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Last week, CNN reported that “Tyson Foods, one of the biggest meat producers, is investing in insect protein.” Nothing about this headline is, strictly speaking, misleading: Tyson produces about a fifth of all American beef, pork, and chicken, and it has indeed acquired a minority stake in the Dutch insect protein startup Protix. But the black soldier flies Tyson has invested in will only be used in pet, livestock, and fish food — they’re not “going into human food,” CNN clarifies, adding ominously, “at this point.”
Still, “the climate people want you to eat bugs!” is a media trope that seems to resurface every couple of months, with bug-eating — or, more politely, “entomophagy” — floated as an opportunity to “save the world” if only Westerners could get over “the psychological ‘ick’ factor.” (Many other cultures and ethnic groups still practice entomophagy today.) Right-wing media, unsurprisingly, loves to play up the gross-out: “The ruling class really, really wants us to eat bugs,” conservative commentator Michael Knowles claimed last year.
The word “bug” usually means “a small insect,” and in that sense, most people in the United States do not electively eat bugs. But colloquially, “bug” is used to refer to any small gross vermin (someone once tried to tell me that a mouse is a bug), and Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary both allow for definitions that include “any of various small arthropods” to be considered bugs too. In which case, the ruling class eats bugs … all the time.
Crabs, lobsters, shrimp, prawns — have you ever really looked at those guys?
This is absolutely a bug.Getty Images
A whole plate of tasty bugs. Getty Images
Like crickets, grasshoppers, and spiders, shellfish are all arthropods, and if they creepy-crawlied their way through our living rooms, rather than out of sight in the ocean, we’d absolutely just refer to them as “bugs” and call the exterminator. In fact, even the human immune system gets confused and “fail[s] to differentiate between bugs of the land and the ocean,” McGill University reports. The 2% of people who have shellfish allergies are typically reacting to the protein tropomyosin, which is also found in “insects like crickets, fruit flies, grasshoppers, cockroaches, locusts, and dust mites.” (I’ve inadvertently tested this out on myself and, uh, can confirm the shared allergen to be true).
Pass the cocktail sauce.Getty Images
While headlines and right-wing commentators continue to scaremonger about “insect protein” creeping closer and closer to our dinner plates, the leap to mainstream bug consumption might not even be that far off because of the relative bugginess of our diets already. In the span of only about 200 years, for example, lobster went from being considered disgusting and barely edible by many Westerners to being one of the most popular last-meal requests of death row prisoners. Conceptually, we’ve already cleared the hurdle of eating animals with more than four legs and that look like they just arrived from outer space. The remaining barrier to bug-eating might be as flimsy as just that: the word bug.
So no, Tyson isn’t going to start sneaking insects into your hamburgers. But when you next walk past your grocery store’s tank of sea cockroaches, consider that if it weren’t for a little residual squeamishness, you could be eating delicious land plankton instead.
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The U.S. central bank left its interest rate target unchanged for the fifth time in a row.
Interest rate relief isn’t coming anytime soon for renewables. As widely expected, the Federal Reserve chose to keep rates unchanged on Wednesday, despite intense pressure from President Trump and two Republican Fed governors to lower rates.
The Fed maintained the benchmark short term rate at a range of 4.25% to 4.5%. During the press conference that followed the rate announcement, Fed Chair Jerome Powell gave no indication that the board will lower rates at the Fed’s next meeting in September, either. That’s contrary to Trump’s claims to reporters after the meeting. “We have made no decisions about September,” Powell said. “We don’t do that in advance. We’ll be taking that information into consideration and all the other information we get as we make our decision.”
High interest rates are particularly detrimental to renewable energy projects, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin has noted many times over. The long-term benefit of renewables, of course, is that the wind and the sun are free (and effectively inexhaustible) fuel sources. The short-term tradeoff, however, is that renewables are capital-intensive, requiring high upfront costs to get up and running. The highest proportion of the lifetime cost of a renewable energy generator, such as a wind turbine or a solar farm, is in building it. Elevated interest rates make it that much more difficult to lure investors and borrow the significant capital necessary to build out renewable infrastructure.
