If You Care About Food, You Have to Care About Land

Summary

---

Shift Key Podcast: "If You Care About Food, You Have to Care About Land"

Podcast: Shift Key with Robinson Meyer and Jesse Jenkins
Host: Heatmap News
Date: June 25, 2025
Guest: Mike Grunwald, author of We Are Eating the Earth

---

Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the intersection between food, land use, and climate change. Robinson Meyer and Jesse Jenkins welcome renowned environmental journalist Mike Grunwald, whose forthcoming book, We Are Eating the Earth, confronts the "food problem" as an essential piece of the climate puzzle. The conversation focuses on the overlooked importance of land as it relates to agriculture, emissions, and policy—clarifying why and how our food system shapes the fate of the planet, and, crucially, why beef consumption is at the heart of the discussion.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Why Food Is Central to the Climate Crisis

• Food's outsized climate impact: While food systems account for 25–33% of global greenhouse gas emissions, food receives only a fraction of climate policy attention and finance ([02:00]).
• Neglected climate conversation: Both policy and the public conversation have been slow to address the food-agriculture-land nexus.
• Grunwald’s epiphany: Realizing his own ignorance as an "energy-climate guy" led him to explore food as "a third of the climate problem and 3% of climate finance and 0% of climate conversation" ([03:51], Mike Grunwald).

2. The Land Constraint: We're Eating the Earth

• Finite resource dilemma: Land is not an infinite resource; all food production is necessarily a land problem ([04:05]-[05:41]).
• Scale of agriculture’s footprint: "Two of every five acres on this planet are cropped and grazed... Urban sprawl is about 1% of land. Agriculture is 40%." ([07:46], Mike Grunwald).
• Urban sprawl vs. agriculture: The magnitude of land dedicated to food dwarfs other human uses like cities and suburbs.

3. Yield, Technology, and the Myth of Sustainable Ag

• High yield necessity: "We need to make a lot of food per acre because otherwise, we're going to need a lot more acres..." ([07:46], Grunwald).
• Industrial vs. organic: Lower-yield, "twee organic farms" require far more land and may worsen rather than solve environmental problems.
• Quote: "The twee organic farms Michael Pollan writes about beautifully...tend to have 30, 40% lower yields, and that means they need 30 to 40% more land" ([09:31], Grunwald).

4. The Technology Gap in Food vs. Energy

• Behind on solutions: Energy transition benefits from clear technological pathways (solar, wind, EVs), but in food, "we don’t even know what we need to know" and lack ready off-the-shelf solutions ([10:54], Grunwald).
• Promise and pitfalls: Innovative ideas—gene-edited crops, alternative proteins, reinvented photosynthesis—are promising but massively underfunded vs. energy technologies (e.g., only $3 billion in cultivated meat vs. $250 billion in solar in a single quarter).
• Quote: "I do think that technology is going to be a big part of the solution...But that said, none of them have much traction. And I can't be 100% sure that any of them are going to work because they haven't really been tested." ([10:54], Grunwald)

5. Accounting for Land: The Invisible Climate Lever

• Biofuels as a cautionary tale: Policies promoting biofuels ignored land opportunity costs, leading to perverse outcomes: "biofuels are eating about a Texas worth of the earth; agriculture is eating 75 Texases" ([13:45]–[15:37], Grunwald).
• Misguided frameworks: "On paper, [low-yield farms] look better...but it just isn’t, because you’re only looking at that acre...not thinking about all the extra acres you’re going to need." ([13:45], Grunwald)
• Quote: "Land is not free...every acre is sacred." ([15:49], Grunwald, referring to ideas of Tim Searchinger)

6. The Human Element: Tim Searchinger & Rethinking Advocacy

• Searchinger’s influence: The book is a narrative journey centered on environmental lawyer Tim Searchinger, who successfully forced the global climate community to rethink land use and biofuels ([19:20], Grunwald).
• Quote: "I've known Tim for 25 years...He gave me the tip that led me to write a book about the Everglades and move to Florida and meet my wife...he was obviously brilliant." ([19:20], Grunwald)

7. Personal Evolution: How Research Changed Grunwald’s Diet

• Beef as the climate villain: "It became really obvious early on that beef is the baddie. Beef uses 10 times more land and generates 10 times more emissions than chicken or pork." ([22:28], Grunwald)
• Personal hypocrisy: "It’s sort of like organized religion. You have to find the level of hypocrisy you’re comfortable with. I couldn't justify continuing to eat beef while writing a book about how beef is really the problem." ([22:28], Grunwald)
• On individual vs. systemic action: "Emissions are us...If we do take this seriously as a climate crisis...individual emissions matter too." ([22:28], Grunwald)

8. Beef, Land, and the Amazon

• In sum: "Cows are really inefficient converters...they need a lot of land. The real problem is land...When you eat a burger, yes, you're eating the cow, but you're also eating the macaws and the jaguars...you're eating the Amazon." ([25:33], Grunwald)

9. Meaty Policy Problems

• Unpopular policies: Taxes or restrictions on meat "are the least popular policy" ever polled—"basically like veterans benefits for ISIS." ([25:16], citing a pollster)
• Realistic levers: Instead, the best policy is “do no harm”—don’t subsidize land-hungry biofuels, avoid low-yield "agroecology" as a panacea, and prioritize a "moonshot" in food R&D ([28:11], Grunwald).

10. International Solutions & Sustainable Development

• "Produce and protect": Help developing countries increase yields—with strings attached to forest conservation ([28:11]).
• Massive misallocated subsidies: The world spends $600 billion/year on ag subsidies, often without environmental strings attached.

11. Carbon Offsets, Soil Carbon, and Policy

• Offset skepticism: Land-based carbon offsets are mostly "bullshit"—the accounting doesn’t work, and much of the policy focus is misguided ([32:21], Grunwald).
• Real solutions: Focus on measurable reductions (e.g., less methane from cows, planting trees, biofertilizers).
• Quote: "Tim says, 'If you want to do a bad thing, go do a bad thing. But if you want the whole world to do bad things, set up accounting rules that make it profitable to do bad things.'" ([34:50], Grunwald quoting Searchinger)

12. Agriculture's GHG Breakdown

• Key impacts in order:
  • Land use (opportunity cost and direct deforestation)
  • Enteric methane from cows
  • Nitrous oxide from fertilizer
  • Methane from rice fields—massive but addressable ([38:04]–[40:51])
• Low-hanging fruit: Simply less flooding in rice paddies can cut methane emissions dramatically ([40:51], Grunwald).

