G1. Progressive Green

Biofuelwatch briefing about the impacts of irish government support for Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil

Tarbert Power Plant (currently burning Heavy Fuel Oil), Photo: Charles W. Glynn

Click here to download the full report

Summary:

Despite well-established fraud and sustainability concerns, the Irish government is pushing ahead with supporting HVO bioliquids as part of the solution for the country’s grid and heating. This is a retrograde step that harms the climate, rainforests and communities in Southeast Asia,, all while costing taxpayers money.

 

It is with profound sadness that the Global Forest Coalition (GFC) has learned of the passing of Mr. Frank Muramuzi, Executive Director and founding member of the National Association of Professional Environmentalists (NAPE) in Uganda.

Frank was a pioneering environmental and human rights defender whose leadership and vision transformed environmental advocacy in Uganda, East Africa, and beyond. Over the course of his life, he served in many roles, including Chairperson of the Uganda Chapter of East African Community Organizations for the Management of Lake Victoria Resources, Board Member of the Uganda Coalition for Sustainable Development and the National Association for Women in Development Uganda, founding member of the African Rivers Network, and East African Coordinator of the Oil Watch Network. He was among the pioneer activists who founded Friends of the Earth and served as the first Chair of its Membership Development Board.

Frank’s legacy is one of unwavering commitment to protecting forests, rivers, and communities. He spearheaded national campaigns to save the Mabira and Bugoma forests, defended the rights of those affected by the Bujagali Dam, promoted alternative energy in Uganda and East Africa, and mobilized grassroots movements such as NAPE’s Community Green Radio and the women-led environmental movement in Uganda. His advocacy extended across continents, making him a widely respected figure in the global environmental justice community.

He was a leader as well as a friend, mentor, and inspiration to many in the GFC network. His voice resonated far beyond Uganda—across Africa and the world—through the media, in community gatherings, and in international forums, always speaking truth to power and standing firmly for justice.

On behalf of GFC’s members and partners, we extend our deepest condolences to Frank’s family, friends, and colleagues at NAPE. We stand with you in grief, and we honor his remarkable life by continuing the struggles he so passionately led.

May his memory continue to guide and inspire the fight for environmental and social justice everywhere.

The post Condolence Message on the Passing of Mr. Frank Muramuzi of NAPE Uganda appeared first on Global Forest Coalition.

Women from around Latin America gathered to debate food sovereignty ahead of Nyéléni 

By Inés Franceschelli, Heñói Centro de Estudios / Global Forest Coalition 

July 22, 2025

More than 30 women peasant and Indigenous leaders and activists in defense of the environment participated in the second in-person meeting of the Women’s School of the Continental Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Latin America and the Caribbean (known as EMA in Spanish).

From July 18 to 21, we engaged in an intense debate on how to strengthen women’s political participation in defending the right to adequate food and nutrition.

The Women’s School aims to strengthen the activist struggles of women in its networks to advance the search for a new food paradigm that overcomes the current global, capitalist, colonial, racist, and patriarchal agri-food system.

The discussions were focused on two main themes: 

• The need to converge and unify our approach in order to influence our own networks and decision-making spaces at the local, national, regional, and global levels.
• Care work—generally undertaken by women in all their diversity—as a fundamental part of the fight against extractivism and a source of strength for resistance.

The participants represented the various networks that make up the Continental Alliance: CLOC-La Vía Campesina, Latin American Agroecological Movement (MAELA), FoodFirst Information and Action Network (FIAN), Continental Network of Indigenous Women (ECMIA), World March of Women, Friends of the Earth Latin America and the Caribbean (ATALC), International Indian Treaty Council (CITI), Movement for the Right to Health, World Forum of Fisherfolk, Global Forest Coalition (GFC), among others. Voices were heard from Mexico, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Brazil, Panama, Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina, Guatemala, Colombia, and Ecuador.

Some of the participants will carry the voices of the region to the Third Nyéléni World Forum of the International Movement for Food Sovereignty, to be held in Sri Lanka in September 2025. This forum will bring together Indigenous peoples, peasants, fisherfolk, workers, pastoralists, feminists, grassroots environmentalists, migrants, nomadic peoples, impoverished urban populations, social and solidarity economy activists, popular health activists, consumers, researchers, and artists. Together, they are organizing to build a common political agenda for popular power and the transformation of the capitalist, patriarchal, imperialist, colonialist, racist, classist, and supremacist system. 

The Nyéléni Forum is part of a process of movements and organizations that share values and a political vision that encompasses food sovereignty and agroecology, popular feminism, sovereignty and self-determination of peoples over their territories, social, economic, environmental, and health justice, feminist economics, and internationalist solidarity. It is a process free from discrimination and harassment that seeks to build unity for action from diversity, based on knowledge sharing. It recognizes the indivisibility of society and nature and embraces the spiritual principle underlying the perspectives of Indigenous peoples, for whom the protection of Mother Earth is fundamental.

Latin America has a lot to contribute to global grassroots movements for food sovereignty, and our movements will in turn be nourished by the many examples of women’s struggles for collective liberation and wellbeing at Nyeleni.

The post Sowing Life and Resistance appeared first on Global Forest Coalition.

Notes from the Meeting on Nature Markets in Guarema, Brazil

By Valentina Figuera Martínez and Andrea Echeverri, Global Forest Coalition

8/8/2025

 

Letícia Tura, the executive director of the Brazilian non-profit organization FASE, speaks with lucidity and nuance about false solutions to climate change. Before taking the podium at the Rosa Luxemburg Auditorium at the Florestán Fernándes School of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), she listens attentively to colleagues from more than 40 organizations across Latin America and the Caribbean. She takes notes in a small notebook with a picture of a jaguar on the front, its menacing eyes a reminder of the power of the jungle.

With a critical take on today’s socio-environmental crisis, Letícia addresses the issue of false solutions in official climate change negotiations and provides a frank assessment of the structural causes of biodiversity loss, deforestation, and forest degradation.

Tura’s talk was part of the Meeting on Nature Markets, organized by GRAIN and the Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Organizaciones del Campo (CLOC)/Vía Campesina, with social movements and organizations from around 20 countries across Latin America and the Caribbean. It was held in Guararema, not far from the Brazilian capital city, from July 21 to 24, 2025. 

Ahead of the upcoming Climate Change Conference (COP 30) and People’s Summit in Belém this November, it was a valuable opportunity to build common understandings about the impacts of projects aimed at the financialization of nature, which destroy thousands of acres of tropical forests and communities across the region.

Participants included civil society groups FASE of Brazil (Federação de Órgãos para Assistência Social e Educacional) and Centro de Estudios Heñói of Paraguay, both of which are members of the Global Forest Coalition, a network for rights-based forest protection that turns 25 this year. At the meeting, they offered critiques of mechanisms like REDD+, the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), biodiversity markets, and carbon markets, the latter of which includes what’s known as carbon farming. GFC members and campaigners spoke up to expand on the critical assessment of schemes for the financialization of nature and defined strategies for territorial defense throughout the region.

Organizations and social movement representatives at the opening session of the Meeting on Nature Markets. Photo: Andrey Martínez, CLOC/La Vía Campesina.

“The climate change debate isn’t just technical; it’s also political: it has to do with the class struggle, gender injustices, and disputes over the development model. The logic behind the debate can’t just be about emissions reductions and market ‘solutions.’ This debate is political, it’s about the type of society we want to build, and it’s in conflict with the business sector that tries to impose its vision of the world on us,” Tura said.

The region of Latin America and the Caribbean has the highest concentration of carbon market projects in the world, partly due to the region’s rich ecosystems, such as the Amazon, the Gran Chaco, and the Mata Atlántica (Brazil’s Atlantic Forest), biomes that are coveted by those seeking to implement false climate solutions. Such projects typically involve greenwashing, fraud, land grabbing, rights violations, and deforestation; however, they are frequently the focus of negotiations on climate and biodiversity finance.

In 2024, in the Brazilian Amazon alone, more than half of the carbon credit projects—which occupy a total of 78,000 square miles—overlapped public lands. Among the companies that bought these carbon credits to compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions are Netflix, Air France, Delta Air Lines, Airbnb, Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., Spotify, and Boeing. 

In addition to rigorous critiques of the most well-known false climate solutions in the region, the meeting also raised the alarm about other carbon credit schemes associated with monoculture tree plantations and so-called carbon farming. According to a report by GRAIN, carbon markets based on afforestation and reforestation have gobbled up 9 million hectares across the Global South, and have given a boost to the territorial expansion of commercial reforestation companies, whose impacts have been widely denounced.

Carbon farming is based on the false premise that carbon can be accumulated in soils through agricultural practices such as zero tillage (no plowing) or pasture rotation and new varieties with deep roots, which are linked to industrial livestock farming. Corporations like the meat giant Minerva, which, through its Renove program, promotes “carbon neutral meat” and also sells credits, have been denounced for their ties to deforestation and land grabbing in the Brazilian Amazon.

A case study of Hacienda San José in Colombia published by GFC demonstrated the repercussions for the Indigenous Sikuani community—and particularly women—of a project that is in the process of obtaining carbon credits and aims to produce 450,000 cattle in a way that is certified “carbon negative.”

The reality is changing, and organizations and social movements are adapting their strategies for the defense and care of the territories and communities. 

“These days, we see that the debate isn’t just about carbon markets in a strict sense,” Tura said. “Rather, there are different forms of appropriation of forests and nature’s common goods, such as the datafication of agriculture and the digitalization of territories. However, we see powerful new forms of resistance. Women play a key role; they’re on the front lines of resistance. We’ve heard some upsetting stories at the meeting, but also tales of resistance in the face of market-based projects and reproduction of the communitarian societies that we want to build. Agroecology, the management of nature’s common goods, community funds, saving and exchanging seeds—these are some of the forms of living resistance in our region.” 

Letícia Tura of FASE at the Meeting on Nature and Markets in Guararema, Brazil. Photo: Valentina Figuera Martínez.

Omar Yampey, the executive director of Centro de Estudios Heñói, leads struggles against big agribusiness and monocultures in Paraguay. A careful and eloquent speaker, he is an expert on the forestry business that has caused social and environmental harm in that country at the hands of companies like Forestal San Pedro and Forestal Apepu, which together control over 17,000 hectares of monoculture eucalyptus plantations in Paraguay. They are both part of Fondo Arbaro, a Green Climate Fund program.

Omar Yampey of Centro de Estudios Heñói. Photo: Mombú Audiovisual.

“False solutions contain elements of classical forms of extractivism and agribusiness. The Paraguayan government has a policy of widespread exploitation of eucalyptus monocultures. In northern Paraguay, the indigenous communities are asking for our help to understand the murky proposals on carbon markets. It’s not a moral issue in the sense of judging communities that do accept carbon markets, but rather, it’s a political issue. We have to position ourselves in response to this scenario,” Omar said.

When the Global North justifies its destruction, the perpetrators won’t be able to claim that the peoples of the South stayed silent. They won’t think we went down without a fight. We’re speaking out, resisting, and enduring, with our real solutions. Let’s keep it that way.

 

 

Translated from the Spanish by Megan Morrissey.

The post The struggle to halt climate change is political, not just technical appeared first on Global Forest Coalition.

Emily Smejkal

Emily Smejkal, policy lead for the Cascade Institute's Geothermal Energy Office, is pioneering the regulatory solutions needed to transform Canada into a geothermal powerhouse.

