LoginReducing the climate impacts of food and farming
In this episode, I chat with fellow energy nerd-turned-ag-reporter Michael Grunwald about agriculture’s climate impact. We explore the folly of biofuels, the promise of meat alternatives, and the central importance of increasing yields. While we can imagine a future of energy abundance, land is a zero-sum game — no one’s making more — so the choices here are uniquely difficult and important.
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David Roberts
Hey everybody, this is Volts for June 27, 2025, "Reducing the climate impacts of food and farming." I'm your host, David Roberts.
A year ago, when I interviewed energy expert Michael Liebreich, we confessed to our mutual climate blindspot: agriculture. It's unquestionably a big contributor to climate change — and getting bigger — but it's just not something we've been able to muster interest in over the years.
That very exchange appears in the introduction of journalist Michael Grunwald's new book, We Are Eating the Earth. It is used as an example of the lack of attention given to agriculture in the larger climate world. (Guilty as charged!) Grunwald is a fellow energy nerd, but unlike me, about five years ago he steered into his ignorance about agriculture and fell down a rabbit hole, where he has been researching and writing ever since. (You may have seen his Canary Media columns on the subject.)
Grunwald is an old-school journalist, who's been a reporter at the Washington Post, Time, and Politico Magazine. His first book, 2006's The Swamp, was definitive on the subject of the Florida Everglades and its woes. His second book, 2012's The New New Deal, was about Obama's stimulus bill and remains underrated IMO — it was extremely educational to me at the time and looks prescient in retrospect.
Eating the Earth is his third book, and I figured since he's gone to the trouble of learning about this stuff and I haven't, I should at least ask him about it. So, I'm going to quiz him on the many things he's learned about these last few years, from indoor farming to gene editing, biofuels to veganism. All right, let's go to the farm.
With no further ado, Mike Grunwald. Welcome to Volts at long last. Thank you for coming.
Michael Grunwald
Thanks so much for having me. I've been a fan for so long.
David Roberts
We have been joking that I have avoided this topic pretty assiduously my entire 20-year career. And, having now read through your book and grappled with this a little bit, I'm not sure I've been persuaded to the contrary. But we can discuss some of the reasons for that as we go.
Michael Grunwald
It's been nice talking to you.
David Roberts
Anywho, bye, bye. So, let's start here. Let's start at the highest possible level. Just give me the sort of — by the way, I've got like 400 questions for you. So, we're going to have to move along here. You're going to have to do the sort of elevator pitch version of all these answers. You know, just obviously, listeners can go read your book if they want the full deal. So, let's start here. Just give me the sort of elevator pitch for why climate types need to pay more attention to agriculture.
Michael Grunwald
Well, food and agriculture is a third of the climate problem, right? And it gets about 2% of climate finance. And I think, you know, about like 0.5% of climate conversation. You know, I'll tell a story of how I got into this because I was, like you, an energy dork. Not quite as, you know, not quite as perhaps a committed energy dork. But actually, I was writing a piece for Politico Magazine about my new green life. I think I beat you to solar panels and an electric car.
David Roberts
I still don't have solar panels. I'm a terrible greenie.
Michael Grunwald
But the point was, "Hey, you know, I'm a climate reporter. I care about the climate, but I'm doing this not because I'm an eco-saint, but because I know enough about this that this is going to save me money." And my feeling was that this was about to go mainstream. So, I had this kind of throwaway line about how, "Look, you know, I don't line-dry my laundry, I don't unplug my computer at night. I still eat meat." But when I went back and looked at that, I was like, "Wait a minute, I don't even know if eating meat is bad for the climate?"
I genuinely had no idea. So, I called this guy, Tim Searchinger, who I knew, and he said, "Yes, duh." But I realized, if I didn't know anything about food and climate, then probably other people didn't. And it's just, you know, even putting climate aside, agriculture is the leading driver of deforestation. It's the leading driver of wetland destruction, water pollution, water shortages. It makes a huge mess. So, it's a big deal.
David Roberts
Yeah, like one of the messages that comes through clearly in your book, which constitutes one of the reasons why I find paying attention to this subject dreary, is you're like, "We shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking, as in energy, that there's good energy, you know, there's clean energy and dirty energy, and the dirty energy is the bad guy and the clean energy is the good guy." It's pretty simple on the energy side, it's not that simple on the ag side. As a matter of fact, a farm is bad, ipso facto, for nature. Any kind. The shift from wilderness to farmed land constitutes the bulk of the environmental damage that farming does and that it doesn't matter what kind of farming you're doing on that land. Farming in and of itself is "a necessary evil," you call it.
So, it's just like levels of bad here that we're basically discussing. Unavoidable, necessary levels of bad.
Michael Grunwald
That's exactly right.
David Roberts
How fun is that, Mike?
Michael Grunwald
Well, that is super fun.
David Roberts
But anyway, so agriculture. So there's the sort of tripartite problem here with agriculture that you go over in the first chapter, which is that the population's growing so we need more food. Climate change is happening, so we need lots fewer GHGs from that more food. And biodiversity is dying, you know, land use is a problem. So we need that more food grown using fewer greenhouse gases on less land, basically. Like that is the tripartite agriculture challenge. And it's like, that's insoluble, Mike. Which is basically the conclusion you come to at the end of the book.
Michael Grunwald
Oh no, I don't think I'm that Debbie Downer. I would say I've concluded that we have not yet begun to solve. But I think I have a lot of promising solutions. And look, I do remind you that, you know, you started writing about this stuff, what, in 2004?
David Roberts
Yeah, that's true. Energy was bleak then, too.
Michael Grunwald
There were no alternatives to fossil fuels, right? There was no solar, no wind. The one alternative, and we'll, I'm sure, talk about this, was biofuels, farm-grown fuels which turn out to be, you know, way worse than gasoline. So, I think this is hard, it is. And you're right, you know, I wouldn't say every farm is bad, look, we gotta eat, but I do say that every farm makes a mess. I do say that every farm is a kind of environmental crime scene. Right. It's like this, it's like an echo of whatever nature was cleared to make room for it.
David Roberts
But this is the problem because I want to emphasize this, because this shapes a lot of what you say for the rest of the book, which is that getting more out of less land with fewer GHGs is incredibly, incredibly difficult. And the main lever you have to pull is yields, which we're going to get to, but sort of like the obsession with yields comes out of this tripartite problem. So this is sort of the background problem of agriculture. We need to make it less land-intensive, less GHG intensive, but we need lots more of it.
And that's like, you know, I don't even know what the right analogy is. It's doing something incredibly difficult. Two, three incredibly difficult things, that we've never really done in earnest, at once.
Michael Grunwald
My bad. I know you hate sports ball, but my basketball analogy is that we need to get more offensive rebounds but also do a better job getting back on transition defense.
David Roberts
I'm sure some listeners out there will know what that means.
Michael Grunwald
It's the "more with less." You're right that I do talk about the supply side. We need to make more food with less land. And we also, on the demand side, need to have less land-intensive diets.
David Roberts
Yeah, yeah. I want to go through all the various and sundry solutions that people have. I'm just going to be tossing them to you for you to take swings at them. But before we get there, I just want to start because the book starts with like 100 pages of accounting of the story of biofuels, basically the story of our assessment of biofuels. And obviously, we don't have time for you to recount that whole story, but sort of the main lesson that comes out of it, the main point of contention in all that fighting was, "What is the role of land use?"
