, and threatening broader, harmful economic and energy security effects,” while the iron processing emissions rule “risks forcing shutdowns, reducing domestic production, and undermining the nation’s ability to supply steel for defense, energy, and critical manufacturing.”
The proclamations allow industries to comply with the Environmental Protection Agency standards that predate former President Joe Biden’s tenure. Trump justified the pause by claiming the former administration had mandated compliance with “standards that rely on emissions-control technologies that have not been demonstrated to work.” Researchers have previously found that air pollutants related to coal power plants cause nearly 3,000 attributable deaths per year. Taconite iron ore processing facilities produce harmful acid gases, including hydrogen chloride and hydrogen fluoride, as well as mercury, which have been linked to numerous adverse health effects.
Separately, the House passed Trump’s $9 billion rescissions package late last night, which includes cuts to international climate, energy, and environmental programs like the Clean Technology Fund. Republicans Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Mike Turner of Ohio joined Democrats in objecting to the bill. Trump is expected to sign the package Friday. An additional rescissions package is expected “soon.”
The Pentagon’s 2026 budget will enable the Department of Defense’s planet-warming emissions to grow by an additional 26 megatons, or about the equivalent of 68 gas power plants, a new analysis by the Climate and Community Institute found. The U.S. military was already the single largest institutional polluter in the world due to its “vast global operations — from jet fuel consumption and overseas deployments to domestic base maintenance,” as well as its manufacturing of weapons and vehicles, the think tank notes. With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Pentagon’s budget will exceed $1 trillion in 2026, representing a 17% increase over 2024. Its emissions, in turn, could grow to the point that if the DOD were its own country, it’d be the 38th largest polluter in the world, producing more CO2 emissions than the Netherlands, Bangladesh, or Venezuela. But “the Pentagon’s true climate impact will almost certainly be worse” than what the researchers found, The Guardian notes, “as the calculation does not include emissions generated from future supplemental funding such as the billions of dollars appropriated separately for military equipment for Israel and Ukraine in recent years.”
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New York’s Public Service Commission decided Thursday against moving forward with a major transmission project that would have had the capacity to deliver at least 4,770 megawatts of offshore wind power to New York City by the early 2030s. The commissioners said they were unable to justify “charging ratepayers for the multibillion-dollar project when feds are stymying” offshore wind, New York Focus’ Colin Kinniburgh reported on Bluesky. “We will continue to press forward regarding infrastructure needs for offshore wind in the future once the federal government resumes leasing and permitting for wind energy generation projects,” PSC chair Rory Christian said.
The canceled Public Policy Transmission Need determination was not specific to a particular offshore wind project, but rather was intended to match New York’s general offshore wind ambitions when it was approved in 2023. But as Heatmap has previously reported, Trump’s crusade against offshore wind has been a “worst case scenario” for the industry since day one, and, per ABC News 10, effectively “eliminates any reason for building new power lines in the first place.”
Microsoft has inked a deal to purchase 4.9 million metric tons of durable carbon dioxide removal from Vaulted Deep, a waste management startup, for an undisclosed amount. The companies boasted that the deal, which runs through 2038, represents “the second-largest carbon removal deal to date.” Vaulted Deep, an Xprize Carbon runner-up, diverts organic waste from landfills and incinerators by injecting it into wells thousands of feet underground using fracking technologies, which it says ensures over 1,000 years of durability, TechCrunch reports. Since Vaulted’s launch in the summer of 2023, the Houston-based company has removed 18,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide. Microsoft, meanwhile, has slipped behind its 2020 goal to remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it generates by the end of the decade due to its rush to build out data centers.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s reorganization and downsizing are set to continue, with the agency offering another round of buyouts and early retirements to staffers in offices it aims to restructure, Politico reports. Among the affected offices are the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, which the EPA said it seeks to tweak to “better address pollution problems that impact American communities by re-aligning enforcement with the law to deliver economic prosperity and ensure compliance with agency regulations,” as well as the Office of Land and Emergency Management, which works on Superfund and disaster response issues. The Office of Research and Development, the Office of Mission Support, and the Office of the Chief Financial Officer are also affected.
Separately, in a preliminary decision earlier this week, the agency moved to block the state of Colorado from closing its six remaining coal-fired power plants by 2031. Colorado was attempting to codify the retirement dates in its Regional Haze Plan, which is typically used to protect the air quality of federal wilderness and national parks; however, the EPA rejected the proposal, according to CPR News. “We believe that the Clean Air Act does not give anybody the authority to shut down coal generation plants against the owner’s will,” Cyrus Western, the administrator of EPA Region 8, said. Jeremy Nichols, a senior advocate for the Center of Biological Diversity’s environmental health program, claimed the EPA’s move shows the limits of what climate-conscious states can do on their own. “We may have state rules, but they won't be federally approved,” Nichols told CPR.
“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.” —Heatmap Pro’s Charlie Clynes, in conversation with Jael Holzman about his new project tracking all of the nation’s county-level restrictions on renewable energy.
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.