This article originally appeared in The Future Economy

Canada is on the verge of a seismic shift—one that could define our economic and environmental legacy for generations. The global race toward electrification and net-zero emissions has created a high-stakes competition. Among baseload power technologies, geothermal electricity generation stands out as a transformative opportunity. Emerging geothermal technologies offer Canada a strategic path to build a globally competitive clean energy industry—one that can leverage our existing strengths and position us for long-term prosperity, if we take the necessary actions to stand the industry on its feet.

Geothermal can be a cornerstone of clean growth. By drilling deep and capturing the Earth’s heat, geothermal provides reliable, baseload, zero-emission power, complementing intermittent renewables like wind and solar. Globally, momentum is building. The International Energy Agency estimates a US$2.1 trillion geothermal investment opportunity. Tech giants like Google, Meta, and Microsoft are investing. The US Department of Energy’s Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE) initiative and Enhanced Geothermal Shot are setting ambitious targets and backing them with serious funding. If Canada does not move now, we risk becoming a technology taker instead of a technology maker.

Canada has the ingredients but lacks the recipe

Canada is currently stuck on the ground floor. We have the tools, the talent, and the terrain—but not a single pure-play geothermal power plant to show for it. Our regulatory frameworks are a patchwork, with only Alberta, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia having geothermal-specific legislation. Federal support has been sporadic, tucked into broader renewable energy programs and grants. There has been no national strategy, no unified vision, and no clear signal to investors or innovators that geothermal is a priority.

But here is the good news: Canada is uniquely positioned to lead. First, we already have a robust, homegrown subsurface supply chain. Our oil and gas infrastructure is not a relic, but a launchpad. The same rigs and crews that drill for hydrocarbons can also drill for heat. Second, Canada’s geothermal potential spans the country. Yes, the West has the hottest gradients, but with emerging technologies, we can tap into heat across nearly every province and territory. Third, we have the talent. Canadians are already leading international geothermal projects. Our universities and public labs are conducting cutting-edge research, and our geothermal industry includes trailblazers like Eavor, DEEP, FutEra, and Indigenous-led initiatives like Tu Deh-Kah.

A modern industrial policy for geothermal innovation

To break through, we need to think bigger. We need a bold, coordinated strategy that matches the scale of the opportunity. That starts with a modern industrial policy. One that sets a clear national goal, similar to the US “Earthshot” target of driving geothermal electricity costs below $45/MWh by 2035. We need a strategy that aligns R&D funding, tax incentives, permitting reform, and IP protections to accelerate innovation. Industrial policy is not about picking winners; it is about creating the conditions for industries to reinvent themselves.

We also need regulatory reform and de-risked investment. A national geothermal regulatory template will harmonize permitting across the country and would enable rapid technology deployment. Cascade Institute’s new Groundwork report lays out guidelines that provinces can adopt and adapt immediately. We also need financial tools that give early-stage projects a fighting chance—expanded tax credits, loan guarantees, and a Canadian Geothermal Investment Fund to co-finance projects. These are not handouts—they are signals that Canada is serious about building a geothermal industry and driving down the cost of clean, baseload power.

Building Canada’s innovation engine

Policy frameworks alone are not enough, though. The Cascade Institute proposes the creation of the Geothermal Science and Technology Research Authority—GEOSTRA. Modelled after the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority (AOSTRA) and FORGE, GEOSTRA would be a national sandbox for geothermal innovation. Its mission: to accelerate the development and commercialization of next-generation geothermal technologies through collaboration, experimentation, and shared learning.

GEOSTRA would consist of four test sites across Canada’s diverse geologies—open-access platforms where industry, academia, and government can work together, share data, and de-risk new technologies. These sites would focus on reducing drilling costs, developing high-temperature tools, refining well completions, and optimizing heat extraction. The goal is not just research, but commercialization—turning ideas into infrastructure and scaling solutions that can power Canada’s clean energy future.

To make this vision a reality, every stakeholder has a role. The federal government must fund GEOSTRA, craft a national geothermal strategy, and expand incentives. Provinces must pass geothermal regulations and streamline permitting. Industry must invest in R&D and partner on test sites. Academia must lead applied research and train the next generation of energy workers. The finance sector must develop tailored geothermal investment vehicles. Indigenous communities must be empowered as full partners and leaders. And entrepreneurs must innovate in drilling, sensors, and heat extraction—leveraging the deep expertise we already have.

Seizing the moment to lead in geothermal energy

This is a defining moment for Canada. Leadership is not a matter of chance—it’s a matter of choice. We must choose to act boldly, to coordinate our efforts, and to invest in the future we want to build. GEOSTRA can be the catalyst. A modern industrial policy and harmonized regulations can be the framework. And geothermal can be the foundation for a clean, competitive Canadian energy economy.

Canada has the heat—now let’s harness it.

Read article in The Future Economy The post How Canada can lead now in geothermal energy innovation appeared first on Cascade Institute.

Civil society organisations and coastal communities have launched a formal appeal against the government’s controversial decision to green-light Shell’s Northern […]

Real solutions to forest degradation, climate change, and biodiversity loss come from the ground up—here’s a powerful example from Zambia, where a group of women has been working with joy and determination to restore forests and food security, bringing agroecological methods to future generations to ensure a healthy environment and community. Check out their inspiring work and the power of women’s leadership in this photo essay:

 

Ubuntu In Action

 

 

Produced by the Global Forest Coalition, Zamsof, and the Kapangya Women Association, with thanks to Andrea Echeverri, Valentina Martínez Figuera, and Gershom Kabasho.

The post PHOTO ESSAY | Ubuntu in Action: Zambian Women Leading Agroecology and Cultural Revival appeared first on Global Forest Coalition.

Over the course of four days, more than 150 people came together across three different continents and online to form new bonds, empower each other and build strategies for resistance in the face of escalating climate and social crises. These were more than just meetings, they were the seeds of a global movement that will continue to grow from Barcelona, Mexico City, and Bangalore.

*

In the midst of unprecedented times, while climate breakdown is accelerated by a system hooked on fossil fuels and the super-rich lean on an increasingly powerful far right to defend their power and profits, we gathered to build the resistance.

Anchored in the struggle to counter aviation, we met groups standing up for climate justice and housing rights, battling touristification and all forms of oppression, as well as academics and scientists, among others. Across all struggles, the root cause was clear: capitalism. And the path forward was equally clear: we can only win if we work together to confront and dismantle this system.

Voices from three continents

Our opening session highlighted precisely this diversity and celebrated the diversity and strength of our network. In Barcelona, we heard from Zeroport, the Anti-Oppression Circle, Las Kellys, the European Housing Coalition for the Right to Housing and the City and our host Coopolís/Bloc4. And we went across seas to receive the inputs from groups in Mexico City and Bangalore, about the realities of their struggles, connecting our local fights to a global front.

Local hubs: Mexico City & Bangalore

In San Gregorio de Atlapulco, Mexico City, a youth-driven and inter-generational meeting connected struggles against touristification, aviation impacts and urban gentrification. Coordinated with great care by our regional network Permanecer en la Tierra and linked to the National Indigenous Congress, the event fostered strong ties with anti-COP processes and movements resisting the commodification of cities and territories. For many participants, the conference also reaffirmed the importance of an explicitly anti-capitalist stance within the Stay Grounded network, laying the foundation for stronger collaboration and resistance in Mexico.

Meanwhile, in Bangalore, the conference brought together a diverse mix of participants, from urban planners and land defenders to organisations supporting communities resisting airport expansion and facing displacement. In a country where the political ecology around aviation is largely silent, the gathering created a rare and vital space to raise awareness, build national networks and start charting a collective roadmap for future action.

Diverse panels

Discussions spanned from setting concrete demands for reducing air traffic, to the harms of a tourism model dependent on aviation. Anti-oppression was at the centre, as a necessary anchor that needs to be included into every part of our work. These exchanges sharpened our collective analysis and strengthened our plans to challenge the system fueling climate and social crises.

Workshops & skill-sharing

Hands-on workshops invited participants to explore strategy, narratives, communications, care, crafts and even a collective board game exposing the aviation industry. These spaces bridged creativity and strategy, welcoming everyone, from experienced organisers to newcomers exploring aviation and climate justice for the first time.

Thematic working groups: where vision meets action

Four thematic working groups tackled both systemic analysis and practical movement-building:

• • Aviation, Tourism & Housing – We connected the dots between climate injustice, touristification and the housing crises, recognising their common roots in extractive, neoliberal capitalism. Resistance must centre oppressed communities and rely on joint mobilisations.
  • Red Lines for Airports – Sixteen local airport struggles advanced toward a coordinated Europe-wide campaign, with shared tools, narratives and potential 2026 action waves.
  • Grounded Imaginaries – We envisioned futures beyond aviation and tourism, collecting real-life alternatives to fuel our narratives and movement-building.
  • Movement Skills for the Crisis – We strengthened the human infrastructure of resistance, practicing somatics, consent work and conflict mapping to build resilient, caring networks in the face of climate urgency.

Together, these groups laid the foundation for a movement that is strategic, coordinated, visionary and deeply rooted in climate justice.

Culture, care & community

Moments of music, shared meals and creative expression reminded us that resistance is also about joy, connection and the cultures we defend against extractivism and exploitation. Care and community were woven into every part of the conference and explored deeply in dedicated workshops, ensuring our movements grow not only strong—but sustainable.

From reflection to action

Our time together culminated in collective action. From Barcelona to Roissy and Mexico City, we drew a red line against airport expansion with our bodies and voices, calling out the urgent need to halt aviation growth everywhere.

The final plenary, echoed these strong bonds of solidarity across borders, with a powerful statement from the conference in Mexico City rallying all of us to the struggle ahead: to dismantle capitalism and defend life. We closed the conference renewed in our commitment to move beyond aviation, tourism, and capitalism. Together, we are grounded in care, lifted by solidarity and ready to take flight in resistance.

World’s largest biomass certifier allows forest destruction and rising emissions under the guise of clean energy PRESS RELEASE

July 31, 2025 (SEOUL, TOKYO, LONDON) – A new international report released today warns that forests worldwide are being cut down and burned for energy, and falsely labeled as “sustainable.” The Sustainable Biomass Program (SBP), the world’s most prominent certifier of biomass, is approving wood linked to forest destruction as climate-friendly fuel, despite science showing it emits more carbon than coal.

Power companies worldwide burn wood pellets for energy, while governments funnel billions in subsidies based on the false claim that forest biomass is low-carbon and sustainable. Nearly 100% of wood burned at the UK’s Drax Power Station, the world’s largest biomass plant, is SBP-certified, despite documented environmental impacts in the United States and Canada.

The report, “Sustainable Biomass Program: Certifying the Unsustainable”, uncovers that SBP enables destructive logging, greenwashes high-carbon biomass — all while helping energy companies claim they are going green. Over 85% of industrial wood pellets used in Europe are SBP-certified.

Authored by forest policy expert Richard Robertson and reviewed by Dr. Peter Wood, forestry faculty and lecturer at the University of British Columbia, the report reveals that the SBP routinely fails to protect nature, climate, and communities.

The report was jointly published by environmental organizations in the UK, Japan, and South Korea — the top three importers of biomass wood pellets — and comes amid growing criticism of each country’s continued support for forest biomass. The governments have begun rolling back support: the UK has halved subsidies for Drax Power Station, Japan has ended support for new large-scale biomass projects, and Korea is phasing out key incentives. Yet forest biomass remains heavily subsidized and central to national strategies, diverting public finance away from truly clean renewables like wind and solar.