13. Current (and Retrograde) Policy Debates

• Biofuel disaster: Expanding subsidies for aviation biofuels is "a potential disaster." New rules would ignore land-use change, the main source of emissions for biofuels ([41:34]–[43:54], Grunwald).
• Aviation emissions: Taxing aviation fuels could raise massive funds with modest impacts on ticket prices, offering more leverage than land-based aviation fuels ([44:01]).

14. Global Lessons: Denmark’s Bold Move

• Denmark as a test case: Denmark is implementing most of the recommended reforms Grunwald and Searchinger advocate—taxing agriculture emissions, increasing efficiency, and linking aid to forest protection ([44:45]).

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Land is not free... every acre is sacred."
  – Mike Grunwald, 15:49 (paraphrasing Tim Searchinger)

• "When you eat a burger... you're eating the Amazon."
  – Mike Grunwald, 25:33

• "Emissions are us."
  – Mike Grunwald, 22:28

• "Taxes or other restrictions on meat are the least popular policy he's ever polled. He said it's basically like veterans benefits for ISIS."
  – Mike Grunwald recounting a pollster, 25:16

• "Tim says, 'If you want to do a bad thing, go do a bad thing. But if you want the whole world to do bad things, set up accounting rules that make it profitable to do bad things.'"
  – Mike Grunwald quoting Tim Searchinger, 34:50

• "The food and climate discussion is 20 years behind the energy and climate discussion."
  – Mike Grunwald, 03:51

---

Key Timestamps

• [03:51] — Carbohydrates are a harder problem than decarbonization: why food is 20 years behind energy policy.
• [07:46] — Industrial vs. organic farming; why high-yield agriculture poses environmental trade-offs.
• [10:54] — Technology adoption in energy vs. food; why we don’t have Silver Bullet solutions for food yet.
• [13:45] — The hidden cost of land; bad accounting in biofuels and carbon markets.
• [22:28] — How the book changed Grunwald's personal eating habits; beef reduction.
• [25:33] — Why beef is so climate-damaging: the Amazon connection.
• [28:11] — Policy levers: "Do no harm," innovation moonshots, and "produce and protect" for international aid.
• [32:21] — The failings of current carbon offset systems and soil carbon policies.
• [40:51] — The promise of lowering methane emissions from rice; a scalable, low-tech solution.
• [41:34]–[44:01] — Policy regression: Congress proposes ignoring land use in biofuels calculation, threatening massive unintended emissions increases.
• [44:45] — Denmark's agriculture reforms as a model.

---

Final Thoughts

This episode highlights agriculture's pivotal but neglected role in climate solutions, emphasizing the irreplaceable value of land and the need for radically better accounting, policy, and technology. Through the lens of Mike Grunwald’s new book and his profile of Tim Searchinger, listeners are challenged to rethink the entire food and land conversation—at both policy and personal levels.

---

For more on the legislative implications discussed in the second half of this episode—specifically the big policy debates around the Inflation Reduction Act and clean energy tax credits—see the extensive breakdown from [46:13] onward.

---

“We need to feed the world without frying the world.” — Mike Grunwald (07:46)

---

For more in-depth discussions on food, energy, and climate policy, subscribe to Shift Key from Heatmap News.

Transcript

[Robinson Meyer]

You are listening to Shift Key, heatmap's weekly podcast about decarbonization and the shift away from fossil fuels. On this week's show, we're talking with Mike Grunwald, the author of a new book about food and climate change. We're talking about why you can't think about food without thinking about land and how thinking about land changed the way that Mike eats. It's all coming up on shiftkeep after this. You might know about heatmap for our award winning journalism covering the clean energy transition, and you may know about heatmap for this podcast, but do you know that we also have a data platform called called heatmap Pro? Heat Map Pro is this special platform full of data and insights on political risk that energy developers can't get anywhere else. In heatmap Pro, we track contested renewable projects all around the country and county level restrictions and ordinances. Then we bring in additional data sources and proprietary polling, all to forecast the risk of local opposition to your project. We generate a political risk score for every county in the country. To learn more about using Heat Map Pro for your community affairs strategy, visit heatmap News Pro. That's heatmap News Pro. Hi, I'm Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of heatmap News.

[Jesse Jenkins]

And I'm Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.

[Robinson Meyer]

And you are listening to ShiftKey, Heatmap's weekly podcast about decarbonization and the shift away from fossil fuels. On this week's show, we are talking about food. Now, food, as you may know, is a huge climate problem. It's responsible for somewhere between 1/4 and 1 third of global greenhouse gas emissions. But it's the subject of a far smaller share of global climate policy and only like 1.5 to 3% of climate finance globally focuses on it. And what does focus on it, frankly, is pretty bad. It's also been, and I should fess up here, the topic of a similarly tiny share of shift key episodes. So today we are starting to fix that. Our guest today is Michael Grunwald. He's the author of a new book, We Are Eating the Earth, which is out next week and is about food's role in the climate problem. But it's also a book about land, about real estate, about how you can't get into talking about why food is a climate or carbon challenge without recognizing that we're talking about an activity and an industry that potentially affects all the land on Earth, all 57 million square miles of it. It's a book about how no matter what humanity does with energy, even if we create clean energy abundance or achieve maximum energy efficiency, we're never going to make more land. Now, Mike is a giant of climate journalism. He's written books about the Florida Everglades and the Obama Recovery act. And he wrote one of my all time favorite climate stories about how the Obama administration and the Sierra Club on the coal industry in the middle of the 2000 and tens. So we're thrilled to have him here today. Mike Grunwald, welcome to Shift Key.

[Mike Grunwald]

Thanks so much for having me, guys. Love what you do.

[Robinson Meyer (co-host or guest host)]

It's exciting to have you here.

[Jesse Jenkins]

I'm excited to dive into this meaty book. Sorry I had to do that at the beginning to get that out of the way. Excited to talk with you today, Mike, about your new book and about the challenges of agriculture and climate change. I have to admit we have not talked enough or thought enough about agriculture and its connection to climate change here on Shift Key. And I've personally in my own career decided, you know, there's enough in the energy system space that I need to get my head around. I probably can't become an expert in this space too. So I'm glad you are and we can have you on the show today to talk about the connection here. You have a great quote. At one point, they say the carbohydrate problem is more difficult than the decarbonization problem. Can you just unpack that to start us off?

