Grist

When then 31-year-old Brazilian culinary student Letícia Dias walked into Eleven Madison Park on a Sunday evening last August, she had no idea a meal was about to change her life. A longtime vegan, it was her first time dining at the world-class New York City luxury restaurant, which in 2021 made the bold move to ditch meat and dairy and offer a fully plant-based menu. When her lips met the deceptively simple-looking corn velouté, something new clicked between her taste buds and brain. 

“I drank that, and I was like, ‘Oh my God. This is insane,’” Dias recalled. “Like, I understand why this is different than other places that I’ve been to.”

It wasn’t just the food that made the dinner unlike any she’d ever had. It was also the ambience and level of personal attention — the mid-meal tour of the famously quiet kitchen, the waitstaff appearing seemingly from nowhere to refill her water glass between sips, and the stories that accompanied each dish down to the ingredient.

Eleven Madison Park, also known by its initials, EMP, has long been considered a bucket list destination for serious foodies. In 2017, it appeared at the top of a list of the world’s 50 best restaurants. After it dropped meat and dairy, it became the first restaurant in the world to be awarded three Michelin stars for a fully plant-based menu. For vegan cooks in training like Dias, who does not want to work with animal products, EMP’s shift away from meat opened up an elite career opportunity. The restaurant has long had a robust training program that helps aspiring chefs cut their teeth and gain valuable skills for the luxury food world and beyond. 

“It’s a teaching institution,” said Matt Ricotta, owner of the plant-based cottage bakery Manifold in Venice, California, who was a pastry intern at the restaurant in 2022. “It’s one of those famous, famous places where everyone wants to go and learn.” 

A maître d’ at Eleven Madison Park in New York City checks the dining room before dinner in 2017.
Spencer Platt / Getty Images

By the time her meal was over, Dias had decided she wanted to apply to EMP for her externship — a temporary, entry-level kitchen job required by many culinary schools to help graduating students gain experience and valuable industry connections. After the staff found out she was a vegan culinary student, one of the chefs even gave her their business card. 

So it was a shock when, just three days after Dias’ visit, Eleven Madison Park chef and owner Daniel Humm announced that the restaurant would be adding a limited amount of meat and dairy back to the menu — say, an optional cameo of lavender-glazed duck here, an if-you-want-it lobster course there — starting in October 2025. Humm told The New York Times that the change was meant to attract a wider base of guests, both for financial reasons and to reflect a hospitality philosophy of wanting to welcome everyone.

As the news spread, concern grew among the members of Dias’s cohort at the Institute of Culinary Education, where she was enrolled in a program geared toward vegetarian and vegan chefs. Just the day before, one of her classmates, Autumn Henson, had sent their completed externship application to the institute’s career adviser to forward to the restaurant. An experienced vegan baker, Henson had wanted exposure to plant-based haute cooking at a place with name recognition: “It’s important that there’s [vegan] representation at all levels,” they explained. 

But as soon as Henson heard the news, they rushed to a computer and quickly shot off a follow-up message. “The subject line was, ‘Don’t send in my application to EMP.” 

Likewise, Dias decided to put aside her partially finished EMP externship application and look for employers with a fully vegan menu. “The options for if you want to do plant-based fine dining are few and far between, and getting fewer,” she said. 

Even before Eleven Madison Park’s menu change, opportunities to train in exclusively plant-based, high-end kitchens were scarce. The short list of such restaurants in New York City — a city with more vegan and vegan-friendly restaurants than anywhere else in the country — already meant cooks like Dias and Henson have a harder time finding their place within the ultra competitive food industry. As more elite kitchens step back from fully plant-based cooking, the ripple effects go beyond individual careers: Fewer chefs trained in plant-based techniques means fewer restaurants able to execute them at a high level, and fewer chances for plant-forward dishes to shape what ends up on menus more broadly. 

At a moment when experts say cutting back on meat and dairy is essential to a sustainable diet, the loss of these training grounds could slow the cultural shift needed to make that future feel both desirable and delicious.

Kimberly Elliott / Grist

Even for more established vegan cooks, part of what made Eleven Madison Park’s return to meat so upsetting was that it had once represented the ultimate achievement for sustainable cuisine, the ascent to the top of the American cultural food chain. 

Within the world of fine dining, vegan kitchens share many of the same hallmarks as traditional haute dining establishments  — prix fixe menus, meticulous presentation, premium ingredients, and a price tag that’s typically north of $100 per person (before drinks!). And yet the concept of a luxurious, formal, plant-based meal is still a culinary outlier in many parts of the United States, with many top-tier restaurants only emerging within the last few decades.

Like the Michelin star system itself — a rating guide that has become the go-to barometer for ranking the world’s best restaurants — special occasion food has historically been dominated by French culinary tradition, which is heavily reliant on meat and dairy. The 1960s through 1980s saw the rise of nouvelle cuisine, a lighter style of French cooking that emphasized simplicity and freshness and ditched heavy sauces, yet remained firmly tied to animal products. 

That’s not to say delicious vegan fare didn’t exist, of course. Yet in popular culture, it was largely associated with healthful self-denial. In many restaurants, diners who eschewed meat often found themselves poking at plates of steamed vegetables over brown rice — hardly cause for gastronomic celebration. 

But in the early 1990s, that started to change. Millennium Restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area was an early pioneer of upscale vegan cooking when it opened in 1994, offering world cuisine-influenced dishes like tempeh glazed with Filipino-style banana barbecue sauce and a cornmeal-crusted maitake mushroom over grits drizzled with Calabrian chile sofrito oil. In the late aughts, vegetarian fine dining restaurant Dirt Candy in New York City gained national acclaim for its trailblazing playfulness with vegetables, like sweet cauliflower chilaquiles for dessert. Next came Vedge in Philadelphia, Crossroads Kitchen in Los Angeles, Avant Garden in New York, and other elevated vegan restaurants that helped nudge plants from the appetizer menu to the main course in the 2010s. 

Then came the COVID pandemic. While American restaurants in general struggled, interest in plant-based diets peaked. During the pandemic, the plant-based food industry expanded by 27 percent, according to a survey conducted by the consumer group Strategic Market Research. Whether they were motivated by concerns over health, the climate impacts of meat and dairy, or the ethics of consuming animal products, increased consumer demand for plant-based products could be seen in grocery aisles and white tablecloth restaurants alike.

But it wasn’t until Eleven Madison Park’s 2021 divestment from meat and dairy that vegan fare became associated with the ultimate level of culinary luxury, which has since come to also include other plant-based dining destinations such as Fabrik in Austin, Texas; Astera in Portland, Oregon; and Michelin-starred MITA in Washington, D.C. 

Chef Miguel Guerra (right) confers with guests in the dining room at MITA restaurant in Washington, D.C., in 2024. Scott Suchman for The Washington Post via Getty Images

For the last few years, upscale vegan restaurants have provided new training grounds for the next generation of vegan chefs and bakers, many of whom have taken those plant-based lessons beyond the haute dining scene. 

Internships and externships in vegan fine dining kitchens teach budding plant-based cooks things that omnivorous kitchens teach, too — like how to chop vegetables on a very, very, very even dice — which you can either call fundamentals or grunt work. (Both descriptions are true.) But these experiences also usually teach some of the skills that are especially important for vegan haute cookery. 

More so than meat dishes, cooking fine plant-based fare requires an advanced understanding of what ingredients are at the peak of their season and ripeness, and how to prepare them in ways that accentuate their flavor, said Dan Marek, director of plant-based culinary and content development at Rouxbe Online Culinary School. Cooks training in haute vegan restaurants might gain specialized skills that are highly tailored to the chef’s approach or to the cuisine the restaurant serves. If they’re at a fancy vegan sushi place, they might learn how to roll vegan sushi. Elsewhere, maybe they’d learn spherification, a molecular gastronomy technique that forms tiny, liquid-filled pearlettes that look like caviar but can taste like anything — Key lime, passionfruit, a peak September tomato. 

Whole roasted carrots with black lentils and green harissa prepared by Rich Landau of Vedge in Philadelphia and his wife, co-owner Kate Jacoby.
Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post via Getty Images

At the pastry station of many high-end vegan kitchens, pastry cooks need to be versed in using plant-based baking substitutes, especially butter. Ricotta of Manifold Bakery said his internship at Eleven Madison Park helped him grasp the importance of using acidic ingredients and generous amounts of salt to heighten flavor, plus exposed him to vegan substitutes and thickeners — part of what he believes sets apart his plant-based baking style today. 