A case study from British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, illustrates how these flaws result in the logging of primary and old-growth forests, with the wood later certified as “sustainable” under SBP.

The report outlines the following core failures:

• No forest audits: SBP certifies wood pellet mills without site visits, relying on paperwork and using weak risk-based forest certifications (e.g., FSC/PEFC Controlled Wood) intended to avoid the worst forest practices, not to assess forest sustainability.

• Carbon blind: SBP ignores smokestack emissions, allowing companies to offset immediate forest carbon losses with long-term recovery that may take decades.

• Old-growth logging approved: SBP accepts wood from logged-over primary and old-growth forests, despite habitat degradation and high carbon impact.

• No consent: SBP undermines the rights of Indigenous communities to say no to logging their forests.

Environmental groups behind the report are calling on governments to: 

• End subsidies for forest biomass and exclude it from renewable energy and green finance frameworks.

• Prohibit sourcing from primary forests and Intact Forest Landscapes.

• Treat biomass combustion emissions as identical to fossil fuel emissions in national and EU energy and carbon pricing policies.

• Mandate due diligence on environmental and human rights impacts across all timber trade.

QUOTES

Richard Robertson, forest certification and governance expert (Canada):

“Our analysis shows that SBP certification fails even its own low bar for sustainability. Policymakers must stop using it to justify burning forest as a climate solution. It’s time for governments to move beyond weak certification schemes like SBP and promote forests as vital protectors of climate and biodiversity, not as fuel sources. The EU and UK and now Japan and South Korea must stop relying on SBP as a proxy for forest sustainability and drop biomass from renewable energy policy in line with their global climate and biodiversity commitments.”

Almuth Ernsting, Researcher and Campaigner at Biofuelwatch (UK):

“SBP serves no practical purpose other than to greenwash a highly destructive industry. It allows pellet and energy companies to claim they are ‘sustainable’ even if they source wood from the clearcutting of old growth and primary forests in Western Canada, from timber concessions in Malaysia that are linked to rainforest clearance and peat drainage, or from coastal hardwood forests in the Southeastern USA that form a vital part of a global biodiversity hotspot.”

Sayoko Iinuma, Researcher at the Global Environmental Forum (Japan):

“The Japanese government’s fuel standards for biomass power generation recognize SBP as proof of sustainability, allowing power plants that burn these wood pellets to receive public subsidies. However, this report shows that SBP permits the mixing of uncertified wood, the use of raw materials from primary forests, and ignores the urgent emissions reductions needed to meet the Paris Agreement targets. Despite clear evidence that biomass energy increases greenhouse gas emissions and degrades forest biodiversity, SBP merely paints it as ‘sustainable.’ We hope this report contributes to reducing public support for high-carbon, low-efficiency biomass power.”

Hansae Song, Forests & Land Use Lead at Solutions for Our Climate (South Korea):

“For over two decades, wealthy nations have poured renewable energy subsidies into the false solution of forest biomass, burning the world’s last remaining forests at the exact moment we need them most. Relying on biomass leads to degraded forests, delayed energy transitions, and rising emissions. Asia’s emerging economies must not repeat these mistakes. This report makes clear: there is no such thing as ‘sustainable biomass’ at scale. Governments must resist industry attempts to hijack climate policy and show real progress heading into this year’s global climate negotiations.”

Matt Williams, Senior Forest Advocate at Natural Resources Defense Council (global):

“SBP — a scheme set up by the biomass industry itself — has never been anything more than bioenergy companies marking their own homework. In the UK we know that burning trees in power stations isn’t good for the planet — just look at Drax in Yorkshire, the world’s largest biomass power plant. Burning the world’s forests can never be sustainable, no matter what labels it has: cutting down the Earth’s lungs stops them absorbing carbon and makes climate change worse. Calling forest biomass sustainable is climate racketeering worth billions.”

Roger Smith, Japan Director at Mighty Earth (global):

“Indigenous Peoples are the best protectors of the forests we all rely on as carbon sinks to help cool our rapidly warming world, and yet SBP largely ignores the rights of those communities to say no to logging on their lands. SBP also overlooks the impact of wood pellet production on impoverished black communities in the US Southeast who suffer serious health problems from air pollution from the pellet plants. SBP’s inadequate approach is failing people, destroying forests and propping up a biomass industry that is not carbon neutral, it’s a carbon nightmare.”

Peg Putt, Coordinator at Biomass Action Network, EPN International (global):

“The fig leaf that SBP certification represents can no longer protect big biomass from exposure. Governments and energy retailers must recognise and act upon the fact that concerns about climate impacts, destruction of natural treasures, and failure to uphold human rights throughout the supply chain of wood fueled energy are real and not conveniently dispensed with by this dodgy certification as they have been keen to believe.”

What is “biomass”?

Biomass energy refers to burning organic materials such as wood to generate electricity or heat. While promoted as renewable, scientists warn that burning trees releases more carbon dioxide (CO₂) than coal per unit of energy produced — and destroys forests that would otherwise absorb CO₂ from the atmosphere. Biomass is now undermining global climate and biodiversity goals — just as countries prepare new climate pledges ahead of COP30.

ENDS. 

Solutions for Our Climate (SFOC) is an independent nonprofit organization that works to accelerate global greenhouse gas emissions reduction and energy transition. SFOC leverages research, litigation, community organizing, and strategic communications to deliver practical climate solutions and build movements for change.

For media inquiries, please reach out to Yi Hyun Kim, Communications Officer, yihyun.kim@forourclimate.org.

Joint report by Solutions for Our Climate, Global Environmental Forum, Mighty Earth, Biofuelwatch, and Biomass Action Network of the Environmental Paper Network Click here to download the report Executive Summary

Faced with pressure to meet climate commitments and reduce reliance on fossil fuels, many countries have turned to forest biomass as an alternative source of heat and electricity. Biomass now constitutes a significant portion of the energy mix in the European Union, United Kingdom, Japan, and South Korea.  However, burning wood for energy accelerates the destruction of the world’s biodiverse and carbon-rich forests, which are already under severe pressure. Decades of research in climate and forest sciences have made it clear that large-scale biomass use exacerbates the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss.

In response to mounting criticism, governments have sought evidence that biomass they support is ‘sustainable’ and contributes to lowering greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The biomass industry responded by creating the Sustainable Biomass Program (SBP) to assure that wood pellets and chips used for energy are sourced sustainably. However, SBP is a private certification scheme developed by the very industry it purports to regulate. It is backed by powerful market incentives in the form of government subsidies, not to restrain the industry, but to promote it. Evidence shows that this structural conflict of interest has resulted in weakened standards and superficial compliance mechanisms that encourage practices far removed from true sustainability.

Sustainable Biomass Program: Certifying the Unsustainable investigates the claims made by SBP through a review of its standards, policies, and procedures. This report finds that  SBP’s portrayal of biomass as a climate-friendly alternative to fossil fuels is misleading on several grounds:

• SBP certifies pellet mills and traders without field audits of forest management practices or direct engagement with logging companies. Unlike other forest certifications, SBP relies on desk-based Risk Assessments and broad screening tools that detect only illegal or grossly unacceptable sources, not genuine sustainability.
• SBP misrepresents the credibility of other certification systems. It treats FSC “Controlled Wood” and PEFC “Controlled Sources” as if they were fully certified sources. In reality, these categories undergo only minimal risk assessment. SBP uses this lower-tier wood to label entire biomass supply chains, including wood from uncertified forests, as sustainable, effectively lowering the bar for what counts as ‘sustainable forest management’ (SFM).
• SBP’s climate impact claims rely on flawed carbon accounting. The scheme assumes that emissions from burning wood are offset by forest regrowth over decades, ignoring the urgent emissions reductions required by 2030 to meet the Paris Agreement. SBP permits sourcing from areas with net carbon losses and uses national averages instead of site-level data, allowing companies to offset
  carbon-rich forest losses with regrowth in less carbon-dense areas.
• SBP fails to mitigate smokestack emissions from burning biomass, deferring this responsibility to energy regulators. By ignoring the fact that biomass emits more CO₂ per unit of energy than fossil fuels, SBP enables operators to claim carbon neutrality’. Current accounting methods fail to trace these emissions back to the land use sector, and the energy sector avoids bearing the cost of climate mitigation associated with biomass use.
• SBP treats ‘forest residues’ as low-risk by default, certifying them even when they originate from primary forests. The framework allows producers to categorize whole logs as residues or byproducts without meaningful oversight, masking the environmental damage of such sourcing.
• SBP inadequately addresses Indigenous peoples’ rights. While it acknowledges the need for consultation, SBP still allows certification to proceed even when free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) has not been obtained, sidestepping the rights of Indigenous communities.

SBP accepts wood from all sources and certifies it as ‘sustainable’

SBP allows whole logs to be used as biomass fuels

Benefiting from these systemic flaws, SBP offers a convenient mechanism for regulators and utilities to fulfill reporting requirements. Biomass producers can claim sustainability even when sourcing wood from uncertified forests, so long as it appears low-risk on paper. Neither the degradation of forests nor the emissions from burning biomass are properly accounted for, thus creating an accountability gap where no
one assumes responsibility for the climate impacts. The case of British Columbia and Alberta, Canada— explored in Part 2 of this report—demonstrates how these systemic failures unfold on the ground.

Despite its name, SBP does not ensure sustainable sourcing of biomass fuels. It endorses industry practices that fall short of other sustainability certification systems and international SFM norms, while contributing to the perception among policymakers, investors, and the public that forest biomass is a renewable energy source. The reality is that the world is already extracting far too much from standing forests. Any additional pressure from exploitative bioeconomy schemes risks derailing global climate and biodiversity goals.

Burning our last remaining forests is not a climate solution, it is a dangerous distraction that narrows the path to a safer future. SBP, in turn, is not fit for purpose.

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Bees have a special way of communicating, and it’s through the magical art of dance. There are many insects in the world that are pollinators. Pollinators transfer the pollen grain, […]

The post The Magical Dance of Bees first appeared on Dogwood Alliance.

Our Children’s Trust, Western Environmental Law Center, Gregory Law Group, and McGarvey Law are proud to announce that they have been awarded Public Justice’s 2025 Trial Lawyer of the Year Award for their landmark victory in Held v. State of Montana—the first constitutional climate case brought by youth to go to trial in the United States.

In March 2020, 16 young Montanans courageously filed a lawsuit against their state, challenging laws and policies that promote fossil fuel development, accelerate the climate crisis, and inflict direct harm on their health and futures. These laws, they argued, violate their constitutional rights to a clean and healthful environment, life, dignity, and freedom. The youth plaintiffs brought their claims to court to demand protection of their fundamental rights.

In a historic, groundbreaking 2024 decision, the Montana Supreme Court affirmed the district court’s ruling that struck down state laws prohibiting consideration of greenhouse gas emissions in fossil fuel permitting and laws barring constitutional remedies. The court ruled such statutes are unconstitutional, affirming that Montana must consider climate and public health impacts in its permitting decisions, explicitly recognizing the harm to children, and recognizing a fundamental right to a stable climate system.

The court wrote: “Montana’s right to a clean and healthful environment and environmental life support system includes a stable climate system, which is clearly within the object and true principles of the Framers inclusion of the right to a clean and healthful environment.”