Basically, like land, the question of land. Because you know, people were doing the calculation like, "You grow corn, it absorbs the GHGs, then you burn the corn, it releases them, you grow the corn, it absorbs them again. Oh, it's carbon neutral." But, as scientists came along and started pointing out, "If you're using that corn for fuel, they have to grow the corn to eat somewhere else." Right? So if you're doing this with the land, you're not doing that with the land. It's called opportunity cost. So, just talk a little bit about the role of land use in that fight and why it was, why it took 20 years to get people to pay attention to it.
Michael Grunwald
This was the one thing I knew about this area before I dove into this book. It was because I had traveled to Brazil in 2008 and wrote a piece about how essentially corn ethanol in the United States was tearing down the Amazon. Because through this exact mechanism you just described, if you're going to grow fuel, then somewhere else you're going to need to grow more food. And guess what, it's not going to be a parking lot. It's going to come out of nature and it's going to come out of, you know, these forests that are full of carbon and also absorb the carbon that we're pumping into the atmosphere with our fossil fuels.
So, my line is that it's, you know, it's kind of like if you want to fix the climate while you're deforesting, it's like trying to clean your house while blowing your vacuum cleaner to bits in the living room. You just can't do it.
David Roberts
But this seems obvious and intuitive, right?
Michael Grunwald
Right. It seems incredibly obvious. But essentially, you've, I'm sure, done more, you know, looking at life cycle analyses over the last 20 years than, you know, than you want to admit. And we all have, but up until, you know, this wetlands lawyer who's the kind of star of my story, Tim Searchinger, he's the guy who I first called and asked if meat is bad for the climate. You know, he was just this lawyer and he thought that seemed weird. Why don't these climate analyses take land use into account? Because actually, growing ethanol, you know, the actual production of ethanol, he's looking at these studies, it's worse than producing gasoline.
"You use more energy in producing it. You know, so all of the benefits, the supposed benefits, benefits from corn ethanol were from growing the corn. And Tim just looked at this and said, "Well, wait a minute, when that cornfield was just growing food, it was still soaking up that carbon. So what the heck is going on here?" And it sounds, you know — he was at the Environmental Defense Fund at the time and he got into this huge fight at work where, you know, the chief economist there was kind of like, "Are you saying you're the only person who realized this?"
And he was kind of like, "Well, yeah, I mean, nobody else..."
David Roberts
And the fight is that, I mean, the sort of technical basis for the fight is that it is very difficult to pin down a counterfactual. It's just very difficult to say what would have happened if you didn't do X, right?
Michael Grunwald
It's hard to pin it down exactly.
David Roberts
Right. As your hero says, it's obviously not zero.
Michael Grunwald
And it's obviously a lot. You know, these studies were essentially claiming that if you just stopped growing corn in the United States for food and just instead put it all in our fuel tanks, it would have no effect on global deforestation. And that was obviously preposterous. And I do, as a side note, have to mention, look, my hero, even though he was not a scientist, got a piece published about this in Science. It caused a lot — he created this idea of indirect land use change, which is now any life cycle analysis involving biofuels or really just about anything involving land has to account for indirect land use change (ILUC).
And I do have to point out that the House Republican bill, the Big Beautiful Bill that, you know, is getting rid of most of the clean energy stuff in the Inflation Reduction Act, not only does it extend the credit for biofuels, but it specifically has language that, when you do the analysis, you can't look at indirect land use change.
You know, because it comes out with answers that corn growers and soy growers don't like. And that is what's behind all this.
David Roberts
Yeah, there's a huge industry. I mean, anybody who's been in our area for as long as we have knows that this is a huge industry and it is a political third rail. Like, you can't get rid of this stuff. People pop up occasionally. So, I don't want to spend a ton of time on biofuels. I will just say they're bad. And that's across the board. Like, they're bad for sustainable aviation fuels, they're bad to make synthetic natural gas. Like, the math does not work. It doesn't, basically, for anybody. Like, I think if you're capturing methane gases that were otherwise going to be vented into the atmosphere and doing something with them, fine.
But, like, that's to avoid doing them in the atmosphere. It's not like you're going to get a good economical —
Michael Grunwald
Well, I will say, if you're actually using a waste product to make your biofuel, then it's probably okay. But a lot of those anaerobic digesters that are turning manure into biogas, they're terrible too. In fact, WRI looked at like 20 different ways that you can better manage manure. And 19 of them were cost-effective. And of course, all the money is going into these anaerobic digesters because, you know, farmers get paid for them. And that's the one that isn't cost-effective. They're mostly like craft brewing biofuels. So really, anything that uses land — I mean, I know I'm hopefully a broken record because this is my message, but we are eating the earth and it's agriculture that's eating the earth. And biofuels, it turns out, are only eating about a Texas worth of the earth. While for instance, livestock are eating 50 Texas worth of the earth.
David Roberts
Right, right, right. This is the second part of the message about biofuels: they're bad. If you've heard that they're bad, that's correct, they are bad. What about this new other kind? Also bad. But scale-wise, agriculture, whatever damage biofuels may be doing, agriculture is doing the same damage at a vaster, vaster scale. That's sort of the point of that section of the book. It segues into the larger land use dilemma, which is mostly about agriculture.
Michael Grunwald
Exactly. And this is something we all kind of know, right? When you look out the window of a plane, you see all those squares and circles and it's like, holy shit, there's a lot of agriculture out there.
David Roberts
Yeah, the numbers are bracing. Like our settlements — I forget the exact numbers you use in the book — but like our actual physical settlements, cities that we live in, it's like 2 or 3%.
Michael Grunwald
Yeah, I'd say one is at 1% going towards 2% of the land on Earth, while agriculture is about 40%. So, you know, you and I, we've both done a lot of work on the sort of scourge of urban sprawl and the importance of urban density. But just think, like agricultural sprawl, is 30, 40 times as bad. You know, that's what's eating our forests.
David Roberts
Yes, the land use problem, to a first approximation, is the agricultural problem. So, what I want to do here for like the next 30 minutes or so is do a little bit of a speed round because we've got a lot to get through and not a ton of time. I just want to kind of throw familiar solutions at you and I want you to tell me sort of like how to think about them. Having spent five years of your life immersed in this miserable research, you've learned all this stuff. Tell me, sort of like, what scale, what is the scale of this solution?
How should we think about it?
Michael Grunwald
David, it was fun. It was fun research. It was just the writing —
David Roberts
Did you say it was fun to write a book?
Michael Grunwald
No, it was just the "butt in seat" writing part that was hell. But actually, running around the world, talking to people, you know — I'm sure you see this with energy, right? I mean, before we get into the solutions, I should say it's really exciting because I'm a cynic, I'm a grouch. But it's really cool talking to these, you know, scientists and entrepreneurs who are thinking about this really massive problem and are just like, "Hey, let's try to fix it." And they have these unbelievable —
David Roberts
That's my whole job, Mike. That's the only thing that keeps me sane. So, I'm glad you got jazzed out of it. Okay, so I'm going to start with, I think, probably some easier ones to get to the harder ones later. Let's start with indoor farming. People love the idea of indoor farming because you can precisely control conditions. You eliminate insects, you eliminate any pests, any natural threat, you can improve yields, etc.
Michael Grunwald
Right. Not to mention night. And weather.
David Roberts
Yes, you can grow during winter; you can grow year-round. So, there are a lot of obvious advantages.
Michael Grunwald
It's a great place to start because it's, in many ways, the allure of indoor farming. It sort of highlights all the problems with outdoor farming, including that it eats the earth. It uses so much land. So, what if we could just put it in a skyscraper, like in downtown Newark?
David Roberts
Right. If you're trying to make it more intensive, more out of less land, exactly. Stacking up, going vertical, squeezing it all together, it sounds...?
