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:
Money is pouring in — and deadlines are approaching fast.
There’s no quick fix for decarbonizing medium- and long-distance flights. Batteries are typically too heavy, and hydrogen fuel takes up too much space to offer a practical solution, leaving sustainable aviation fuels made from plants and other biomass, recycled carbon, or captured carbon as the primary options. Traditionally, this fuel is much more expensive — and the feedstocks for it much more scarce — than conventional petroleum-based jet fuel. But companies are now racing to overcome these barriers, as recent months have seen backers throw hundreds of millions behind a series of emergent, but promising solutions.
Today, most SAF is made of feedstocks such as used cooking oil and animal fats, from companies such as Neste and Montana Renewables. But this supply is limited by, well, the amount of cooking oil or fats restaurants and food processing facilities generate, and is thus projected to meet only about 10% of total SAF demand by 2050, according to a 2022 report by the Mission Possible Partnership. Beyond that, companies would have to start growing new crops just to make into fuel.
That creates an opportunity for developers of second-generation SAF technologies, which involve making jet fuel out of captured carbon or alternate biomass sources, such as forest waste. These methods are not yet mature enough to make a significant dent in 2030 targets, such as the EU's mandate to use 6% SAF and the U.S. government’s goal of producing 3 billion gallons of SAF per year domestically. But this tech will need to be a big part of the equation in order to meet the aviation sector’s overall goal of net zero emissions by 2050, as well as the EU’s sustainable fuels mandate, which increases to 20% by 2035 and 70% by 2050 for all flights originating in the bloc.
“That’s going to be a massive jump because currently, SAF uptake is about 0.2% of fuel,” Nicole Cerulli, a research associate for transportation and logistics at the market research firm Cleantech Group, told me. The head of the airline industry’s trade association, Willie Walsh, said in December at a media day event, "We’re not making as much progress as we’d hoped for, and we’re certainly not making as much progress as we need.” While global SAF production doubled to 1 million metric tons in 2024, that fell far below the trade group’s projection of 1.5 million metric tons, made at the end of 2023.
Producing SAF requires making hydrocarbons that mirror those used in traditional jet fuel. We know how to do that, but the processes required — electrolysis, gasification, and the series of chemical reactions known as Fischer-Tropsch synthesis — are energy intensive. So finding a way to power all of this sustainably while simultaneously scaling to meet demand is a challenging and expensive task.
Aamir Shams, a senior associate at the energy think tank RMI whose work focuses on driving demand for SAF, told me that while sustainable fuel is undeniably more expensive than traditional fuel, airlines and corporations have so far been willing to pay the premium. “We feel that the lag is happening because we just don’t have the fuel today,” Shams said. “Whatever fuel shows up, it just flies off the shelves.”
Twelve, a Washington-based SAF producer, thinks its e-fuels can help make a dent. The company is looking to produce jet fuel initially by recycling the CO2 emitted from the ethanol, pulp, and paper industries. In September, the company raised $645 million to complete the buildout of its inaugural SAF facility in Washington state, support the development of future plants, and pursue further R&D. The funding includes $400 million in project equity from the impact fund TPG Rise Climate, $200 million in Series C financing led by TPG, Capricorn Investment Group, and Pulse Fund, and $45 million in loans. The company has also previously partnered with the Air Force to explore producing fuel on demand in hard to reach areas.
Nicholas Flanders, Twelve’s CEO, told me that the company is starting with ethanol, pulp, and paper because the CO2 emissions from these facilities are relatively concentrated and thus cheaper to capture. And unlike, say, coal power plants, these industries aren’t going anywhere fast, making them a steady source of carbon. To turn the captured CO2 into sustainable fuel, the company needs just one more input — water. Renewable-powered electrolyzers then break apart the CO2 and H2O into their constituent parts, and the resulting carbon monoxide and hydrogen are combined to create a syngas. That then gets put through a chemical reaction known as “Fischer-Tropsch synthesis,” where the syngas reacts with catalysts to form hydrocarbons, which are then processed into sustainable jet fuel and ultimately blended with conventional fuel.