Barbara Chillcott, Senior Attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center, said: “We are incredibly grateful to receive this recognition from Public Justice for our work to support these remarkable young plaintiffs in Held v. State of Montana. Our gratitude goes first to the courageous young Montanans who stepped into the spotlight and persevered through the challenges of litigation to fight for their generation’s future. We also thank the dedicated Montana and global experts whose contributions were instrumental in building the strongest possible case. This victory is just the beginning—we’re now focused on ensuring Montana fulfills its constitutional obligations so that we can all share in a livable future.”

Julia Olson, Chief Legal Counsel and Executive Director of Our Children’s Trust, said: “We are deeply honored and humbled to receive this award, which belongs first and foremost to the sixteen brave youth plaintiffs in Held v. Montana. Their courage in taking the stand and speaking truth to power helped secure a ruling that protects the rights of young people to a safe and stable climate. Young people have always led civil rights and social justice movements, and we’re proud to stand alongside them as they use the courts to protect their fundamental rights against governments who wield their power to harm children. They don’t win money, but they win back their rights to health, a safe environment, and their basic human dignity. This September, some of those same youth will be back in federal court in Montana as plaintiffs in Lighthiser v. Trump, challenging executive orders that expand fossil fuel development, suppress climate science, and endanger their right to life. We are carrying forward the momentum from Held at a time when the stakes could not be higher—to make sure no president or government can sacrifice children’s lives for fossil fuel power.”

The legal team includes:

• Barbara Chillcott and Melissa Hornbein of Western Environmental Law Center
• Julia Olson, Nate Bellinger, and Mat dos Santos of Our Children’s Trust
• Phil Gregory of Gregory Law Group
• Roger Sullivan of McGarvey Law

Together, this team and its brave youth plaintiffs secured a precedent-setting victory that affirms climate accountability under constitutional law and strengthens the rights of young people to demand protection from government-caused climate harm.

Some of the same young people have been joined by others to continue this work in Lighthiser v. Trump, a federal constitutional case in Montana that challenges the executive actions undermining climate science and expanding fossil fuel production. As in Held, the plaintiffs are youth demanding their government protect—not endanger—their fundamental rights.

Contacts:   

Melissa Hornbein, Western Environmental Law Center, hornbein@westernlaw.org

Barbara Chillcott, Western Environmental Law Center, chillcott@westernlaw.org

Julia Olson, Chief Legal Counsel, Our Children’s Trust, 415.786.4825, julia@ourchildrenstrust.org

Helen Britto, Communications Associate Director, Our Children’s Trust 925.588.1171, helen@ourchildrenstrust.org 

The post Trailblazing legal team honored for landmark Montana climate victory   appeared first on Western Environmental Law Center.

Today, as the climate and biodiversity crises rage across America, Reps. Westerman and Golden introduced the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act. Under the guise of streamlining infrastructure permitting, the proposed law takes an axe to the nation’s bedrock environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

Permit reform advocates have fallen prey to numerous myths that NEPA is impeding construction of roads, housing, and other infrastructure, yet data proves the law leads to better decisions and ultimately better projects. Instead of taking a reasoned approach to identifying and addressing specific permitting needs, this bill would open the door to plundering our nation’s resources on public lands and dramatically cut back the public’s ability to be heard during project development or to seek redress for violations of law in court. Last week, WELC led a coalition of 27 western conservation groups, authoring a letter to Rep. Huffman and the members of the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources advising all to exercise extreme caution on NEPA rollbacks such as this.

The sponsors’ press release bemoans NEPA’s “cumbersome and lengthy process,” which experts agree is rooted in chronic underfunding and under-staffing federal agencies—a problem created by Congress. The sponsors complain that NEPA “is currently the most litigated environmental statute,” but the fact is less than a quarter of a percent of NEPA decisions end up in court annually.

“The SPEED Act in this Congress is certain to virtually eliminate public participation and crucial environmental and health protections, opening the door to unchecked public lands exploitation without consideration of impacts to ecosystems and the communities that depend on them.” said Kyle Tisdel, Climate and Energy Program director at the Western Environmental Law Center. “The SPEED Act’s proposal to reduce the timeline for filing a legal claim from 72 months to five months would dramatically limit communities’ ability to seek recourse for harms to our air, water, and landscapes. This bill would provide near-blanket legal immunity to polluters for poisoning people and the environment.”

Congress has passed numerous updates to NEPA that are meaningfully reducing permitting times, such as FAST-41, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Fiscal Responsibility Act, and others. Before creating a new fast-track process, we should see how all of these changes play out.

Significantly, by defining the law as purely procedural, the bill guts NEPA’s central purpose to ensure that all federal agencies consider the environmental impacts of their actions. For 50 years the law has directed agencies to consider environmental consequences of proposed actions, engaging the public and communities in that process to ensure that “to the fullest extent possible,” they “look before they leap” and make well-informed decisions that encourage harmony between human beings and the environment for present and future generations.

The bill also limits the types of projects subject to environmental review and eliminates an agency’s ability to consider the combined impacts of other projects, meaning environmental reviews will no longer fully inform the public. In addition, it takes away standard judicial remedies by eliminating courts’ ability to set aside agency actions that violate NEPA, meaning there would be no incentive for agencies to comply with the law. Moreover, projects would be able to proceed while any violations are corrected—tantamount to “bulldoze first, consider impacts later.”

We can improve the speed of permitting, and we already are. We must, because the climate and biodiversity crises demand swift and powerful responses. But we must not erode community and environmental protections to achieve this goal.

Contact:

Kyle Tisdel, Western Environmental Law Center, 575-770-7501, tisdel@westernlaw.org

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Knowledge Is Power: How Does Climate Change Affect You?   Climate change is real and it affects our lives in […]

How to cash in on clean energy tax credits before they disappear rcoleman July 25, 2025

Several consumer tax credits for renewable energy upgrades are suddenly poised for complete phaseouts over the next year, some in just a few months.

The recently enacted “Big Beautiful Bill” eliminates many tax incentives designed to bring down the costs of cleaner ways to power your life, such as rooftop solar and electric vehicles.

But there’s still time to take advantage of the federal tax incentives that help make it financially possible for many households to go green.

Here’s what you need to know about clean energy tax credits before they’re gone.

Rooftop solar

Rooftop solar has become increasingly popular in recent years as an energy option that’s better for the planet – and often less expensive than other electricity sources.

California has been a leader on rooftop solar, with roughly 2 million households using it. More than 60% of those users are low- or middle-income. Along with over 300,000 renters, they’ve seen reduced monthly utility bills, thanks to the clean energy source. 

Currently, consumers who install rooftop solar panels can have 30% of their installation costs reimbursed through the federal Residential Clean Energy Credit. The credit also applies to solar water heaters, wind turbines, geothermal heat pumps, fuel cells and battery storage technology.

But under the new law, that credit for customer-owned clean energy systems will disappear after December 31. Residents hoping to use it will either have to have paid for their system by then or already have it fully installed – the law isn’t clear.

The safest bet is to try to finish installation before the year ends. This is often defined as getting “permission to operate” from your local utility, the final step in the process.

Residential solar systems take about a week to install, according to the Solar Power Authority. But when you factor in contractor selection, site visits, permitting, utility interconnection procedures and other administrative requirements, the total process can take between one and five months, sometimes even longer.

That means consumers hoping to take advantage of federal tax credits for their solar projects should get started as soon as possible. But even with the tight timeline, seek bids for multiple contractors, check their licenses and read contracts carefully before signing them.

The commercial version of this credit will stick around a little longer. Developers can still get 30% back for solar systems that either begin construction by July 4, 2026, or are fully installed by December 31, 2027.

This means homeowners wanting to go solar can still choose a third-party-owned system, also known as a Power Purchase Agreement, which describes a commercial entity’s ownership of the rooftop solar panels and sale to you of the solar energy through a long-term contract. 

Electric vehicles

Tax credits for electric vehicles, or EVs, will be the first to go under the law.

These cars are becoming increasingly popular as low-carbon alternatives to traditional gas guzzlers, helping to reduce emissions from one of the country’s most carbon-intensive industries. They’re also attractive because they’re more efficient.

But in the U.S., EVs are sometimes more expensive than their gas-powered counterparts.

The Biden administration implemented a federal tax incentive program in 2022 to encourage Americans to drive electric. Anyone buying an EV – with certain limitations – can get $7,500 back on their annual taxes if the car is new, and up to $4,000 back for a used EV. The credit doesn’t apply in all taxpayer situations.

The new law moves up the end date of these incentives, from the end of 2032 to Sept. 30 of this year – just two months away.

Buyers must purchase and take delivery before then if they want to take advantage of the savings federal credits can supply.

Energy efficiency upgrades

Several home efficiency improvements, such as installation of electric heat pumps and replacement of insulation, were subsidized under the Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit.

These changes can reduce the energy demand of your home, in turn lowering the electricity bill. But the credit will end after December 31.

Before then, consumers can claim up to $2,000 on new heat pumps or water heaters that meet or exceed certain standards. You can get up to another $1,200 back for upgrades to windows, doors or insulation or for conducting a home energy audit.

Some limitations apply. Credits don’t roll over to future years. They also don’t apply to businesses or new homes.

There’s a separate, similar credit for builders investing in energy-efficient technology in new homes, but it disappears as of June 30, 2026.

Other federal programs that encourage home efficiency upgrades will remain in place, unaffected by the new law. Some states and local governments have their own programs, too.

But homeowners hoping to take advantage of this tax incentive must act before the year is out.

Areas of Focus Energy Federal & State Energy Policy Renewable Energy Guest Authors Zoe Kolenovsky, Communications Fellow July 25, 2025

Transcript of EWG podcast ‘Ken Cook Is Having Another Episode' – Episode 36 JR Culpepper July 24, 2025

In this podcast episode, EWG President and co-Founder Ken Cook talks with Mike Grunwald, one of the nation’s most prominent investigative reporters and a modern agriculture expert. Grunwald is a New York Times bestseller and has written for publications including the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Time and Politico. 

Cook and Grunwald discuss Grunwald’s newest book, "We Are Eating the Earth, the Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate." They tackle how food fits into the climate debate and attempt to answer a seemingly contradictory question: How to feed more people with less land?

Ken: Hey, it's Ken Cook and I'm having another episode. I'm gonna start this episode off with a story. It's 25 years ago. I'm fresh out of high school and I'm standing in the middle of a field in Aniston, Alabama with a friend who later became a board member of EWG David Baker, an amazing environmental community advocate, champion who was taking on Monsanto because Monsanto had caused the field, the two of us were standing in to be raised to the ground. It was formerly a neighborhood. There were homes, but when we were standing there, there were only empty streets with weeds growing up through the cracked cement. A few street signs, but no homes left because Monsanto had dumped huge amounts of PCBs for decades on this town. 

And instead of owning up to it and being held accountable and doing the right thing. They simply bought the property, the value of which was depressed by the Monsanto pollution, and then raised all of the homes to the ground. It was not even a ghost town. While I'm standing in that field, I call back to my colleague Mike Casey, tell him what I'm seeing. 

I had just come from a courtroom where Monsanto was being sued. So it was all coming together. But here I was, I called him and he said, “You know, you need to call Mike Grunwald at the Washington Post and tell him the story.” 

So while I'm standing there with my cell phone, I called Grunwald and I told him what I was seeing.

I told him about the court case. We had some internal documents that we had gotten hold of, and I told them that they spelled out even more of the story that Monsanto knew for decades that they were poisoning this little community. They knew fish were dying. They knew that the levels of PCBs in the soil and in the water and in the air were way above limits that were deemed safe by any scientists and authoritative bodies. And they didn't do anything about it. So they had to be sued. 

