The ethanol disaster unveiled a bigger problem

Summary

Podcast Summary: Open Circuit – "The Ethanol Disaster Unveiled a Bigger Problem"

Release Date: July 18, 2025
Host: Stephen Lacy, Executive Editor at Latitude Media
Guests: Michael Gruenwald (Author and Journalist), Katharine Hamilton (Co-founder and Chair of 38 North Solutions), Jigar Shah (Co-founder of Multiplier)

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Introduction: Unveiling the Hidden Climate Crisis

In this enlightening episode of Open Circuit, Latitude Media delves into the profound yet often overlooked impact of agriculture on global climate change. Hosted by Stephen Lacy, the discussion features author Michael Gruenwald, who brings insights from his latest book, "We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate." Co-hosts Katharine Hamilton and Jigar Shah join the conversation to explore the intricate ties between agricultural practices, biofuels, and climate policy.

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Agriculture’s Significant Role in Climate Change

Michael Gruenwald sets the stage by highlighting the staggering contribution of agriculture to global emissions:

“Agriculture accounts for nearly a third of global emissions and we've barely begun to grapple with them.” (00:38)

He emphasizes that while the energy sector receives considerable attention for its carbon footprint, the agricultural sector's impact is equally, if not more, substantial. This includes emissions from livestock, deforestation for cropland, and the intricate web of land use changes that amplify greenhouse gas outputs.

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The Corn Ethanol Quandary: Good Intentions, Bad Outcomes

A pivotal segment of the discussion revolves around the corn ethanol industry's rise and its unintended environmental repercussions. Gruenwald introduces Tim Searchinger, an environmental lawyer turned carbon accounting expert, whose research exposed the flaws in ethanol as a sustainable fuel alternative.

“When you grow fuel instead of food, then somewhere else you're going to have to grow more food. And that's probably not going to be a parking lot. It's going to be a forest or a wetland.” (08:00)

This revelation underscored that biofuel mandates, while reducing reliance on fossil fuels, inadvertently led to deforestation and habitat loss elsewhere—a phenomenon known as indirect land use change (ILUC). The initial promise of ethanol as a green solution was thus marred by complex ecological consequences.

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Policy Battles and Political Hurdles

The episode delves into the intricate political landscape that hampers effective climate action within the agricultural sector. Gruenwald criticizes the formidable influence of the agricultural lobby:

“The ag industry is way more powerful than the oil industry or Wall Street or any of these lobbies.” (47:10)

He explains how policies like California's Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) have struggled to integrate comprehensive land use assessments due to staunch opposition from biofuel proponents and farm interests. This political tug-of-war often results in compromised regulations that fail to address the root causes of agricultural emissions.

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The Limitations of Popular Climate Solutions

Co-host Katharine Hamilton and Gruenwald express skepticism towards widely touted alternatives such as regenerative agriculture and plant-based meats. They argue that many of these solutions, while ethically appealing, fall short when scrutinized through rigorous carbon accounting:

“A lot of these ideas fall apart when you run the carbon math.” (28:20)

Gruenwald points out that despite their popularity, these alternatives lack the scalability and efficiency needed to make a significant dent in global emissions. For instance, plant-based burgers have not achieved the market penetration necessary to offset the environmental costs of conventional meat production.

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Innovative Solutions: Biology and Beyond

Looking forward, Gruenwald advocates for embracing biological innovations to revolutionize agriculture's environmental footprint:

“The 21st century is going to be about biology.” (59:48)

He highlights the potential of synthetic biology, gene editing, and advanced agricultural technologies to enhance crop yields and reduce emissions. Katharine Hamilton echoes this sentiment, emphasizing the importance of making sustainable choices economically attractive to consumers and producers alike:

“It's healthier for you to do this, it will help your body, it will reduce your cost... those are things that I think we need some of the ways we need to approach solutions.” (38:05)

Additionally, reducing food waste emerges as a critical area with immense potential for lowering emissions, given that a significant portion of agricultural output never reaches consumers.

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Conclusion: Charting a Path Forward

The episode concludes with a call to action for industry stakeholders to prioritize scalable and scientifically grounded solutions. Gruenwald urges the energy and agricultural sectors to collaborate, ensuring that efforts to decarbonize do not inadvertently exacerbate environmental degradation elsewhere.

“If you were to focus on any one part of the agricultural system... where would you suggest... Where would you put your attention and where are the areas that you think people need to put more attention?” (59:16)

By fostering innovation, reforming policies, and aligning economic incentives with sustainability goals, the conversation underscores a path toward a less carbon-intensive and more resilient global food system.

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Key Takeaways:

1. Agriculture’s Impact: Accounts for nearly a third of global emissions, surpassing many sectors traditionally highlighted in climate discussions.
2. Biofuels’ Hidden Costs: Corn ethanol, while reducing fossil fuel use, leads to significant land use changes that negate its environmental benefits.
3. Political Obstacles: Strong agricultural lobbies impede the implementation of effective climate policies that address land use and emissions comprehensively.
4. Skepticism Towards Popular Solutions: Regenerative agriculture and plant-based alternatives, though promising, lack the necessary scalability to effect substantial change.
5. Future Directions: Embracing biological innovations and technological advancements is crucial for creating a sustainable and efficient agricultural system.
6. Collaborative Efforts Needed: Integrated approaches between the energy and agricultural sectors are essential for meaningful climate action.

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This comprehensive discussion in Open Circuit sheds light on the intricate challenges at the intersection of agriculture and climate change, urging listeners to reconsider and reframe their approaches toward building a sustainable future.

Transcript

[Stephen Lacy]

Latitude Media, covering the new frontiers of the energy transition.

So there's this little nuance to the production side of things. It's very common to ask when testing microphones what the guest had for breakfast. So this is the first time I actually get to air the answer. Michael, what did you have for breakfast?

[Michael Gruenwald]

I had nothing for breakfast. It's 7am in San Francisco.

[Jigar Shah]

That is the most climate friendly breakfast I have ever heard.

[Michael Gruenwald]

Exactly. No emissions yet.

[Stephen Lacy]

From Latitude Media. This is open circuit. The story of climate change is often the story of fossil fuels, of pipelines and coal plants, of oil companies and electric cars. But there's another story. It's about agriculture and land use, and it's one we're only just beginning to grapple with. A new book, We Are Eating the Earth, tells that story. Agriculture accounts for nearly a third of global emissions and we've barely begun to grapple with them. This week we're going to talk about the hidden cost of biofuels and what they tell us about land use. We'll explore why other feel good solutions we've championed regenerative ag, vertical farms, localization are not enough. And we'll look at some of the technologies and practices that could take a bite out of emissions. Oh my God. These food puns are too easy. Our conversation with author and journalist Michael Gruenwald is coming right up.