Twelve says its proprietary CO2 electrolyzer can break apart CO2 at much lower temperatures than would typically be required for this molecule, which simplifies the whole process, making it easier to ramp the electrolyzers up and down to match the output of intermittent renewables. (How does it do this? The company didn’t respond when I asked.) Twelve’s first plant, which sources carbon from a nearby ethanol facility, is set to come online next year, producing 50,000 gallons of SAF annually once it’s fully scaled, with electrolyzers that will run on hydropower.
While Europe may have stricter, actually enforceable SAF requirements than the U.S., Flanders told me there’s a lot of promise in domestic production. “I think the U.S. has an exciting combination of relatively low-cost green electricity, lots of biogenic CO2 sources, a lot of demand for the product we’re making, and then the inflation Reduction Act and state level incentives can further enhance the economics.” Currently, the IRA provides SAF producers with a baseline $1.25 tax credit per gallon produced, which gradually increases the greener the fuel gets. Of course, whether or not the next Congress will rescind this is anybody’s guess.
Down the line, incentives and mandates will end up mattering a whole lot. Making SAF simply costs a whole lot more than producing jet fuel the standard way, by refining crude oil. But in the meantime, Twelve is setting up cost-sharing partnerships between airlines that want to reduce their direct emissions (scope 1) and large corporations that want to reduce their indirect emissions (scope 3), which include employee business travel.
For example, Twelve has offtake agreements with Seattle-based Alaska Airlines and Microsoft for the fuel produced at its initial Washington plant. Microsoft, which aims to reduce emissions from its employees’ flights, will essentially cover the cost premium associated with Twelve’s more expensive SAF fuel, making it cost-effective for Alaska to use in its fleet. Twelve has a similar agreement with Boston Consulting Group and an unnamed airline
Eventually, Flanders told me, the company expects to source carbon via direct air capture, but doing so today would be prohibitively expensive. “If there were a customer who wanted to pay the additional amount to use DAC today, we'd be very happy to do that,” Flanders said. “But our perspective is it will maybe be another decade before that cost starts to converge.”
No sustainable fuel is even close to cost parity yet — Cerulli told me that it generally comes with a “roughly 250% to over 800%” cost premium over conventional jet fuel. So while voluntary uptake by companies such as Microsoft and BCG are helping drive the emergent market today, that won’t be near enough to decarbonize the industry. “At the simplest level, the cost of not using SAF has to be higher than using it,” Cerulli told me.
Pathway Energy thinks that by incorporating carbon sequestration into its process, it can help the world get there. The sustainable fuels company, which emerged from stealth just last month, is pursuing what CEO Steve Roberts told me is “probably the most cost-efficient long-term pathway from a decarbonization perspective.” The company is building a $2 billion SAF plant in Port Arthur, Texas designed to produce about 30 million gallons of jet fuel annually — enough to power about 5,000 carbon-neutral 10-hour flights — while also permanently sequestering more than 1.9 million tons of CO2.
Pathway, a subsidiary of the investment and advisory firm Nexus Holdings, has partnered with the UK-based renewable energy company Drax, which will supply the company with 1 million metric tons of wood pellets, to be turned into fuel using a series of well-established technologies. The first step is to gasify the biomass by heating the pellets to high temperatures in the absence of oxygen to produce a syngas. Then, just as Twelve does, it puts the syngas through the Fischer-Tropsch process to form the hydrocarbons that become SAF.
The competitive advantage here is capturing the emissions from the fuel production process itself and storing them permanently underground. Since Pathway is burying CO2 that’s already been captured by the trees from which the wood pellets come, that would make Pathway’s SAF carbon-negative, in theory, while the best Twelve and similar companies can hope for is carbon neutrality, assuming all of their captured carbon is used to produce fuel.