And ultimately the litigation turned out to bring about one of the biggest civil rights settlements in history for the people of Aniston. Mike went down to Aniston, he dug into those documents. He did incredible investigative work. And the next thing we know, there's a front page story in the Washington Post that says, Monsanto hid pollution for decades.

That led to other journalists picking up People Magazine picked up, did a six page spread on Aniston, Alabama. 60 Minutes did a story focused on my colleague, friend, and inspiration, David Baker, who took on Monsanto and won. 

So I'm thrilled today to have Mike Grunwald on the show. He's one of the really great investigative reporters of our time, certainly one of the greats that I've ever come across.

You can find his work now at Canary Media, at the Breakthrough Institute and on the Climate Wars Podcast. He's a New York Times bestselling author, and his new book is called We Are Eating the Earth, the Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate. It's about uncovering uncomfortable truths about our food system, including uncomfortable truths for critics and defenders of modern agriculture.

So I'm especially excited about it because it's built a lot around a friend and colleague, and another inspiration of mine, Tim Searchinger and his amazing journey uncovering these uncomfortable truths. 

Mike, welcome to the show. It's great to see you again, my friend, and I'm tickled that you're here to talk about your great new book.

Mike: It's awesome. It's been a long time since Aniston man. 

 

Ken: Yeah. Yeah. And Monsanto hasn't done any better since, but that's another story, right? 

 

Mike: Yeah. I remember looking at those documents and being like, wow, they put it all in writing. They wrote it. 

 

Ken: Yeah. We had one of them in our [office] hallway. I don't know if you remember one of the documents we blew up to about eight feet high. It was Monsanto telling the state authorities in Alabama that they hoped they would not disclose what Monsanto knew to be the case with this PCB pollution. The state regulators were reported in the same memo as saying, “Yes, that's not a problem. We won't say a word about how you're poisoning our people.” 

 

And on top of it all it was, I think, “confidential, read and destroy.”

 

Mike: Exactly. That's what I remember. That's the thing I remember most about that story. It was like the first few documents, it was like “confidential, confidential.” And Purdue was like, “Super super duper confidential.” And then “confidential, read and destroy.” 

 

That's when I'm like, huh, I think this is a story.

 

Ken: Well, it was a story in your hands and it was a great win and it really had a huge impact. On the proceedings in Anniston, the litigation, the uproar around it, the bipartisan support to help the folks down there with the problems they were having, getting a response from the EPA… All that. The best that you [could] expect from investigative journalism, and that is that it opens up issues in ways that ordinary people would never have had the opportunity to open up. And does it in a way that has a lasting impact. 

 

So that's how I, when I think of your career, I think of that. And I think this book is very much in line with that. So I love the eating part and I love how you first decided you were gonna write this book. 

 

Mike: You kind of gave away a little bit of the punchline, which is that really agriculture is eating the earth.

 

Right now, two of every five acres on this planet are cropped or grazed. And, you know, a lot of us, spent a lot of time writing about urban sprawl, about how it's kind of going into forests and wetlands. And it is, it's a real problem. 

 

But I always point out that sort of cities and suburbs and highways and driveways, the developed part of our planet, that's 1% of our land. Agriculture is 40%. 

 

And so the book is really about how this natural planet of ours is becoming an agricultural planet, which has incredible all kinds of environmental consequences, including climate consequences. Because as our agricultural footprint expands, our natural footprint shrinks. That's, you know, forests and wetlands that store a lot of carbon and that also absorb a lot of carbon from the atmosphere.

 

You know, what we're doing, it's like we're trying to clean our house when we try to decarbonize the planet, but it's like we're smashing the vacuum cleaner to bits in the living room. That's what we're doing with deforestation and we're continuing to lose a soccer field worth of tropical forest every six seconds.

 

And that's because of agriculture. 

 

Ken: Yeah. And as someone who's been to Brazil myself, that part of your book is really, really compelling and, and really concerning. But we're, you know, we're more than happy to plow up land here for no real good reason unless you count subsidies and the need to do something with that land that earns  greater return. 

 

Mike: Well, I do try to bang my spoon on my highchair a little bit about this notion that, you know, we look at the United States where there is some, still some wetlands, drainage, and there is still some deforestation, but essentially like we tore down our ‘Amazon’ in the 19th century, right?

 

Ken: Absolutely. 

 

Mike: Indiana was 85% forest and now it's all corn and soybeans. And we wag our fingers at Brazil when we see deforestation there for corn and soybeans, mostly for cattle. The fact is, you know, what we are doing is not all that different from what they're doing. They're just doing it a little bit later.

 

My sort of larger point of this book is really about recognizing that essentially we have a land problem. That we need to make more food with less land and fewer emissions. 

 

It's not like we are the good guys because we got rid of our nature so long ago while Brazil and Indonesia are, you know, dealing with those issues now. It's all the same issues. And if we'd had bulldozers, we would've done it faster 

 

Ken: Back in the day, but— 

 

Mike: Exactly. Exactly. I mean, 12,000 years ago, early agriculturalists got rid of a South America worth of nature. They transformed that into farmland before the industrial revolution. Before the tractors. [Instead of] the nasty chemicals, you know, they just use fire and the ax. 

 

So agriculture really does make a mess. And my kind of message is that we first of all have to acknowledge this mess. It's something that a lot of us don't think about every day. I certainly didn't until I started working on this.

 

And then we gotta do something about that mess. Because we gotta eat. 

 

Ken: Yeah. No question about that. And there are more and more of us who have to eat, people need food and they want more protein. That comes at a huge price. So Tim Searchinger, who's the protagonist in the book, [who] I think of as a friend of many years of mine and colleagues here at the Environmental Working Group.

 

We've worked together on any number of issues. Farm [subsidies] in particular, but also the ethanol fight in the early 2000s, and up through about 2014-2015. And so I don't know who latched onto who. My experience has been [that] Tim latches onto something and doesn't let go, but in this case, he didn't come to you and say, write a book about me.

 

But it was very compelling the way you tell his story of a critical thinker who's willing to take on, I mean literally, any intellectual challenge if he's convinced that he's right. Most of what he has built his life around is protecting the planet and human health. How did you meet Searcher? How did you decide that you're gonna, you know, follow his story and tell this broader story that you tell so well?

 

Mike: So I've known Tim for 25 years. I actually tell the story in the book of the first time I met him, which was in Union Station. I had just started doing some investigative stuff at the Washington Post, and he had some ideas for me, and I talked to him like at the time he was, you know, we were both very young.

 

He was wearing this—he kind of looked like it was like a college kid wearing his first suit. And what I remember is even [in] that first meeting, first of all this like just blizzard of verbiage which is what you get with Tim Searchinger. He is obviously brilliant. But one thing that really stuck with me is that here's this guy who's, at the time we were talking a lot about the Army Corps of Engineers, and how they were just building these wasteful and destructive boondoggles all over the country that were destroying rivers. And really for no apparent reason. 

 

First of all, he had all the documentation, because he would say these things that sounded kind of crazy. And he showed me he had done all the work—and here's the documentation. What I also remember is that he would give me all the opposing arguments, you know, he's a lawyer. He was a wetlands lawyer, but he would kind of go through the six best arguments for the other side and he would explain why four of them were bogus. And then this one was only partly bogus and this is actually a pretty good argument here. So I was like, my God, this guy is like, he's just sort of incredibly, [he’s] honest but also incredibly smart and ridiculously driven.

 

You know, I ended up doing a whole thing. I spent a year kicking around the Army Corps on the front page of the Washington Post. He gave me the first tip about the Florida Everglades that led me to write my first book and move to Florida and meet my wife and have a family. So, Tim's been a kind of influential person in my life.

 

But we had sort of, uh, we had… I guess we drifted a little apart. I'd been doing all kinds of different sorts of reporting, including a lot of climate reporting and I was mostly energy reporting, like most of us who think a lot about climate. And I had written this piece about my own life in the green economy. I'd gotten solar panels and an electric car. 

 

My point was not that, ‘I'm an awesome eco saint and you should be like me.’ My point was more like, “Hey, I'm saving a lot of money. If I've figured this out, this stuff is gonna go mainstream.” 

 

I actually had this kind of throwaway line about how I don't line dry my laundry, I don't unplug my computer at night, [and] I still eat meat. And then when I was fact checking it, I was like, huh, I still eat meat. Is meat even bad for the climate? 

 

I genuinely didn't know and I'd been writing about climate stuff for 15 years and I knew, like people talked about the cow farts. Yeah. And I knew that like, ‘Meatless Mondays’ was supposed to be good. But I [thought] like, “Is this just something that vegans say because we want to be nice to animals, or is this actually bad for the climate?”

 

Ken: Vegans with solar panels and electric cars?

 

Mike: Yeah. I knew Tim was sort of doing some agricultural stuff with climate. I called him and I said, “Hey Tim, is meat really that bad for the climate?” And he said, “Yes.” And then he said, because that's sort of how Tim is, “Just a little bit.” We ended up having this conversation and so one of the things he explained basically is that food is about a third of our climate problem, and of course it's like 3% of climate finance and like 0% of climate conversation.

 

So that was really striking to me. And we had done a story together about biofuels and he said basically the problem with meat is [that it’s] like biofuels. It uses too much land. 

 

Biofuels use about a Texas worth of the earth, and that's crazy. But livestock use like 50 Texas' worth of the earth. You know when you eat a burger, you're eating a cow, but really you're eating the Amazon, you're eating the Macaw and the Jaguars and the rest of the cast of Rio.

 

And it was just, that first conversation really made me think, ‘I don't know anything about this stuff, that it's a third of the climate problem and I write about the climate. [If I don’t know] then probably most people don't.” Obviously there are like a million books about energy and climate and a lot of them are really good books and this, it's really important. But we kind of know what to do about energy now. I mean, we're even starting to do it just not fast enough. 

 

Food, I realized, was just this incredible white space where we don't know what to do. The problem's getting worse and we haven't even really grappled with it. And so my book is really, I hope it grapples with it.

 

Ken: Yeah. So what do you think some of the big misconceptions are about how agriculture's affecting the climate and just the environment generally? The critters go first and the climate goes right after? Why hasn't more attention been paid to it? Is it just too naughty, too complex? 

 

Mike: Sure. Well, I mean, I think there are a whole bunch of misconceptions, because I think the first thing is that people don't really know much about food and climate. But then it's also a lot of what they think they know just isn't so. The first big issue, and obviously this is kind of the title of the book, is that land use, that's the giant elephant in the room, and that's what's been ignored, that the climate analysis of food, of agriculture, of biofuels has consciously ignored land use. That's where all the marbles are. That's been the big problem. 

 

And so Tim's big insight essentially is that land is not free. 

 

He first discovered this by looking at biofuels, where essentially there had been a lot of criticism of biofuels, particularly corn ethanol, because the idea was we're using almost as much fossil fuel to create ethanol as we are replacing fossil fuels. I mean, it's just incredibly inefficient. 

 

But the idea was always, yeah, you do emit a lot in making ethanol, but then when you grow corn, that kind of sucks the carbon out of the air. That you're burning in the engine. When you burn the corn and it goes out the tailpipe, those negative emissions in the field kind of offset it.