“All that came from my time there,” he said. Ricotta said that if he were seeking an internship today, the presence of meat on the restaurant’s menu wouldn’t dissuade him, so long as the pastry program remained fully vegan. Eleven Madison Park says it will “at this time.”

Vegan fine-dining chefs who stay in that part of the field and open their own restaurants also need to eventually learn, or at least consider, the extra element of performance that some restaurants leverage to help vegetable-only dishes feel worthy of a lofty price tag. Eleven Madison Park brought that to the plant-based culinary scene with dishes like its famous carrot tartare, ground at the table and mixed up by the diners themselves, like a big, playful wink at steakhouse expectations. 

But for all its innovation in the kitchen, plant-based eating recently began showing signs of trend fatigue. Meat is making a cultural and political comeback in America. Carni-bros, farm-to-table acolytes, and people looking for easy, protein-filled weeknight recipes alike are on the bandwagon. In January, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released updated federal dietary guidelines that championed red meat and dairy in a major reversal of previous recommendations. 

It wasn’t the ideal professional landscape for Dias and Henson, as they looked for other plant-based externship options in New York last August. Going down the list of high-end plant-based restaurants in New York, they discovered their options were rapidly dwindling. In 2025, at least 20 well-known vegan restaurants in the city closed permanently, two others closed temporarily, and another two, including Eleven Madison Park, de-veganized. 

While restaurant turnover is part of the food industry, it’s notable that most of the recently shuttered vegan businesses in New York are not being replaced by new vegan eateries. Marek attributes a broader nationwide contraction to an overly saturated market: The U.S. restaurant scene got to a point where there were more plant-based eateries than the market of vegan and vegan-curious eaters could actually support. “We’re seeing a lot of closures in the past year,” he said — more than can be attributed to the inherent challenge of targeting a niche clientele. 

“The bigger the swell, the bigger the fall.”

Kimberly Elliott / Grist

Though the vegan restaurant scene has shrunk compared to its post-pandemic high, it’s by no means gone. There are still about a dozen high-end meatless restaurants in the Big Apple alone. A few — like Dirt Candy, Bodai, and Omakaseed — are formal fine dining, centered on tasting menus. Others, like abcV and Avant Garden, are upscale, with enough gastronomic ingenuity to be listed on the Michelin guide. Dirt Candy is the lone one in the bunch with a Michelin star, one of just a few meatless restaurants nationwide with the honor.

Before applying to Eleven Madison Park, Dias had applied to almost all the city’s high-end vegan kitchens, including Omakaseed and the vegan restaurants owned by the groups Overthrow Hospitality and City Roots Hospitality. But by the end of August, she hadn’t gotten any replies. She decided to look beyond the city’s entirely plant-based upscale options, applying to abcV, which is vegetarian and is owned by renowned French chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s restaurant group. The restaurant’s use of some eggs gave Dias pause, but abcV is still considered vegan-friendly. She really admired its approach to letting vegetables be vegetables instead of leaning on meat substitutes. 

“It’s like school. Sometimes the benefits outweigh whatever I may feel,” she said. 

Henson, meanwhile, had also sent an externship application to Overthrow Hospitality, which owns Avant Garden and the elevated homemade pasta spot Soda Club among others, but didn’t hear back. (Overthrow Hospitality later told Grubstreet that it plans to close almost all of its New York City restaurants “over time” in favor of launching a national chain of pizza-and-pasta locations.) After inquiring about City Roots Hospitality, they learned the vegan group doesn’t take externs. After doing a trail (or job tryout) at both abcV and Dirt Candy — two restaurants they were excited about — they learned that Dirt Candy’s sole externship spot had gone to another plant-based student in their culinary class. 

“I gotta say, it’s been a little harder than I thought,” they said to Grist about a month into their search. 

Lunchtime diners at abcV, a vegan restaurant in New York City. Deb Lindsey For The Washington Post via Getty Images

Outside the U.S., plant-based fine dining and training pathways into it for budding vegan chefs look like they may actually be expanding, inch by inch — even in France, of all places. Arpège, a three-Michelin-starred restaurant in Paris helmed by chef Alain Passard, said last summer that it would ditch all animal products except honey. The French culinary school Le Cordon Bleu, meanwhile, has launched plant-based cooking and pastry programs at its Paris, London, Malaysia, São Paolo, and other locations over the past several years.

But inside the U.S., the spotty landscape of meatless culinary school training opportunities just took a hit. While Henson and Dias were still in classes at the Institute of Culinary Education, they learned that their program, which had been entirely vegetarian, would be changing beginning with the following cohort. A previous iteration of the program had been plant-forward but with some instruction in poultry and seafood — taking inspiration from the shuttered vegetable-centric culinary education pioneer the Natural Gourmet Institute. Last fall, the institute’s vegetarian program reverted back to this model, reincorporating a few lessons with chicken, fish, and shellfish. 

That shift may not matter much for early-career cooks who are flexible on the presence of meat in their educational program. It might even be helpful for broadening their career opportunities, since they’d be well-poised for work in a vegan kitchen but could also walk into a traditional kitchen knowing how to filet a fish. Vegan or plant-forward chefs who are OK with the presence of meat in their work environment have more places to do haute vegan cooking than those who draw the line at steak. There are 20 or so Michelin-starred omnivorous restaurants around the country that offer dedicated vegan or vegetarian tasting menus — The French Laundry, Le Bernardin, Per Se, and now Eleven Madison Park among them. Many more without a Michelin star do the same. The field of vegetable-centric restaurants that serve meat is much larger. 

But for vegan chefs like Dias and Henson who really want to avoid meat due to their personal convictions, shifts like the ones at Eleven Madison Park and the Institute for Culinary Education make it harder to see themselves in the field at all. The U.S. now has only one major professional culinary school offering a vegetarian culinary diploma in person — the Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts in Boulder, Colorado. (Escoffier didn’t respond to requests for comment about whether it has any plans to incorporate more animal products into its in-person or online program.) Marek said Rouxbe’s online programs, which he described as “1,000-percent vegan,” aren’t going anywhere.

While Dias and Henson were willing to apply to vegetarian externships, both said that they wouldn’t have attended the Institute for Culinary Education at all if their program had included poultry and seafood. “I feel kind of lucky that I got in while it was still meat-free,” Henson said.

Courtesy of Autumn Henson

That wasn’t Henson’s only break. In late September, they finally received an externship offer —  from abcV, the same restaurant where Dias was training — with a starting date in early October. 

A few days into the role, Henson started running the restaurant’s dosa station solo. Dias, who started a few weeks earlier, had recently learned how to make abcV’s Sichuan tomato broth for her favorite dish — wontons filled with late-summer sweet corn and shiitake mushrooms. She was getting additional instruction in how seasonality figured into the design of a tangy heirloom tomato salad served with fruit. She watched how the chefs chose different fruits to include, depending on what they got from the farmers market. 

“It’s always so beautifully presented,” Dias said. 

In mid-November, Dias finished her externship, which she called “very enriching.” Between her time at culinary school and abcV, she felt ready to move forward with her dream of menu consulting, developing vegan recipes for omnivorous restaurants, beginning with her family’s. By December, she was back in Brazil, feverishly developing plant-based dishes for a new pan-Asian bar-restaurant her family was opening before Christmas. 

Henson’s time at abcV looked a little different. They ended up staying at the dosa station for the entirety of their two-and-a-half-month externship due to what they described as “worker shortages.” When their training ended, they decided to leave haute cuisine and continue their vegan bakery business in California, with the goal of eventually scaling it up to wholesale. 

Reflecting back on their externship, Henson was glad they’d done it but had mixed feelings about its utility. The experience had given them new skills, including familiarity with new produce and herbs — helpful knowledge for developing their own future vegan pastry flavors. But compared to culinary school, which had given them more breadth of knowledge, they weren’t sure it had been truly necessary. They felt it would have been essential — probably more so than school — if they had gone into actual restaurant work, fine dining or otherwise.  

In the end, Henson saw their externship less as a prerequisite than as one narrow path among too few. 

Fine dining has long functioned as a testing ground for ideas that eventually reach far beyond white tablecloths and Michelin stars. Techniques, flavors, and expectations incubated in elite kitchens tend to migrate outward, influencing what other restaurants attempt and what diners come to want. As fewer of those kitchens commit fully to plant-based cooking, the question isn’t only where vegan chefs will train. It’s whether the knowledge needed to make vegetable-centered food feel ambitious, indulgent, and culturally central will continue to spread at all — or quietly slip off the menu.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Vegan fine dining had a moment. Now it’s over. on Feb 5, 2026.