[Mike Grunwald]

Sure. I mean, first I should say that I was one of you guys, right? You know, I was an energy and climate guy and really I sort of realized, gosh, food is a third of the climate problem and it's 3% of climate finance and 0% of climate conversation. So that was one of those things where I realized I was so spectacularly ignorant that probably other people were too. And this ought to be something I should learn about. And really, I think one way for I think your listeners to think about this is that the food and climate discussion is 20 years behind the energy and climate discussion. If you think about it, 20 years ago, there were like no alternatives to fossil fuels except for maybe like corn ethanol, which as I'm sure we'll get into, is turns out to be a climate disaster. But now, you know, as you guys have done such a great job of discussing and documenting, we've had this clean energy revolution. We kind of know what we need to do with energy even if we're not doing it fast enough. But basically we gotta electrify the global economy and transform it to clean electricity with food. We don't even know what we need to know. Like we really haven't grappled with this stuff. And so my book is at least an effort to grapple.

[Jesse Jenkins]

Yeah. So I always think about the decarbonization challenges. You know, it's sort of twofold. One, of course, we have to cut emissions, but we have to do that while delivering enough affordable energy to power the lives and human aspirations of 10 billion people. It's the same challenge for food. Right. We have to prepare ourselves to grow enough food and calories and nutrition to feed a planet of roughly 10 billion people by mid century without expanding its carbon impact by 50%. Right. And in contrast, we actually have to cut it not necessarily to zero because maybe we can offset it in other areas, but dramatically decrease the impact. So what are some of the key levers that we have to do that?

[Mike Grunwald]

No, that's exactly right. We're going to need 50% more food. We're on track to need 70% more meat. And particularly beef, as I discuss, is really, you know, that's the baddie, that's what's eating the earth. And, and we have to do it with less land and fewer emissions. We're losing a soccer field worth of tropical forest every six seconds. And obviously I talk about how trying to decarbonize the planet while we keep vaporizing trees, it's like trying to clean your house while you're smashing the vacuum cleaner to bits in the living room. Right. Our trees are what soaks up all the carbon in the atmosphere that we've been pumping with our fossil fuels. The trick is really how can we have less land intensive diets? And a lot of that means less beef, but also how can we waste less food which also wastes the farmland that we use to make the food as well as the fertilizer and water. But then on the flip side, how can we make more food with less land? And that involves all kinds of new technologies as well as new policies. Whether it's reinventing photosynthesis or alternative pesticides and fertilizers, or gene edited crops to be drought tolerant or flood tolerant or higher yield. There are all kinds of things that we're going to need to do to essentially solve this food problem that we're, that so far has really been an afterthought.

[Jesse Jenkins]

So those are the kind of key two ingredients there. So first we have to make choices about our diets that are less land intensive. And then second, we got to get as much out of Each acre of land that we are cultivating. I want to come back to each of those, but maybe let's start with that second one there. Because that I think runs counter to what a lot of people have in their minds about what sustainable agriculture looks like. It sounds like, you know, you're talking about we got to industrialize agriculture even more, probably spreading the kinds of industrial agriculture we see in the US or Europe, around the world to places with lower yields and more traditional farming practices. But that's very contrary to what you would read in a typical environmentalist book on ag and food. So let's talk about that for a bit.

[Mike Grunwald]

Sure. Well, there's definitely some of that, and I try not to be an advocate for a particular type of agriculture. But yeah, we're talking about high yields. We need to make a lot of food per acre because otherwise going to need a lot more acres to make food. That's the ultimate challenge. When I say we're eating the Earth right now, two of every five acres on this planet are cropped and grazed. And that's just extraordinary, Right. Like we talk about urban sprawl, right? All these suburbs and cities that are kind of sprawling into nature. That's about 1% of the Earth's land. And agriculture is 40% of the Earth's land. So really what we're talking about is this natural planet becoming an agricultural planet and losing these forests and wetlands that provide biodiversity as well as carbon storage. And yeah, industrial agriculture. People don't like factory farms. And I get it, right? They're bad to animals, they're bad to people. They use too many antibiotics. They may be creating pandemic risks. Their politics suck. But the fact is factories are good at making lots of affordable stuff. They're manufacturers. And we're going to need to manufacture a lot of food to feed 10 billion people. And the fact is, when I talk about how the book is about we need to feed the world without frying the world, we actually know how to feed the world. We've had a green revolution. We can tear down more trees. The question is, how do we do it without frying the world? And that is does involve, among other things, higher yield agriculture, which doesn't always mean industrial agriculture. But right now, the kind of twee organic farms that Michael Pollan writes about beautifully, they tend to have 30, 40% lower yields, and that means they need 30 to 40% more land.

[Robinson Meyer (co-host or guest host)]

Comparing the food problem to the energy problem I think is really instructive because I feel like one of the mindset changes that folks at Energy World have undergone over the past 20 years. Let's say, is this shift from, let's say, efficiency thinking to technology thinking. There was a world where we thought about climate change, where it was like, we're going to have to use a lot less energy. And a lot of our, a lot of our policies were aimed at using less energy, period. Now we understand that solving climate change will involve using less energy, but a lot of those energy uses come from efficiency gains by adopting new technologies. And we can kind of sidestep the hard choices involved in reducing energy use by like adopting new technologies and changing how we generate power and electrifying and all the things we talk about on every other, literally every other episode of Shift. But part of that means that we have now technological solutions that we can pick up and be like, look, if we only adopted this, if we only adopted EVs, or if we only adopted wind and solar or nuclear, whatever it is, we would be in a better place. Do you feel like we have those technology solutions today in food? Or is this much more of a classic efficiency problem where it really actually does matter? We may actually really need to change much more of our lifestyle to adjust?

[Mike Grunwald]

I think we don't have those technologies and we need them. And that's possible, right? I think about when I was writing about biofuels 15, 20 years ago and saying that they were a climate disaster and people would always say, well, if not biofuels, then what do you think we should use? And I'd be like, gasoline. You know, be like, that's terrible, it's a fossil fuel. And I'd be like, I know it's terrible, but biofuels are even worse. And now, of course, I have a better answer. I can say electric vehicles. To step back a little, I guess I would say that human beings seem to be really bad at being nice to each other. We seem to be not so great at making great sacrifices for long term goals, particularly when the crisis is invisible and isn't going to kill us tomorrow. But we seem to be really good at inventing stuff. And I do think that technology is going to be a big part of the solution to these problems. And I write about dozens of really promising solutions in this book. But that said, none of them have much traction. And I can't be 100% sure that any of them are going to work because they haven't really been tested. I mean, we're, we've seen like at least a first round of kind of alternative proteins, which I think is A really important solution. The kind of plant based meat, but also the mycelium based meat and ultimately the cultivated meat grown from animal cells that I think are really promising. But when you think of where they are compared to where Sol was 30 years ago, the entire cultivated meat industry has had $3 billion in investment and they've reduced their costs 99.9% in a decade. It's been extraordinary progress. But of course they're still not on the market. Solar, I think there was $250 billion investment in just the first quarter of this year. So when you think about the kind of orders of magnitude difference, I'm still very optimistic about a lot of these technologies, whether it's biofertilizers or biopesticides that are from the same MRNA technology that we use for the COVID vaccines. And instead we're going to constipate potato beetles to death. There are guys in the University of Illinois who are literally reinventing photosynthesis and they think they can increase crop yields 50% because this essentially natural technology that's been around for 2 billion years is, turns out to be kind of inefficient. So I think there's incredible stuff happening, but it's going to just like with energy, it's going to require the R and D. Then we're going to have to have deploy, deploy, deploy of the stuff that works. And we're going to need some better policy to, to change the incentives and as I write about, to also change the accounting because the accounting kind of sucks.