Michael Grunwald
It's amazing, right? Instead of having a harvest, you know, maybe twice a year, you have it every two weeks. I mean, it's just, it's really remarkable. You don't, you know, you control all your inputs so, you're not creating any pollution, the birds aren't pooping on your crops. It's incredible. The long story short is that it doesn't work on any real scale. A friend of mine started one of the indoor farming companies called Bright Farms. He ended up getting fired because he was always complaining that the ambition wasn't big enough. What he was always saying is, "We're gonna solve the lettuce problem, maybe someday we'll solve the strawberry problem, but we're not gonna solve the food problem.
And of course, his board was like —
David Roberts
Because the food problem is grain, mainly a grain problem. And grains don't really... Like, what they're growing in these vertical farms is mostly leafy greens.
Michael Grunwald
Exactly. The high-end stuff. You can grow weed in a vertical farm and make a lot of money. Strawberries are the most, the highest margin, thing in your grocery store. You can do it with that. But it just, the energy costs too much and it's just like the sun is awesome. So the purely vertical farms...
David Roberts
Is it just that then? The energy costs too much?
Michael Grunwald
That's the sort of short-term problem.
David Roberts
But because one of my questions is like a lot of the technologies I cover here on this pod are only really going to work at scale without subsidies if renewable energy gets lots, lots, lots cheaper. So, a lot of solutions are pending that, basically. And so, I'm wondering, if we got to something like energy abundance, trivially cheap renewable energy, would that solve this problem or are there other things?
Michael Grunwald
It would make it a lot better. But right now, it uses so much energy. I think I remember I was doing back-of-the-envelope math with this one guy who had invested in one of these greenhouse type deals, and we calculated that it would take, I think, 30% of all current renewable energy in the United States to grow America's current tomato crop. And you know, tomatoes are not a big part of — you know, again, we use a couple hundred thousand acres for lettuce in the United States, and we have a couple hundred million acres of crops.
So, it's just really tiny. The real problem is that you can't grow these — at least nobody yet has figured out how to grow the big five: corn, soybeans, wheat, rice. This is a big problem. And I will say that I wrote a piece about this back when Plenty, Bowery, and AeroFarms had billion-dollar valuations. I wrote a column saying that the headline was something like "Vertical farming just isn't going to work." It was in Canary Media and I took a lot of crap, and now all three of those companies have gone bankrupt.
David Roberts
Okay, indoor farming is probably good for some nice boutique high-end crops, but it's not a scale solution. Another thing people are obsessed with in this is food waste. You often hear, "We don't have a supply problem. We grow enough food to feed the world. The problem is distribution. It's not getting to the people who need it, we're wasting enormous amounts of it, etcetera, etcetera." So, how should we think about food waste in the solution set?
Michael Grunwald
So, I'd say two things about it. First, I would say that it's true. It's absurd that we waste a quarter of our food, you know, some say a third. I think it's more like a quarter around the world. In the rich world, it's mostly, you know, we just waste it on our plates or at the restaurant. In the poor world, it's more, you know, we waste it close to the fork, they waste it close to the farm because they don't have good ways to store it.
David Roberts
Infrastructure.
Michael Grunwald
Yeah, they, you know, they can't get it to market. They don't have the right harvesting equipment, the processing equipment. And so, the first thing I always say is, "Yes, it's a huge problem, because when you waste a quarter of our food, that means we're wasting a quarter of the land we use to grow the food and the fertilizer and the water."
David Roberts
A quarter of the Amazon.
Michael Grunwald
Yeah, exactly. So, yes, I'm for getting rid of food waste. Everybody is. It's hard. And that's going to be a theme of a lot of these solutions is that, you know, like, I'm sure we'll talk about eating less meat, which is also really hard, but it's especially hard because we love meat. Nobody loves food waste. And yet it's still hard. I just did a piece for Slate about how there's a lot of data that shows, you know, we're all pissed off because food has gotten more expensive. Right. Yeah, I think we just picked a new president because of it.
Right. "Oh, it's terrible. We're paying too much for groceries."
David Roberts
Subsequently, eggs have risen in price almost every day since.
Michael Grunwald
Right. And now the new guy is unpopular, and that's probably why. Not because of fascism or any of that stuff. Everybody hates, you know, paying more for food. Well, we are not wasting less food. And so, it is just, it's hard. That said, there are a lot of things that I'm excited about. You know, there are these technologies where you can better manage inventories if you're a grocery store.
David Roberts
Yeah, that's kind of what I wondered. Is, like, what's at scale? Because whenever I hear about solutions to food waste, it's always these kind of local, incredibly high touch, like "We're employing people to drive to restaurants and gather this and..." You know, it just doesn't sound like stuff that could scale to any appreciable extent.
Michael Grunwald
I mean, I think some of it, I mean, groceries, again, because they have a purely economic motive and they're better at acting on economic motives. You know, these things like Flashfood, where you get the app and when food is ready to expire, they put it on sale automatically. AI puts it on sale for 50% and you come to the store. That's really moving the needle. And actually, groceries are doing a better job with their waste. And I think, you know, there are these like Apeel Sciences which has these kind of biotech invisible peels that you coat avocados and bananas with so they last longer.
I think that's exciting. And there are policy levers you can use too. I just mentioned expiration dates. Well, most of them are bullshit, and certainly the "best buy" dates. But it's sort of whataboutism, right? This idea like, "We don't need more food, we just need to waste less food." And you also hear, "We all just need to go vegan," or, you know, "We just need to reduce population growth." And what it really, you know, to wildly oversimplify the math, is that we kind of need to do all the things. Even if we reduce — the current US goal and global goal is to reduce food waste in half. Even if we do that, even if we eat 50% less meat in the rich world —
David Roberts
Quit skipping to the meat thing, Mike. We're not at that yet. We're getting to that later.
Michael Grunwald
Even if we get rid of biofuels, we stop using them entirely, we're still going to need to grow our agricultural yields even faster over the next 30 years than we have over the last 60. So, we're going to need a lot more food.
David Roberts
Okay, so food waste is important, but it's just one bit of the buckshot here.
Michael Grunwald
Don't waste food!
David Roberts
So, my understanding is that fertilizer is a huge problem here. It's got a bunch of nitrogen in it, it's polluting water, it's messing with the greenhouse. What about now — like, I'm always reading about cool synthesis and electrochemistry and all these abilities we have now to make new materials. Is there any promising attempt to make benign, more benign fertilizers?
Michael Grunwald
Yes, there are some exciting things. The first thing I would say is that half of all — you know, we just talk about food waste. Half of all fertilizer is wasted too.
David Roberts
Just overused, imprecisely?
Michael Grunwald
Overused. And it's annoying because, you know, food waste just ends up in the landfill and it fills up our landfills, creates a little methane. You know, fertilizer waste, we call it pollution, right? It's either, you know, it's nitrates that end up in the, you know, creating the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, or the algal blooms in the Great Lakes, or it's nitrous oxide emissions, which —
David Roberts
And that is because of the nitrogen. It all basically comes back to the nitrogen.
Michael Grunwald
Yeah, you know, I mean, nitrogen fertilizer is literally made out of natural gas. So obviously, if you could think of ways to use less of it, that would be really awesome. And right now, you know, this is going to be really shocking to you, Dave, but in the United States, we mostly rely on voluntary measures from our farmers. And this is probably going to be even more shocking: they're not working all that well.
David Roberts
Is fertilizer just so cheap that there's not that economic incentive? Because, I mean, these are like big corporate operations. You'd think they would be cutting costs. You'd think they would be thinking of ways to use less fertilizer on their own. You wouldn't think they would have to be forced to do so.