President Donald Trump is considering allowing companies to lease more than 113 million acres of waters off Alaska for seabed mining. Alaska is the latest of several places Trump has sought to open to the fledging industry over the past year, including waters around American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Like those Pacific islands, Alaska is home to Indigenous peoples with ancestral ties to the ocean, and the proposal is raising cultural and environmental concerns.

Deep-sea mining, the practice of scraping minerals off the ocean floor for commercial products like electric vehicle batteries and military technology, is not yet a commercial industry. It’s been slowed by the lack of regulations governing permits in international waters and by concerns about the environmental impact of extracting minerals that formed over millions of years. Scientists have warned the practice could damage fisheries and fragile ecosystems that could take millennia to recover. Indigenous peoples have also pushed back, citing violations of their rights to consent to projects in their territories.

Trump, however, has voiced strong support for the industry as part of his effort to make the United States a leader in critical mineral production. He has also pushed for U.S. companies to mine in international waters, bypassing ongoing global negotiations over international mining regulations. 

Kate Finn, a citizen of the Osage Nation and executive director of the Tallgrass Institute Center for Indigenous Economic Stewardship in Colorado, said she worries the seabed mining industry will repeat the mistakes of land-based mining.

“The terrestrial mining industry has not gotten it right with regards to Indigenous peoples,” Finn said. “Indigenous peoples have the right to give and to withdraw consent. Mining companies themselves need to design their operations around that right.”

It’s not yet clear which companies, if any, are interested in mining off Alaska. A spokesperson for The Metals Company, one of the leading publicly traded firms in the industry, said it has no plans to expand to Alaska. Oliver Gunasekara, chief executive officer of the startup Impossible Metals — which has asked Trump to allow mining around American Samoa despite Samoan opposition — said his company has no plans either. 

“We do not have current plans in Alaska, as we do not know what resources are in the ocean,” he said. “If there are good nodule resources, we would be very interested.” 

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The potential lease area under consideration is larger than the state of California. Cooper Freeman, director of Alaska operations for the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, said the scope is so broad that it includes ecologically important waters already closed to bottom trawling, a fishing method that drags heavy nets across the seafloor. 

“A lot of these areas, particularly in the Aleutians, have been put off limits for bottom trawling because there are nurseries for commercially important fish and ecologically important species and habitat, ” Freeman said. 

In its announcement, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, the agency responsible for regulating deep-sea mining, said the proposed area included depths more than 4 miles deep near the Aleutian Trench and the abyssal plains of the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska, at depths as low as 3.5 miles. “BOEM is particularly interested in areas that have been identified by [the U.S. Geological Survey] as prospective for critical minerals as well as heavy minerals sands along the Seward Peninsula and Bering Sea coast.”

The waters are off the coast of a state that is home to more than 200 Alaska Native nations. Jasmine Monroe, who is Inupiaq, Yupik, and Cherokee, grew up in the village of Elim in Alaska’s Bering Strait region. She said she became concerned about what the proposal could mean for the seafood her community relies on after learning the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management opened up a 30-day public comment period last week on potential leases.

“We eat beluga meat, we eat walrus, we eat seal, we eat whale,” she said. “Whatever happens in the ocean, it really does affect our way of life.” 

“It just feels like we don’t have any say on whether it happens or not,” she said. “It just feels like the system is set up for failure for us.” 

The Alaska Federation of Natives, an organization representing Indigenous peoples of Alaska, did not respond to requests for comment.

Monroe, who works on water quality issues at the nonprofit Alaska Community Action on Toxics, said she feels disempowered by what she described as a top-down approach and short timelines for public input. 

Kate Finn from the Tallgrass Institute said Indigenous peoples have the right under international law to consent to activities in their territories and warned that U.S. federal regulations alone may not be sufficient for companies to meet international legal standards, particularly amid deregulation. 

“Companies will miss that if they’re only relying on the U.S. federal government for consultation,” she said. 

Finn added that Indigenous nations have their own economic and cultural priorities and that some have chosen to work with mining companies under specific conditions. 

“There are Indigenous peoples who work well with companies and invite mining into their territories, and there is a track record there as well,” she said. 

Monroe said she recognizes that seabed mining could supply minerals used in technologies like electric vehicle batteries, similar to other mining proposals she’s opposed in Alaska including a graphite mine that could pollute waters. But she doesn’t see electric vehicles in her community, and said the environmental and cultural cost is too high.

“It really feels like another false solution,” she said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous concerns surface as Trump calls for seabed mining in Alaskan waters on Feb 5, 2026.

The Montezuma Wetlands drape across 1,800 acres of Solano County, California, where the Sacramento River empties into San Francisco Bay. Once drained and diked for farming and grazing, the marsh has been rehabilitated over the past two decades, and in 2020, tidal waters returned for the first time in a century. Today, the land teems with shorebirds, waterfowl, and other wildlife in a rare example of large-scale habitat restoration.

But just as the ecosystem is on the mend, another makeover may be coming. A company called Montezuma Carbon wants to send millions of tons of carbon dioxide from Bay Area polluters through a 40-mile pipeline and store it in saline aquifers 2 miles beneath the wetland. Approval could come in as little as 12 to 18 months once the county approves a test well, with what its backers call “limited disposal” coming one year after that. If the project proceeds, it could be the Golden State’s first large-scale, climate-driven carbon capture and storage site. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency approved Carbon TerraVault, a smaller project in Kern County, California, that would store carbon dioxide in depleted oil wells.

Proponents say the area’s geology and proximity to regional industries make it an ideal place to stash carbon, and the company notes its facilities will be “well away from the restored wetland areas and far from sensitive habitats.” Residents and environmental justice groups argue that the project is being steered toward a low-income, working-class county long burdened with industrial development, and they worry about safety, ecological disruption, and whether the technology is a distraction from more effective and affordable climate solutions. Their fight over risk, consent, and who must live with climate infrastructure will help define not just the future of this project, but how California decides who bears the costs of decarbonization.

Long before becoming a showpiece of ecological recovery, the wetland in question was treated as expendable. Beginning in the late 19th century, the Montezuma Wetlands were transformed into farmland and shielded from natural tidal flows. By the end of the 20th century, much of the area functioned less as a marsh and more as a repository for industrial waste.

That began to change in the early 2000s, when University of California, Berkeley professor and environmental scientist Jim Levine led a remediation effort that used sediment dredged from the Port of Oakland to restore the wetland. The project was praised by regulators and conservationists and reestablished tidal habitat, altering the trajectory of a landscape long defined by extraction.

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Levine’s involvement with the site evolved, eventually placing the Montezuma Wetlands at the center of a vastly different environmental experiment. Around 2010, scientists with Shell and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory identified the area’s shale composition as potentially suitable for storing large amounts of carbon dioxide. As California’s climate targets grew more ambitious, Levine began promoting the site as a place where those geological conditions could support a large-scale carbon capture and storage project.

In May 2023, Montezuma Carbon sought an EPA permit to inject CO2, sourced from refineries, hydrogen plants, and power plants, into the Montezuma Wetlands. The project, designed by scientists with the Lawrence Berkeley lab, Stanford University, and UC-Berkeley, stalled last spring as Levine’s health declined. After his death in September, its technical lead, seismologist and Berkeley professor Jamie Rector, wanted to “do right by Jim” and reignite the proposal, positioning it as both a climate solution and a research-driven test case — even as scrutiny and opposition have intensified.

“Solano County historically has long been treated as a waste dump for the region’s polluters,” said local pediatrician Bonnie Hamilton. “We have a beautiful area and don’t want to see it messed up for the sake of rich people wanting to get richer.” 

Opponents frame Montezuma Carbon’s proposal as a question of who controls their land and who absorbs the risks of decarbonization. The county is home to roughly half a million people, including the Bay Area’s largest per capita populations of veterans and residents with disabilities, and it is among the most racially diverse counties in the nation. Limited resources can make navigating regulatory and legal processes difficult, heightening concerns about meaningful consent. Those worries are compounded by a history of industrial violations, including an $82 million penalty levied last year against the Valero refinery in Benicia for years of unreported toxic emissions and other air quality failures.

Within the next three years, the project’s architects hope to be depositing up to 8 million tons of carbon annually, a significant stride toward the state’s goal of capturing 13 to 20 million tons by 2030. Rector believes the site could store at least 100 million tons over its 40-year lifespan. The site’s compacted mud, silt, and clay, he said, would provide a natural cap that could keep the pollutant locked underground indefinitely, while its location alongside Bay Area industries would reduce carbon transportation costs.