The choice of Drax as a feedstock partner is not without controversy, however, as the BBC revealed that the company sources much of its wood from rare old-growth forests. Though this is technically legal, it’s also ecologically disruptive. Roberts told me Drax’s sourcing methodologies have been verified by third parties, and Pathway isn’t concerned. “I don't think any of that controversy has yielded any actually significant changes to their sourcing program at all, because we believe that they're compliant,” Roberts told me. “We are 100% certain that they’re meeting all the standards and expectations.”
Pathway has big growth plans, which depend on the legitimacy of its sustainability cred. Beyond the Port Arthur facility, which Roberts told me will begin production by the end of 2029 or early 2030, the company has a pipeline of additional facilities along the Gulf Coast in the works. It also has global ambitions. “When you have a fuel that is this negative, it really opens up a global market, because you can transport fuel out of Texas, whether that be into the EU, Africa, Asia, wherever it may be,” Roberts said, explaining that even substantial transportation-related emissions would be offset by the carbon-negativity of the fuel.
But alternative feedstocks such as forestry biomass are finite resources, too. That’s why many experts think that within the SAF sector, e-fuels such as Twelve’s that could one day source carbon via direct air capture and then electrolyze it have the greatest potential for growth. “It’s extremely dependent on getting sustainable CO2 and cheap electricity prices so that you can make cheap green hydrogen,” Shams told me. “But theoretically, it is unlimited in terms of what your total cap on production would be.”
In the meantime, airlines are focused on making their planes and engines more aerodynamic and efficient so that they don’t consume as much fuel in the first place. They’re also exploring other technical pathways to decarbonization — because after all, SAF will only be a portion of the solution, as many short and medium-length flights could likely be powered by batteries or hydrogen fuel. RMI forecasts that by 2050, 45% of global emissions reduction in the aviation sector will come from improvements in fuel efficiency, 37% will be due to SAF deployment, 7% will come from hydrogen, and 3.5% will come from electrification.
If you did the mental math, you’ll notice these numbers add up to 92.5% — not 100%. “What we have done is, let's look at what we are actually doing today and for the past three, four, five years, and let's see if we get to net zero or not. And the answer is, no. We don't get to net zero by 2050,” Shams told me. And while getting to 92.5% is nothing to scoff at, that means that the aviation sector would still be emitting about 700 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent by that time.
So what’s to be done? “The financing sector needs to step up its game and take a little bit more of a risk than they are used to,” Shams told me, noting that one of RMI’s partners, the Mission Possible Partnership, estimates that getting the aviation sector to net zero will require an investment of around $170 billion per year, a total of about $4.5 trillion by 2050. These numbers take a variety of factors into account beyond strictly SAF production, such as airport infrastructure for new fuels, building out direct air capture plants, etc.
But any way you cut it, it’s a boatload of money that certainly puts Pathway’s $2 billion SAF facility and Twelve’s $645 million funding round in perspective. And it’s far from certain that we can get there. “Increasingly, that goal of the 2050 net-zero target looks really difficult to achieve,” Shams put it simply. “Commitments are always going up, but more can be done.”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.
President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.
Republican candidates won in two House races in Florida on Tuesday, one of which was looking surprisingly tight going into the special elections. The victories by Jimmy Patronis in Florida’s First District and Randy Fine in the Sixth District bolster the party’s slim House majority and could spell trouble for the Inflation Reduction Act as the House Ways and Means Committee mulls which programs to cut to pay for tax cuts. But the result in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election was less rosy for Republicans. Liberal Judge Susan Crawford defeated conservative Brad Schimel despite Schimel’s huge financial backing from Tesla CEO and Trump adviser Elon Musk, who poured some $15 million into the competition. The outcome “could tarnish the billionaire’s political clout and trigger worry for some Republicans about how voters are processing the opening months of Trump’s new administration,” as The Wall Street Journalexplained.