Michael Grunwald
You would think that. You know, and they are not, they are not idiots, these guys. They run businesses. And it's not just because Koch Industries is selling them the fertilizer, which, you know, has something to do with the lack of, you know, fertilizer regulation. But the fact is, and this is maybe skipping ahead, also the gains they can make by better yields, they so outweigh the costs of buying a little excess fertilizer that they call it "Insurance N." Like insurance nitrogen. And there are exciting technologies with, you know, some of them through precision agriculture, where your tractor basically tells you where on your field needs fertilizer and just drops it there, as well as some of these, you know, actual alternative fertilizers. Right now, there just isn't that much incentive if there's any danger of losing yields.
David Roberts
Well, let's get back to the alternative fertilizers. Is that a big thing? Like, can you fertilize without nitrogen?
Michael Grunwald
It's starting. So, there's a company called Pivot Bio that's backed by Bill Gates that I'm pretty excited about. And look, there are a lot of arguments over how well this stuff works, and we're not entirely sure, but it's on 5 million acres in the United States. 5 million corn acres.
David Roberts
That's a alternative fertilizer? How did they avoid —?
Michael Grunwald
It's cool. So, and this is one general theme, I think, in a lot of agriculture and probably a lot of society, is that the 20th century was chemistry. All these chemical solutions did really cool stuff, but often had these really toxic unintended consequences. The kind of mess that fertilizer makes being a classic example. I tell a story in the book about Norman Borlaug, the founder, father of the Green Revolution. I talked to this guy who has since died, but he was 93 years old when I interviewed him. And he went to Iowa with Norman Borlaug and sort of the punchline is that Norman Borlaug told him like, "Fertilizer is the Achilles heel of the green revolution and makes such a mess."
The 21st century is going to be biology. And so, Pivot Bio has essentially genetically engineered microbes. The original, the holy grail was, "Oh, can we just re-engineer these crops so that they can kind of fertilize themselves?" And that just hasn't worked really well yet. But what they did was they re-engineered these microbes that naturally fix nitrogen from the air and bring it to the soil and feed plants, but have kind of gone dormant because there's already so much fertilizer in the soil, so much nitrogen in the soils. It basically turns off their sense of smell.
So, they keep fetching nitrogen, even though it's already there. They're no longer lazy.
David Roberts
So they fetch the nitrogen from the atmosphere rather than us putting it in there?
Michael Grunwald
Which is what the whole chemical, you know, the Haber-Bosch process, that converts air, the alchemy of turning air into nitrogen. This is doing it biologically. And right now, they say they replace about 40 pounds of nitrogen per acre, which is about one fifth of the fertilizer on a typical US cornfield. The idea is that, you know, as it works, and there's pretty good evidence that it's working at least a little bit and that it isn't harming yields.
David Roberts
I mean, is there a horizon you can see, where that gets better and better and makes a substantial? I mean, obviously, these things are difficult to predict. Like, I have all the faith in the world in electrons, but I don't know enough about biology to know whether to sort of lay all my money, I'll put all my chips on that. But like, is that a solution to the nitrogen problem, or is that just another one of these sort of like trimming it at the margins things?
Michael Grunwald
No, I think that this is like the idea is that this can really take a big bite out of it over time, as with better gene editing. You know, like, technology is cool.
David Roberts
Well, this segues into my next question, which is about genetic modification. I have some criticisms later of the technocratic approach in this book. But this seems like an area where the technocrats have it right and the hippies are just wrong about this. You know, there's been a lot of objections to GMOs and as far as I have heard, no research whatsoever showing physical health harm. This obviously puts aside the politics and power questions, but the crops themselves have not been shown to hurt.
Michael Grunwald
Not in human health. It's like these are the most studied stuff on earth. And I agree, the hippies are wrong. That said, this is, you know, the technophiles have made a lot of big promises about GMO crops. Most of them have been somewhat disappointing in terms of the spectacular yield increases. They've been overhyped somewhat.
David Roberts
Yeah, what's your level of, I mean, what's the sort of appropriate level of hope to put in gene fiddling?
Michael Grunwald
I think, especially on the crop side, there's pretty good reason for hope. On the gene editing, I mean, this seems really cool. I mean, these, you know, the way they did genetic modifications, it was really kind of haphazard. You're just sort of bombing these crops with, you know, and sort of hoping something weird and cool and Spider Man-y happens and it just didn't work that well. But with gene editing, you can be really precise and you know, you combine it with the artificial intelligence and these supercomputers where — you know, I tell this story, I went to the University of Illinois where they are literally trying to re-engineer photosynthesis.
David Roberts
Yes, and the point of the AI and the computing is just that you can run simulations of these things that would have taken weeks or months. You can do dozens in a day.
Michael Grunwald
Right. And it would have taken tens of thousands of dollars. And you can do it for pennies. Like at the University of Illinois, they have set up this supercomputer that models the 170 steps of photosynthesis because it turns out photosynthesis — it's like it's 3 billion years old, and it does a good job of maintaining life on Earth and everything.
David Roberts
Pretty good record established.
Michael Grunwald
Yeah. So, like, give it — But it turns out to be pretty inefficient.
Like, you know, it takes carbon from the air, but it often grabs oxygen by mistake. And it turns out that it doesn't react that well when the sun, like a cloud, blocks the sun for a bit; photosynthesis turns off and then it's really slow to get started again. So, these guys have sort of figured out, "Well, okay, where's the gene that kind of restarts it? And let's have more of that." Anyway, they're doing stuff. It's going to take a long time, but, you know, you could really be looking at like 20, 40, 50% yield increases.
And, on the fertilizer side, you could be looking at replacing 20, 40, 50% of it. Fertilizer has about as much emissions as aviation.
David Roberts
Interesting.
Michael Grunwald
So, probably a little bit more. So, we're talking about big numbers here.
David Roberts
Yeah, yeah. What about another favorite of the hippies? And by the way, I just, I hope listeners know that I refer to hippies out of love and identification. I am, of course, a hippie myself, deep down, as you well know.
Michael Grunwald
I just did a debate at Berkeley where I was sort of debating a hippie professor who is, you know, pushing some of the agro-ecology regenerative stuff we'll talk about later, but Alice Waters was sitting in the third row just glaring at me the whole time.
David Roberts
Well, okay, so there's a lot of hope being put into trapping carbon in the soil. Soil carbon is a big, hyped thing right now. The idea is basically that you can just change your farming practices in such a way as to lock more carbon into the soil where it will stay stable, and as I understand it, will boost yields, will boost the fertility of the soil also. Am I making that up? Tell me what's going on with soil carbon and how big of a deal I should think of it.
Michael Grunwald
So, on the soil carbon stuff, I try to be very measured about a lot of this stuff. And since so much of it is ideological, and a lot of it, the truth is, you know, both really is somewhere in the middle. Carbon farming is bullshit. A lot of the regenerative practices that you see in Kiss the Ground and Common Ground that are being pushed by General Mills, Archer Daniels Midland, PepsiCo, RFK, Joe Rogan, Michael Pollan, and Al Gore.
David Roberts
You know, when I say, wait, so when we're talking about soil carbon, we're just talking about regenerative — are those basically the same kind of the same thing?
Michael Grunwald
Well, well, the thing is, regenerative is more — you know, they would say the regenerative movement would say, "It's about soil health," and it really does help with soil health. They would also say that it, you know, there are kind of societal benefits as you know, when you're creating these regenerative systems as opposed to extractive systems. There's a lot to be said for all of that. But they also say that it stores a lot of carbon in the soil and that basically you can reverse global warming by essentially taking all that carbon that we've pumped into the sky and just farming differently, and it'll come down in the soil.
And that is just not true.
David Roberts
Okay, well, we're going to get more into regenerative later. We're going to argue about that at the end. I'm saving that for our finale here.