[Katharine Hamilton]

OpenCircuit is brought to you by Natural Power. For nearly two decades, Natural Power has provided engineering and consulting services for renewables projects across the US Natural Power supports clients in wind, solar and battery storage with a focus on independent engineering, technical due diligence, energy estimation and developer support. With more than 245 gigawatts of project experience in North America and acceptance from major financiers, Natural Power is responsive, able to meet tight timelines and pragmatic. Natural Power works with you to understand quantities, quantify and mitigate risks. Learn [e-mail] or click the link in the show notes. OpenCircuit is supported by Sungrow, a leading supplier of PV inverters and battery storage systems. For nearly three decades, Sungrow has provided reliable, affordable technology that meets your energy needs. How? By building diverse, resilient supply chains. Today, Sungrow has a network of suppliers all over the world that ensures developers can get the technology they need to keep the lights on. Learn [e-mail] or click the link in the show notes.

[Stephen Lacy]

Welcome. I'm Stephen Lacy. I'm the Executive Editor at Latitude Media. I am here, as always, with Katharine Hamilton and Jigar Shah, Kathryn is the co founder and chair of 38 North Solutions. How are you?

[Katharine Hamilton]

I'm doing great. And I'm sitting, of course, in Virginia farm country. So I'm really excited to talk to Michael this week.

[Stephen Lacy]

You were up very late last night finishing Michael's book.

[Katharine Hamilton]

Yes. I was determined to get to the gory finale of like, are we actually going to do anything? But it was a great book. Just super impressed and I learned a ton.

[Stephen Lacy]

Well, you look very well rested, no worse for the wear. Jigar Shah is the co founder of Multiplier. He is the former director of the Department of Energy's loan programs office. Hello, Jigger.

[Jigar Shah]

Hello.

[Stephen Lacy]

Did you sit on the beach reading Michael's book?

[Jigar Shah]

No, but I did stay in the Holiday Inn Express last night and took it all in. But no, it was a great book. And I actually did finally use that AI thing that you told me to try to use, but I also caught the Monty Python references. And so I did like a number of things to get through the book. And it was from, frankly, an amazing book.

[Stephen Lacy]

And the author of that book is with us. It's Michael Gruenwald. He's a longtime journalist. I have been following him for a long time. I started reading him nearly two decades ago when he was writing about policy, politics and energy. And he's got a few books under his belt. The newest is We Are Eating the the Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate. Michael, welcome.

[Michael Gruenwald]

Oh, thanks. It's so great to be back with you guys. And thanks for all those kind words.

[Stephen Lacy]

So the show is devoted largely to energy, but we invited you here to talk about the book on food, land, agriculture, because there is so much crossover with energy. And you're asking a pretty simple but profound question. What if we decarbonize the energy sector but still come up way short? So when did agriculture become your journalistic obsession?

[Michael Gruenwald]

Well, it's funny. I was one of you guys, right? I was an energy and climate nerd. And I guess six or seven years ago, I really realized, as you mentioned, food is about a third of the climate problem. It's a much bigger percentage of our biodiversity problems, deforestation, water pollution, water shortages. And I didn't know squat about it. I tell the story in the introduction of how I had written a story about my own green life, how I had gotten solar panels and an electric vehicle. And the point of the story was that, you know, I wasn't some eco saint, that I was doing this because it was really economically sensible and that this stuff was ready to go mainstream. And so I had a line in there about how, you know, I didn't line dry my laundry, I don't unplug my computer at night. I still eat meat to show I wasn't an eco saint, just this eco mercenary. And I realized I wasn't even sure if meat is actually bad for the climate. So I actually, I called this guy I knew who worked on agriculture and climate, Tim Searchinger. And I asked him, you know, is, is meat really that bad? And he said yes. And then he said, duh. And I, I kind of figured if I was this spectacularly ignorant, then probably other people were too. And then that was really the beginning of the journey.

[Jigar Shah]

You clearly still are one of us.

[Michael Gruenwald]

You know, I still, in my heart, in my heart.

[Stephen Lacy]

So Michael Pollan's rules of eating weren't enough for you?

[Michael Gruenwald]

You know, it's funny, my wife is a psychedelic counselor, so. So I always say that, that we have a mixed Michael Pollan marriage. He unfortunately writes so beautifully about food that I think he's, he's convinced a lot of people have a lot of wrong ideas.

[Stephen Lacy]

Yeah, well, we're gonna get to what some of those ideas are a little bit later in the show, but let's turn to Tim Searchinger. So this is not like a heavy handed book where you're scolding people. You have strong character development and good story. And Tim is at the center of this book. He's a former environmental lawyer turned carbon accounting obsessive who helped reframe how we understand the true climate cost of farming. And one of his insights was that the land itself carries this carbon opportunity cost and that using it to fuel or inefficient food unlocks hidden emissions that we've long ignored. And so I want to start to where this revelation began, which was with the rise of corn ethanol. Obviously this is something that has been long hailed as this homegrown environmental savior. Ethanol became this case study of good intentions gone wrong and a lesson in land use accounting. So who is Tim? Why does he matter? And what was this moment that like changed his perspective?

[Michael Gruenwald]

Let's let me start with, yeah, a little bit about Tim, because he is a sort of unusual, maybe a protagonist for, for a book like this, but, but to step back to where we started, you know, the energy and climate problem, which is a really big problem and you guys do an awesome job talking about it every week, but it is, at this point we kind of know what we need to do.

[Stephen Lacy]

Right?