The Sleipner carbon dioxide gas processing and capture project, the world’s first commercial sequestration operation, has stored 20 million tons of the gas about 3,000 feet under the North Sea.
Daniel Sannum Lauten / AFP via Getty Images

The National Energy Technology Laboratory, which leads the Energy Department’s research on carbon capture and storage, points to key advantages of the site like minimal environmental sensitivity and low population density. The nearest community, Rio Vista, is 10 miles away. Rector added that advanced pipeline monitoring systems, such as acoustic, pressure, and temperature sensors, can quickly detect and contain leaks. Unlike enhanced oil recovery — where pressurized CO2 is injected to extract oil, with regulations aimed primarily at protecting groundwater — EPA rules for climate-driven sequestration require operators to demonstrate that injected carbon will remain buried. The project’s proponents also argue that decades of experience pumping carbon underground — including more than a billion tons injected in the U.S. for commercial use, such as for beverage carbonation, since the 1970s, and over 20 million tons that have been safely stored at Norway’s Sleipner project since 1996 — suggest that Montezuma is a low-risk site.

Pipeline safety has drawn heightened scrutiny since 2020, when a carbon dioxide pipeline ruptured in Satartia, Mississippi, casting a dense cloud of gas near the ground and hospitalizing dozens of residents. Although that pipeline was federally regulated, critics and regulators alike later acknowledged those rules were inadequate for managing the public safety risks of large-scale CO2 transport.

Rector quipped that the project would leak “when pigs fly,” but identified pressure-induced seismicity as the principal peril, given the wetlands’ position between the Kirby Hills and Midland faults — though the National Energy Technology Laboratory has said a devastating event is unlikely. To reduce that risk, Rector has proposed drawing down water from a nearby reservoir to ease subsurface pressure and create more capacity for injected gas, with the water potentially redirected to farmers and industries facing chronic shortages.

Carbon capture and storage is widely seen by policymakers, industry leaders, and many scientists as a necessary — if imperfect — tool for meeting state climate goals, even as environmentalists argue it diverts attention from cheaper, cleaner solutions. California Governor Gavin Newsom has said “there is no path” to carbon neutrality without the technology, a point the California Air Resources Board echoed when it told Grist it “could not weigh in on specific projects, but carbon management is a critical piece of the state’s plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045.” This institutional support is reflected in legislation like SB 614, which stresses the technology is central to California’s effort to reach net-zero emissions.

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Supporters argue that the value of carbon capture is most obvious in sectors where greenhouse gases are hardest to curb, such as cement production, which accounts for roughly 8 percent of global CO2 output. While lower-carbon materials and cleaner manufacturing techniques are emerging, they will be costly and slow to deploy at scale. Even with those changes, substantial emissions would remain, said Ben Grove, a deputy director at the Clean Air Task Force, leading him to consider carbon capture a necessary complement to other climate solutions.

For Montezuma Carbon, that high-level backing has yet to translate into financial certainty. Project leaders say technological advances that could lower costs, along with government incentives and private investment, are still essential. 

Still, the company faces significant hurdles, including regulatory approval and the loss of its founder. Cost is now the “albatross around our neck,” Rector said, as the project has no financing and is estimated to require roughly $2 billion. The Department of Energy denied a $340 million grant in 2023, and Rector acknowledged that without government subsidies or a promising return for investors, funding will be difficult.

In its EPA application, Montezuma Carbon contends the project would bring jobs, tax revenue, cleaner air, and a hub for climate innovation to “disadvantaged local communities.” Residents and local environmental justice advocates don’t buy it. They also argue the technology will only perpetuate the use of fossil fuels. The International Institute for Sustainable Development considers carbon capture and storage “expensive, energy intensive, unproven at scale, and has no impact on the 80 percent of oil and gas emissions that result from downstream use.” Similar carbon pipeline schemes have failed in the Midwest because of community opposition, and Montezuma Carbon is just one of a dozen such projects under consideration in California.

Dr. Bonnie Hamilton, a Solano County pediatrician, speaks at a Sept. 9, 2025 press conference launching Communities Against Carbon Transport and Injection, a local coalition formed to block the Montezuma Carbon project. Tom Kunhardt, Communities Against Carbon Transport and Injection

Local officials are reviewing California’s first geological carbon storage project, in Kern County, as they try to understand how similar proposals have been evaluated elsewhere. County Supervisor Cassanda James “does not have a comment at this time,” according to her chief of staff, and other county supervisors did not respond to requests for comment. Alma Hernandez, the mayor of Suisun City, which is about 20 miles from the proposed site, said her staff is “still learning more” about the project and “no position has been taken.”

For many residents, the unanswered questions go deeper than permitting or precedent. They ask whether industries labeled “essential” must continue emitting carbon dioxide at all, or whether cleaner alternatives could negate the need for technologies like underground storage. And they question who gets to decide which communities should host infrastructure designed to manage the consequences of pollution generated elsewhere. “All of us want to believe the climate crisis could be solved without changing how society functions,” Theo LeQuesne of the Center for Biological Diversity said.

The Montezuma Wetlands have endured centuries of human interference, first in its destruction and then its restoration. It now faces another possible refashioning to manage emissions from an economy that still rests solidly on fossil fuels.

At the heart of the debate is not only whether carbon capture is an effective way to meet California’s climate goals, but where such infrastructure should be built, and who gets to decide. The fate of the project hinges on the weight of statewide climate ambitions, scientific confidence in the technology, and the objections of the community being asked to host it.

toolTips('.classtoolTips0','A technology that catches carbon dioxide at the point of release, preventing it from escaping into Earth’s atmosphere. CSS systems typically are installed on industrial or energy facilities, like coal-burning power plants, where the greenhouse gas is captured, compressed, and then buried deep underground.
'); toolTips('.classtoolTips3','Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other gases that prevent heat from escaping Earth’s atmosphere. Together, they act as a blanket to keep the planet at a liveable temperature in what is known as the “greenhouse effect.” Too many of these gases, however, can cause excessive warming, disrupting fragile climates and ecosystems.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips4','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Inside the polarizing plan to stash carbon in a California wetland on Feb 4, 2026.

The conversation around energy use in the United States has become … electric. Everyone from President Donald Trump to the cohosts of Today show has been talking about the surging demand for, and rising costs of, electrons. Many people worry that utilities won’t be able to produce enough power. But a report released today argues that the better question is: Can we use what utilities already produce more efficiently in order to absorb the coming surge?

“A lot of folks have been looking at this from the perspective of, Do we need more supply-side resources and gas plants?” said Mike Specian, utilities manager with the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, or ACEEE, who wrote the report. “We found that there is a lack of discussion of demand-side measures.”

When Specian dug into the data, he discovered that implementing energy-efficiency measures and shifting electricity usage to lower-demand times are two of the fastest and cheapest ways of meeting growing thirst for electricity. These moves could help meet much, if not all, of the nation’s projected load growth. Moreover, they would cost only half — or less — what building out new infrastructure would, while avoiding the emissions those operations would bring. But Specian also found that governments could be doing more to incentivize utilities to take advantage of these demand-side gains. 

“Energy efficiency and flexibility are still a massive untapped resource in the U.S.,” he said. “As we get to higher levels of electrification, it’s going to become increasingly important.”

The report estimated that by 2040, utility-driven efficiency programs could cut usage by about 8 percent, or around 70 gigawatts, and that making those cuts currently costs around $20.70 per megawatt. The cheapest gas-fired power plants now start at about $45 per kilowatt generated. While the cost of load shifting is harder to pin down, the report estimates moving electricity use away from peak hours — often through time-of-use pricing, smart devices, or utility controls — to times when the grid is less strained and power is cheaper could save another 60 to 200 gigawatts of power by 2035. That alone would far outweigh even the most aggressive near-term projections for data center capacity growth. 

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Vijay Modi, director of the Quadracci Sustainable Engineering Laboratory at Columbia University, agrees that energy efficiency is critical but isn’t sure how many easy savings are left to be had. He also believes that governments at every level — rather than utilities — are best suited to incentivize that work. He sees greater potential in balancing loads to ease peak demand. 

“This is a big concern,” he said, explaining that when peak load goes up, it could require upgrading substations, transformers, power lines, and a host of other distribution equipment. That raises costs and rates. Utilities, he added, are well positioned to solve this because they have the data needed to effectively shift usage and are already taking steps in that direction by investing in load management software, installing battery storage and generating electricity closer to end users with things like small-scale renewable energy. 