Michael Grunwald
I should say, though, that trees are great stores of carbon. Like planting trees, which is part of this movement, right through agroforestry. That's awesome.
David Roberts
Yeah, Reforesting deforested land is like — who could not love that?
Michael Grunwald
Oh, and we should say, remember my first book, which was when I first met Tim Searchinger, was about the Everglades. Tim gave me the first tip that sent me to the Everglades, where I wrote the book, met my wife, and moved to Florida. But restoring wetlands is, like, that's the best bang for the buck. If you can, like, take wetlands, that's like — we're looking for one billionaire who could put in a few billion dollars and literally reduce 1 or 2% of global emissions by restoring wetlands.
David Roberts
All right, let's get to one of the things that everybody wants to talk about. If I am, as an individual, primarily concerned about climate change, what is the best change I can make to my diet? Like, what three foods should I give up if I'm most concerned about climate change?
Michael Grunwald
Beef and lamb. It's, you know, ruminant meat is really the baddie. That's what I've done with my diet. I've cut out beef and lamb. Like, if you can go vegan, that is awesome. That is the best. Beans and lentils are by far better than chicken and pork, but beef and lamb, the ruminant meats, are so much worse than chicken and pork that it turns out that actually vegetarians, also great, are no better than just cutting out beef and lamb, because vegetarians end up eating more dairy. And cows are really the problem because they are eating the earth.
David Roberts
Yeah, I guess you're dodging beef, but if you go to dairy, you're still supporting the cow agriculture.
Michael Grunwald
Right. And dairy isn't as bad because, you know, cows only produce beef once. While they produce dairy on a, like, shockingly constant basis. If you go to one of these industrial dairies.
David Roberts
So, this is like beef and lamb first, and then there's a big gap.
Michael Grunwald
Yeah, exactly. Less beef is really important. I mean, you know, beef, they provide about 3% of our protein or calories, and they use about half of our land. It's just an incredibly inefficient machine of converting animal feed into food. There are lots of cool things about cows, but —
David Roberts
Is there a name for a diet that avoids cows, lamb, and dairy, but not chicken and fish? You know, just like an anti-cow.
Michael Grunwald
Can we call that the Grunwald diet? I don't know exactly.
David Roberts
Somebody needs to put a diet book out.
Michael Grunwald
I mean, it would be a climavore diet to name check my RIP podcast.
David Roberts
But the reason veganism is best is mainly because of dairy. It's cows —
Michael Grunwald
I mean, plants are —
David Roberts
I mean, they're healthy too.
Michael Grunwald
Plants are great. And plants are healthy. Well, you know, look, Doritos aren't healthy. Right? Or, you know, but in general, eating plants is a lot more efficient than eating the, you know, eating plants that have been laundered through an animal. Right. And that's what dairy and beef is, right? It's, you know, the chickens eat soybeans. The cows eat corn and they turn it into beef. And you know, everybody's, I'm sure we're going to get to fake meat too. And people say like, "Oh, it's processed food." But I like to remind people that what goes on inside a cow's stomach, that is a process. It's like, it's crazy. So.
David Roberts
But if my concern is animal welfare, as I understand it, chickens are the number one problem from that point of view.
Michael Grunwald
That is true.
David Roberts
Just because there are so many, their suffering is so extensive.
Michael Grunwald
And they're treated worse. They're treated, I mean, it's horrible.
David Roberts
The cruelty of the chicken game is truly horrific.
Michael Grunwald
It's funny, I talk a lot in the book about how, yes, a big part of the problem is that we are going to need, particularly in the rich world, to eat a lot less beef, but that means that we're also going to need more efficient beef. And it turns out that you can make beef more efficiently. Chickens are already like the 42 days from, you know, egg to broiler is just, it's just like they grow so fat that they can't stand on their legs. It's horrible. And you really can't do it more efficiently.
They've practically reached their biological limits. While cows, there's, you know, for better or for worse, there's still a lot that can be done.
David Roberts
Just, like with cows, you're tweaking their diet so their gut biome works differently or what's the, what's a more efficient cow?
Michael Grunwald
I went to Brazil where I saw these ranches mostly. They have just millions of acres of degraded land and degraded ranches in Brazil where you'll have like one cow on 10 acres. And I saw these incredibly efficient ranches, some of which, by the way, use a lot of regenerative practices, including no-till and cover crops. They let the cows wander around the crops, which is something that the Michael Pollan types love. But they also do a lot of industrial stuff. They have feedlots and they fertilize their pastures, and they can put, you know, seven cows on one acre.
And so, it's like, you know, when you think, when you're like five, six, seven times more efficient in producing beef, that means you're using 1/5, 1/6, 1/7 as much of the Amazon.
David Roberts
Okay, so important marker there. Beef and lamb, absolute climate villains. Unquestioned, unambiguous.
Michael Grunwald
Yeah, and grass-fed is even worse, by the way. It's like, you know, from a climate perspective, not only because of the land, but because of, as many of your listeners know, the burps and farts are a real problem. And if you just, you know, have grass-fed beef, which spends their entire lives in pasture, it can take like twice as long to reach slaughter weight as it does for a feedlot fed. They only spend a couple of months in the feedlot, but that means they get to slaughter weight a lot quicker. So they don't spend the extra time burping and farting and creating methane emissions.
David Roberts
And this is one area where, and I think there are lots of these in agriculture, where a concern for climate and a concern for, let's say, other environmental and social problems don't necessarily point in the same direction. Like, grass-fed beef might be better for the welfare of the cows. It might be better for the biodiversity of the farm. It might be better on other metrics that you care about, but it will be worse strictly on greenhouse gases. Do you agree with that general point that those are different in a lot of cases?
Michael Grunwald
There are definitely trade-offs, but the environmental trade-offs are not always obvious. And I just do want to point out that the eating of the earth that I bang my spoon on my highchair about is not just a climate problem. Remember, this is like, you know, we're destroying the habitat, you know, these habitats for, you know, this is what's creating the sixth mass extinction. Right. It's not like pesticides in the air. It's agriculture taking over the earth. It really is.
David Roberts
Okay, before I talk about engineered meats, which I do want to talk about, let's talk about some of the other possible large-scale protein substitutes that people toss around. Bugs, seaweed, cultivated microorganisms. Are any of these sort of large-scale alternative proteins going anywhere?
Michael Grunwald
Well, they're all off to a slow start, I would say. But look, I think insects could be a solution — I don't think it's like that's what we're all going to eat when we grow up. But I think it can replace a lot of fish feed. I think it can replace, you know, hopefully someday a lot of animal feed. And remember, we use a lot of land for that. So I think it's promising. I think the idea that — you know, these are mostly efficiency questions and, and there are some really efficient animals, you know, that are very tiny, that grow protein pretty quickly.
David Roberts
This is sort of George Monbiot's — is that how you say his name, actually? I don't know. I don't know that I've ever said his name out loud. But that's his whole thing, right? He wants to just wipe out normal farming and replace it basically with microorganisms that are much more efficient in producing protein for energy input.
Michael Grunwald
He fell in love with a couple of potential solutions that I think are very exciting potential solutions. But I think, you know, we should absolutely be letting a thousand flowers bloom. But I would not shut down agriculture until these other... you know, I think that's one of the things that always kind of irritates me. There's this idea, it's like, "Well, let's first start by having lower yield agriculture because we know there are all these other things we can do that can, you know, help us feed the world without frying the world." And I'm always like, "Why don't we make sure that other stuff works and then, you know, maybe we won't need all this agriculture?"
David Roberts
I'm going to flip that around on you in a minute. But we're not there yet. So, of all these alternative proteins, is there one or a set of them that you think are particularly more promising than others? Is seaweed meaningful?