[Michael Gruenwald]

We got to electrify the global economy. And run it on clean electricity. And we've actually started to do that. Right. We're not doing it fast enough or consistently enough. And obviously the mess in Washington right now has been a setback, but energy is now kind of a political problem. Well, food, particularly, when I started this, we didn't even know what we needed to know. So it's really an analytical problem. And Tim is, above all an analyst. He's a facts guy, a data guy, a science guy. On the, you know, on his front porch, the doormat says, no dogmas allowed, right? So he's, he's not into group think. He's not swayed by ideology. I mean, he's just a guy who does all the reading, gets into the details, and sort of doesn't understand why. Why everybody else doesn't. So that's the kind of backstory. Used to be that he was a wetlands lawyer when he, when he stumbled into ethanol and he was fighting to protect bas, basically Midwestern wetlands from corn fields. And he saw that they were talking about a new ethanol mandate, and he said, huh, that's going to mean more cornfields and that could threaten wetlands. So he looked into it and he thought maybe climate would be a way in. He didn't know anything about climate, but he saw the big study that had been done at the Argonne National Laboratory that found that ethanol was maybe 20% better for the climate than gasoline. And, and he was like, this is super weird because most of the study was talking about how inefficient ethanol was and how it, you know, producing ethanol through, you know, fertilizing corn and running the tractors and harvesting the corn and then brewing the ethanol, that it produced way more greenhouse gas emissions than just producing gasoline. And he realized that the trick was that while gasoline, you burn it in a car and the carbon goes up into the sky. Corn, you burn it in, burn it in the car, and the carbon goes up into the sky. But then you grow corn in the, in the field, and that absorbs carbon from the sky. And so therefore, ethanol was better. And Tim's insight was, wait a minute, it was already absorbing carbon from the sky when it was just a cornfield growing food. And if you grow fuel instead of food, then somewhere else you're going to have to grow more food. And that's probably not going to be a parking lot. It's going to be a forest or a wetland or something that stores a lot of carbon already that you're going to lose it. And that basic insight that climate analysis was completely Ignoring land use was really the beginning of this, you know, this long dive first into biofuels and all bioenergy and ultimately into the larger problem of agriculture and meat.

[Stephen Lacy]

And it sounds so simple in retrospect. Catherine, you were involved in the biofuels industry around this time. Do you want to reflect on what was happening and how this debate unfolded?

[Katharine Hamilton]

Yeah, it's interesting. When I started reading the book, I was like, well, I've been a vegetarian for 30 years and I don't even have that much dairy. And then I was like, oh no, I'm part of the problem about biofuels. And I was working, I was co directing the American Bioenergy association with Megan Smith from 2000 to 2003. So it was early, it was even earlier than this book started. And our hypothesis was there were a lot of ways to make things incrementally better, one of which was to make corn ethanol better by using cellulosic biofuels. And this was about taking all the junk that wasn't being used, the corn stove, all of the, you know, the sugarcane bagasse, all of the waste, the wood waste that was out there and turning it into something useful. And that could have been, you know, cellulosic ethanol. NREL was, we had come out, both come out of nrel. So NREL was doing a lot of work on that that we were, you know, taking to the Hill. Megan was testifying before Congress about this. We also looked at and biomass power. I was working on like coal firing with coal just to reduce the emissions of coal because we knew coal was bad. It's like, all right, well maybe we can clean it up by using bioma or using gasification, making biomass into chemicals or using it for refining. And what ended up happening was that the corn ethanol industry is just huge. The cellulosic ethanol business was just not going to be able to fight the corn ethanol folks no matter what they did. And the big plant in Jennings, Louisiana that was touted as this is the first big plant, it was eventually bought by BP and then closed about 10 years ago. It had been a 10 year project trying to get it and trying to create a market out of it. The gasification stuff is like, you know, this is like the McNeil plant in Burlington, Vermont that everybody hates and is like the most polluting plant that they have in the state is still considered a renewable energy plant. So a lot of what we did early on was trying to make a difference around the edges. And it was really hard to do because of existing industry. And I'm sure Michael, in reading through your book that is a huge impediment.

[Jigar Shah]

The thing I don't understand though is why California loves ethanol. Right? When you think about the low carbon fuel standard credit program, 80% of all of the proceeds basically goes to biofuels. Right. And so they're taking existing plants saying we'll ship the physical ethanol to California for the blending and giving the credit. Right. And so what I don't understand is that if this insight was so ubiquitous and we certainly saw it at the loan programs office, there were lots of people who had great scores on their carbon intensity score in California. And when Nettle looked at it we were like no, like this is worse for the planet. You're not getting a loan. So like we figured it out out of the life cycle carbon analysis. But like why is California ethanol pilled?

[Michael Gruenwald]

Well, you know Catherine, you, you nailed it. I, I talk about in the book about how, how, how searching her went to the guy who was running the low carbon fuel standard, who really was really his baby to Tim basically you are absolutely right on the substance but it's not politically realistic and that if we try to take on farm based biofuels we are going to lose our entire low carbon fuel standard. That the politics just won't sustain it even in California. So it was a combination of the farmers who wanted to make sure that basically there was no real analysis of any farm grown fuels as well as some of the people pushing the advanced biofuels that Catherine talked about because they use land too and, and they don't really pencil out. It turns out to be in some ways a kind of good thing for the planet that, that some of these switchgrasses and, and other ideas never really worked technologically and economically. But they were lobbying the Governor Schwarzenegger directly and saying you shouldn't even be looking at indirect land use change that's going to, that's going to hurt our products too. And so as you said, I tell the story about how in Congress when Tim was trying to early on lobby against the early ethanol mandates and he went to Senator John Corzine's office and he figured here's a liberal Democrat from New Jersey which doesn't grow a lot of corn, he's arguing to his aide that this is going to increase food prices and increase gas prices just to make some agribusinesses in the Midwest rich. The guy says I got to stop you right there, Tim. We can't do anything that's gonna offend Iowa farmers. And Tim is like Wait a minute. Corzine used to run Goldman Sachs. Does he honestly think that he's gonna be President of the United States? And the aide says, Tim, they all think they're gonna be president of the United States. So it's just very tough taking on, taking on the ag industry in any state.

[Stephen Lacy]

Tim got pushback from environmental groups. You mentioned that there was concern about pushing back against the ag industry, but like they didn't come around to these find. When did his findings start to break through? Were there other factors that contributed to environmental groups sort of sticking their heads in the sand, so to speak?

[Michael Gruenwald]

Sure. Well, as you suggested, I mean this is 20 years ago and at the time there really were no alternative to fossil fuels. Right? There was, wind and solar were in their infancy. There's just been a documentary called who Killed the electric car. GM had literally scrapped their initial EVs. And so there was this kind of desperation for something, something new and different that I find understandable. And obviously this was an alternative to fossil fuels and people were starting to understand the danger of fossil fuels. That said, it turned out to be, you know, when you did the math, it was worse than fossil fuels. And Tim published, even though he was not a scientist, he published a piece in Science that, that showed that it was about twice as bad when you incorporated the land use. He's, he's now published 10 articles in, in Science or Nature, the most prestigious journals, even though he is still technically not a scientist. So I think there were, and I tell the stories of how there were some scientists and some environmentalists who realized they were wrong. And that is not something that humans are really great at. And so I wanted to kind of call them out and give them some credit because that was not everybody's reaction. And I think a lot of people who worked on biofuels as a climate solution, they didn't want to say, oh wait, I just wasted 10 years of my life or all of my professional credentials are really kind of useless because this is not going to be part of the solution. It's hard to get people to admit things like that. And so there was a real circling of the wagon.