The Trump administration announced mass layoffs across the Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday, part of a larger effort to reduce the agency’s workforce by 25%. The cuts included key staffers with the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which has existed since 1981 and helps some 6.7 million low-income households pay their energy bills. A 2022 white paper calls LIHEAP “one of the most critical components of the social safety net.” The move comes at a time when many U.S. utilities are preparing to raise their energy prices to account for higher costs for materials, labor, and grid upgrades. In a scathing letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy. Jr., Senate Energy and Commerce Democrats call the workforce cuts “reckless” and demand detailed explanations for why roles have been eliminated.
Energy storage startup Energy Vault on Wednesday announced it had closed $28 million in project financing for a hybrid green hydrogen microgrid energy storage facility in California. The firm says its Calistoga Resiliency Center, deployed in partnership with utility company Pacific Gas & Electric, is “specifically designed to address power resiliency given the growing challenges of wildfire risk in California.” The zero-emission system will feature advanced hydrogen fuel cells that are integrated with lithium-ion batteries, which can provide about 48 hours of back-up power via a microgrid to the city of Calistoga during wildfire-related power shutoffs. The site is expected to be commercially operational in the second quarter of 2025.
“The CRC serves as a model for Energy Vault’s future utility-scale hybrid microgrid storage system deployments as the only existing zero-emission solution to address [power shutoff] events that is scalable and ready to be deployed across California and other regions prone to wildfires,” the company said in a press release. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last fall, PG&E has become an important partner for climate and energy tech companies with the potential to reduce risk and improve service on the grid.
China will finalize its first-ever sale of a green sovereign bond Wednesday. The country is expected to issue the bond on the London Stock Exchange and has reportedly received more than $5 billion in bids. “It’s no coincidence that China has chosen to list its debut green bond in London, given European investors’ continued strong demand for environmental products,” Bloombergnoted. Green bonds are investment vehicles that raise money exclusively for projects that benefit the climate or environment. China’s finance ministry wants the bond to “attract international funds to support domestic green and low-carbon development,” and specifically climate change mitigation and adaptation, nature conservation and biodiversity, and pollution prevention and control. Some of the money raised might also go toward China’s EV charging infrastructure, according toReuters.
GE Vernova has now produced more than half of the turbines needed for the SunZia Wind project in New Mexico. When completed in 2026, the 2.4 gigawatt project will be the largest onshore wind farm in the Western Hemisphere.
Rob and Jesse catch up on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with former White House official Kristina Costa.
The Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $27 billion to build a new kind of climate institution in America — a network of national green banks that could lend money to companies, states, schools, churches, and housing developers to build more clean energy and deploy more next-generation energy technology around the country.
It was an innovative and untested program. And the Trump administration is desperately trying to block it. Since February, Trump’s criminal justice appointees — led by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — have tried to use criminal law to undo the program. After failing to get the FBI and Justice Department to block the flow of funds, Trump officials have successfully gotten the program’s bank partner to freeze relevant money. The new green banks have sued to gain access to the money.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk with Kristina Costa, who has been tracking the effort to bankrupt the green banks. Costa helped lead the Inflation Reduction Act’s implementation in the White House from 2022 to 2025 — and is a previous Shift Key guest. She joins us to discuss how Trump is weaponing criminal law to block a climate program, whether there’s any precedent for his actions, and what could come next in the legal battle. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: There's kind of two lines you hear from the Trump administration about this, two claims made by the Trump administration about the reason for these seizures, and I just wanna talk about them briefly because this is an unprecedented action. We should look at why the government has claimed that it needs to take this unprecedented action.
The first has to do with this video made by Project Veritas, a kind of conservative media organization …
Kristina Costa: A hit squad.
Meyer: A hit squad that recorded, unwittingly, an EPA official who described the EPA’s actions during December 2024, between the loss of the election and the inauguration, as “throwing gold bars off the Titanic.” That the agency was so eager and desperate to spend as much of the IRA down as it could before the Trump administration took office that it was like they were throwing gold bars off the Titanic — you know, a sinking ship.