Michael Grunwald
No, I mean, I think seaweed as a feed additive for, you know, to get the cows to burp and fart less methane, has some promise. I don't think as a food source that's — I haven't seen a lot of excitement. But some of the — and this is getting towards the fake meat stuff generally — I do think biomass fermentation, which is essentially, you put fungi into a, you know, a beer brewery and it just grows into something that is kind of shockingly like meat and shockingly nutritious.
David Roberts
So, what's your take on fake meat then? This is one of these things where, like, very few people have had any direct experience with it, but people love to have takes on it. It's a take attractor. What's your take?
Michael Grunwald
I started working on this book. My first reporting trip, I went to the Good Food Institute conference, basically the fake meat conference in 2019. And so this was a few months after Beyond Meat, which does the plant-based meat. Those burgers, they had just gone public and it is still the biggest popping IPO of the 21st century, really. Their stock went up to $250 a share.
David Roberts
It's been a disappointment, though, as I understand it. Like, the plant-based stuff has not taken off like people were hyping it.
Michael Grunwald
Oh, no. Well, at that, you know, in 2019, I literally thought I was going to accidentally raise a series A round on the drinks line. It was like the exuberance was — and people were literally having arguments with, "Are we going to replace meat in 10 years or 15 years?" It was like that kind of thing. And so it was over the top. And now, yes, like Beyond Meat was at $250 a share. Now it's at $2 a share. I went back to the GFI conference in 2023 and it was all doom and gloom. "This is dead." It's the trough of disillusionment.
David Roberts
This is the plant-based stuff or the engineered stuff because those are very different?
Michael Grunwald
Sort of everything. All of the investors who poured billions of dollars into this stuff have, you know, fled for the hills.
David Roberts
Where did they just ban it?
Michael Grunwald
Well, in my state of Florida, Ron DeSantis banned it. It's banned in Alabama, Mississippi, Montana. That's the lab-grown meat or, you know, the cultivated meat. But I will say, look, plant-based meat went onto the market and, you know, my take on it is that it was way better than the kind of veggie burgers of yore, right? Those like hockey pucks that were just for vegans, but they weren't as good as meat and they were more expensive. And so it was kind of like a play for —
David Roberts
The sausages are good. The breakfast sausages are pretty good.
Michael Grunwald
And I think Just Egg does a really nice job with their egg substitutes.
David Roberts
I haven't tried those.
Michael Grunwald
I think Impossible Burgers are pretty good, as is the Impossible Whopper.
David Roberts
My kid went and had an Impossible Whopper, and he gave it a pretty vigorous thumbs down. I was disappointed.
Michael Grunwald
I think those are fine. Actually chicken, like the plant-based chicken nuggets. There's really no reason to have a chicken nugget anymore. The plant-based chicken nuggets are just as good. I mean, who the hell knows what's in the real chicken nuggets anymore?
David Roberts
Yeah, I know. Because normal chicken nuggets are so distant from meat anyway.
Michael Grunwald
All the stuff that these are just vehicles for sauce, and that's fine. But, I think right now, the sort of use case for these alternatives are just for people who are trying to save the climate. And that's what we learned from Tesla, despite all the other stuff. All of these companies said they were going to be the next Tesla, but Tesla had a really awesome product that people thought was cool, and that has not yet happened with plant-based meat.
David Roberts
And I suspect that they're not going to get there with plant-based meat. I mean, it's obviously like there's nothing wrong with it. I love it, it's great. But, as a scale substitute for meat, I'm very skeptical. Whereas, cultivated meat sounds, I mean, you know, on the one hand, the product sounds meatier but on the other hand, the backstory sounds creepier. So, what's your take on how it's going to play out?
Michael Grunwald
I mean, I think on all of these things again, I'm like, I have a lot of faith in technology, particularly when it's supported by government investment. It is only just starting to happen globally with these alternative proteins. Remember, the first solar panel was what, like 1960, and it didn't become a thing for like 50 years. The first real, even plant-based burger that was designed for meat eaters was, you know, basically 2012. And the first lab-grown meat hasn't really hit the market.
There's been a couple, you know, in Singapore you can get, you know, some like 3% cultivated meat.
David Roberts
Have you tried it?
Michael Grunwald
Oh yeah, I've tried it all, and I've tried the chicken.
David Roberts
How is cultivated meat?
Michael Grunwald
It's fantastic because it's —
David Roberts
Is it really indistinguishable from meat?
Michael Grunwald
Well, at 100%, you know, like I had Upside's chicken and it's better than chicken because the chicken we eat today is bred for growth in six weeks. This was like cells from a heritage chicken, the kind of old fancy chicken and it was delicious. It tasted chickenier than chicken.
David Roberts
Interesting.
Michael Grunwald
I've had lab-grown sushi, I've had lab-grown lox, lab-grown burgers and, you know, I will say the meat, there's something, you know, we've been eating this stuff for 2 million years and there is something in our, you know, that when you have the actual meat that sends that it's like 2 million years of evolution saying "hello." Even when it's blended with plants, which I think, you know, as this stuff hits the market and the first us like Mission Barns, they make cultivated fat, pork fat that they're going to mix into a meatball and that's going to be the first product probably that comes to market.
David Roberts
Oh, interesting.
Michael Grunwald
Hopefully, this year. And I think, you know, and that tastes good. It tastes, you know, even just, just fat, even just with maybe 10% cultivated cells, it's a really good product. And I do think, I'm sure you've seen like the New York Times did a big story about the revolution that died on the way to dinner saying, "This lab-grown stuff is never going to work."
David Roberts
Yeah, we've already been through a hype cycle, maybe even two hype cycles, on this stuff when it barely even exists yet.
Michael Grunwald
Exactly. I'm really, again, I'm really optimistic, and I'm working on a story about this. But behind the scenes, there's amazing progress happening. In fact, the big scientific paper that came out that threw cold water on this stuff, the biggest problem with cultivated meat is essentially the feed. They call it the "media." It's like the glop that the cells grow in. It's what they eat. And to oversimplify, this guy said that these companies would never get it below $6.50, you know, and then in the best, best case scenario, maybe they'll get it to $3 a liter.
Well, they're already below a dollar a liter. And I've heard, and I've talked to some firms that are below 50 cents. So, like technology, you know, it moves fast, things happen. And the people who say like, "Oh, you know, you can't do it." I say even on the plant-based side, like, I don't know, I think like, you know, our species is very bad at changing our behavior. We're very bad at being nice to each other, but we're pretty good at inventing stuff, right?
David Roberts
Yes, a lot there. So, we should talk about the main thing here, the main story, which is the reason people in this area are mad at you, this question of what to do about factory farming, basically about industrial-scale farming. So, there's a lot of sentiment out there that industrial farming is bad in a bunch of ways for climate, also for particulate pollution, also crucially, socially, morally, you know, politically bad in a million ways. So, there's a lot of push towards what's called regenerative farming, which is just kinder to the soils, kinder to the more you switch crops, you leave a field fallow for a year, so it regenerates.
There's lots of different techniques that have come up. There's been a lot of hype about this. You know, like, this is one of those things that journalists love to write stories about: "Meet Bob. Bob squinted out over his field." You know, and Bob's beautiful farm where he knows all the animals and everything. Your basic point, and it's not you, you didn't invent it. The point that you make that other people make too, is "Whatever other benefits regenerative agriculture may have, it produces less yield per acre. And if you produce less yield per acre and you're producing the same amount of food, you are using more acres." So in other words, your critique here is by reducing yield, you are accelerating agricultural sprawl.