[Stephen Lacy]

So you describe the rise of corn ethanol as this well intentioned disaster. And now here we are in search of sustainable aviation fuels with another looming disaster potentially ahead. Talk about like the state of fuels policy today and why we haven't learned our lessons.

[Michael Gruenwald]

Well, this is a big problem for the corn and soy lobby, right, because electric vehicles have panned out and, and they're really a threat to you know, we don't really need to put corn and soy into our cars anymore. So they've realized that there's, there's another potential market and that's putting corn and soy into our planes. But that doesn't pencil out at all if you're doing any kind of decent climate analysis. And there were really kind of intense fights inside the, the Biden White House and throughout the administration to basically, how are we going to do these, these models, how are we going to use. With Secretary Vilsack and USDA pushing very hard to essentially ignore land use as much as possible to make corn and soy look better, and ultimately it still didn't pencil out for, for, for, for corn in particular and soy barely. So the big beautiful bill, which, as you guys have done such a great job talking about, cuts about a trillion dollars worth of actual clean energy subsidies, has tens of billions dollars of new subsidies for sustainable aviation fuel and at the same time has language essentially saying that since soy and corn aren't penciling out, the government needs to put down their pencils and that when they do these analysis of what's actually sustainable, you cannot look at land use, which of course is the whole problem with biofuels. So it's very depressing. And another example of what Catherine was talking about, the incredible power of the farm lobby.

[Jigar Shah]

But this time the EU is in on it, right? I mean, the, the markets here for sustainable aviation fuel is not the United States. I mean, there's a little bit in California and a little bit in some of the other markets that have passed state policy like Illinois, but the vast majority of the volume is going to go into the EU requirements for sustainable aviation fuel blending. So all flights from the east coast to the United States or anywhere in the United States that land in Europe will have to contain biofuels to land or they have to pay penalties. And so what I don't understand is how the EU got into this whole racket.

[Michael Gruenwald]

Well, I tell the story of the sort of initial EU foray into biofuels where sort of everybody, or at least a lot of people behind the scenes, acknowledged searching or science and said that, oh, this land use is a real problem. And back in early 2008, the guy who is putting together their Renewable Energy Directive basically said, hey, we're going to scrap this entire Renewable Energy Directive and all your goodies for wind and solar if you insist on this language taking land use change seriously. So that really started the biofuels movement in Europe. Though I will say that when it comes to Sustainable aviation fuel. They have a rule that you can't use crops.

[Jigar Shah]

No, I saw that. And so the facility, which is a.

[Michael Gruenwald]

Chain, to me it's sort of an acknowledgment that like, well then why are you using crops at all? And they've capped it for passenger fuels. But again, it's kind of like, well, if it's bad to put it in a plane, why would it be good to put it in a car?

[Katharine Hamilton]

Yeah, we work with a company called Twelve that uses electrochemically, basically hydrogen produced fuel from CO2, water and renewables. And they use up to 1,000 times less water, 30 times less land, of course, with 30% more reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. And they have a partnership with Alaska Air which hopefully can get us to at least begin to understand that there are solutions that do not involve using land.

[Michael Gruenwald]

Right. And that's the, that's the problem. And you know, look, biofuels, because, because of some of these concerns that have been raised, they haven't taken off quite like people expected. But because of the aviation fuel stuff, they're in Indonesia, in a lot of Asia, they're, they're looking at, you know, a massive expansion and it's a problem. Right now. Biofuels are already eating about a Texas worth of the earth. Now again, you know, we'll talk later. Livestock are eating 50 Texas worth of the earth. Agriculture is eating 75 Texas is worth of the earth. But there are better alternatives. They shouldn't be eating any of the earth.

[Jigar Shah]

Yeah, I think one of the big challenges, as you correctly pointed out from 20 years ago, is that there does seem to be this desire for everybody to cling on to hope. Hope. Right. And so this is sort of where a lot of this is coming from. People don't really want to cut back on flights. Right. And so they're like, how do I make my flights feel better? You know, I think one of the analysis that we did in the sustainable aviation fuel liftoff report was whether it was actually just cheaper to pay for DAC credits and just burn avgas. And I think it turned out basically, yeah, it's basically like, like better just to pay 400 bucks a ton for DAC credits. It was sort of on the bubble. And so part of what I'm trying to understand is how much of this is really just a fight between people not wanting to make real changes to modern lifestyles and the sort of free use of the ecosystem.

[Michael Gruenwald]

Well, Jenner, what I would say is, and this goes to what you just mentioned is that I do think there is this desperation for change, right? There's a sense that fossil fuels, fuels are bad and we need something different. But a lot of people who are looking at this stuff and this is relevant to your audience, they're energy people, right? And they want to solve energy problems and they don't think about the land sector problems. So I would kind of make the case for your listeners who are in this energy world that you kind of can't dump your problems onto the land sector. That has been a little bit of what's behind a lot of this sort of endless push, even after the numbers don't work. I do think the hope is understandable. But at the beginning when I started writing about how biofuels suck and people would say, well then what should we use instead? And I was like, I don't know, gasoline. And now of course, I can say electric vehicles, it takes solar panels produce on one acre as much energy as if you can had, you know, 100 acres of ethanol to run a car. And actually because electric vehicles are so much more efficient, it would run about 250 miles for every mile of ethanol. So now we're in the same situation with jet fuel, right? And people say like, well then what should we use instead? And I'm like, jet fuel, you know, right now there's, you know, and I think you can electrify some short flights and hopefully Catherine's Hydrogen Green hydrogen solutions will catch on. But we shouldn't jump to a worse solution just because we want a solution.

[Katharine Hamilton]

Open Circuit is brought to you by Natural Power. For nearly two decades, Natural Power has delivered expert independent engineering and consulting services for renewables projects across the US and beyond. Success in project transactions requires an independent engineer who's laser focused on timelines, understands the nuances of risk, and collaborates seamlessly to develop solutions tailored to your needs. Natural Power excels at working within tight time constraints while ensuring diligence never takes a backseat. With deep expertise in wind, solar and battery storage, Natural Power delivers top tier support and independent engineering, technical due diligence, energy estimation and developer support accepted by major financiers. Their flexible approach ensures projects are built on a strong foundation powered by expertise driven by sustainability, that is natural power. Find out [e-mail] or click the link in the show notes. OpenCircuit is supported by Sungrow, the world's top maker of PV inverters and battery storage systems. There is no question international trade is more complicated than ever, but Sungrow is poised to meet the moment they've been operating for 28 years and supply projects across the globe. They've built a diverse global supply chain that can handle whatever comes their way with high quality industry leading fire safety products designed for all scenarios. Sungrow is committed to delivering affordable clean energy and keeping the lights on around the world. Click the link in the show Notes to learn more or go to sungrow.