 

At the time, it was basically the, the prevailing science was, ethanol was like 20% better because of that. And Tim just looked at this and was like, well, that's weird because that cornfield was sucking up carbon when it was growing food, like even before it was growing fuel. If you're gonna grow fuel, then somewhere else you're gonna have to grow more food and it's probably not gonna be in a parking lot. It's gonna be in a forest or a wetland or a prairie or someplace that had a lot of carbon and there's gonna be a real cost. You're going to use more land and that has just been completely ignored by all of the science. And so when Tim ended up doing the math and the modeling, ethanol was not 20% better than gasoline, it was twice as bad, and soy biodiesel was even worse because you needed more land to make the same amount of diesel. 

 

So that was really the initial insight, and that really is the idea that's behind a lot of this book. You know, when you think about agriculture, there's this kind of notion that a lot of people have of, there's kind of good agriculture, Michael Pollen, agriculture. Less chemicals, which is nice, but also small scale, diverse, old school more natural. And then there's kind of big evil industrial agriculture, which is like large. And yes, it has a lot of chemicals, mono cropping, but also it's often called production agriculture or efficient agriculture. Like efficiency is this kind of evil word that rapacious corporations kind of dredge dollars out of the dirt. 

 

But when you realize, when you start thinking about land, it’s that making more food per acre is really important because then you need fewer acres to make food and that there really is this trade off.

 

When you reduce yields, there's a lot of nice things about regenerative agriculture that takes care of the soil or organic agriculture where you're using fewer chemicals. But to the extent there's a yield drag, then there's increased pressure on the Amazon, on the Congo Rainforest, on this Saranetti, you name it.

 

Ken: Or even on The Great Plains. What's left of the grasslands there. 

 

Mike: Yeah, exactly. And of course, it also creates pressure on hunger because the world population is growing and we are gonna need 50% more calories by 2050. Right now we're on track to need 70% more meat. And if we keep doing things the way we're doing them now we're gonna have to deforest another dozen Californians worth of land and we don't really have that. 

 

So that's really the kind of issues that I think have been misunderstood. There's this idea that kind of like sustainable agriculture means like not being too mean to the soil or not being too intensive. But you know, the phrase is sustainable intensification. You know, if you can make more food per acre, that is a really good thing. 

 

Ken: Yeah. The one thing that I, I kept thinking about when I was reading your book, is that there are ways in which you could intensify production and get more yield, even in an organic system or agroforestry systems. But the amount of labor it takes to do that, the return to the land, the ability to earn a living from doing it, that's not just subsistence, that's the dilemma that I think, you know, we also don't confront. 

 

Even if you could show, yeah, I'm growing instead of growing corn, I'm growing fruits and vegetables. I'm getting more value per acre, more calories per acre, more nutrients per acre. And I'm doing it organically. That's fine. But you can't, but it doesn't scale.

 

Mike: That's exactly right, that's the word I was going to use. It's very difficult to scale because really my book is about how do we feed the world without frying the world? And I do think people want to look at their own little acre. Right? And say, “Look at my microbiome. You know, look at these diverse crops.” But is that really gonna scale on the kind of like millions and billions of acres? We're going to need to actually feed 8 to 10 billion people. It's hard. 

 

Now, I wanna say, sometimes I come off, when I talk about this, I end up sounding like this kind of apologist for industrial agriculture.

 

And when, first of all, I wanna say like, I acknowledge all the things that people hate about him and I usually hate it too. Right. You know, the way that they treat animals badly, they treat people badly, they create a lot of toxic pollution. They dump too much crap in rivers. They use too much antibiotics, which creates a public health menace. Their politics suck. I'm aware of all that and I don't wanna justify that. 

 

I'm more of the, how can we reform them so that they can make even more food with less of a mess. At the same time, I also don't want to just blow off this idea that there can be better ways of farming. 

 

I went to a ranch in Brazil where they have a feedlot, they fertilize their pastures, stuff that Michael Pollen wouldn't like at all, but they also do a lot of Michael Pollan stuff. They have cover crops, they have no-till. They integrate their cattle and let them graze the cover crops. They rotational graze their cattle, so you know, the kind of regenerative mob grazing? And they get unbelievable yields. So my real focus is like yield production. That is really important because we really do need to create a lot of affordable, sustainable food.

 

But I don't wanna be the guy who's saying things like, “You have to do it this way, or you have to do it that way.” Like right now organic generally has like 20 to 40% yield drag in the United States and other parts of the world even more. But if you can figure out a way to do super high yield organic, good for you. That's awesome. 

 

Ken: You know, legislation that was passed had us on the path of really dramatically expanding ethanol, and I think Tim's argument, and there weren't many of us making the argument. It was a landslide, including a lot of people in the environmental community, which you write about, who were in favor of, let's go for ethanol. Some, partly because they bought into the technical scientific reasons that the problems with it weren't as apparent until Tim's insights became more commonplace. And secondly, some of them just wanted to curry favor with farm state legislators to get energy bills passed. That was, that's true. The ugliest part of it.

 

Mike: I tell that story, but it was also the politics of ethanol sucked. I tell that funny story about when Tim was trying to convince one democratic senator who had no corn in his state, you know, he was talking to an aide and was like, “Hey, this is just gonna tax your people and it's just going to reward agribusinesses in the Midwest.”

 

And this was John Corzine's and he said to Tim, “Look, I'm sorry, the boss can't afford to piss off the farmers in Iowa.” And Tim was like, “Wait a minute! I mean, your boss used to be the head of Goldman Sachs. He thinks he's gonna be president someday?” And the aide said, “Tim, they all think they're gonna be president someday.”

 

Ken: That's right. That's right. Especially when they look at who's already running.

 

Mike: Oh, exactly. Exactly! And so I do think, you know, the Ag-lobby is really extraordinary. Tim thought once he kind of figured this stuff out about ethanol, he realized he had this great idea where he was going to basically try to create some dissension in the ag ranks. And he went to the, he secretly met with the pork lobby because he figured, “Hey, they feed corn to their yeah pigs and ethanol's gonna increase the price of corn.” But of course the pork guys, whatever their difference about ethanol, they all stick together.

 

And they dimed Tim out and Tim ended up having to leave his environmental group because they dimed him out to his bosses that he was trying to cause problems with ethanol. People forget that this was around 2007. There was no solar [energy]. There was no wind [energy]. There were no electric cars. 

 

Biofuels were the only alternative to fossil fuels we had .And at the time Tim comes along and is sort of like, “They're actually worse than fossil fuels.” That was not what people wanted to hear. And in a way, I was kind of shocked by how many environmentalists were actually willing, and scientists were willing, to look at what Tim came up with, even though he wasn't a scientist at the time, and sort of say like, “Hey, you know what? You're right. We were wrong.” Which is a hard thing for us humans to say. 

 

That said, I do think there are still some environmentalists who are trying to make fetch happen when it comes to biofuels. Even now with everything we know about, about the land use problems, you know, and a lot of Democrats, Midwestern Democrats in this, in the Big Beautiful Republican Bill, there's language that makes it work that basically says, “Well you can't look at the [biofuels]. When you look at biofuels, you can't look at the land use change, because of course that's what makes it not pencil out.”

 

Ken: That's the Achilles heel. A hundred percent. So essentially the— 

 

Mike: The government is saying, okay, well you have to put down your pencils.

 

Ken: Yeah. And we were pretty actively involved on Tim's side and most of the environmental community was on the other side. Friends of the Earth did some good work. They were on our side. You know, some folks in the wildlife community 'cause they saw that what was left of wildlife habitat was being turned into corn ground at the loss of grasslands in the prairie, parts of the heartland.. It just got completely out of control. 

 

I was invited to speak at an ethanol conference because we were critics and they, to their credit, wanted to go back and forth with us. And I'll never forget, somebody came up at the reception. He said, “So Ken, you made some good points, but lemme ask you this. If we paired back on ethanol, what are we gonna do with all that corn?” Right? 

 

Because that was what was really driving it. Too much fucking corn. 

 

They couldn't subsidize exports anymore because of the WTO. You can only do so much with corn here in the U.S. The domestic demand has been reasonably flat. So what do we do? Well, we put it in our SUVs. Next they wanna put it in the plains. 

 

Mike: Which is even crazier! And sort of back of the envelope, to provide about a quarter of the world's jet fuel, with crops would take about 40% of the world's crops. 

 

Ken: Yeah. So talk a little bit about that because you know, one thing that people could accuse you of, I happen to know it's not the case, is that individual action is futile—It's all about big numbers, big acreages and so and so forth, making changes at the policy level. But talk a little bit about everyday people, how they should think about where they fit into this. 

 

Mike: That’s a great question. I think it was about like five years ago, there was just this vision, it kind of farang through the environmental community, this notion that we've gotta stop scolding people. You know, we don't want to be that guy anymore. I think it was like one of the big oil companies actually came up with the first carbon footprint calculator. And so it became, the kind of cool thing to say was like, if worried about your carbon footprint, you're just doing big oil’s bidding.

 

And I get it and look, they're bad. We can stipulate that. We can also stipulate that policy is really important. And look, corporations need to do their part. But you know, like Donald Trump isn't, and, and McDonald's and JBS are not shoving all these burgers, you know, they're not forcing us to eat three burgers a week.

 

And the fact is, if we only ate two burgers a week, we would save like a Massachusetts worth of land every year. And even beyond that, I think there's something kind of uncool about the environmental community. On the one hand, sort of saying like, you know, we're in a crisis. This is horrible. Like we have this deadline, we need [to be under] 2 degrees Celsius by X date, all hands on deck. 

 

And then at the same time being like, “Oh, but your emissions don't matter. Don't worry about that.” So I just think that's crazy. Yeah. You know, I don't want to be judgy and I'd certainly, I don't think perfect's on the menu and you're a vegan. That's the best thing you can do for your diet, for the climate, and that's awesome. I am weak. I am a hypocrite. I think some of this is a little bit like organized religion. You find the level of hypocrisy you're comfortable with. Right. I have cut out beef; like I said, vegan is the best and being a vegetarian is also great. But cutting out beef is about, generally about as good as being a vegetarian for the planet and the climate, because beef is so bad and vegetarians end up eating more dairy to replace their protein. And I do tell the story in the book of how I went to Brazil and spent a couple weeks on cattle ranches and fell off the wagon and ate a lot of delicious steak.

 

Ken: Hard not to in Brazil, 

 

Mike: People told me like, “Oh, after a month you won't even miss it.” And that was bullshit. I really miss it. [Beef] is delicious. And our ancestors started eating this stuff 2 million years ago. We like it. That said, I do think the best thing you can do in your individual diet is eat less beef and waste less food because when we waste food, we waste the farmland and the water and the chemicals and fertilizers that are used to grow that food.

 

It's dumb that we, the world, use about a China worth of land to grow garbage. That seems suboptimal.

 

 I try not to get up on my high horse, just [say] like, “I have an electric vehicle and solar panels and stuff.” But I fly too much. We all have an impact. 

 

All agriculture has an impact. 

 

This is my third book and, and all three books, one of the big themes has been that better is better than worse. And I think that's a good goal. I think we should try to do better rather than worse. 

 

Ken: Yeah. I do think an individual commitment like that or an understanding like that can often nourish an interest, and looking and participating in efforts to change policy. It gives you a degree of authenticity, a grounding, and so forth. 

 

Mike: We vote three times a day, right? So it really is a matter of consciousness.