You are requiring more land to produce the same amount of food. So, even if regenerative farming is better than factory farming, regenerative farming is not better than the wilderness that the regenerative farm replaced. Right? Wilderness is always best. So, insofar as you're driving more land use, you are shooting yourself in the foot; you're doing worse for the climate.
Michael Grunwald
"You are eating the earth," some might say.
David Roberts
You're eating the earth. And the idea that you are pushing — a lot of other people are — is if you increase the yield, the per acre yield, through these factory farming, sort of intensive, highly technological means, you then spare that land. You need less land, you spare land, you spare wilderness. And so, you come out ahead, basically. Is that a fair summary of the sort of argument there?
Michael Grunwald
Well, you don't automatically spare the land, but you have no chance of sparing it if you've already torn it down, that's for sure. And it's like, you know, the classic example is I read a Washington Post piece about Kernza, which is the regenerative grain that they've started growing in Kansas. And it's awesome. It's perennial. So it's really like nature. It's much more like nature than other, you know, other approaches. And the headline was something like, you know, "A recipe for feeding the world and saving the climate." And you get to literally the 38th paragraph, and they say that they've now increased Kernza yields so that it's almost 30% of wheat's yields.
And it's like, "Well, wait a minute. If you're going to need more than three times as much land to grow the same amount of wheat, then you are not feeding the world or saving the climate."
David Roberts
Back to the land use, back to the opportunity cost of land use.
Michael Grunwald
I agree with all of these problems with factory farms, about how they're bad for animals and people.
David Roberts
They concentrate power, political power.
Michael Grunwald
Too many antibiotics, they lobby against the climate. They're probably a pandemic risk, although not necessarily more of a pandemic risk than other forms of raising animals. They're bad, bad, bad. But the thing that factories do well is manufacture a lot of stuff relatively cheap and relatively efficiently. And that is really agriculture's main job over the next 30 years. You know, what I say is that, you know, and some will say that this is unrealistic too, but, you know, all of this is going to be hard. But, you know, there are $600 billion worth of agricultural subsidies around the world.
You know, $300 billion is literally just money handed to farmers. I think we need to have a little bit more of a bargain where it's like, "Okay, if we're going to keep paying you, you've got to at least... You've got to at least be a little less nasty."
David Roberts
Have you ever tried to wrestle a dollar of subsidy out of the hands of a farmer, Mike? Have you ever?
Michael Grunwald
Exactly, I'm saying you can't. So let's at least try to attach, like, "Okay, we're going to give you your money, but here are a couple of things that we can do that will actually, you know, hopefully work out best." You know, for instance, we talked about wasting less fertilizer, right? Like, maybe we can come up with ways and we'll do the research for you. I want your listeners to understand, like, the extent to which people want to think that they can just transform agriculture, like the Rockefeller Foundation and the like —
Remember, these are the guys who initially bankrolled Norman Borlaug to do the work that led to the Green Revolution. They've put out a white paper where — it's a group of philanthropies, because basically, any philanthropy these days, if you say the word "regenerative," money starts pouring out of their pocket.
David Roberts
What if you said AI, regenerative and AI?
Michael Grunwald
That's VCs. That's VCs. But these guys, you know, they want a $4 trillion transition to agroecological systems. And it's not just like, you know, these are the biggest philanthropies, the United Nations, the World Bank, and then these big agribusinesses because they're like, "Oh shoot, you know, we'll push a dollar any way you want it and we'll get our, you know, like, that's fine." So you have like, you know, General Mills and Archer Daniels Midland and Danone. These guys are big on this. You know, "Fine, that's great. We'll have our farmers grow it regeneratively."
The problem is we're going to need a lot more farms.
David Roberts
Well, if you're telling them to do something that will require them to triple their production, obviously they're not going to complain about it. We're going to subsidize you and also thereby force you to triple the amount of land you have in production.
Michael Grunwald
I understand why people get upset at me about this stuff because, you know, industrial agriculture does suck.
David Roberts
Well, let me just throw this at you. I mean, it seems like at the very least, if the premise of focusing on intensifying yields through factory farming, if the whole premise of that is that it spares land, then at the very least, it seems like before you give these dollars to the farmers, you should require them to spare some land. The idea that it theoretically spares land. I mean, this is the thing about corn. If you look at the history of corn biofuels, like when corn yields improved, they didn't reduce the amount of land they devoted to corn.
They just found new uses for corn. That's what ethanol is. So, like, you know, this is Jevon's paradox, or however the hell you're supposed to say that. You know, this is like, "If you make it more efficient, we're just going to use more of it." You have to build the land sparing in legally, not just as a slogan.
Michael Grunwald
And this is the failure of REDD and REDD+ plus and all these other international efforts to protect forests is that you've got to have produce and protect together. They've got to be conditioned in each other and we will help you produce more. But exactly like you said, if you help a farmer increase his yields, the first thing he's going to do is like, "Great, I'm going to cut down more forest and grow more food and like, you know, and get rich." It has to be tied together and not just for that one farmer, but on a sort of jurisdictional basis. For Brazil, right?
You've got to tell Brazil, "We will give you all this money to work on increasing your yields and protecting your forest, but you've got to have the results." And what I will say is that the first Lula administration was really starting to do this. They were promised, "We'll give you a lot of money and we'll help you increase. You work on your yields, but also you work on protecting forests." And they did a lot of this. The international community did not keep its promises and did not provide the money. That's part of what led to Bolsonaro.
Like, people were pissed. So, I do think there it is — it's going to take a shit ton of money. You know, you can't do this stuff on the cheap. And it is going to require that there's going to have to be carrots as well as sticks.
David Roberts
Let me come at you with a critique from a different direction then, which is the argument here is like, we're not going to be able to persuade people to eat less meat. We're not going to be able to persuade these giants. You know what I mean? There are just immovable barriers.
Michael Grunwald
The argument is that we have to do all the things.
David Roberts
The only thing we can move is yields. But, like, that's a socially constructed fact. The idea that we can't move the meat lever, that this is the only lever that's movable, is socially constructed. And if we put, like, what if we diverted all this R&D money away from factory farming into regenerative practices, which has not gotten nearly the amount of, you know, R&D. Are you certain we couldn't improve the yields of regenerative practices if we really doubled down on it and tried?
Michael Grunwald
And as I said, I've seen areas where regenerative practice — I'm not against regenerative practices. I do think the carbon farming part of it is bullshit. But I'm all for regenerative practices, especially on the grazing side. When I talk about intensive grazing, usually that involves regenerative practices. The regenerative practices seem to increase the stocking rates, and you can make more beef than just — a lot of these conventional ranches, they call it the "Columbus" method. You send the cattle out in the fall and you go discover them in the spring, and that's really inefficient. Now, these regenerative practices require a lot more labor.
They're hard. But, I completely agree. And, I got to push back a little bit on this idea that I'm giving up on meat, I'm giving up on food waste. I'm saying we got to do all the things and the government has to be involved on the research side, on the deployment side, just like it was with energy. Food is probably about 25 years behind energy, but we don't really have 25 years to jerk around like we did on this energy stuff.
David Roberts
Here's yet another angle, a political economy angle. And this will sound familiar from the energy world, which is if you allow agriculture to become an oligarchic business like this, if you allow power to concentrate in a few giant, giant corporations and then your solution to the problems that are thereby created is to restrict the corporations through law and regulation. I think the political economy critique here is like you can't create these powerful, selfish entities and then expect to rein them in like that. That horse is out of the barn. You need to break up the concentrated power here if you want to have any hope of positive reform.
Do you buy that at all?
Michael Grunwald
I mean, this is a long discussion, and I would say it's sort of partly true. But remember, like oil companies, they exist to make a product that's inherently bad, and there's really kind of only one way to do it. You know, it's not like there's a lot they can do. They're just going to fight.