[Stephen Lacy]

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That moves us nicely into this broader menu of solutions. Vertical farms, plant based burgers, regenerative grazing and I want to ask a question which is are we investing in what actually works or just what sounds good? Because for all the hype, as you point out, a lot of these ideas fall apart when you run the carbon map math. And some of them, like meat alternatives, are not scaling in the way that we believe they would. So you write that agriculture is a couple of decades behind energy when it comes to decarbonization. Why?

[Michael Gruenwald]

Well, that's kind of the good news, right? Is that we see how far energy has come in 20 years. And 20 years ago, as we said, energy was nowhere. There really weren't alternatives to fossil fuels. And now with food. And this is why I dove into this topic. As you said in the introduction, this is not an issue that people have really grappled with. Agriculture is eating the earth. It's now two of every five acres of this planet are either cropped or grazed. And it's extraordinary. It's like only one of every hundred acres are cities and suburbs. So we are losing a soccer field worth of tropical forest every six seconds. And that is a huge climate problem. Not only because those forests store carbon, but also they absorb the carbon that our fossil fuels are pumping into the atmosphere. So I always say that trying to decarbonize the planet while you're continuing to vaporize trees, it's like trying to clean your house while you're smashing your vacuum cleaner to bits in the living room, you're making a huge mess and you're crippling your ability to clean up the mess. So this is something that we need to deal with now. And as you said, I think it's very exciting. I write about dozens of really promising solutions with incredibly smart people who are working on them, on the science, on the business. But also I'm pretty upfront that none of these solutions really have a lot of traction yet. And that particularly over these next four years in America, where it doesn't look like we're going to have a lot of, of positive climate policy, this is a really important time to us to figure out what works, what's never going to work, so that once there is climate policy, we can start as Jigar would say, deploy, deploy, deploy.

[Jigar Shah]

But aren't we back to culture change again? I mean, we wrote a bunch of work on this when I was running the carbon war room in Brazil. The big challenge is rotational grazing that they just need to put in some minor fences and actually do real rotational grazing. And then they could get, get three times or four times the amount of cattle per acre of land that they're currently getting. And folks are like, well, but why, why don't we just cut down more of the Amazon? It's a lot easier than doing rotational grazing. I mean, I think that part of this is just understanding that some of the basic solutions that we've already come up with are just not palatable to the folks who are there. And that's why, for instance, in the United States, we have the Farm Bureau and all these, these things that we use to educate farmers around cover crops and all the other things that people could be using. I guess I'm just trying to understand that. It feels like that culture change is so weaponized in this political moment where people can say, we don't need to do any of this stuff at all. And if you vote for this other person who's asking you to change your multi generational practices, then like, then you're basically a socialist, you should decide to stick with me. I won't make any changes.

[Michael Gruenwald]

Well, it is going to be hard. And that is sort of where I start. And certainly behavioral change is really hard, right? As a species, we don't seem really awesome at making sacrifices for the good of the planet. We're not great at being nice to each other, but we're really good at inventing stuff. And you know, we're pretty good at solving problems when we set our minds to it. So, you know, I think there is, there is hope. But as you suggest, I think a lot of it is going to depend on, you know, having the right incentives in place. And the politics will matter. Look, I mean, just as electric vehicles a while back were seen as like Obama mobiles, and that made it really tough to get sort of widespread adoption, I think right now, you see fake meat is seen as Biden burgers. Right? And that's toxic. You don't want to become woke meat or woke energy. You want this just to compete in the marketplace. And when you point out that the politics kind of suck on these sorts of things, all I can do is say like, yeah, if it were easy, it would have been fixed already. I do think Tesla's as an example of if you do build a better mousetrap, it doesn't mean in solar too. Not everybody's going to instantly adopt it, but some people will, and that'll help get to scale and drive down the costs and make it more attractive to consumers and ultimately maybe change the politics as well. So I do think there are a lot of exciting technologies. Just as the government was important in the energy transition, I think that will be true in the transition to sustainable food and agriculture as well. I'm not going to pretend it's easy. I do quote a Democratic pollster in my book who says that taxes and other restrictions on meat are the least popular policies he's ever polled. He said it's up there with veterans benefits for isis. So, you know, not easy.

[Katharine Hamilton]

Yeah, I did a little poking around just to figure out how many people in the world are vegan and vegetarian and how many people in the US are. So the US about 2% or around 2% are vegan, 4 to 5% are vegetarian. But interestingly, 41% say they're reducing their consumption of red meat. So that's a big piece, and that is a big piece of emissions is folks switching the way they're eating. Eating is a very intimate thing. Telling people what they can and can't eat is really difficult. But telling them something else, like, it's healthier for you to do this, it will help your body, it will reduce your cost. It's still delicious. Those are things that I think we need some of the ways we need to approach solutions. I also noted, Michael, in your book, that all these folks who came up with all these different solutions, they're all dudes. Sorry, they're all dudes. And when I looked at the stats on women and who buys food, guess who buys the food and prepares the food in homes for the most part, women say between 56 and 78% say they're the ones that make the food decisions. So we need to figure out how do we get to the people who are buying the food, who are preparing the food in ways that are really approachable and don't make it look like it's a moral issue, but that there's some other way to disrupt it.