 

The one thing I will say is, you know, I often hear. And usually it's to excuse something else. It's sort of like, we don't need to do X, we just all need to go vegan or we just need to stop wasting food or stop using biofuels. And one thing I do point out is that, and this is a real theme in the book as well, is that math is the math.

 

And the math really sucks. 

 

So that even in the rich world [if] we cut our beef consumption in half. Which I think is gonna be really hard, but that I think should be the goal. Because in the poor world, we actually want people to eat more meat. I mean it's outrageous that there are 6 billion people on earth that basically eat none. So just for equity and you know, we want people to be healthy and have affordable meat. 

 

Imagine we cut our beef consumption in half and imagine the entire world cutting food waste in half. And just imagine we got rid of all biofuels. We're still gonna need to make a lot more food with a lot less land to basically feed the world without frying it by 2050.

 

We really need to do all the things, or at least, you know, if not all of the above, most of the above. And that includes, on the dietary side, whether it's, you know, eating less beef or replacing it with alternative proteins, whether it's, the fake meat or maybe someday the cultivated meat grown from cells.

 

But also on the agricultural side, we need to again, whether it's higher yield crops, drought tolerant crops, alternative fertilizers, alternative pesticides, better grazing that puts more cows on the same amount of land. We're gonna need to investigate all that stuff. We need to throw money into research.

 

We need to deploy the stuff that works and then it's still gonna be hard. 

 

Ken: Yeah, no question. I think the next logical thing is, okay, well, so if I'm thinking big about policy and I'm trying to balance this out, what's the combination that results in progress, not perfection, but it's meaningful progress?

 

Taking on the climate challenge and the challenge of feeding people at the same time. If you invest in technology that boosts yields, how do you avoid the pressure to take that technology and clear more land because it grows so much more food? What's the policy frame there? 

 

Mike: That's a great question because right there is this kind of rebound effect where globally, if we increase yields, that should decrease demand for land. But locally, you give a farmer in Brazil, you know, or a farmer in Africa, access to fertilizer, he's gonna grow more food and the first thing he is gonna do is like, this is awesome. And he's gonna go and cut down more trees; farm another sector [because it] would be good. Expand the farm. 

 

So I would say from a global policy perspective, we really do need this notion of ‘produce and protect’ where it's linked, where we're gonna help farmers and we're gonna help particularly developing nations, we're gonna help them increase their yields. And also we're going to help them with the kind of climate friendly technologies that we discussed. Biological fertilizers or biological nitrification inhibition or, you know… I'm really fun at parties. 

 

Ken: People are usually worried I'm gonna take a blood sample or something. So I think, I think exactly.

 

Mike: I might even be lower on the invite list. 

 

Look, I mean, there are all kinds of very exciting technological and agronomic solutions that I think should be invested in and that can really help. But at the same time, that has to be linked with—like there has to be strings attached to the money. Hey, if not all of Brazil, at least the Brazilian province, we will give you all this money to help you make even more food, but you cannot cut down your forest. And if you do, the money gets cut off.

 

I should point out that like about 10 years ago that was supposed to be the deal where. Brazil was supposed to do its part, and if they did its part, they were supposed to get lots of money and the international community did not come up with the money, which broke our promises. And that led to a lot of political unrest and all kinds of disaster. 

 

So again, this is all very hard. I want to acknowledge that this is not something you can just snap your fingers and be like, “produce and protect, easy.” But I think that it is the model where we should be looking at and unfortunately the energy at the institutions like the UN foundations like Rockefeller and Walmart, and you name it. And even these agribusinesses like PepsiCo and General Mills, the big food, big Ag guys as well as in the United States, you see Bobby Kennedy and Joe Rogan on the right, as well as Michael Pollan and Al Gore on the left.

 

Everybody has this vision where we're gonna spend billions, maybe trillions of dollars essentially transitioning to this agroecological paradise where we're just gonna be nicer to the soil and somehow the carbon from the sky is gonna come down and just be repatriated to the soil. And that is very dangerous because the carbon farming aspect of it is mostly bullshit. It doesn't pencil out. It just doesn't work. 

 

And the regenerative agriculture part of it, which does do some very nice things for the soil, but again, if you're reducing your yields, you're creating a real deforestation problem. So I just think this is stuff that needs to be thought through. We can't have this kind of faith-based transformation of global agriculture. 

 

Ken: Yeah, I think that's right. I see a lot of benefits to regenerative agriculture, which, so capacious in its definition, it could mean everything. It's no surprise that we have some really devout, smart, advanced agro ecologists thinking about it.

 

And we have fair thinking about it, right? They both used the term. No surprise that we need a little definitional rigor here. The notion that we're going to farm in such a way that it's going to be the solution to climate change, storing carbon in the soil. And, you know, my background long ago was soil science.

 

And all the soil scientists I've gotten to know over the years have basically said when you start clearing land, you never have a very good chance of going back to that carbon storage capability that you had in a forest, say, or even tallgrass prairie. 

 

Mike: You're absolutely right, and this is an area where, again, scary Michael Pollen is a beautiful writer, and I wish I wrote as well as he does. He's done a little bit of a disservice by creating this kind of nostalgia and romance around this idea that there's this kind of good, sustainable old style farming with lovely diverse crops and the red barn and the rustic pastoral setting and the farmer and his wife with the pitchfork.

 

It's true that when those kinds of pastoral bucolic farms got transformed into bigger industrial farms, there was some environmental cost to that. And you at the Environmental Working Group have done a fantastic job of really focusing particularly on the pesticide side of it, that there really are trade-offs there that are, that are absolutely real.

 

But that said, the real environmental catastrophe was the transformation of the prairie or the forest into those bucolic Michael Pollen, beloved farms in the first place. That's where we lost biodiversity. That's where we lost the carbon. That's like a different way of thinking about agriculture.

 

When you're taking your cross-country flight and looking at all those squares and circles, you know, a way that actually treasures the land, not just for that individual piece of land, but being able to think of it as part of a food system where we are going to need to feed. A shit ton of people and they're gonna need a shit ton of food. And that agricultural sprawl, like I said, it's 40 times as big as urban sprawl and it's getting bigger and that just can't continue indefinitely.

 

Mark Twain said they ain't making any more of it. And right now there's about as much nature as there is farms.

 

But the farm part is getting bigger every day and the nature part is getting smaller. 

 

Ken: So your book is coming out and the name of the book is, We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate. And I would recommend anyone with an interest in climate, energy, agriculture, our food system, to pick up Mike's book.

 

I think it'll challenge the way you think about some things. I think it will maybe open some creative new ways to characterize the problems as maybe some of us have conceptualized them in the past and come back. I think everyone will come back to the importance of the land. I think everyone agrees it's important, but I think it's important in your book in a different way because if we continue to lose the capability to preserve nature, because we chew it all up and eat it all, we're in big trouble as we have MAHA (Make America Healthy Again). We had Kennedy on the campaign trail saying he was gonna be in charge of all the health agencies and USDA. It didn't exactly work out that way, among other promises that didn't work out. So how do you see this debate unfolding over the next few years?

 

You have a republican control of Congress. It looks very much like Mr. Trump's Secretary of Agriculture is very conventional in the way she approaches politics and policy. You have. Kennedy, unable to really do much that affects agriculture from his perch at HHS. He can do a lot of other things like cut Medicaid, but he can't really do much about agriculture.

 

So how do you see these arguments unfolding, Mike, over the next few years? 

 

Mike: We talked a little bit in the beginning about how uh, there's sort of this energy and climate world and the food and climate part of it is sort of new. Right. And I like to say it's probably 20, 25 years behind energy and climate.

 

Right now for people who are energy and climate people, which I was one of them, I guess I still am, even though I've taken this six year detour. Obviously these next four years are gonna suck. We know where Trump is. He doesn't give a shit about the climate and he's actually. A fan of fossil fuels. He is going to do everything he can to advance fossil fuels at the expense of clean energy. 

 

Ken: To his great credit, he has figured out that there's a problem with solar energy, which is called sunset. 

 

Mike: Did you know that the wind doesn't always blow, Ken? Have you, Have you heard that? 

 

Ken: I know, I wrote it down. The first time I heard him say it. 

 

Mike: So he's going to be rolling back. A lot of good stuff happened. The good news is that wind and solar and batteries and electric vehicles have gotten so cheap and good that I don't think he can just completely end the revolution.  But that's gonna be, you know, it's gonna be a political fight and he is gonna roll some stuff back.

 

So the sort of good news for my world from food and climate is that it’s so new that there's nothing to roll back. Or at least not very much. Right. But I do think that this is a time where we need to figure shit out.

 

In a way it's, I mean—opportunities not really the right word at least—so that when there is globally and in the United States when at least the kind of political stars are aligned to actually do something about this stuff we'll be ready to do the right thing. And that's where I do have to at least give a shout out to Denmark.

 

You know, when I talk about this stuff, people are, you know, there's a lot of like, oh yeah, right? “Yeah, we're just gonna snap our fingers and take on the ag industry and do this and do that.” 

 

Well, Denmark, it turns out, is doing all the things I went there with, searching for her who had been hired along with the World Resources Institute, by the Danish agricultural lobby, essentially to help them decarbonize their industry. Denmark had done so much work on climate stuff, basically on the energy side that suddenly agriculture was looking like a massive part of the problem. 

 

So they were kind of like, even though they were very powerful and they were like, “Oh my God, I mean the energy guys did their part. We're gonna have to do ours. What can we do?” And of course at the time the environs were like,”Well, you need to shut down your pig farms and shut down your dairy farms.” And Tim came and said, “No, you have incredibly efficient pig and dairy farms. It would be dumb to shut it down and outsource all that deforestation and pollution to the developing world. Instead, we should make it even more productive, but less of a mess. Test all of the technologies, you know, the drought tolerant crops and the greener fertilizers and… you name it, the feed additives so that the cows burp less methane. We're gonna test all that. We're gonna deploy the stuff that works. You'll make even more food, but you're also going to have to use less land. And we're gonna rewild a million acres of farmland at the same time. We're gonna tax agricultural emissions. We're going to have a nationwide effort to promote plant forward eating.” 

 

So basically we're gonna do everything. And I think that's the model.  

 

Now, I don't expect that to happen very soon in the United States. I talked to one pollster who told me that actually taxing or any kind of restrictions on meat was the least popular policy he had ever surveyed, he said, “It pulled like veterans benefits for ISIS.”

 

So again, it's hard. But I think that should be the goal, it’s to try to let a thousand flowers bloom, let the technologies improve, get better policy and try to have individuals try to do their part. Even if we're not perfect—we're all flawed—but we could try to do a little better.

 

Ken: Well, Mike, I'm so grateful to spend this time with you. I'm so proud of all the books you've written but especially this one. I'm really excited to have it hit the streets and the debate it's gonna stir up, I think is long overdue. We've been, in some ways, resting on some comfortable delusions for maybe too long about how big this problem is and how to take it on as an organization that's been in the teeth of big Ag for a long time. We know how hard they fight. But I do think you're pointing the way here to some ideas that we really knew do need to at least give a good sounding to and who knows.

 

The pendulum swings and there may be an embrace of some of these ideas. We look at the ideas that are popular now that we didn't think were thinkable just a few years ago. So times do change and politics change and I think, in the agriculture space, this is gonna really help shape the conversation about that.

 

So, Mike I'm thrilled for you and grateful to you and can't wait to see what you do next. 

 

Mike: Well, it's been awesome talking to you, and I really appreciate all your kind words and of course, all your great work. 