[Jesse Jenkins]

Say more about that. What are we accounting for here and why is it wrong in their current practice?

[Mike Grunwald]

Well, the short answer is that most of our climate analysis has ignored land. And this is why biofuels looked good, right? Even back 15, 20 years ago, people were saying like, gosh, these biofuels are incredibly inefficient. They use almost as much fossil fuel to make as they replace. But you know, since then in the corn field, that soaks up carbon from the atmosphere, the stuff that we emit out the tailpipe, that's probably a wash. So it maybe reduces carbon, the emissions like 20%. And then Tim Searchinger, the star of my book, who is at the time just a wetlands lawyer, says, wait a minute, you're forgetting about the land. You're forgetting about the opportunity cost of land. If you use land to grow fuel, that means you're not using it to grow food. And somewhere else you're going to have to grow more food. And that's probably not going to be in A parking lot, it's probably going to be a forest in a wetland. And it turns out that the emissions end up being twice as bad as gasoline. And look, biofuels are eating about a Texas worth of the earth, but agriculture is eating 75, Texas is worth of the earth. And we really have not accounted for that. And that's why again, to go back to Jesse's question earlier, that's why when you do the climate math today or the climate accounting or even these carbon markets, it's like, hey, that low yield farm that doesn't use as much fertilizer, so might have fewer nitrous oxide emissions or doesn't have as many cows, so it might have fewer methane emissions. On paper, that looks like better than a high yield farm, but it just isn't because you're only looking at that acre of land and you're not thinking about all the extra acres that you're going to need to provide the food that you're not producing because of your low yields.

[Jesse Jenkins]

Yeah, this is the like the central opportunity cost thinking that Tim Searchinger has been so good at hammering into people's minds and yet is still so absent from so much of the conversation about land use. There's not, we're not making more land. Right.

[Mike Grunwald]

That's the classic Mark Twain said, that's.

[Jesse Jenkins]

Why real estate is such a good investment. Right. They ain't making any more of it. And that is fundamentally true. Right, for agricultural land as well. Except we do make more agricultural land, I guess, by taking other natural lands or marginally productive lands. Right. And throwing them into production. But there's a cost and there's a cost to that. Right. There's just a fixed amount of land. We need a certain amount of food. And anything you're doing that is reducing the production of food on current land that's already in agriculture is going to shift that production somewhere else. And because we're already using the best farmland, that somewhere else is going to be a relatively poor piece of land for farming. Right. Slash and burn agriculture in the rainforest or something like that. It's not high yield farmland growing, which we're currently using to grow corn or soybeans in the Midwest that we then throw into biofuels. So yeah, that's. This thinking is a, is a really important mindset and it completely changes your life cycle assessment.

[Mike Grunwald]

You know the two lines that Tim uses. One is land is not free, right? This idea that if you're using land, even to, if you're using marginal land to grow food, then that land can't store carbon. If you're using land to grow fuel, you know, that land can't make food and it can't grow trees. That there really is a cost. And then there's this idea that every acre is sacred, that we really have to think about land. We've always taken it for granted, right? This America was the land of opportunity because we thought of it as endless land. But today when you take a cross country flight and you look out the window, you see all those squares and circles. That's what our land has become, that's how we use it. And there is a cost to that. We got to eat. You know, there's a lot of talk about like, oh, we can make agriculture into a climate solution. It can save the environment. And as you'll see, you know, I'm very skeptical. A lot of that talk, the kind of kiss the ground ideas where we're going to take all that carbon from the sky and put it into the soil, that's mostly bullshit. But the fact is we do need the land and we do need it to make stuff. There is going to be, there is going to be a cost to that. We just need to minimize those costs and particularly we need to minimize our agricultural footprint so that we can maximize our natural footprint.

[Robinson Meyer (co-host or guest host)]

I will say that much like Jesse, I myself am like, I don't know a lot about food. I read there was a big UN report about food in the late 20 teens, which I read and I was very, really changed my thinking about a lot. But that was kind of the last time I've engaged on the land problem. I was like, this is exciting. I'm excited to read about food. And then I got to the point where you introduced Tim Surchinger as the main character in the book. And Tim was actually someone who I also first talked to about that UN land report. But at that point I went, oh my gosh, it's not a food book. I mean, it is a food book, but it's a Tim book. It's a book about Tim, who's this extremely creative, thoughtful, incandescent kind of thinker in the space and who's so good, as Jesse was saying it, thinking about these land trade offs, I was like, that's a totally different prospect. Obviously you're never going to put on the COVID This is the book about Tim Serkinger. Because books aren't targeted at Rob Meyer personally.

[Jesse Jenkins]

However, the people who grew up in the Princeton area, Rab Meyer personally, is.

[Robinson Meyer (co-host or guest host)]

Very excited about a. Jim, can you just Intro a little bit more about him. You gave us a brief bio about him as a character, but can you just talk a little bit about like how you encountered him and his background? Because until I read, I didn't realize that he wasn't. That he isn't a academy trained scientist, right?