[Michael Gruenwald]

Catherine, that's such a great point. I would also note that particularly in this alternatives protein space, most of the people running these companies are also vegans and they're trying to make meat for meat eaters. Right? Which is because making fake meat for vegans, what's the point? That's not real in terms of the environment, that's not helping. Vegans aren't the problem. But yes, it's absolutely. They have really failed to meet the market and essentially the dogs didn't like the food. I started my reporting for this book at the Good food conference in 2019. And this was the convening of all the different alternative meat. People are making it out of plants, out of animal cells, out of fungi. They're making alternative dairy and they're all there. And it was just absolute pandemonium. Because Beyond Meat had just gone public, it was suddenly worse. Worth a third as much as Tyson Foods. Its stock was on its way up to $250 a share. There were serious conversations about whether it was going to take 10 or 20 years to get rid of meat. My joke was that I thought I was going to accidentally raise a Series A round in the drinks line. It was just the exuberance was off the charts. And then of course it turns out that these initial plant based burgers, they were better than those old vegan hockey pucks, but they weren't better than meat meat. So people tried it, but then they didn't keep buying it. And beyond meat went from $250 a share to $2 a share and investors just ran for the hills. And I went back when I was finishing my reporting to the Good food conference in 2023 and it was doom and gloom. It was, oh, this was a fad. What were we thinking taking on this trillion dollar industry? But honestly, I think that's a little excessive too. I think as you guys know, that technologies tend to go through these, the gardener hype cycle where you have the peak of inflated expectations and then the trough of disillusionment, which is you are here. But cows are a pretty mature technology and this stuff is going to get better. It's going to taste better, it's going to get cheaper, it can even get healthier. And once there's a kind of compelling use case, I think then people are going to buy it. But as you said, Catherine, it's not just going to be because, like, hey, this is better for the planet, or even, hey, this is better for animals because, you know, every year, you know, there's been a lot of new information about how, you know, meat is bad for the planet. And you see new videos about the horrible way that animals are treated. And every year the world eats more meat. We're up to 350 million tons a year here.

[Katharine Hamilton]

Yeah. So I do have a question here, which is how we can, how can farmers help us do better? And I say this because I live in Culpepper, which is a farm community, and I go to farm days every year I go to. Just this weekend I went to the farm show, which is Culpepper, Madison, Rappahannock counties. It's like the 4H club where all the young people, the kids bring their favorite cow, pig, sheep, goat, bunny. One of them had a peacock. I mean, they bring all of their animals and get awarded prizes and they're so proud of it. There's a big cooperative extension network. There are land grant colleges in Virginia, like Virginia Tech, Virginia State, that are really helping these communities find new techniques. I have, my neighbors are farmers. We buy all, any meat that we buy, we buy from them. And they use techniques like they move their cattle from, you know, every single day. So at the end of 30 days, they're back to the original field. They never have to feed them grain. They don't use that much space. And it feels like the farmers who are producing this and who love what they do and know the most about the land could help us find those solutions and use technology.

[Michael Gruenwald]

Well, I agree with that, Katherine. In fact, and as Jigger suggested, some of that rotational grazing is really effective and can help increase stocking rates, which essentially increases productivity. And right now, beef is, from a land use and emissions perspective, about 10 times worse than chicken or pork. And I visited ranches in Brazil where they're doing it way better. And so it's only three or four times worse than chicken or pork. And that makes a huge difference. Difference. You know, if they're 10 times more efficient than the, than the average degraded ranch in Brazil, then they're using 1/10 as much of the Amazon. And that's really important. Now, I should also say some of those ranches, while they were doing Rotational grazing and they were integrating their cattle with their cover crops in ways that Michael Pollan would really love. They're also fertilizing their pastures and they have feedlots which Michael Pollan wouldn't like at all. And again, they didn't read Michael Poll and they're just doing whatever they think it takes to create kick ass yields. But that is really what I would say to farmers is that that is important. You need to make more food per acre because otherwise you're going to need more acres to make the same amount of food. And that's what's eating the earth. So, you know, I do understand people love their kind of old, the diverse farms with the red barns and they're pastoral and they're rustic and they treat the soil nicely and the animals have names instead of numbers. But if they are not efficient, they are not helping the earth. Because the real environmental tragedy of agriculture is not the transformation of those rustic, bucolic, kinder and gentler farms into the evil chemical drenched monoculture farms, the factory farms. There is an environmental cost to that, don't get me wrong. But the real disaster, the real loss of carbon, the real loss of biodiversity is when nature becomes those nice diverse farms in the first place.

[Stephen Lacy]

Well, this brings us to a more controversial topic and that is around the role of industrial scale agriculture to solve the problem. And this brings us to one of the solutions that has been lionized, regenerative agriculture. There have been tons of documentaries about it and it's in corporate ESG plans and you say it's mostly hype and that sort of coming out of the Michael Pollan era of writing about food, people thought that localization of food, getting their food from small farms, while it has tons of economic and ethical benefits, is not the climate solution if you're just looking at the carbon math. So can you talk about some of the feel good agricultural solutions a bit deeper and why they have caught on and why people think that they are a solution and what the actual reality?

[Michael Gruenwald]

Sure. What I would say is I try not to be prescriptive about how people should farm, the specific practices, whether you should be regenerative or industrial. But I do think it's really important that it needs to be productive and efficient and high yield because otherwise we're going to eat a lot more of the earth. We're going to need 50% more calories by 2050. Right now we're on track to deforest another dozen California's worth of land to feed feed nearly 10 billion people and we just don't have another dozen Californias worth of forests to spare. So what I do say is that you cannot hand wave away this yield problem and that if you, these glorified gardens that are sometimes regenerative ag is, it's absolutely nicer for the soil. But if it is not the kind of regenerative ag that is promoting, you know, powerful yields than it is, I think that is an ethical problem because remember, like climate change, you know, it isn't just, you know, it isn't just a question of like whether your farm looks nice. You know, that's going to be devastating for indigenous people in the Amazon, for smallholder farmers in Africa, for you know, poor people living in the floodplains in Bangladesh. So I do think that this idea, I did a debate at Berkeley with this professor of agroecology who was pushing a lot of the, these kind of kinder and gentler, more natural practices and was kind of suggesting that yields don't matter. And Alice Waters, the famous chef from Chez Panisse who does kind of part of this regenerative, slow food, organic movement, she was sitting in the third row glaring at me the whole time like I was like the big evil industrial guy. But the fact is there are absolutely problems with these factory farms where they treat people badly, they treat animals badly, deadly, they use too many antibiotics, their politics suck, right? They're lobbying against environmental regulation and climate action. But one thing factories are really good at is manufacturing a lot of affordable commodities. And that is going to be, that is Agriculture's number one job over the next 30 years. We're going to have to make more calories over the next 30 years than we made over the last 12,000. And so I think factory farms are going to have to change. They're going to have to make a lot more food with a lot less mess. But this idea that we can just get rid of them and transform to a global agroecological paradise, I think that's kind of a faith based transformation of agriculture that could sacrifice not only the well being of billions of, of people in the developing world, but you know, the, it's going to, it's going to tear down a lot of forest.

