The Trump climate story is boring — except this part

Canary Media’s ​“Eating the Earth” column explores the connections between the food we eat and the climate we live in.

As a journalist who spent three decades reporting for mainstream media outlets — and specifically as a climate journalist who’s spent the last six years researching the impacts of the food system — here’s my preliminary analysis of President Donald Trump’s rush to abandon the Paris climate agreement, gut climate regulations, cancel congressionally approved climate spending, scrub climate references from agency websites, manufacture evidence that global warming is actually good for humanity, move the Environmental Protection Agency out of the environmental protection business, and generally reorient U.S. policy to maximize fossil fuels and ignore carbon emissions:

It’s bad. It’s all bad.

The thing is, it’s also boring. I like to write nuanced stories explaining complicated issues, but what’s the nuanced take on a climate-denial administration taking climate-denial actions? Is there a more sophisticated analysis of Trump pushing oil and gas, killing battery factories, lying that windmills cause cancer, and blaming the Green New Deal (which Congress never even passed) for the state of the economy than the obvious one: The dude likes fossil fuels and hates the climate?

I doubt it. And I doubt it matters much whether Trump feels this way because he enjoys owning libs, because he’s raking in oil and gas donations, or because he sincerely believes fossil fuels are harmless. Trump aides say he’s simply committed to an all-of-the-above energy-abundance strategy to drive down energy costs, but that’s bogus. It’s some-of-the-above. He’s throttling wind and solar projects that provide cheap power. He’s pushing tariffs that drive up energy prices. He gaslights and defunds and deregulates like a fossil-fuel shill; he’s a fossil-fuel shill.

So now what? As I’ve been preparing to bring back my Eating the Earth column after some time off to finish a book about the race to feed the world without frying the world, I’ve been wondering: How should writers like me approach four years of drill-baby-drill hostility to climate progress, and how should readers like you think about it?

These are hard questions, harder than a lot of keyboard warriors make it sound. Bad things are happening, and more bad things will happen, but not all the things will be equally bad, and it will be counterproductive to turn the freak-out dial up to 11 on all of them. On the supply side and demand side of journalism, especially climate journalism, it will be important to focus on facts, avoid knee-jerk doomerism, and maintain perspective. It will be just as important to see things for what they are, not what the truth-manglers claim they are.

What matters is what happens, how bad it gets, and what progress can be made in the parts of climate world Trump doesn’t control. The next four years will be a good time to figure out the best climate technologies and policies, even though the U.S. government won’t pursue them. And there will be plenty of non-boring things to say about them.

I’m a little biased here — did I mention that my food and climate book is available for pre-order? — but I happen to believe the least boring piece of the climate story over the next four years will be the story of the food system.

Sharp-eyed readers of Carl Hiaasen’s raucous 2020 novel ​“Squeeze Me” might recognize its incurious, avaricious, transactional, egomaniacal U.S. president. He’s a race-baiting, diet soda–guzzling, rage-tweeting, immigrant-bashing oaf with a fake tan who ​“looks like someone had put a fire hose up his ass and inflated him with meringue.” He’s only identified by his Secret Service code name, Mastodon, which he likes so much that he demands a trip to the zoo to see one. But there’s definitely something familiar about a commander-in-chief who slaps his name on golf courses owned by Russian oligarchs, fulminates about ​“fake hoaxes” by the ​“deep state,” and wears a ball cap ​“yanked down tight to keep his hairpiece moored to its Velcro moonbase.”

It’s a funny book, if not a subtle one, with — spoiler alert! — a satisfying post-2020 epilogue. After the failure of Mastodon’s scheme to blame an undocumented immigrant for the disappearance of a political supporter, followed by the failures of his reelection campaign and a subsequent insurrection, he ends up a lonely and pathetic figure, trapped in his gone-to-seed Palm Beach club, ​“scrambling to revive his desiccated business empire,” cutting deals to endorse air-conditioned golf carts in Korea to pay the lawyers handling his 412 subpoenas. Code enforcement tears out his club’s helipad, and his urologist stops making house calls. He’s finished.

Of course, in the real world, he’s not.

In the wake of the 2020 election, it was tempting for the eco-minded Hiaasen, and the rest of us who recognize the grim realities of climate science, to see Trump’s presidency as a one-off fever dream. Had a 21st-century president really claimed global warming was a hoax manufactured in China, when the world was busting heat records every year, clean energy was booming, and Wall Street was boasting about green investment strategies? Surely, after voters chose a feeble but reality-based Joe Biden and the Capitol insurrection sputtered, Trump would be dumped in the dustbin of history and U.S. climate debates would at least acknowledge the necessity of climate action.

But instead, we’re back in cuckooville, joining only Iran, Libya, and Yemen in rejecting the Paris accord. Every day, there’s news about Trump rolling back climate programs and climate aid while axing environmental bureaucrats and environmental rules. It’s not a lot more subtle than Hiaasen’s depiction of Mastodon as ​“a soulless imbecile who hated the outdoors.”