[Mike Grunwald]

No, he's just a random lawyer who's written now 10 articles in nature and Science, which is more than a lot of academic scientific departments. You know, it's funny, when I first pitched the book about this kind of food and climate problem, I remember one of an editor I knew told me, I think you need a little less Holocaust, a little more Anne Frank. Which is a horrible thing to say, of course, but, you know, Tim was my Anne Frank. And yeah, I've known Tim for 25 years. I tell the story of when I first met him. I was a young reporter at the Washington Post. He was a not quite as young wetlands lawyer, but looked like. I remember, I still remember the first time I saw him in Union Station. And he looked like this college kid who had borrowed his dad's suit. And the things I remember is, first of all is like he would not shut up. He was just Blizzard of Verbiage. The other thing I remember is that he was obviously brilliant that day. We were talking a lot about the Army Corps of Engineers and, and he had done the work. He had like stacks of documents. He was telling me crazy stuff about how the Army Corps was destroying rivers for barges. And then there were no barges on it. And it sounded just ridiculous, but he was like, no, here. And here are all the documents and here's all the Army Corps technical reports about every barge that's come through. And it was something that was hidden in plain sight, which is something that Tim seems to be really good at. He's just really so relentless about it. The other thing I remember is that that day he gave me like six arguments that his critics would use. And then he explained why four of them were totally bogus and then one of them was only partially bogus. And then this one is actually a pretty decent argument. And he's had to modify the way he talks about this in this particular way. So I had sort of stumbled into the smartest and most honest thinker I had ever met. Not the least pain in the ass thinker I had ever met. You know, Tim's, Tim's a big personality and hopefully that comes across on the page. But look, I mean, he ended up, you know, that Army Corps. I spent a year writing about it for the Washington Post. He gave me the tip that led me to write a book about the Everglades and move to Florida and meet my wife. So he's always been this important figure in my journalistic career. But then we lost touch and I sort of, you know, knew he was involved in agriculture and climate. I had written a story and had a throwaway line about meat, and I realized I didn't know if it was bad for the climate. And I called Tim and I said, hey, Tim, is meat really that bad for the climate? And honestly, I thought he might say no. And this might be a cool kind of man bites dog story like I had done about biofuels with him. And he said yes. And then he said duh, which is something that Tim likes to say. And that was the beginning of my journey.

[Robinson Meyer (co-host or guest host)]

Perfect segue. How did writing the book change how you yourself approached food or you yourself eat? Do you find yourself eating less meat now? Do you find yourself eating less dairy?

[Mike Grunwald]

I cut out beef pretty early in my reporting. I realized it became really obvious early on that beef is the baddie. I mean, if you're a vegan, that's amazing. That's the best thing you can do from a climate perspective. If you're vegetarian, that's also great. But it turns out that cutting out beef is about as good as going vegetarian because vegetarians tend to eat more dairy and cows are really the problem problem. Beef is like, use 10 times more land and generate 10 times more emissions than chicken or pork. And yeah, chicken or pork are worse than beans and lentils. But I, like many people, are weak. I'm a hypocrite. I feel like this stuff, it's sort of like organized religion. You have to find the level of hypocrisy that you're comfortable with. And I couldn't justify continuing to eat beef while writing a book about how beef is really the problem and we need to eat less beef and better beef. But look, our ancestors started eating meat 2 million years ago and is. We're really, I think, hardwired to eat it. That said, I have stuck to it. I write in the book about how I did a bunch of reporting on cattle ranches in Brazil and I spent two weeks trying to think about how we could have better beef. And I did fall off the wagon during those two weeks because, like, steak is delicious. People told me that, oh, if you're still eating chicken and pork after a month, you won't even miss beef. And they lied. I still miss beef. But look, I do think, and we can talk about this, but I know in the climate world it's become kind of uncool to talk about individual action. There's this whole spate of stories about like, you know, I'm in the climate movement and I don't care if you recycle or veganism isn't going to save the world. But I honestly think first of all, like, emissions are us. You know, JBS and Donald Trump and McDonald's are not forcing us to eat all this beef. These are decisions we make. And second of all, that if we do take this seriously as a climate crisis, it's true policy is going to matter more. Corporate behavior is going to matter a lot. But individual emissions matter too. And I don't like the idea of people saying like, yeah, this is a horrible crisis. Oh, but also your emissions don't matter. I understand enviros don't want to sound like scolds. They used to have a bad reputation, but honestly I think, I think, yeah, well now, now I think their reputation is for ine rather than scoldy and I think I liked it better when they were scoldy. I think our, there's a role for.

[Jesse Jenkins]

A voice of moral clarity out there. I guess the politics of it may be not so great. As you noted, Republicans have seized on this idea that the climate movement and woke liberals are trying to take your hamburgers away as a pretty salient sort of piece of this, of the, you know, social wars or culture wars.

[Mike Grunwald]

I did quote that pollster saying that taxes or other restrictions on meat are the least popular policy he's ever polled. He said it's basically like veterans benefits for isis.

[Jesse Jenkins]

So I get it, it's even worse than carbon taxes.

[Mike Grunwald]

Yeah.

[Robinson Meyer (co-host or guest host)]

Can you just explain in the most searching Jerry in terms possible why beef is bad?

[Mike Grunwald]

It's funny, everybody talks about the cow farts and it's actually more burps and there is a lot of methane from that and that is a problem. And that's one reason why feedlot finished beef is even better. That is better than, than grass fed beef because it gets them to slaughter weight faster so they're alive. Less time to burp methane. But the real problem is land. Cows are really inefficient converters of their food into our food. And so they need a lot of land. And ultimately when you look at what's happening in the Amazon right now, it's being torn down for beef. It's cattle pastures. It's also a little bit of soy, but mostly the soy replaces cattle pastures and the cattle pastures move deeper into the Amazon. So the short answ that ruminants just use a lot of land. So when you eat a burger, yes, you're eating the cow, but you're also eating the macaws and the jaguars and the rest of the cast of Rio, you're eating the Amazon.

[Jesse Jenkins]

And so you recommend shifting, not necessarily becoming vegetarian, but shifting meat consumption towards more efficient animals. Right. Particularly poultry, I think is the most efficient way to get calories for meat.

[Mike Grunwald]

That is right. And in fact, we know it's possible because over the last 50 years in the rich world, we've basically reduced our per capita beast consumption by a third. I like to say that before the rise of solar, that was probably the biggest human shift that favored the climate. It was obviously a totally inadvertent shift. Chicken got cheap and people realized it's a little healthier than beef. But yes, just like, like those chick fil a the cows on the billboards, they say, eat more chicken. I mean, I should say it sucks for the chickens and obviously you're eating more animals and the chickens do get treated worse than cows. But from a climate and from a biodiversity perspective, it's really the best thing you can do.

[Jesse Jenkins]

So I wanted to turn to the policy interface here because that shift that you talked about. So there probably is some policy there in the sense that ag subsidies and other things are probably influencing that relative affordability of chicken versus beef. But what are, what do you see as some of the key policy levers here? If we're not going to tax beef and try to take away people's hamburgers because it's politically toxic, what are some of the policy levers that we can use to drive more systematic change here than just encouraging individuals to act more responsibly, which, again, you can do that, but probably not to the scale that we need to tackle the challenge.