“The lack of interest rate relief means that construction loans, which are floating-rate loans tied to market conditions, will command higher interest rates and raise the total project costs for energy developers,” Advait Arun, senior associate of energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise and a Heatmap contributor, told me over email. “Developers rushing to build solar and wind energy between now and next summer to take advantage of tax credits will have to pay out these higher interest costs as they build.”
Though the Fed’s decision was unsurprising, the circumstances surrounding Wednesday’s meeting were out of the ordinary. For the first time since 1993, multiple Fed governors cast no votes on a rate decision. Christopher Waller and Michelle Bowman, both Republicans appointed by Trump, have voiced their preference for the Fed to lower rates by a quarter of a percentage point.
Additionally, Trump himself has been vocal about his views on chopping interest rates,— even going so far as to publicly threaten to fire Powell and appoint himself as head of the central bank, though he is legally unable to make good on his promise. Trump also recently criticized the Fed’s $2.5 billion building renovation project, singling out Powell for cost overruns. At the press conference on Wednesday, Powell emphasized the importance of the Fed’s independence from outside influence. “If you were not to have that, there’d be a great temptation of course to use interest rates to affect elections, for example,” he said.
While it may appease Trump, cutting interest rates won’t hold back the major energy price shocks that are very likely on their way. “Cutting rates sooner rather than later might make it easier for market actors to weather the coming shocks, but — crucially — they will not address the fiscal policy issues that created the shocks,” Arun noted. “However helpful rate cuts might be, they are not a solution to tariffs, tax credit uncertainty, and, soon, sharp spikes in electricity prices.”
The Department of Energy announced Wednesday that it was scrapping the loan guarantee.
The Department of Energy canceled a nearly $5 billion loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express, a transmission project intended to connect wind power in Kansas with demand in Illinois that would eventually stretch all the way to Indiana.
“After a thorough review of the project’s financials, DOE found that the conditions necessary to issue the guarantee are unlikely to be met and it is not critical for the federal government to have a role in supporting this project. To ensure more responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources, DOE has terminated its conditional commitment,” the Department of Energy said in a statement Wednesday.
The $11 billion project had been in the works for more than a decade and had won bipartisan approval from state governments and regulators across the Midwest. The conditional loan guarantee announced in November 2024 would have secured up to $4.9 billion in financing to fund phase one of the project, which would run from Ford County in Kansas to Callaway County in Missouri.
In response to a request for comment, an Invenergy spokesperson said, “While we are disappointed about the LPO loan guarantee, a privately financed Grain Belt Express transmission superhighway will advance President Trump’s agenda of American energy and technology dominance while delivering billions of dollars in energy cost savings, strengthening grid reliability and resiliency, and creating thousands of American jobs.”
The project had long been the object of ire from Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who recently stepped up his attacks in the hopes that a more friendly administration could help scrap the project. Two weeks ago, Hawley posted on X that he’d had “a great conversation today with @realDonaldTrump and Energy Secretary Chris Wright. Wright said he will be putting a stop to the Grain Belt Express green scam. It’s costing taxpayers BILLIONS! Thank you, President Trump.” The New York Times later reported that Trump had made a call to Wright on the issue with Hawley in the Oval Office.
Hawley celebrated the Grain Belt Express decision, writing on X, “It’s done. Thank you, President Trump,” and exulting in a separate post that “Department of Energy officially TERMINATES taxpayer funding for Green New Deal ‘grain belt express.’”
The senator had claimed that the plan would hurt Missouri farmers due to the use of eminent domain to acquire land for the project. In 2023, Hawley wrote a letter to Invenergy chief executive Michael Polsky claiming that “your company’s Grain Belt Express construction campaign has hurt Missouri’s farmers,” and that “they have lost the use of arable land, seen their property values decline, and been forced to operate under a cloud of uncertainty.”