The media have an obvious responsibility to chronicle the carnage — I’d recommend focusing less on what Trump says than what he does — but honestly, I wouldn’t suggest that readers bum themselves out by doomscrolling through all the coverage. For example, the best place to find news about the clean energy transition happens to be an outlet called Canary Media, but unless it’s your job to track this stuff, you’ll make yourself crazy if you read every Canary story about a wind project biting the dust or a solar company in trouble. What you should read are Canary’s big-picture stories about how the U.S. is still on track to install more grid batteries than ever, blue states are moving forward with green programs, and Europe is unveiling a clean industrial policy that would counteract Trump’s fossil-fueled approach.

These days, the most useful and interesting clean energy stories — again, Canary is all over them — are about the post-Trump future. Like Eric Wesoff’s dive into fusion, ​“an energy source that has been 40 years away from commercialization for 50 years.” Or Julian Spector’s report on the prospects for turning methane into clean hydrogen. Or Maria Gallucci’s look at the vast potential of geothermal power. The fate of these technologies will probably have a bigger impact on 2050 emissions than Donald J. Trump.

In general, it’s smart not to hyperventilate about every move Trump makes to delay the clean energy transition, because the transition is happening. It really matters how long the transition takes, because energy generates two-thirds of the world’s greenhouse gases, but we basically know where it’s headed: toward a largely electrified economy powered by zero-emissions electricity.

What we don’t know is what the hell is going to happen with the other third of the emissions warming the planet, the greenhouse gases generated by our food and agriculture system. That system has not yet begun making a transition to a climate-friendlier approach. There’s not even a consensus about what that kind of transition would look like.

That will be the subject of my Eating the Earth columns, and also of my book — the title might look vaguely familiar — and I think it will be a far more compelling subject than Trump whining about wind turbines or flacking fossil fuels. With energy, we know what we need to do; with food, we barely even know where to start.

I explained our basic food and climate problem in my first Eating the Earth column: We’ll need to grow about 50% more calories to feed the global population by 2050, and if we stay on our current trajectory, we’ll need to clear two more Indias worth of additional farmland to grow them. That would wipe out much of the world’s forests and wetlands while ratcheting up carbon emissions from the land sector during a time they need to drop about 75% to meet the Paris targets.

So we can’t stay on our current trajectory.

Until recently, there was only dim public awareness of any connection between food and climate — a vague (and, it turns out, incorrect) sense that GMOs, pesticides, and industrial agriculture in general are climate killers, while eating local, natural, and organic is climate-friendly. The 2023 global climate summit in Dubai was the first to devote an entire day to food, and the issue still tends to lurk below the media radar except when climate skeptics are accusing activists of trying to ban cheeseburgers or force everyone to eat bugs. In February 2024, Elon Musk posted on X, ​“Farming has no material effect on climate change,” but that preposterous lie did not provoke much outrage or interest.

In fact, farming has a huge effect on climate change — more than transportation or industry, nearly as much as electricity. And while the rise of renewables has helped our energy and climate problem start getting a little better, though not nearly fast enough, our food and climate problem is still getting worse. Food is about 25 years behind energy, and we can’t wait another 25 years for it to catch up.

The good news is that there are dozens of promising solutions that could help us eat less of the earth. I’ve written about some of them: using fewer biofuels, eating chicken instead of beef, intensifying cattle pastures, and getting over our fear of high-tech meat substitutes. I promoted technological solutions like low-emissions fertilizers and a miracle tree called pongamia, while questioning whether vertical farming would ever pencil out. (It certainly hasn’t yet!)

Trump, needless to say, does not care. His administration is already trying to shut down President Joe Biden’s $23 billion ​“climate-smart agriculture” initiative. Then again, it’s not clear whether that initiative’s focus on regenerative farming practices was actually climate-smart, so it’s hard to say what effect this particular knee-jerk anti-climate response will have on global emissions. On the other hand, the Trump team has approved a billion-dollar Biden administration clean-energy loan for a Montana refinery to make ​“sustainable aviation fuel,” a supposedly climate-friendly alternative to fossil fuel that may well end up eating much more of the earth.

The next four years, when serious climate policy is on hold in the U.S., will be a good time to piece together which of this stuff makes sense. Climate has become a partisan culture-war issue, but food and farming are still nonpartisan. Trump’s unconventional health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is likely to clash with his conventional agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, over issues like seed oils, GMOs, and agri-chemicals, and Democrats are likely to face internal conflicts over those issues as well. Climate progress won’t happen around energy as long as Trump is in charge, but it’s at least conceivable and debatable around food.

At the very least, Trump’s second term will offer an opportunity to fill in knowledge gaps that could come in handy the next time there’s a president who actually wants to do something about global warming. Four years ago, a lot of us envisioned his story ending like Mastodon’s ended in ​“Squeeze Me” — forced to renegotiate his wife’s compensation for public appearances, relegated to a balcony where he can see how his once-loyal supporters have abandoned his failing resort, oblivious as his bathrobe flops open to reveal ​“the pale and pendulous details of his frontal topography.”

Instead, Trump’s got more power than ever, and he’s going to use it to block solutions to two-thirds of the climate problem. We might as well try to figure out the other one-third.