David Roberts
No regenerative drilling?
Michael Grunwald
Now, farming, there's a, you know, farming. You can measure emissions and often the big guys have, you know, they can afford efficiency in many ways and they can afford to do things in often climate friendlier ways than, you know, the guys who are just running a few cows or, you know, just, you know, have a few acres. So, I do think it's not insane to think that. And we've seen some examples. You know, the best example is Denmark. Partly because they've done so much on the energy side, they were suddenly realizing like, "Hey, we're on track for by 2030, agriculture is going to be half our emissions and it's only 1% of our economy."
And believe me, in Denmark, you know, they use more land for agriculture than any other nation except for Bangladesh. So, they are like, the agriculture guys are really powerful there. But they realized they were going to have to come to the table, and they came up with a deal where they're putting tons of money into promoting the kind of plant-based alternatives, but they're also putting tons of money into the kind of things that are going to help these farmers increase their yields and reduce their footprint. And then they are also requiring them to essentially turn about one sixth, a million acres of farmland, back to wetlands. You know, it's unbelievable.
They're going to have a carbon tax on emissions from animals. I mean, this is like, you know, they're doing all the things.
David Roberts
Yeah, they got serious about it.
Michael Grunwald
Yeah, it's Denmark. I know they're the model nation. Right. You know, all that. But like, you know, it's like "you never say never." And I do think, like I always say, that the book is kind of about how we're going to feed the world without frying the world. As if, which makes it sound like it's kind of two different challenges. But honestly, we know how to feed the world and if they have to, they're just going to cut down more trees and make more food. So I think there's like, like getting them to do it without frying the world is really, you know, the incentives, believe it or not, are kind of focused in the right way.
Like, there's, you know, JBS is all about efficiency. Tyson Foods, Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, these guys, they have actually pretty slim margins and they're happy to work towards approaches that can make more food with less land. And I would add for those big guys in particular, the alternative proteins, that's an option for them to make bigger margins. Even as a lot of these venture-funded startups are having incredible trouble, JBS is still going ahead with a cultivated meat factory in Spain. Cargill has invested in Upside Foods and Wild Type, which is doing cultivated seafood.
Tyson has invested in Believer, which has built a factory in North Carolina to do cultivated chicken. They see this as, you know, whether it's the short-term future or the long-term future, they see it as the future because ultimately they see that animal agriculture, and agriculture in general, can't take over the entire world. Right. And, like we all saw in The Martian, that's going to be a tough place to grow crops.
David Roberts
All right, so we're out of time. But as a sort of final way to wrap this up, I mean, the example of Denmark is poignant, as always.
Michael Grunwald
My sense is we're not quite there, politically.
David Roberts
We're not just a little bit shy of the mark.
Michael Grunwald
I haven't been paying as close attention to politics while I was working on this book, but my sense is that it has not progressed in a really climate-friendly direction.
David Roberts
Well, this is my question. Like, in the US, we seem not only so far from where Denmark is in taking this seriously and putting serious restrictions on these companies. A) They seem more sort of brutally powerful here. I'll never forget when they disciplined Oprah. Remember that? Like, to me, that was so telling. I was like, "My God, there's a force in American life more powerful than Oprah that can bring Oprah to heel. That is power." They seem more powerful here. They seem like they're getting more powerful, not less powerful. They seem like they're getting more corrupt.
The administration is more corrupt and in bed with them. Everything's going in the wrong direction here. So, for the individual, you can make dietary changes; you can give up beef and lamb, that's what you ought to do. You could go further and give up dairy as you ought to do. But that's, you know, I'm somewhat skeptical about the prospect of individual behavioral changes amounting to scaled solutions here as in other areas. So, if I'm engaged in this and I care about the problems of agriculture and the climate challenge of agriculture and I want to go beyond personal behavioral change, what do I do?
Like, on energy, I can tell people a lot of ways to get involved. You know, that's more than individual action but short of federal lobbying. You know what I mean? There's a lot of stuff in the middle I can think of. What is the way to politically organize around this problem? Do you know what I mean? Like, how should people engage in more than individual action?
Michael Grunwald
Well, let me at least make the case since I know your listeners are the energy wonks that I considered myself. I was your people before I took this six-year detour. And so, I guess the first thing I would say is that you should give a shit about this stuff because it really matters. Here's the thing, the next four years are going to suck in the United States for all kinds of climate action, right? But actually, there's a real difference, like with energy, you know, thanks to the Dave Roberts' of the world, and actually, there's probably only one.
So, maybe just thanks to you, we know what to do. We got to electrify the economy and run it on clean electricity. And you know, we're sort of even, you know, Trump aside, we're, you know, we're sort of starting to do it, like not fast enough, but it's happening. And this has been like, this is a story that I used to tell. I started telling it back in my Obama book.
David Roberts
It's happening, just not fast enough.
Michael Grunwald
Exactly. Now, with food, we don't even know what to do.
David Roberts
Right. It's not happening. Because we don't even know what it is.
Michael Grunwald
And a lot of the things we think we know are just not so right. So, it's not like, unlike with energy, Trump isn't going to be repealing all this progress that's been made. Right. This is actually a good time for us to start figuring shit out.
David Roberts
"Can't repeal progress if you don't make any," the guy tapping his head meme.
Michael Grunwald
Exactly, precisely. And this is going to be a good time for us to start to figure out what are these, you know, what are the real solutions, what are the fake solutions? You know, this is stuff that philanthropy, which, you know, if it wasn't just going headlong into just giving money to every hippie who says they're doing, you know, they're going to save the soil. And I should say that there's like, Bezos is funding some good stuff on alternative meats, on reducing emissions from cattle. We really ought to be figuring stuff out and we ought to be thinking at the international level about less crappy global policies that essentially work towards this "produce and protect" approach.
David Roberts
And the one thing we can all take out of this with crystal clarity is that ethanol sucks and should be crushed into the dirt now and for all time.
Michael Grunwald
Can I say one more thing about that? Because actually, ethanol is a perfect example. Remember, a lot of the enviros and a lot of the energy people were all excited about ethanol and all these biofuels because they were trying to solve their energy problems. They were like, "Oh, we'll reduce fossil fuels." The land sector was somebody else's problem. Now, I've spent six years, and the land sector is my problem. It has come to my attention that you energy people, of which I guess I used to be one of them, but when you're talking about burning wood for electricity or running our planes on corn and soy, you are dumping your energy problems on the land sector.
And you shouldn't do that. Like, this is something energy needs to solve its own problems. And then, you energy people should start caring about our land problems too.
David Roberts
There is such a thing as energy abundance possible, and even on the horizon, but there is no such thing as land abundance. Land is intrinsically a scarcity issue. And if you're using it for one thing, you're not using it for something else.
Michael Grunwald
There really is no Planet B.
David Roberts
We're going to get through all the cliches before we're done here. Alright, Mike, thank you for taking six years of your life to wade into this and figure out just how depressing and intractable it is. All kinds of solutions are on the horizon in four years —
Michael Grunwald
None of which you give a shit about.
David Roberts
No, I support them in theory, Mike. It's like, you know what I mean? There are all kinds of good things, things that I support that I don't care about, like oceans. Like, you think the ag people are mad at me. The oceans people really hate me because oceans are definitely super important, and I don't care about them either, really.
Michael Grunwald
Well, I hope your readers at least understand. And it's also fun. The book is fun. It's not dreary like David makes it sound.
David Roberts
All right. It is a rollicking read. All right, thank you, Mike. Thanks for your work, and good luck.
Michael Grunwald
Thanks so much, Dave, and thanks for everything you've done.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.