The EPA administrator has fixated on this line and described it as waste and self-dealing, suggesting reckless financial mismanagement, blatant conflicts of interest, astonishing sums of tax dollars awarded to unqualified recipients and severe deficiencies of regulatory oversight.
You were involved in setting up the IRA. I wonder, first of all, just how do you reflect on this episode? And second of all, was the Biden administration doing the proverbial version of throwing gold bars off the Titanic during the post-election period?
Costa: Yeah, so I mean, it falls apart as any sort of quote-unquote evidence in what's happening with the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund if you just believe in the linear nature of time. So, as I said, we announced EPA made the selections in April of 2024. The funds were fully obligated in August of 2024. Grantees were starting to make announcements about investments in October of 2024 — all dates which precede election day by weeks to months. And so it is just a complete fabrication on the part of Lee Zeldin that there was any sort of inappropriate action on the part of the Biden EPA or any of the other agencies in doing what Congress directed us to do, which was to award and obligate funds to recipients consistent with the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act that authorized and appropriated funds for the programs.
We had also — and I think I might have said this when I was with you guys in December — one of the first things that we did, from the White House implementation team, was to meet with all of our grant agencies and, in September and October of 2022, set targets for them for how much funding we wanted them to try to award and obligate by the end of the administration. And we set a goal, basically, that we would be aiming to have at least 80% of the available funds obligated by the end of 2024. And we hit that. And so the idea that there was some massive acceleration post-election — like, were there some contracts that the agencies obligated in December and January that, in the event of a Kamala Harris administration, they would've maybe obligated in February and March instead? Sure. I'm not going to say otherwise, but those grants had been made already. There wasn't this rush of actual decision-making.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
That trust was hard won — and it won’t be easily regained.
Spring — as even children know — is the season for planting. But across the country, tens of thousands of farmers who bought seeds with the help of Department of Agriculture grants are hesitating over whether or not to put them in the ground. Their contractually owed payments, processed through programs created under the Biden administration, have been put on pause by the Trump administration, leaving the farmers anxious about how to proceed.
Also anxious are staff at the sustainability and conservation-focused nonprofits that provided technical support and enrollment assistance for these grants, many of whom worry that the USDA grant pause could undermine the trust they’ve carefully built with farmers over years of outreach. Though enrollment in the programs was voluntary, the grants were formulated to serve the Biden administration’s Justice40 priority of investing in underserved and minority communities. Those same communities tend to be wary of collaborating with the USDA due to its history of overlooking small and family farms, which make up 90% of the farms in the U.S. and are more likely to be women- or minority-owned, in favor of large operations, as well as its pattern of disproportionately denying loans to Black farmers. The Biden administration had counted on nonprofits to leverage their relationships with farmers in order to bring them onto the projects.
“This was an opportunity to repair some of that trust, through this project,” Emily Moose, the executive director of the sustainable agriculture organization A Greener World, told me in an email. Moore and her teammates spent years recruiting farmers from the group’s Oregon community, and eventually got 77 of them to sign up to create certified regenerative farm management plans. A Greener World was notified in January that its reimbursements were being suspended, and now risks losing $10,000 in incentive payments, meaning the farmers in the program “are now having to weigh paying for certification out of pocket or dropping the certification process entirely and losing market opportunities.”
Nicole Delcogliano, director of programs at the Organic Growers School, a farmer training organization in North Carolina, and a small farmer herself had similar hopes for a grant the group received to help mentor and educate early-stage farmers. The department had “finally started to build back a little bit of trust,” she told me. With the funding pause, she said, “I think that is going to be lost.”
Affected grants include billions set aside for the USDA through the Inflation Reduction Act for soil and water conservation projects, as well as more than $820 million earmarked for the Rural Energy for America Program, or REAP, which incentivized agricultural producers to make energy-efficiency improvements on their land. Grants issued through the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program for farm innovations that have greenhouse gas and carbon sequestration benefits — funded through the USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation, a Dust Bowl-era entity more typically leveraged to protect farm income and prices during disasters — are also on pause. Original plans for the program under Biden would have seen it eventually scaled to 60,000 farms, reducing an estimated 50,000 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent.