[Robinson Meyer (co-host or guest host)]

Right.

[Mike Grunwald]

Well, first of all, I try to make this not a Debbie Downer book. I talk about all these exciting solutions, but I also try to be really upfront that these solutions are not there yet. They're not ready. And that's why my first kind of principle is do no harm. The kind of Hippocratic climate oath which means, like, don't pour billions of dollars into biofuels that make the land problem worse. For a lot of energy people, it's like, hey, we can replace fossil fuels and we'll just dump the problem on the land sector. That's not good. And the same thing goes with these discussions of pouring trillions of dollars or at least hundreds of billions into this kind of agroecology, this low yield agriculture. I don't think we want this faith based transformation of agriculture into let's get away from making all that food. I don't think that's a great idea. So don't do that. And then the other sort of implication of how long this is going to take is hurry up on the energy stuff, including on the ag world, right? And we're seeing the opposite effect in the United States where in hundreds of rural counties they're banning wind farms and solar farms on farmland. So again, you guys know this, but don't do that. That's bad. Beyond that, I think we need a real moonshot for research into alternative proteins, into better crops, gene editing, not only of crops, but even of livestock, the kind of photosynthesis, alternative fertilizers, alternative pesticides, biological nitrification, inhibition. You can tell I'm like, like super popular at parties. There are all these kind of really obscure but exciting solutions where there's some guy in Nepal who is, you know, on a shoestring budget is trying to turn rice straw into a usable animal feed. If you just think of we have like 400 billion tons of rice straw on this planet, you could save a lot of land that we use to grow animal feed if you could, through chemical treatment or biological treatment, turn that into something that animals can eat. So I think there needs to be all out research, all out deployment of the stuff that works. And then on the international scale where it's really just been a disaster, we need this combination of produce and protect where we're helping developing countries essentially make their agriculture more productive, whether it's just by getting them green revolution technologies like fertilizer and irrigation and better seeds, or investing in some of these new technologies that are going to have drought tolerant and flood tolerant and higher yielding crops the works. But it really needs to be tied to this idea of protection that we're going to give you a lot of money, we're going to help you do all the cool things your forests need to stay intact. And if they don't, the money gets cut off. And right now the world provides about $600 billion worth of agricultural subsidies every year. And 300 billion of that is just direct handouts. And there's pretty much no strings attached. I think in the future we're going to have to move towards at least some strings attached. Like, hey, we're going to give you the money. You have all the political power, we're going to even Help you make even more food. But you've got to do it with a little bit less mess.

[Jesse Jenkins]

There's also the whole carbon offset world, much of which revolves around land based carbon offsets. Some of that is paying people to sequester carbon in soils, which we could come back to. You've called that bullshit a couple of times. We should probably unpack that. But a lot of it is also to try to preserve forest land, right? Paying people not to cut down trees. I think what you're saying is that's important, we should not cut down the trees. But the way to do that is actually to pay them to intensify their agriculture so that they don't have to cut down the trees. Carbon offsets is probably not the right framework for any of this. The accounting gets in the way of the actual solutions and it is only permitting other durable fossil emissions somewhere else in the economy. But we do need to figure out how to replace those cash flows into the developing world in particular in ways that are much more effective. And that could be a role for philanthropy, but it could also be a role for policy and international development funding. Not that the US does that anymore.

[Mike Grunwald]

I think that's right. I would point out that particularly in this land sector, carbon offsets, or at least insets, right where you're working in your actual supply chain are probably there. Like what did, like Winston Churchill said about democracy, they're like the worst solution, except for all the others. And I think they just, just, you know, so far they have sucked. There has been a lot of money pouring in, poured into these offsets that are bogus. Whether because they're just like bogus projects or because they're ignoring additionality and leakage and all these kind of insider jargony stuff that basically mean you're not actually paying somebody to preserve a forest that wouldn't have been preserved in the past. That said, I do think that the next frontier seems to be soil carbon. Paying farmers to do some of these regenerative practices that is going to miraculously more carbon in the soil. The too long don't read is that yes, it is mostly bullshit. And you essentially, it is really difficult to store more carbon in your soil without adding more nitrogen. And that creates all kinds of other climate problems. Even if you could measure it, which you really can't, or make sure that it wasn't, you know, was additional. So those are real problems. But there are real ways. Like you can pay farmers to use less nitrogen. You can have, you can reward them for when their cows burp less methane. And there are now feed additives that can help their cows burp less methane. Planting trees in your pasture, Silva pasture, which can actually give the cows some shade as climate change gets worse. But. And also if they're certain types of trees actually seem to make the pastures more productive. But also you can measure the carbon it is in a tree. It is above ground. You can do that with some agroforestry where you're planting shrubs and crop fields. I think there's a lot of promise for using climate finance to support some of that. But right now, like the Biden administration poured $20 billion into climate smart agriculture, and almost all of it was for soil carbon. That is not necessarily the best way to do things, but there are ways that I think you can pay farmers to make less of a mess and document the less mess in a way that can really help the climate and the planet.

[Jesse Jenkins]

Is the issue that the soil carbon simply that it just doesn't actually work to increase the amount of carbon stored in the soil, or is that it has a negative impact on yields, which then has this sort of opportunity cost that wipes out any benefit you might get from that.

[Mike Grunwald]

It's a little bit of both. Certainly you've got to take the yields into account. That's the accounting where you saw what happened in Sri Lanka, right, Where they banned agrochemicals, no more chemical fertilizer or pesticides. So, you know, I guess from some perspective their emissions dropped, their agriculture emissions, but also their yields crashed and the government fell and they had to reverse it. That's not a good outcome. That's not what we want to do. But also there are real technical problems with storing carbon in the soil. And a lot of the. When you see these kind of regenerative heroes kiss the ground with all the celebrities and they talk about how they, they've increased the carbon in their soil, usually because it's like they used to have crops and now they have cows pooping on it. And so they have more carbon in their soil, but those cows are now not pooping somewhere else. So it's this shell game where they're moving carbon around the world and the people who have more carbon get paid for it, but the people who have less don't have to pay. Again, it's not good accounting. And again, accounting makes my book sound boring and I tried to make it a fun narrative with exciting characters. But like Tim says, if you want to do a bad thing, go do a bad thing. But if you want the whole world to do bad things, set up accounting rules that make it profitable to do bad things. And that's what's happening with a lot of these. A lot of these carbon markets.