[Jigar Shah]

I think that we're sort of in this place right now where a lot of the narratives that were being sold to people around why they should be hopeful are turning out to be less ideal than, you know, I think were originally provided. Whether it's around solar, wind and battery storage or whether it's around on sort of small Farms where you're paying three times the cost of what you normally pay at farmer's markets to make yourself feel better. I think one of the things I'm curious about, though, in this moment is the politics of it all. Because part of the challenge I see is that we are increasingly going into a place where the established providers of solutions have a huge amount of money to try to keep things, things the way that they are. Right. And the folks who are promoting new solutions have a lot less money. Right. So to the extent that they're under the radar screen, they might get away with it and or less objectionable to the people in power. But once you start becoming real, then you start getting in the crosshairs of some of these folks. Right. So when you think about the fossil fuel industry, did try to, to tear down the biofuels industry in the first Trump administration. Right. Remember, they tried to like, get a lot more exemptions for the ethanol blenders, credit, et cetera. And they got their ass handed to them by the ethanol industry. And so I don't think they're trying to do that this time around. Right. And so I'm curious how you think the power dynamics work. I mean, the other piece of this, obviously, was in the first Trump administration, you had this trillion trees effort that people were kind of, you know, sort of backing. Right. And so, so, like, you know, how does this work, not just from a technology standpoint, but from a politics standpoint?

[Michael Gruenwald]

Well, it's hard. And the ag industry, yeah, they are way more powerful than the oil industry or Wall street or any of these lobbies that are often used as sort of shorthand for power in Washington. They're Nothing compared to the 1% of Americans who grow food for the other 99% of us. So I have, have, you know, I had an article op ed this weekend in the, in the New York Times where I did sort of call for a new kind of food and ag politics that's more centered on eaters rather than growers. Particularly for Democrats. Right. Who, at least Republicans, you can understand why they're sucking up to these farmers who are, you know, the biggest funders of their campaigns and are, you know, the biggest suppliers of their votes. You know, Democrats are throwing money at these guys who will never vote for them in a million years. So you think they would be open to at least a kind of grand bargain where, okay, we'll keep giving you your money, but there are at least going to be some strings attached. And I do think globally, that is part of the answer and it's again an idealistic answer, but the agricultural industry gets $600 billion worth of subsidies worldwide every year. And I think it's probably unrealistic to say that we're just going to take them away way. But it's not entirely unrealistic to say that, well, maybe we could try to steer some of that towards making them do some good stuff with it. And I will point to what just happened in Denmark where they passed an agricultural reform that is essentially the kind of like the Mike Grunwald dream reform. And I know it's Denmark, they're like the model nation, right? It's only 6 million people, but they could be a model for the world. And I would first say that they've done such a great job decarbonizing energy that suddenly ag was an outlier and they were the only ones with no path to zero emissions. And environmentalists there were starting to say, let's shut down our pork industry, let's shut down our dairy industry. So the ag guys came to the table. But they're really powerful. Denmark has a larger percentage of its land devoted to agriculture than any country except for Bangladesh. And they passed a tax on agricultural emissions. They passed a law that's going to require a million acres of Danish farmland to return to nature. But they also have a lot of government assistance to help them increase yields so they can be even more efficient. They're not forcing them to shut down their pig farms and their dairy farms and outsource all their pollution and deforestation to the developing world. Instead, they're going to help invest in climate friendly technologies, the feed additives that'll help their cattle burp less methane and the gene edited crops that'll grow with higher yields and drought tolerant and flood tolerant to feed to their pigs. So I think they're going to kind of do all the things and it shows that it can be done even if it isn't being done in a lot of places.

[Katharine Hamilton]

And Michael, don't you want to appeal to the pocketbook as well? The pocketbook of the farmers. So if you think about, of course you want the footpr to be smaller so you're not just continually tearing up forestry to provide food, but getting more food per acre to fill more stomachs, that to me sounds like more money, also generating fewer greenhouse gas emissions. So we got that covered, right? We can figure that out. And I would just say there's an interesting example from alec, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is a right wing group, a Koch brothers funded group that does does legislative proposals in various states and they have a resolution in support of farming and energy production. And this is all about community solar and farming and trying to get the greenhouse gas emissions down. But not because of greenhouse gas emissions, but because of productivity and because of being able to make money and doing two things for the price of one. Right. Like being able to multi use the land, be able to produce several things with one piece of land. So I'm interested in kind of, kind of how do you. From a policy standpoint, yes, you want to get the accounting rules right, but that feels like a stick for the farming folks. Does like putting tax on emissions is a stick. And you're saying we need to support. So all right, grants are fine, but also how do you actually allow these folks to feel like well, we're going to actually do better and make more money if we can produce more?

[Michael Gruenwald]

That's a great question. I mean one thing I would point out is to go back to the alternative proteins a little bit. Companies like Cargill and Tyson, they are all in on this stuff. They love it because those particularly look at the Cargill business model. They have unbelievably tiny margins. They're just dealing with such massive amounts of grain and meat that they really do make it up on volume. But selling the feedback to feed cells instead of cows, these kind of high value, high margin commodities, they would love to get into that business. And JBS is building a cultivated meat factory in Spain. So I think that's one example. I do think you're right. And the Biden administration did take an all carrots approach to dealing with the farm industry. Secretary Vilsack and his aides were just like, we are not going to convince these Republican farmers wearing John Deere caps that we are not going to tell them what to do. It just won't work. We're going to just pay them to try to do the right things. And they put $20 billion into Climate Smart agriculture. Now I would argue that some of it was, most of it was kind of focused on these soil carbon solutions. This kind of idea that if you do regenerative farming that'll all that carbon that we pumped into the sky will magically be repatriated into the soil. And I think the science on that is terrible and that's not where I would have put the money. But I think the idea that we're going to make it in farmers interest to do things that we consider climate friendly is certainly the right idea. Because as Jigger keeps pointing out, they are a very Powerful option lobby and the idea that you're going to muscle them on farm policy, which all the political science about how intense interests pay more attention to policy than the diffuse interests. The 1% of growers watch farm policy a lot more closely than the 99% of eaters. So I think you're absolutely right that carrots are going to be very important.

[Stephen Lacy]

So Michael, if we think about whether agriculture can learn from the scaling playbook in energy, are there any lessons that you have drawn over from your reporting and experience in energy that you think can be applied to some of these technological solutions in ag?

[Michael Gruenwald]

I mean, sure, I mean look, food we vote on three times a day, right? So it is really personal. But I do think some of those larger energy stories that we talked about where solar was nowhere for decades before Jigger got involved, but also government got involved. And so the importance of research, the importance of figuring out what works and then deploy, deploy, deploy what works, works that I wrote, my last book was about the Obama stimulus which tried to let 1,000 clean energy flowers bloom, poured $90 billion into all kinds of solutions and really helped with solar and wind and LEDs and electric vehicle batteries, helped jumpstart that when the market wasn't interested so that the market could get more interested. And then also had a lot of failure failures with, you know, the famous Solyndra solar manufacturing.