 

Ken: Mike Grunwald, thank you so much for joining us today. I also want to thank all of you out there for listening.

 

Be sure to check out Mike's latest book. We are Eating the Earth, the Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate. And if you'd like to learn more. Be sure to check out our show notes for additional links. To take a deeper dive into today's discussion, make sure to follow us on Instagram at Ken Cooks podcast, and if you're interested in learning more about EWG.

 

Head on over to ewg.org or check out the EWG Instagram account at Environmental Working Group. If this episode resonated with you or you think someone you know would benefit from it, send it along. The best way to make positive change is to start as a community with your community. Today's episode was produced by the extraordinary Beth Row and Mary Kelly.

 

Our show's theme music is Courtesy of Moby. Thank you Moby, and thanks again to all of you for listening.

Areas of Focus Farming & Agriculture Climate & Agriculture Conservation Factory Farms Farm Pollution Food & Farm Workers Press Contact JR Culpepper jr.culpepper@ewg.org (202) 779-9990 July 24, 2025

EWG statement on FDA seeking to define ultra-processed foods rcoleman July 24, 2025

WASHINGTON – The Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture are seeking public input as they develop a definition for ultra-processed foods, or UPF. 

The following is a statement from Scott Faber, the Environmental Working Group’s senior vice president for government affairs:

EWG welcomes any effort to address the health harms posed by ultra-processed foods. While many processed foods can be part of a healthy diet, ultra-processed foods are different from processed foods, because they combine industrial ingredients and additives in ways that make our food hyperpalatable. 

These industrially engineered foods are not simply delicious; they are literally irresistible, because they change the signals sent to our brain’s reward center, increase the speed with which that reward is delivered and interfere with the signals that tell us to stop eating. 

UPF are not merely high in fat, sugar and salt. They are also processed and combined with chemicals in ways that make them unlike the foods our parents and grandparents enjoyed. 

At a time when the cost of diet-related disease continues to grow, we welcome any effort to help consumers identify and avoid UPF and build healthier diets, including state efforts like California’s groundbreaking legislation to define UPF and California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recent executive order directing state scientists and top researchers to develop new policy proposals.

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The Environmental Working Group is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization that empowers people to live healthier lives in a healthier environment. Through research, advocacy and unique education tools, EWG drives consumer choice and civic action. 

Areas of Focus Food & Water Food Toxic Chemicals Food Chemicals Press Contact Monica Amarelo monica@ewg.org (202) 939-9140 July 24, 2025

Former EPA scientists join EWG to expand, bolster EWG Verified® program rcoleman July 23, 2025

WASHINGTON – The Environmental Working Group is thrilled to welcome three distinguished experts and former Environmental Protection Agency leaders to the staff. They will help expand and strengthen EWG Verified®, the organization’s flagship initiative for safer, healthier consumer products. 

The trio’s deep expertise at the EPA in advancing science-based public health protections will strengthen EWG’s leadership as a trusted source for rigorous, transparent standards millions of consumers depend on.

Clive Davies
Vice president, EWG Verified

Davies brings with him a wealth of scientific and programmatic leadership developed during his long tenure at EPA and his work to encourage and reward development and use of safer chemicals. 

Before joining EWG, Davies led the EPA’s Safer Choice program, which identifies products made with ingredients that are safer for human health and the environment. The program also evaluates antimicrobial products seeking the EPA’s Design for the Environment certification for strict health and safety criteria. 

At EWG, Davies will lead a team of scientists advancing the organization’s rigorous standards for personal care, cleaning, baby products and mattresses through the EWG Verified and EWG Reviewed for Science programs. 

Lauren Sweet Duffy, Ph.D. 
Senior scientist, toxicology lead, EWG Verified

Duffy served as the lead toxicologist for the EPA’s Safer Choice Program beginning in 2017. She evaluated the safety of ingredients in cleaning products and other consumer goods. Now, as the chief toxicologist for EWG Verified, Duffy brings her deep scientific expertise and regulatory experience to strengthen the program’s rigorous standards. 

She will play a central role in ensuring that every EWG Verified product meets the highest benchmarks for health and safety while also maintaining the integrity of the program and reinforcing consumer trust.

Taylor K. Dunivin, Ph.D. 
Director, science communications, EWG Verified

Dunivin is a respected scientist and seasoned science communicator with a deep commitment to public health and chemical safety. She served as a biologist and outreach lead with the EPA’s Safer Choice program, working to identify and promote safer chemical ingredients in everyday products. 

Before her tenure at the EPA, Dunivin worked as a Senate legislative aide and at the National Institutes of Health during the Covid-19 pandemic. In her new role at EWG, Dunivin will lead the development and expansion of science communications with both companies and consumers, helping brands meet EWG Verified standards and empowering shoppers with clear, trustworthy information. Her work will play a key role in growing the EWG Verified program and expanding access to safer, healthier personal care and cleaning products.

“Clive, Lauren and Taylor each embody the science-based approach that is central to our mission,” said Jocelyn Lyle, EWG’s executive vice president for mission and partnerships. “Their combined expertise will elevate the rigor, transparency and trustworthiness of our EWG Verified program. On behalf of the entire staff and myself, we are thrilled they have joined the team at EWG.”

About EWG Verified and EWG Reviewed for Science

EWG Verified and EWG Reviewed for Science recognize products that meet the highest standards for ingredient safety and transparency. These programs are grounded in independent toxicological review and data evaluation, empowering consumers to make safer, healthier choices about their personal care, cleaning, baby products and mattresses.

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The Environmental Working Group is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization that empowers people to live healthier lives in a healthier environment. Through research, advocacy and unique education tools, EWG drives consumer choice and civic action. 

Areas of Focus Personal Care Products Household & Consumer Products Toxic Chemicals Press Contact Alex Formuzis alex@ewg.org (202) 667-6982 July 23, 2025

How ultra-processed food may fuel Type 2 diabetes rcoleman July 23, 2025

Type 2 diabetes affects roughly 34 million Americans. The numbers are rising, especially among children, and ultra-processed food might be playing a role.

Americans are increasingly consuming this type of food, which can include packaged snacks, soda, instant noodles, fast food, frozen entrees and refined bread. Americans’ dietary habits for ready-to-eat foods has gone up over the past two decades, according to a 2022 study. 

On average, ultra-processed food or UPF, accounts for almost 60% of an American adult’s diet. It’s even higher for kids and teens, representing more than two-thirds of their total calories. 

The rising consumption of these foods may play a role in the increased incidence of long-term chronic diseases like cancer, heart disease, cardiovascular disease, Crohn’s disease, depression and brain disorders like dementia. 

Rising prevalence of Type 2 diabetes 

Some studies have associated increased consumption of UPF with a higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, one of the most widespread chronic diseases in the U.S. 

Type 2 diabetes accounts for 90% to 95% of all diabetes cases, and according to the National Institutes of Health, nearly 12% of people in the U.S. of all ages have diabetes. 

With Type 2 diabetes, the body begins to lose its ability to effectively regulate blood sugar. Disruptions to the body's usual metabolic system can also lead to higher blood pressure, cholesterol, glucose levels and obesity.

The incidence of Type 2 diabetes went up dramatically between 2002 and 2018 for all children in the U.S., especially for Black and American Indian children. 

There is a growing body of research linking UPF consumption and the risk of Type 2 diabetes, with high intake increasing the risk in one study by as much as 31%, according to a 2022 study.

In 2024, European researchers found that each 10% increase in UPF consumption in the diet was associated with a 17% higher incidence of diabetes.

This rise could mean hundreds of thousands of additional diabetes cases across the U.S.

Defining ultra-processed food

Food can be categorized by how much it has been processed – ranging from unprocessed whole food to ultra-processed. Most food products found in the grocery store are processed in some way, even if it’s just cooking or pasteurizing to make it safe and edible. 

Ultra-processed foods are different. 

They are made using one or more industrial ingredients like artificial colors and flavors, non-sugar sweeteners, and additives such as emulsifiers and thickeners. UPF is designed to be cheap, irresistibly palatable and ready to eat straight from the package. These products are engineered so we keep wanting to eat them.

Part of what makes them so craveable is their often high levels of sugar and fat.  

Studies have shown that consumption of UPF may interfere with our brain’s reward system and the signals that tell us to stop eating. This may lead to eating more of these foods compared to minimally processed foods.

Health impacts of UPF

Studies have linked UPF consumption to metabolic diseases such as metabolic syndrome and fatty liver disease.

UPF’s combination of high energy density and hyperpalatability promotes overconsumption. This can also contribute to weight gain. 

U.S. obesity rates have risen over the past several decades. Obesity also significantly increases the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. 

Overconsumption can increase fat storage in the body and interfere with the body’s metabolic processes. This can increase insulin production and fat storage in the liver, both of which promote Type 2 diabetes. 

Policy failures and state action 

The Food and Drug Administration is failing to protect us from harmful food chemicals, including those in UPF. Nearly 99% of food chemicals introduced since 2000 have been approved by the food and chemical industry, and not reviewed by the FDA. 

Progress on oversight for food chemicals and UPF has come largely from state governments.

California recently enacted two first-in-the-nation bans on certain food chemicals, including harmful food dyes in school food. EWG co-sponsored both of these bills. 

Other states have introduced and passed similar legislation.  

The California Senate is now considering Assembly Bill 1264, which would restrict the offering of harmful UPF in public schools. 

How to limit exposure to harmful UPF chemicals

Food choices are often driven by availability and cost. Ultra-processed foods in many categories are often cheaper than less processed foods. 

It doesn’t help that so much of what’s in the grocery store is UPF – by one estimate, as much as 70%. 

But, just as higher consumption of UPF can be connected to Type 2 diabetes, the reverse is also true: Replacing UPF in the diet with food that is less processed can lower the incidence of diabetes. 

Not all UPF are equally harmful either, and processing alone doesn’t make food unhealthy. Plain Greek yogurt, whole wheat bread and whole grain cereals are processed foods that contain nutrients like protein and fiber.

For many UPF, there’s a healthier, less-processed alternative. Instead of yogurt with added flavors, artificial colors, zero-calorie sweeteners and thickeners, you might choose a yogurt with simple ingredients: cultured milk and fruit.

The key to identifying these products is reading ingredient lists and nutrition facts. This means looking beyond marketing claims, including greenwashing. Here’s what you can do: 

• Choose simple ingredients. Focus on products with ingredients whose names you recognize.
• Make healthier swaps. When possible and affordable, choose whole, minimally processed foods such as fruits and vegetables and whole grains, beans, lentils and meats.
• Upgrade your pantry. If you are buying mac and cheese in a grocery store, consider items like Ancient Harvest Pow! Mac and Cheese Power Protein Pasta over Kroger Original Macaroni and Cheese.
• Don’t aim for perfection. Eating less UPF doesn’t mean giving up convenience – it means checking ingredient labels.
• Check EWG guides. EWG has several useful food shopping guides to get you started, from frozen food to general tips in the grocery store. 

Consult EWG’s free, searchable Food Scores database, which offers ratings for more than 80,000 food and beverage products based on nutrition, ingredient concerns and processing. A flag that identifies the most unhealthy UPF appears as part of the nutrition facts in the EWG Top Findings section of a product when applicable. 

Our Healthy Living app makes it easy to check what’s in products at the store.

Areas of Focus Food & Water Food Family Health Toxic Chemicals Food Chemicals Guest Authors Owen Curtin, EWG Communications Intern July 23, 2025