[Jesse Jenkins]

So I think it'd be helpful to maybe break down the ways in which agriculture intersects with the climate problem. I think we've been touching on these indirectly. But. So the biggest one I think you're arguing, and Tim searching here would back this up. Right. Is this sort of opportunity cost of using land for agriculture that could otherwise be used for. For natural lands. Right. Whether those are wetlands or forests or scrubland or anything else that is going to both help with biodiversity, but also is going to grow and do its natural thing and absorb carbon dioxide in.

[Mike Grunwald]

That state as well as direct, not just opportunity cost, but direct deforestation. When you're tearing down, that's the. Every six seconds we're putting a soccer field worth of carbon into the sky. That's not good.

[Jesse Jenkins]

Yep. So the second one is deforestation or clearing of other natural lands. I guess the next one, the one we've been talking about just now, is how much your managed lands absorb carbon, whether that's forest lands that are in managed rotation. Right. For pulp and paper and timber and other things, or agricultural lands. And that sounds like it's a bit tricky to improve substantially on farmland. But that's another intersection. There are some direct greenhouse gas emissions that come from agriculture. You've mentioned the methane that comes from ruminants and their digestive system. But there's also nitrous oxide, which is a very potent greenhouse gas that comes from fertilizer and the production of nitrogen and ammonia for fertilizer. There's methane from manure and the breakdown of other agricultural materials that we maybe can capture and use as a fuel instead of let go into the atmosphere. And then there's course fossil fuel consumption in the agricultural supply chain itself. Right. There's the fuel we need for tractors and things like that. But there's also, I think the biggest one is most of the nitrogen fertilizers we make from natural gas or coal in some countries. So we're eating fossil fuels directly in the fertilizer that we're using to get to these high yields. Can you rank those in order of importance? Kind of help us understand which ones we need to be thinking about the most?

[Mike Grunwald]

I mean, land is the biggie. It really is. We are eating the earth. I didn't make that up. But the enteric methane from cows is a really big problem. The nitrous oxide from fertilizer is a really big problem. And that's also an opportunity. Right?

[Jesse Jenkins]

Right.

[Mike Grunwald]

Because the nitrous oxide and the nitrates, when you look at the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, right, it's like the size of Connecticut or the algal blooms in the Great Lakes, that's from nitrogen fertilizer that leeches out in the form of nitrates. And of course that's wasted. Like the farmers would rather that nitrogen ends up in their crops to help them grow. And it turns out that about half of all nitrogen is wasted. But it's a little bit like the old joke about advertising, right. Where we just don't know which half. But there are really exciting technological solutions that can increase what the dorks call nitrogen use efficiency as well as provide, you know, biological. There's a company, a Bill Gates backed company called Pivot Bio, that basically gene edits microbes to fix their own nitrogen from the air and feed it to crops so that you can use less chemical fertilizer. And I think that's exciting. I would mention one other one, just because there's a really exciting, easy solution, which is methane from rice fields. It turns out that about 10% of agricultural emissions, which means, you know, more emissions than the entire aviation industry, come from flooded rice fields. These bacteria that thrive without oxygen and, and basically they spit out a lot, a lot of methane. And the solution turns out to be really simple. Don't flood your fields as often. And so I mentioned that the Biden administration spent $20 billion on these, this climate smart ag stuff. And I feel like a lot of it is going to turn out to be wasted. There was a $7 million grant to a company that's working on these methane problems on rice fields. And they have already they're reducing methane emissions percent just by basically paying farmers to keep their fields flooded. Not as long the yields are the same, they're saving tons of water. And now they are selling carbon credits, like lots of them. They are now they've expanded, they're not going to need subsidies to keep this program going because the carbon credits are so lucrative. And they're now on 150,000 acres of right fields in the US US which is like 5% of US rice. So it's a pretty good example of how, you know, there's not going to be one giant silver bullet solution. But there are solutions that are just, you know, they really are pretty low hanging fruit. Just nobody's been picking them.

[Jesse Jenkins]

Yeah. And rice is a pretty important one, depending on what cultural background you're From. You may already know this or not, but rice is like 20% of all calories consumed worldwide. It is the most important crop in many ways, and it has this direct greenhouse gas impact.

[Mike Grunwald]

Yeah, if you can cut rice methane in half, you're going to reduce a lot of methane.

[Robinson Meyer (co-host or guest host)]

We're talking a lot about Biden administration policy and what the Inflation Reduction act did, but there's new legislation that's happening as we talk. So the One Big Beautiful Bill act includes some significant changes to biofuel policy, and the Trump administration has also pursued similar changes. Can you just talk about whether policy right now is getting worse or better? And if so, how?

[Mike Grunwald]

Oh, way worse. I mean, you guys have done such a great job talking about the trillion dollars of clean energy cuts in the Big Beautiful bill, and those are very serious. But of course, there's also $45 billion in new money to expand subsidies for biofuels, particularly aviation biofuels, what's known as sustainable aviation fuel. You know, spoiler alert, alert. It ain't that sustainable, because electric vehicles have really depressed the market for putting corn and soy in our gas tanks. They want to put it in our planes. And there are right now some rules that when they do their climate analysis, they have to check and see if these sustainable aviation fuels actually reduce emissions. And that's made it really tough for corn and soy to pencil out.

[Jesse Jenkins]

Out.

[Mike Grunwald]

So essentially, what the Big Beautiful Bill does, aside from putting in this $45 billion to expand aviation biofuels, is to tell the government to put down its pencils. It says, from now on, when you analyze the emissions from biofuels, you cannot look at land use change. And of course, as we've been discussing for the last hour, land use change is the problem with biofuels. Abraham Lincoln used to tell a joke about, how many legs does a dog have? If you call a tail a leg? And the answer is four. It doesn't matter what you call it, it's still a tail. And you can say that those emissions from land use change don't exist. But they do exist, whether Congress admits it or not and whether we include it in our climate calculations or not. So this is really a potential disaster. If we created just a quarter of the world's aviation fuel from crops, it would use 40% of the world's cropland. So when people say, there's no Planet B, we would need one. If we go ahead with this kind of unsustainable aviation fuel.

[Jesse Jenkins]

Yeah, this is one of those ones where I just. I keep trying to think about a world in which we've actually substituted fossil aviation fuel for something else. And I like just can't come up with something that's actually scalable, that doesn't cost five times as much or whatever as the current fuel or has these huge land use implications.

[Mike Grunwald]

And it's right back 20 years ago where people are asking me, well then what should we use instead? And I'm saying jet fuel.

[Jesse Jenkins]

Jet fuel, yeah, yeah. And you know, let's find some other way elsewhere in the economy to draw down greenhouse gas emissions to offset that.