Though the Trump administration eventually released about 1% of the IRA-related USDA grant money in late February, much remains out of reach, with no timeline for payout. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition assumes that the “majority” of the $2.3 billion allocated to farmers on IRA-funded contracts is “likely still in USDA’s coffers.” Additionally, more than half of the $3.1 billion allocated to the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program had not yet been paid out by the end of February, according to The Hagstrom Report, an agricultural news service. (The Trump administration has said it would reconsider REAP grants if applicants rewrite them to “remove harmful [diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility] and far-left climate features.”)
All of the affected grant programs work on a reimbursement basis, with the farmers incurring costs upfront protected, in theory, by a contractual guarantee that the government will pay them back. Individual farmers aren’t usually the direct beneficiaries of USDA grants, however. The USDA more commonly awards a grant to nonprofit organizations that, in turn, provide financial and technical support to farmers making sustainable transitions. Many of the nonprofits are now having to furlough or lay off staff. Meanwhile, farmers are still seeking their reimbursements, but there’s no funding there to pay them.
Hannah Smith-Brubaker, the executive director of Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit that was awarded a Climate Smart Commodities grant and a Farm and Food Workers Relief from the USDA, is planning to furlough 60 people — most of her team — due to the pause. Another project director at a Mid-Atlantic sustainability nonprofit told me his organization has “been lending cash” from their own books since January 27, when the pause was announced, and that he anticipated being laid off shortly after our call.
But while the nonprofits are certainly hurting, the farmers are the ones stuck with the final bill. In addition to the USDA’s history of discriminating against Black farmers, many who manage smaller acreages report feeling overlooked by the federal government in favor of powerful agro-business conglomerates. More than 70% of farmers under age 40 reported being unfamiliar with USDA programs that could help them, and nearly half said they’d never received support from the agency, according to polling by the National Young Farmers Coalition published in 2022.
“In the last administration, there was recognition that they didn’t have the trust of a lot of farmers who historically haven't been served, or been underserved, by USDA,” Smith-Brubaker said. With programs like the Climate-Smart Commodities grant, the Biden administration “asked us to leverage the trust that we already have with farmers — to ask them to trust us to enter into this program.”
It worked: Many of the more than 30,000 contracted farms are already a year or two into multi-year projects with nonprofits designed to improve soil health, plant cover crops, or improve farm efficiency. That means they’ve already hired the extra staff for the projects, placed orders for new equipment, and set aside precious land for soil-enrichment projects.
But with no word on the future of their funding, some are now hesitating over whether to spend more money out of pocket on those projects if the government might not uphold its end of the deal. The pause has led many of the farmers I spoke with to reevaluate their trust in future USDA funding. “It’s unsettling because you’re like, ‘Well, if I implement the practices I’m supposed to, but then I don’t get that reimbursement sometime in 2025, what does that look like?’” said Delcogliano, who received one Conservation Stewardship Plan payment in October for her farm, Green Toe Ground, but hasn’t yet heard yet whether future payments will be affected.
Delcogliano also emphasized that despite the commodities grant containing the “buzz word” of “climate,” what it actually encourages are long-established practices that help conserve water and soil. “It’s just smart farming,” she told me. Ed Winebarger, a chef and farmer in North Carolina, told me he participated in the Climate-Smart Commodities program for a year and saw an immediate 20% increase in production. “My crops did better, the system works — period,” he said.