“It defers some of the heavy investment,” said Modi. “In turn, the customer also benefits.” 

Specian says that one reason utilities tend to focus on the supply side of the equation is that they can often make more money that way. Building infrastructure is considered a capital investment, and utilities can pass that cost on to customers, plus an additional rate of return, or premium, which is typically around 10 percent. Energy-efficiency programs, however, are generally considered an operating expense, which aren’t eligible for a rate of return. This setup, he said, motivates utilities to build new infrastructure rather than conserve energy, even if the latter presents a more affordable option for ratepayers. 

“Our incentives aren’t properly lined up,” said Specian. State legislators and regulators can address this, he said, by implementing energy-efficiency resource standards or performance-based regulation. “Decoupling,” which separates a company’s revenue from the amount of electricity it sells, is another tactic that many states are adopting. 

Joe Daniel, who runs the carbon-free electricity team at the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute, has also been watching a model known as “fuel cost sharing,” which allows utilities and ratepayers to share any savings or added costs rather than passing them on entirely to customers. “It’s a policy that seems to make logical sense,” he said. A handful of states across the political spectrum have adopted the approach, and of the people he’s spoken with or heard from, Daniel said “every consumer advocate, every state public commissioner, likes it.” 

The Edison Electric Institute, which represents all of the country’s investor-owned electric companies, told Grist that regardless of regulation, utilities are making progress in these areas. “EEI’s member companies operate robust energy-efficiency programs that save enough electricity each year to power nearly 30 million U.S. homes,” the organization said in a statement. “Electric companies continue to work closely with customers who are interested in demand response, energy efficiency, and other load-flexibility programs that can reduce their energy use and costs.”

Because infrastructure changes happen on long timelines, it’s critical to keep pushing on these levers now, said Ben Finkelor, executive director of the Energy and Efficiency Institute at the University of California, Davis. “The planning is 10 years out,” he said, adding that preparing today could save billions in the future. “Perhaps we can avoid building those baseload assets.” 

Specian hopes his report reaches legislatures, regulators, and consumers alike. Whoever reads it, he says the message should be clear. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The US doesn’t need to generate as much new electricity as you think on Feb 4, 2026.

The year 2010 was a reckoning for Japan’s economic security. 

On September 7, the Chinese fishing trawler Minjinyu 5179 refused an order by Japan’s coast guard to leave disputed waters near the Senkaku Islands, which are known in China as Diaoyu. The vessel then rammed two patrol boats, escalating a decades-long territorial feud.

Japan responded by arresting the captain, Zhan Qixiong, under domestic law, a move Beijing considered an unacceptable assertion of Japanese sovereignty. Amid mounting protests in both countries and the collapse of high-level talks, China cut exports of rare earth elements to Japan, which relied upon its geopolitical adversary for 90 percent of its supply. The move reverberated throughout the global economy as companies like Toyota and Panasonic were left without materials crucial to the production of everything from hybrid cars to personal electronics.

It wasn’t long before Japan gave in and let Qixiong go. The crisis, which garnered worldwide attention, became a catalyst for Japan’s push to secure a reliable supply of critical minerals. “That was the turning point,” said Takahiro Kamisuna, a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

Fifteen years later, that reckoning has only deepened.

China still provides 60 percent of Japan’s critical minerals, a reliance that has grown riskier as Beijing asserts its position as the world’s dominant supplier. Last month, Japan took a bold step to break that dependence when it launched a five-week deep-sea mining test off Minamitorishima Island. A crew of 130 researchers aboard the Chikyu — Japanese for “earth” — will use what is essentially a robotic vacuum cleaner to collect mud from a depth of 6,000 meters, marking the world’s first attempt at prolonged collection of minerals from great depths.

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Seabed mud off the coast of that uninhabited island, which sits 1,180 miles southeast of Tokyo, is rich in rare earths like neodymium and yttrium — distinct from the potato-shaped polymetallic nodules often associated with marine extraction. Such materials are essential for electric vehicles, solar panels, advanced weapons systems, and other technology.

The expedition, which is expected to end February 14, is being led by the Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science and Technology, which did not respond to a request for comment. It comes three months after the country signed an agreement with the United States to collaborate on securing a supply of critical minerals. It also propels Japan to the forefront of a growing debate over how far nations should go to secure these materials. Deep-sea mining “is not a new thing,” Kamisuna said, “it’s just gaining more attention mainly because of geopolitical tensions.”

The trawler incident highlighted a vulnerability that successive governments vowed to alleviate. Many criticized then-prime minister Naoto Kan of the country’s center-left party for capitulating to China, but he pledged to never again let Japan’s industrial future hinge on a single supplier. His successor, Shinzo Abe of the center-right party, was more aggressive and saw critical minerals as not just an economic issue, but a matter of national security that must be addressed even if it meant exploiting the deep sea. 

Establishing a domestic supply could help Japan reach its goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050, a high priority for Yoshihide Suga, who succeeded Abe. Although Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, an Abe protégé who assumed office late last year, supports the 2050 timeline, she has said the transition must not risk Japan’s industrial competitiveness and energy stability. 

Takaichi has proposed slashing subsidies for large-scale solar projects or batteries, largely because so much of that technology is imported from China. Instead, she has hailed nuclear power as the path toward carbon neutrality. With the mining experiment unfolding in the Pacific, Takaichi hopes to secure a strategic reserve of minerals to protect key industries.

But Japan doesn’t face an either-or choice, said Jane Nakano, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. “Energy security and energy transition are closely tied,” she said.

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“To me, it’s much more about the pace, not so much the direction,” said Nakano, who has worked for the U.S. Department of Energy and for the energy attaché at the U.S. embassy in Tokyo. “I don’t find Takaichi’s way of framing this dual challenge — energy security and decarbonization — unique to Japan. A lot of G7 countries are starting to recalibrate again, so they do have to think about international competitiveness. Direction-wise, [Japan] is just aligning itself with the political establishment and the industry.”

Unlike China, Japan lacks the sedimentary geology associated with rare earth deposits, requiring it to look toward the waters within its exclusive economic zones. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Japan has the right to exploit the resources within 200 nautical miles of its coastline, which includes the atoll island of Minamitorishima. 

Although the minerals to be found there lie nearly 20,000 feet beneath the surface, proponents of digging them up argue the challenge of extracting them and the cost of refining them is justified by mounting geopolitical tension. With Takaichi’s recent political jabs at Beijing, China has begun choking off its exports to Japan. Nakano said Japanese officials seem “confident” in the outcome of the experiment. “They’ve determined that it merits to have this demonstration of technologies and equipment this time around,” she said.

Japan’s foray into deep-sea mining comes amid mounting concern about the ecological cost of such technology. Scientists and environmental groups warn that marine extraction is racing ahead of our understanding of the impacted ecosystems. They are particularly concerned about sediment plumes, noise and light pollution, and damage to habitats and food webs, noting that scars left by equipment could render the seafloor uninhabitable for decades, even centuries.

“A tiny little nudge, and the whole seafloor is disturbed,” said Travis Washburn, a marine biologist at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi. He studies deep-sea environments and human impacts on marine ecosystems, and he has analyzed the waters around Minamitorishima Island and represented Japan at International Seabed Authority workshops. He believes that mining rare earths from mud could have the same impact as mining nodules. “I think that they’re both pretty much going to destroy the habitat directly affected.”

Government officials insist the ecological impacts will be closely monitored. But assessing them could be difficult, because the seafloor around the island, home to sea cucumbers, sponges, corals, and potentially rare endemic species — remains the subject of intense study. Scientists fear these ecosystems may be permanently altered before anyone assesses them. As with many extractive industries, Washburn noted, technology is often deployed before anyone fully understands its environmental impacts.

Shigeru Tanaka, deputy director general of the Pacific Asia Resource Center, is an outspoken critic of deep-sea mining. He argues that the industry as a whole disregards international law and that exploiting the seafloor will harm fisheries and trample upon the rights of Pacific Islanders who consider the sea as sacred. (The Indigenous people of the Mariana Islands have raised such concerns in opposing Trump administration plans to open the waters there to mining.) He also believes that some of the experts involved in Japan’s project “are not really taking seriously the risks to the environment and how irreversible it may be.”