Controversy over eminent domain and the use of agricultural land by transmission lines illustrates the difficulties in building the long-distance energy infrastructure necessary to decarbonize the grid.
Opposition to the project had been gestating for years but picked up steam in recent weeks. Earlier this month, Andrew Bailey, the Republican attorney general of Missouri, announced an investigation into the project. “This is a HUGE win for Missouri landowners and taxpayers who should not have to fund these green energy scams,” he wrote on X Wednesday following the DOE’s announcement.
As the project appeared to be more imminently imperiled, Invenergy scrambled to preserve its future, including making plans to connect gas to the transmission line. In a letter to Secretary of Energy Chris Wright written earlier this month, the Invenergy vice president overseeing the project wrote that the Grain Belt Express “has been the target of egregious politically motivated lawfare,” echoing language President Trump has used to describe his own travails.
If the author’s intent was to generate sympathy from the administration, it didn’t work. The end of the loan guarantee could be a death blow to the project, and will at the very least force Invenergy into a mad dash to try to match the lost capital.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include a comment from Invenergy.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the company’s expanding ambitions in a Threads post on Monday.
Meta is going big to power its ever-expanding artificial intelligence ambitions. It’s not just spending hundreds of millions of dollars luring engineers and executives from other top AI labs (including reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars for one engineer alone), but also investing hundreds of billions of dollars for data centers at the multi-gigawatt scale.
“Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online,” Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s Threads platform Monday, confirming a recent report by the semiconductor and artificial intelligence research service Semianalysis.
That first gigawatt-level project, Semianalysis wrote, will be a data center in New Albany, Ohio, called Prometheus, due to be online in 2026, Ashley Settle, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed to me. Ohio — and New Albany specifically — is the home of several large data center projects, including an existing Meta facility.
At the end of last year, Zuckerberg said that a datacenter project in Northeast Louisiana, now publicly known as Hyperion, would take 2 gigawatts of electricity; in his post on Monday, he said it could eventually be as large as 5 gigawatts. To get a sense of the scale we’re talking about, a new, large nuclear reactor has about a gigawatt of capacity, while a newly built natural gas plant could supply only around 500 megawatts.
As one could perhaps infer from the fact that their size is quoted in gigawatts instead of square feet or number of GPUs, whether or not these data centers get built comes down to the ability to power them.
Citing information from the natural gas company Williams, Semianalysis reported that Meta “went full Elon mode” for the New Albany datacenter, i.e. is installed its own natural gas infrastructure. Specifically, Williams is building two 200-megawatt facilities, according to the gas developer and Semianalysis, for the Ohio project. (Williams did not immediately respond to a Heatmap request for comment.)
Does this mean Meta is violating its commitments to reach net zero? While the data center buildout may make those goals more difficult to achieve, Meta is still investing in new renewables even as it’s also bringing new gas online. Late last month, the company announced that it was procuring almost 800 new megawatts of renewables from projects to be built by Invenergy, including over 400 megawatts of solar in Ohio, roughly matching the on-site generation from the Prometheus project.
But there’s more to a data center’s climate footprint than what a big tech company does — or does not — build on site.
The Louisiana project, Hyperion, will also be served by new natural gas and renewables added to the grid. Entergy, the local utility, has proposed 1.5 gigawatts of natural gas generation near the Meta site and over 2 gigawatts of new natural gas in total, with another plant in the southern part of the state to help balance the addition of significant new load. In December, when the data center was announced, Meta said that it planned to “bring at least 1,500 megawatts of new renewable energy to the grid.” Entergy did not immediately respond to a Heatmap request for comment on its plans for the Hyperion project.
“Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researcher. I'm looking forward to working with the top researchers to advance the frontier!” Zuckerberg wrote.