[Stephen Lacy]

Wait, what company is that?

[Michael Gruenwald]

You know, never heard of it. The guys doing the concentrated solar in the desert and a 123 with batteries and the next gen clean coal plant and a bunch of biofuel refineries that didn't work out but failure is part of it. And I think that, that you have to be okay with that. You know, that's certainly a lesson. And then that policy matters that you do have to get the incentives right. Like if you look at, we talked a lot about the sort of difference between productive ranches and degraded ranches in Brazil. I mean right now if you're running one of those productive ranches that use one tenth as much of the Amazon and can put 10 times as many cows per acre, the smartest thing you could do to access the carbon market markets would be to re degrade it. Because right now the carbon markets think you have more emissions because you have more cows and you're fertilizing your pastures so you have nitrous oxide emissions and you're getting no credit for the land use miracle that you're creating and the savings that are outside the four walls of your property. So I do think Think what I bang my spoon in my high chair about is this idea that land matters. Land is not free, every acre is sacred and that we need to think about that when we do policy. And also, yeah, in our individual lives, the average American eats the equivalent of three burgers a week. If we ate two burgers a week, we would save the equivalent of a land mass the size of Massachusetts every year. So I've cut beef out of my diet. No, not as good as going vegan. But you know, we all find the level of hypocrisy that we're comfortable with. And you know, I think not everybody's writing a book about food and climate. But like I said, you know, maybe one meal a day, you, you, you don't have, you, you don't have meat, maybe, maybe you have a little less beef. And I do think, you know, even though these are drops in the bucket, the drops fill the bucket, particularly on food issues. So I think it's not hopeless, but it's really hard.

[Jigar Shah]

One of my best friends is Suzanne Hunt, who has been doing this kind of land issue work and biofuels research for a long time, was on the advisory board for Monsanto and Bayer and trying to figure that out too. Look, I do think that one of the things that I'm taking away from this is that your book is seminal and everyone should read it, but more importantly, that we actually don't have a clear plan on how to reduce emissions here and people actually need to start doing charrettes and gatherings locally to have this conversation because it does feel like people are bringing a lot of priors to the table that are not necessarily science based and they are not going to be happy reading an op ed from you or me or Catherine or anybody else and rallying behind that as their policy prescription for two years from now. I feel like people actually need a lot more education, a lot more engagement to get to a set of policy prescriptions that they believe are the right ones. To work with Big Ag in some cases and work against Big Ag in other places and work with Big Fossil in some places and work against Big Fossil and other places. I mean, I do think, think that part of what you're bringing to the table is an entire rethink of sort of the best practices that people thought were going to get us to a decarbonized ag sector.

[Stephen Lacy]

Well, that's a really nice closing thought, jigger. And I guess that brings me to one final question, Michael, which puts you on the spot a little bit. The people who listen to this podcast are overwhelmingly doers. They're people in the industry, they're inside companies, they're building tech, they're deploying tech. If you were to focus on any one part of the agricultural system or in food tech or whatever it is, like, where would, where would you suggest? Where would you put your attention and where are the areas that you think people need to put more attention?

[Michael Gruenwald]

Well, beef is such an outsized part of the problem, right? Where, you know, like in the United States we have, you know, we use half our agricultural land for beef that provides 3% of our calories. And we've actually, there's hope there too, because we've reduced our per capita beef consumption by a third over the last 50 years. Not because we care about the climate, but because we've started to eat more chicken. But we still eat four times as much beef as the global average. So I think there's so much room for change there, whether it's through alternative beef on the demand side side or better beef on the supply side, that I think is a really fruitful area to work. Food waste would be another one where we waste a quarter of our food, which means we waste a quarter of the farmland and water and fertilizer and emissions we create to grow that food. And there are a lot of exciting technological and behavioral and political solutions that I think could. There's no reason for us to make be using a land mass the size of China to grow garbage. The average American family wastes $1,500 a year on food that doesn't reach their stomachs. And so the incentives are nicely aligned. So I think that would be an exciting place to work. And just generally, I think in the same way that the initial green revolution was about chemistry, and that's how we tripled crop and livestock yields so that we'd otherwise use three times as much land to produce the amount of food we do. I think the 21st century is going to be about biology. So I think all of these kind of synthetic biology solutions, whether it's fertilizers or pesticides or crops or even edited livestock, I think that's where a lot of the excitement and opportunity is. There are guys at the University of Illinois literally reinventing photosynthesis with artificial intelligence and gene editing and big data, and they think they can increase crop yields 50% just by editing out the inefficiencies in this 3 billion year old process. So I think there's a lot of exciting things, and that's one of the reasons I have hope is that you do see young people who want to change the world going into this, into this field. In a way, maybe 20, 25 years ago, more of them were saying, hey, isn't there. I've heard that there are problems in energy and there ought to be an energy gang to talk about it now. That's become. That's become a more mature field, which is awesome. And food is the startups.

[Stephen Lacy]

The book is We Are Eating the the Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate. The author is Michael Gruenwald. Thank you so much. This was great. I loved the book. I know you've been working hard on it for years, so congrats.

[Michael Gruenwald]

Thank you so much. And you guys do such a great show. I really appreciate having me on.

[Stephen Lacy]

You've given us a lot to digest. A well done conversation, you might say. You peeled back the layers on the food climate problem.

[Jigar Shah]

Oh, how rare.

[Stephen Lacy]

Okay, I'm done. I'm done, I'm done. Katherine, thanks for dishing with us.

[Katharine Hamilton]

Yes, that's a rare treat.

[Stephen Lacy]

Oh, my goodness, Chigger, you brought the heat today. Thanks for not melting under pressure.

[Jigar Shah]

Oh, my gosh, I feel like this is overdone.

[Stephen Lacy]

Nothing half baked about this crew. All right, I'm really done. Open Circuit is produced by Latitude Media. Jigar Shah and Kathryn Hamilton are my co hosts. The show is edited by me. Sean Marquand is our technical director. He wrote our theme song. Anne Bailey is our senior podcast editor. Latitude Media is supported by Prelude Ventures. And of course, if you want trans transcripts or other supplementary materials, go to Latitude Media and you can subscribe to our newsletters, read all of our coverage. We've got a daily, weekly and AI Energy Nexus newsletter there. Just hit the subscribe button on the homepage and go find this show. If you're not subscribed already, which I assume you are. But for those of you who are finding this, for the first time, you can find us anywhere you get podcasts. We will see you next week. Thanks for being here.