Even some government officials have expressed concern. Yoshihito Doi of the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy has said Japan should mine only “if we can establish a robust system that properly takes environmental impacts into account.” 

cobalt, nickel and manganese." data-caption="A geologist inspects a bucket of polymetallic nodules, misshapen black globes encrusted with metals like cobalt, nickel, and manganese, collected by the research vessel MV Anuanua Moana from near the Cook Islands.
A geologist inspects a bucket of polymetallic nodules, misshapen black globes encrusted with metals like cobalt, nickel, and manganese, collected by the research vessel MV Anuanua Moana from near the Cook Islands.
William West / AFP via Getty Images

It remains unclear what exactly is unfolding beneath the waves during this current test, but based upon his experience working with the Japanese government on similar research, Washburn said the top priority will be assessing whether the technology works. Researchers also will monitor how much material the system can hold and if the machinery can keep the sea mud contained without releasing a massive sediment plume on the seafloor or in the water column. 

If Japan can successfully deploy a 6,000-meter pipe that can suck up 35 metric tons of mud under extreme pressure — about 8,700 pounds per square inch, or 600 times the pressure at sea level — government officials say a broader trial, which may include polymetallic nodules, could begin in February 2027. 

One longer-term goal is to develop what’s called “hybrid mining.” Because deep-sea polymetallic nodules sit atop the rare-earth mud around Minamitorishima Island, researchers are exploring whether both could be collected and separated in a single operation.

Kamisuna said Japan faces another challenge: The energy needed to acquire and refine a stockpile. “If we want to create a sufficient reserve for rare earth [minerals], either using domestic or export, a large amount of electricity is required,” he said. “And the question is, What are we going to use, liquified natural gas or coal? What is the environmental cost?”

Using more environmentally friendly methods of extraction and processing can be expensive, he said — which is one reason many countries turn to China as a cheaper option. 

For now, Japan’s deep-sea mining experiment seems to have drawn little public opposition at home, unlike in the United States and Australia where environmental activists and Indigenous communities have pushed back against such operations, particularly around the Pacific Islands. In the meantime, the country’s test moves forward, even as the implications of success, and questions about its long-term impact, remain unresolved.

“We are not prepared,” Tanaka said. “My personal take is that by the time we are ready, when the technology and the science is set, I really do not think there would be a demand for it.” 

toolTips('.classtoolTips2','A group of 17 soft gray metals including lanthanides, scandium, and yttrium, so-called rare earths form key parts of the magnets in wind turbines and are used in high-tech products ranging from consumer electronics to defense satellites.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips4','The process of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that drive climate change, most often by deprioritizing the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas in favor of renewable sources of energy.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips7','A lightweight, silvery-white alkali metal with properties that allow it to store large amounts of energy. Lithium is a key component of many batteries, including those that store renewable energy and power electric vehicles.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips9','A conductive and heat-resistant metal that forms a key part of many battery cathodes, which allow electric charges to flow. It is used in the lithium-ion batteries that power many EVs as well as solar energy systems and wind turbine components.'); toolTips('.classtoolTips10','A scarce blue metal that helps battery cathodes store large amounts of energy without overheating or collapsing. It is a key component of lithium-ion batteries. ');

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Japan’s unprecedented project could test the limits of deep-sea mining on Feb 3, 2026.

I recently ate a pig that’s alive and well at a sanctuary in upstate New York. Her name is Dawn, and she donated a bit of fat, which a company called Mission Barns grows in bioreactors, then blends with plant-based ingredients to create pork products (like the meatballs above) that taste darn near like the real thing. Its “cultivated” offerings join a herd of alternative meats — including those from mainstays like Impossible Foods and Eat Just — that are challenging the traditional livestock industry, which uses immense swaths of land and spews staggering quantities of greenhouse gas emissions.

In his new book Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food — and Our Future, Bruce Friedrich, founder and president of the Good Food Institute, catalogs the extraordinary costs of conventional meat production and the vast potential for alternative culinary technologies. Grist sat down with Friedrich to talk about the progress, challenges, and potential of the fledgling industry. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Q. It’d be great to get a rundown on — if you’ll pardon the pun — your beef with meat.

A. Conventional meat production has significant external costs. In 2006, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization released a more-than-400-page report called Livestock’s Long Shadow. It said that animal-product production is responsible for all of the most serious environmental harms at every scale, from local to global. It looked at deforestation, climate change, air pollution, water pollution, water depletion, loss of biodiversity, and said that the inefficiency and extra stages of production involved in producing animal products made meat, dairy, and eggs a significant contributor to all of those, including being the number one contributor to deforestation.

All of those environmental consequences have gotten worse. If it takes 9 calories of feed to get 1 calorie of chicken, or 10 or more calories of feed to get a calorie of farmed fish or pork, and even more calories to get a calorie from a ruminant animal — a cow or a sheep or a goat — that’s an inherent inefficiency that really is 800 percent food waste, or more. All of the inefficiency adds up, and that’s why the latest numbers are that roughly 20 percent of climate emissions are attributable to animal agriculture. 

Q. We’re at an interesting point in which the technology has gotten extremely advanced when it comes to replicating what is grown in an animal in a field somewhere. What are the options for alternative meats? 

A. It’s very much similar to how we think about renewable energy or electric vehicles. There is a recognition that the world is going to consume more energy, the world is going to drive more miles. The world is also going to eat more meat. In the last 25 years, meat production is up about 65 percent. It will probably be up something like 65 percent again through 2050, and that means all of the external costs of meat production continue to get worse.

Just like if you’re talking about energy, we need an all-of-the-above strategy. So we want everything from more energy-efficient light bulbs to houses, but we do need renewable energy as one of the tools in the toolkit. Here, the solution is to figure out how we create plant-based meat that is indistinguishable and less expensive, and how we grow actual animal meat in factories rather than on live animals. 

Q. You talk in the book about a number of ways this can be incentivized, though there are many states that have already done things like ban cultivated meat. What could be done in these early days of alt meats that could accelerate both the science and the adoption?

A. One very encouraging aspect of a shift in the direction of plant-based meat and cultivated meat is that because they are so much more efficient, there is a massive profit motive. And there is also a massive food-security motive for countries like China, Japan, and Korea that have significant food self-sufficiency concerns. Countries that cannot feed themselves recognize that that is a significant national security threat and are highly motivated to figure out how to feed themselves. These countries recognize that if they can produce meat with a fraction of the inputs required to produce animal-based meat, that will be a boon to their national security. And in the United States, we’re also seeing bipartisan support for alternative proteins for economic competitiveness reasons.

Q. One challenge now is that there’s a backlash in the United States against ultra-processed foods. Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have been struggling financially lately, perhaps as part of that. Is that a surmountable challenge for the industry?

A. The first thing to say is that the plant-based meats are significantly healthier than what they are replacing. All of the plant-based meats that consumers like best, relative to animal-based meat, have less fat, less saturated fat, less cholesterol, more fiber, and more protein. All of the plant-based meats are significantly less calorically dense than the animal-based meat they’re replacing. The indictment against ultra-processed foods works, generally speaking, as shorthand for products that are low in fiber, calorically dense, high in fat, high in sugar. But comparing plant-based meat to Doritos and Coca-Cola doesn’t make a lot of sense. There are some questions around some of the other ultra-processed foods, but the science is clear that the meat and dairy alternatives do not lead to bad health outcomes.

Q. You make the point in the book that these companies should collaborate with the traditional meat industry, reforming the industry instead of replacing it. Why? 

A. The goal of the meat industry is to produce high-quality protein profitably. Figuring out how to produce that same end product far more efficiently is going to be extremely profitable for the companies and countries that lean in. If you’re sort of analogizing to photography, nobody wants to be Kodak. Everybody wants to be Canon, and to seize the opportunity rather than to pretend it doesn’t exist.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why the future of meat production is in vats, not farms on Feb 3, 2026.

Last spring, the Environmental Protection Agency made a surprise announcement: President Donald Trump would consider giving some polluters exemptions from a handful of Clean Air Act rules. To get the ball rolling, all it would take was an email from a company making its case. The EPA set up a special inbox to receive these applications, and it gave companies about three weeks at the end of March to submit their requests for presidential exemption. Hundreds of companies wrote in, including coal plants, iron and steel manufacturers, limestone producers, and chemical refiners. 

One industry was particularly eager for exemption: medical device sterilizers. About 40 of the roughly 90 device sterilization plants that operate nationwide, along with their trade association, wrote in, arguing they shouldn’t have to comply with an air quality rule limiting how much toxic material they could emit. That’s because these facilities sterilize medical equipment with ethylene oxide, a potent carcinogen that studies have linked to cancers of the breast and lymph nodes.