Small farmers who pursued the government grants likely would have been interested in the practices regardless of the financial incentives in many cases; Erin Foster West, the Policy Campaigns Director for the National Young Farmers Coalition, told me the group’s research found nearly 85% of its membership was “motivated by environmental stewardship to farm.” Caroline Anderson Novak, the head of the Professional Dairy Managers of Pennsylvania — which is collaborating with Penn State on its greenhouse-gas-reducing Climate-Smart Commodities program, and which hasn’t received a notification of a pause from the USDA as other organizations have — told me that things like experimental feeds and sharper data assessments represent “operational improvements” that just happen to have attractive climate upsides. “They are things that the farm already wants to do,” she said.
What the grants do is provide the capital necessary for farmers to put these efficiency upgrades into practice. Margins, particularly at small farms, can be razor thin, and the risks of operational experiments can be steep. “A lot of the time, you would need to pursue a loan just to get started with the project,” Emma Jagoz, the owner of Moon Valley Farm in Maryland, who has hundreds of thousands in USDA grants tied up by the pause, told me.
As a result, farmers waiting for clarity on their grants generally have clear eyes about the root of the problem. “The organization that we work with, they can’t help the cuts. It’s not their fault,” Patrick Brown, who enrolled 90% of his North Carolina farm’s acreage in a climate-smart project, told me. “This administration has blatantly stated their approach.”
Kristin Reilly, the executive director of the Choose Clean Water Coalition, a collective of small nonprofits in the Chesapeake Bay watershed that is helping its farming partners navigate the funding freeze, agreed that “the practitioners on the ground are definitely seeing that it’s not the nonprofits who are not paying them; they’re struggling along with them.”
Almost everyone I spoke with was pessimistic that the USDA would honor the grants, even as Earthjustice and other groups have launched lawsuits against the federal government over the freeze. (Pasa has joined a lawsuit with the Southern Environmental Law Center.) “I don’t think [the pause is] going to lift as long as this guy is in power because he’s so disconnected from reality,” Winebarger, the North Carolina chef and farmer, said of President Trump. “He’s never put his hands in dirt in his entire life. He doesn’t understand me. He doesn’t understand my farming neighbors.”
Delcogliano shared a similar sentiment: “The government is incompetent,” she told me. “They’re not in touch with the people that are actually doing the work.”
Perhaps most crucially, while the federal money is paused, the climate continues changing. Any given season could bring a new drought or deluge that wipes out a farm entirely. Though separate from the troubles with the grant pauses, both Delcogliano and Winebarger are also recovering from extensive damage to their farms from Hurricane Helene, a process they told me has been made even more painful due to the lack of emergency funding available from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Farmers will also be particularly vulnerable to the impacts of some of the tariffs the Trump administration plans to enact this week.
“It just feels like I’m driving behind a truck full of hammers that are dumping on me,” Winebarger said of the compounding problems. “And I can’t dodge them — they’re going to hit me. I don’t know how we’re going to get out from underneath this.”
Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture & the Environment, a Maine-based nonprofit that stands to lose a $35 million Climate-Smart Commodities grant, has begun to reformulate how its programs could continue with the support of buyer funds, state funding sources, or philanthropic dollars instead. It had once envisioned working with more than 400 partners over the grant’s lifespan, but that idea has given way to smaller-scale projects it can still afford.
“This is about so much more than climate change,” Ellen Griswold, the director of Wolfe’s Neck, stressed to me about the importance of finding a way forward with or without the government. “It’s about making farmers as resilient and profitable as possible. Without this assistance, there will be impacts to the farming community” — including farmers themselves and their suppliers. That could include a fencing company, nursery, or refrigerated truck dealer farmers can no longer afford to pay, or regional schools or food banks that are now forced to pay more for local, organic produce.
The reverberations of the grant pause will be felt far into the future, too. Even if the contracts are ultimately honored by the Trump administration, some farmers will undoubtedly feel justified in their suspicions of partnering with the federal government. Nonprofits will have more difficulty convincing community partners to take on voluntary climate projects down the line, and common-sense efficiency projects with climate co-benefits will stay dormant.
“If another opportunity comes along like this, I completely understand if farmers say, ‘No, I’m not doing that,’” Smith-Brubaker of Pasa said.