In 2024, the Biden administration issued regulations requiring sterilizers to cut their emissions by about 90 percent. Companies were given two years to comply, and many had begun installing new monitoring equipment and pollution-control devices to meet the standard. But last year, after President Trump took office, the EPA gave these companies a way out; they could request a presidential exemption. About 40 facilities, many of which are located in residential neighborhoods close to schools and day cares, took advantage of the offer and were granted the exemption through a presidential proclamation last summer.

Now, a coalition of national environmental groups and community nonprofits is suing Trump and the EPA, seeking to overturn the ongoing exemptions. Maurice Carter, president of the Georgia-based environmental advocacy group Sustainable Newton, which signed on to the suit, told Grist that financial interests of sterilization companies shouldn’t override public health concerns about ethylene oxide. Any policy change should account for that, he argued. 

“You have to do that in ways that are not harmful to the people that live here and to the planet that our children are going to inherit,” he said. Carter lives about a mile away from one of the exempted facilities.

Read Next How medical supply warehouses poison workers with ethylene oxide Naveena Sadasivam & Lylla Younes

The suit was filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C., and assigned to Judge Christopher R. Cooper, an Obama appointee. Trump’s Justice Department, which represents federal agencies in court, has 60 days to respond.  

Taylor Rogers, a spokesperson for the White House, told Grist that the president had used “his lawful authority under the Clean Air Act to grant relief for certain commercial sterilization facilities that use ethylene oxide to sterilize critical medical equipment and combat disease transmission.” The Biden-era rule would’ve forced facilities to shut down, Rogers argued, “seriously disrupting the supply of medical equipment and undermining our national security.” A spokesperson for the EPA said the agency doesn’t comment on pending litigation.  

A provision in the Clean Air Act does allow the president to grant facilities narrow exemptions from one section of the law. But presidents can only grant an exemption if the technology to meet the standard is not available and the exemption is in the country’s national interest. The sterilization facilities claimed they met both criteria. In a letter to the president the Ethylene Oxide Sterilization Association, the industry’s trade organization, claimed that companies would not be able to meet the 2024 rule “due to the limited number of equipment manufacturers and workforce shortages.” Supply chain constraints and the time it would take to install and validate equipment meant that the control technology needed “is functionally unavailable within the required timeframes,” the group said. 

When the EPA finalized the rule in 2024, it determined that only 7 out of a total of 88 sterilizer facilities “already met the emission standards and will not need to install additional emission controls.” Several others met one or more requirements of the rule. Nearly 30 facilities would be required to install so-called Permanent Total Enclosures, which are among the most expensive pollution-control technologies and seal facilities so that ethylene oxide can be trapped and burned.

Georgia has the highest concentration of exempted sterilization plants; all five of the state’s facilities were granted exemptions. By comparison, only two of the facilities in California, which has the largest number of sterilizers in the country, received exemptions. According to records submitted to the state environmental agency, nearly all California facilities already meet the vast majority of requirements laid out in the 2024 rule. One facility in Atlanta met the standards as early as 2022 — yet it nevertheless received an exemption. 

“These are facilities that have been making changes to their processes in their facilities to comply, and yet they received exemptions anyway,” said Sarah Buckley, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the environmental groups suing. (Editor’s note: The Natural Resources Defense Council is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.)

“That shows that the president was not making any good faith determination, was not basing this on an actual assessment of the facts on the ground and the capabilities of these facilities, but instead was just looking for excuses essentially to hand out free passes to avoid the rules,” Buckley added, calling the exemptions a “get-out-of-jail-free card.”

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James Boylan, head of the Georgia Environmental Protection Division’s air protection branch, said the agency had been working with companies to install upgraded control equipment and revise permits to comply with the 2024 rule before President Trump announced that Georgia’s sterilization facilities would be exempted. Some of those updates have since been delayed because of the exemption, Boylan told Grist in an email.

If companies exceeded the Clean Air Act emission limits and faced state action or lawsuits by community groups, they could use the exemption to claim the rules don’t apply to them. Companies that are exempted will also be relieved of the cost of complying with regulation. The EPA estimated that it would cost $313 million for all of the roughly 90 sterilizers to meet the new standards. But even those already in compliance could benefit from an exemption, because monitoring and pollution-control equipment require regular maintenance and oversight.

“There is a monetary incentive to not operate equipment even if you already have it,” said Buckley.

Sterilizers aren’t the only industry benefiting from these exemptions. Last year, President Trump issued a series of proclamations exempting more than 150 facilities, including dozens of coal plants and chemical manufacturers. Environmental groups have sued over several of these exemptions, claiming that Trump had exceeded his statutory authority. Many of these cases are winding their way through the courts. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s ‘get-out-of-jail-free card’ for polluters faces its latest test in court on Feb 2, 2026.

Kristi Noem faces intensifying public scrutiny over her leadership of the Department of Homeland Security. Criticism of the former South Dakota governor has focused on her handling of the killing of Alex Pretti by a federal immigration agent and her oversight of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The controversies have prompted calls from Democratic lawmakers — and a small but noteworthy group of Republicans — for her resignation or impeachment.

The immediate flashpoint has been the January 24 killing of Pretti, which occurred during ongoing protests in Minneapolis. Noem initially described Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, as a “domestic terrorist,” a narrative repeated by others in the Trump administration. Her account was almost immediately contradicted by numerous videos that showed Pretti was unarmed and restrained when federal agents shot him repeatedly.

“She should be out of a job,” Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, said after the videos emerged. While President Donald Trump has publicly said Noem’s position is secure, a number of potential successors have reportedly emerged, including Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin and Lee Zeldin, who leads the Environmental Protection Agency.

Noem’s handling of the killing — which came two weeks after a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis fatally shot protestor Renee Good — follows sustained criticism of her management of FEMA. Lawmakers, disaster response experts, and disaster survivors say her policies have slowed emergency response and delayed recovery funding. Long before the crisis in Minnesota, concerns were building over her approach to FEMA preparedness and spending and its response to calamities like last year’s devastating floods in the Texas Hill Country.

“It’s a policy of chaotic austerity,” said Sarah Labowitz, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies disasters and adaptation. “It’s magic-wand policymaking, where you need a crisis in order for something to happen.”

FEMA helps coordinate the response to major disasters like last year’s Los Angeles wildfires, but the agency more often acts like a bank, reimbursing states and cities for their disaster preparedness and recovery spending. When Noem took office, she throttled that spending by, among other things, requiring her personal sign-off on all expenses over $100,000. The pace of disbursements has since slowed to a trickle.

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Those restrictions reportedly hindered the agency’s response to emergencies like July’s floods in Texas because officials could not pre-position search and rescue teams. The acting head of FEMA at the time, David Richardson, was reportedly unreachable for several hours, and the agency did not answer two-thirds of calls to its hotline. More than 130 people died in the floods. 

On Thursday, a coalition of disaster survivors released a “report card” that gave Noem’s leadership an “F.” Brandy Gerstner, a member of that coalition, lost her home and belongings in the Texas flood. She and her family live in the rural community of Sandy Creek and spent three days without power or water waiting for federal assistance.

“Official help was scarce,” she said. “Despite that, Kristi Noem and Texas Governor [Greg] Abbott have described the response as exceptional, a lie that insults the memory of those lost in the floods.”

Beyond floods in Texas and fires in Southern California, the United States experienced relatively few major disasters last year. Even so, Noem’s restrictions on FEMA spending has also slowed payments to local governments still recovering from past catastrophes. The reimbursement backlog has reached $17 billion, according to The New York Times — more than the agency spends on such things in a typical  year. 

Delays have also affected FEMA’s efforts to reduce the impact of future catastrophes. A Grist analysis found that the agency’s net spending on resilience grants declined over the past three quarters, even as climate-driven disasters intensified nationwide. The nonprofit news outlet NOTUS identified a $1.3 billion backlog of such allocations, the primary source of federal funding for states and cities seeking to harden infrastructure. FEMA terminated another climate resilience program last year, though a court has ordered it to reinstate that program.

Former FEMA chief of staff Michael Coen Jr. said Noem’s departure could ease the logjam.

“I don’t see another secretary coming in that is going to want to review every single grant,” said Coen, who served in the Obama and Biden administrations. “I would think that most executive leaders … are gonna find that that is micromanagement.”

Beyond Noem’s leadership lie other questions about the agency’s direction. The Trump administration has yet to nominate a permanent administrator, leaving Karen Evans, a former cybersecurity official, in charge since Richardson departed in November. Agency leaders have suggested firing more than 11,000 employees, many of them contract workers involved in local response and recovery efforts. 

The Trump administration’s touted “review council” was set to produce a report on FEMA’s future, but Noem reportedly pared the council’s final report to a fraction of its original length. The panel abruptly cancelled its plans to present the findings in December, and its deadline has been pushed to March.

“I think whether she stays or goes, there are huge issues that have been created in the last year at FEMA that have to be resolved quickly ahead of hurricane season,” Labowitz, said, referring to the season to come.

Noem appeared to soften her approach last week. The agency paused its planned terminations, and Noem hosted her first in-person briefing with agency employees, whom she attempted to rally ahead of Winter Storm Fern. She also appeared to respond to mounting criticism on Thursday when she announced the release of $2.2 billion in disaster response funds. The money will reimburse states and local governments for repair costs associated with events like Hurricane Helene, the 2023 floods in Vermont, and coastal erosion in Louisiana. A press release frames the allocation as “additional” recovery money, but recipients told Grist that FEMA is merely following standard procedure in granting reimbursements.

“We were all quite surprised yesterday when we were informed that the payment was coming as quickly as it came,” said Joe Flynn, the secretary of the Vermont Agency of Transportation. FEMA told his agency that it would provide $22 million to help rebuild a fleet garage destroyed in the 2023 floods. “There’s plenty of towns in Vermont that would still say they’re waiting.”  

The offer was less than the state had requested, but Flynn accepted it given uncertainty about future funding. “With everything going on in the federal government, an adequately granted award is a bird in the hand,” he said. 

The press release appeared to have been composed in haste. It contained multiple typos, including a misspelling of Louisiana as “Louisianna.” The director of the Greeneville Water Commission, after confirming that FEMA will reimburse the cost of rebuilding infrastructure lost to Helene, noted that her own town’s name was spelled wrong as well. 

“By the way,” said commission director Laura White, “they spelled Greeneville wrong!”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Turmoil at FEMA adds to the revolt against Kristi Noem on Feb 2, 2026.

When Oregon’s short legislative session convenes in early February, conservation advocates will once again try to convince lawmakers to pass a major funding bill that could provide nearly $30 million annually to protect the state’s biodiversity.

The 1% for Wildlife bill, sponsored by state representatives Ken Helm, a Democrat from Beaverton, and Mark Owens, a Republican from Crane, would increase the state’s current hotel and lodging taxes by 1.25 percent, creating a new revenue stream for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to support long-neglected habitat conservation programs. Last session, the bill passed the House, but two Republicans blocked it in the Senate.

Oregon’s federally required State Wildlife Action Plan identifies species at risk of extinction or decline due to habitat loss, climate change, and other threats. In 2025, as the plan was being updated, dozens of species were added, including the Crater Lake newt, the California condor, and the North American porcupine, bringing the total to more than 300.

“It’s a blueprint of the most imperiled species and habitats in the state,” said Sristi Kamal, deputy director of the Western Environmental Law Center, which supports the bill. “But a plan is only as good as the funding to implement it.”

Though Oregon’s Fish and Wildlife Department receives some state funding, most of its budget comes from state hunting and fishing licenses and federal taxes on guns and ammunition via the Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937. The majority of Oregon’s federal funds, about $20 million annually, are earmarked for big game species and sport fish. Other federal grants primarily support species already protected by the Endangered Species Act. That means that Fish and Wildlife, like most state wildlife agencies, has little money to prevent species from becoming endangered in the first place. Between 2023 and 2025, it spent just 2 percent of its budget on wildlife conservation programs.

Dense mats of Ludwigia spp. choke out native vegetation at Horseshoe Lake, Palensky Wildlife Area, Oregon. Lauri Brewster/Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife

Increasing hotel and lodging taxes would leverage the state’s robust ecotourism industry, which annually attracts tens of thousands of out-of-state and international visitors.

If the bill passes, Oregon’s statewide hotel tax rate would be 2.5 percent — the third-lowest rate in the U.S. and less than half of what Washington, Montana, and Idaho charge. The 1% for Wildlife bill could provide a new model for state-level conservation funding, said Mark Humpert, director of conservation initiatives at the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, which advocates for state agencies at the federal level.

“Ninety-five to 99 percent of species that states are responsible for have no dedicated funding from the federal government. We sometimes joke that state agencies have to offer bake sales to fund this work,” Humpert said. Some sell specialty license plates; others use a small percentage of sales taxes on outdoor equipment. The “gold standard,” Humpert said, is Missouri, where a state constitutional amendment dedicates one-eighth of 1 percent of its sales tax to its Department of Conservation.

According to a 2016 study by the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies and its partners, fully implementing every State Wildlife Action Plan in the country would cost around $1 billion annually. But for years, Congress has failed to pass the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, a bipartisan bill that would bolster states’ conservation funding. Now, as the Trump administration slashes federal conservation and climate funding, advocates say that the 1% for Wildlife bill could provide the stable funding needed to implement Oregon’s wildlife action plan. “The bill is a very innovative concept, and there are probably 49 other states that are watching closely to see if it’s successful,” Humpert said.

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In northeast Oregon’s high-desert region, Jamie Dawson, the Greater Hells Canyon Council’s conservation director, hopes the bill can fund wildlife crossings on Highway 82. “This section of the Blue Mountains is an absolutely critical habitat connectivity corridor — of continental importance,” Dawson said. Deer, elk, and other species use it to migrate between the Rocky Mountains and the Cascades Range in western Oregon and Washington. But the route is a wildlife collision hotspot, with hundreds of animals killed by vehicles over the past few years.

Elsewhere, the funding could support studies of migratory bird habitats like eel grass estuaries and wetlands, said Joe Liebezeit, conservation director for the Bird Alliance of Oregon. In spring 2025, local birdwatchers and radar data indicated that half as many birds as usual migrated through the state, though the reasons for this are unclear.

As the state’s general fund waxes and wanes, so does the wildlife department’s budget, which is rewritten every two years. The lack of stable conservation funding prevents it from focusing on long-term solutions for species conservation, said Davia Palmeri, the agency’s federal policy director. “We do monitoring for these species when we can — when there’s a grant or short-term funding — to get pulses on species like reptiles or amphibians.”

For over a decade, advocates have fought to secure state funding for conservation. “At one point, there was a proposal to put a tax on birdseed,” said Danielle Moser, wildlife program manager at Oregon Wild. “There was the idea of a gear tax — things you buy at REI.” But none of these ideas would have raised enough, and ultimately, they fizzled.

Last year, two Republican senators, Daniel Bonham and Cedric Hayden, killed the bill by refusing to allow the final committee vote that would bring it to the governor’s desk. Now, conservation advocates from across the political spectrum are determined to pass it.

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“You won’t always see all these logos on the same page,” says Amy Patrick, policy director at the Oregon Hunters Association, which is working with conservation groups like Oregon Wild to shape the bill. “The goal of this funding is to keep common species common, and that’s something sportsmen can get behind. There’s a real sense that this is an investment that will benefit all of our wildlife and habitats.”

The current 1.5 percent tourism tax funds the $45 million annual budget of Travel Oregon, which promotes the state’s tourism industry. Travel Portland, an independent nonprofit that works with Travel Oregon, opposes the bill, arguing that the additional tax would discourage large conferences and events. (Update: Travel Oregon did not respond to a request for comment before publication, but in a later statement, the agency said that it does not take positions on bills.)

The Oregon Restaurant and Lodging Association called the bill a “Pandora’s box” of future tax increases. “We don’t see an end in sight, with all the other state agencies that would love a new revenue source,” said Jason Brandt, the association’s president. Brandt and others note that the bill’s original text only provided a 1 percent tax increase for the wildlife agency, but amendments tacked on 0.25 percent for conservation efforts by other departments, including the Department of Agriculture’s invasive species management and anti-poaching efforts at the Department of Justice.

The association’s political action committee donated over $17,000 to Bonham during his time in state office. Bonham, who resigned from the Senate in October when he was nominated to a federal position, did not respond to a request for comment.

Kamal and other advocates say the tourism industry’s opposition is ironic, given that revenue from the new tax would be reinvested in some of the state’s most popular attractions. Travel Oregon’s surveys show that scenic beauty is the top draw for 90 percent of out-of-state visitors.

“A lot of people come to Portland for business, but then they go to our beaches, or the mountains,” said Kamal. “The tourism industry is standing on the back of these natural resources. If you don’t invest in it, the pressures on these resources will make that legacy crumble.”

This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, which is supported by the BAND Foundation.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Visiting Oregon? You may soon have to pay a tax to protect its wildlife. on Feb 1, 2026.