[Mike Grunwald]

Exactly. And there are, you know, you can electrify shorter flights. And this is where I do feel like, rather than this preposterous Rube Goldberg sustainable aviation fuel, if you did slap a tax on global aviation, Tim Searchinger has calculated that it would tax the cost of a transatlantic flight about 100 bucks. But you could raise about 100 billion doll. And you could raise another $100 billion from shipping. And that's the kind of money where you could really start to make a dent in these food and climate problems.

[Jesse Jenkins]

But again, to invest that money, not because we're going to use the carbon price to drive really expensive biofuel alternatives. Right. It's because we're going to take that money and use it to find ways to solve the problem.

[Mike Grunwald]

Well, the hope is, and this is like as long as I'm doing non Debbie Downer, I mean you look at what they're doing in Denver, Denmark, and again, I know it's Denmark, but they've done so great on their energy problems that now agriculture is looking like a big part of their climate problem. And so I actually, I remember I went with Searchinger in February 2020. You know, at the time Tim was going around making the rounds trying to tell people, hey, you should not shut down your pork and dairy industry. Instead you should make it even more efficient. But you should also invest in all of these great technologies that are going to reduce the climate impact of your agriculture. And you should force agriculture to turn a million acres back to the wild and you should tax agricultural emissions and you should have a nationwide effort to promote plant forward eating. And the Punchline is in 2025, Denmark did it. They did all of those things. And you know, we'll see how it works. It's Denmark, but it is possible.

[Robinson Meyer (co-host or guest host)]

Well, we'll have to leave it there. Mike, this was an awesome conversation. Where should people find your book?

[Mike Grunwald]

The book is out July 1, but you can pre order it today on Amazon or wherever you get your books and I just really appreciate your bringing me on to talk about it. It's good to be with my former fellow energy dormant foreign.

[Robinson Meyer (co-host or guest host)]

We'Re back. We're going to do something a little differently this episode. Instead of our usual segment at this time, which is Upshift, Downshift, where we take a look at the climate news from the past week, we wanted to take a look at one big piece of climate news in particular, something that if you listen to the show, you're probably paying attention to, and that is that last week the Senate Finance Committee released its draft of the one big beautiful bill act, the big reconciliation mega bill that contains basically all of Donald Trump's second term legislative priorities and is currently moving through Congress and crucially for our interests, contains a massive rewrite and in many cases a repeal of the tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act. Last month, when the House of Representatives published its own draft and then ultimately voted on its own draft of this big IRA repeal effort, we discussed what was in that bill. The Senate version is a little different for some tax credits. It's quite different, but it would still entail a pretty seismic overhaul of the energy policy in the Inflation Reduction Act. And I think that's especially true if you care about emissions, which you presumably do. You might, if you listen to this show, a lot of the policy in the IRA that was aimed at reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions is stripped out of this bill in ways that are going to be pretty noticeable. And so we have thoughts. We also just want to introduce you to what are the changes? And so, Jesse, should we get into it?

[Jesse Jenkins]

Yeah, I just wanted to start with, I think Senator Martin Heinrich from New Mexico, Democrat from New Mexico, had the perfect summation of how to think about the Senate version of this bill. He told Joshua Siegel, the reporter, that the Senate Finance bill is a, quote, slightly mitigated disaster as opposed to the House past completely unmitigated disaster. That's pretty much a good way to think about it, right? So I could call this a slight upshift, I guess, in this context, relative to the House bill. Obviously relative to current law, it is still pretty disastrous and marks a major unwinding of the set of key tax credits that are driving most of the emissions reduction power of the Inflation Reduction Act. So maybe just to start with a couple of those big ones, Electricity and transportation are where most of the emissions reductions from the IRA are likely to come from. As we talked about in the past, wind and solar and batteries in the power sector and EVs in the transportation sector. They're relatively mature, they're ready to scale. And so with some additional incentives from tax credits, they can make a major dent in greenhouse gas emissions over the next five to 10 years. And so the changes in tax credits here are particularly important. The Senate bill might be slightly better. It might eke out a few more days of tax credits than the House, but still basically ends all of the EV incentives, both for personal vehicles and commercial vehicles, including the medium duty trucks we talked about last episode. But it ends those credits 180 days after enactment instead of at the end of 2025. And so depending on when this bill passes, that might bring us into the first quarter of next year, potentially as opposed to the end of 2025.

[Robinson Meyer (co-host or guest host)]

I just want to enumerate exactly what those tax credits are. So the IRA contains a $7,500 tax credit for consumers below a certain income threshold who buy a new electric vehicle is gone. I'm going to get back to it in a second. The IRA also contains a smaller tax credit for consumers who buy a used electric vehicle. That's totally gone and that's done.

[Jesse Jenkins]

That's gone 90 days after passage, as opposed to 180. So that one will sunset.

[Robinson Meyer (co-host or guest host)]

First. That tax credit covered $4,000 of the cost of buying a used EV. That's going to be gone this year if the Senate version passes. The IRA also contains obtained this tax credit called 45W, that did two things. The first that kind of was very clear when it passed, was that it discounted the cost of a commercial electric vehicle, especially a particularly heavy commercial electric vehicle, which means basically a medium or heavy duty vehicle, by what, 30%? Jesse?

[Jesse Jenkins]

Yeah, up to $40,000, whichever was less.

[Robinson Meyer (co-host or guest host)]

Of the cost of a new commercial vehicle. But what, what that tax credit also did, which I have to say was also clear on the day of passage, if you closely read it, was that it allowed dealerships to claim the tax credit as companies or financing companies basically allowed consumers to get a tax credit if they leased a new electric vehicle. And unlike 30D, the tax credit for buying a new electric vehicle, the rules around who could lease that vehicle and what their income had to be and where that vehicle had to come from were much more forgiving.

[Jesse Jenkins]

I mean, they didn't exist.

[Robinson Meyer (co-host or guest host)]

They didn't exist, exactly. And so this leasing provision turned out to be quite important. That's gone as well. Getting back to the new EV tax credit, there's some difference between the House and Senate bill that I want to get into. So the House bill said the tax Credit for new electric vehicles expires at the end of this year. But if you're an automaker who sell who sold fewer than 200,000 eligible vehicles, then it will expire at the end of 2026. The Senate bill says no automaker can claim the tax credit anymore 180 days after the bill passes. And this really affects which companies will benefit the most. So under the House bill, companies like Ribbon or Lucid, these new automakers could potentially claim the tax credit as late as December 31, 2026. Companies like Tesla, General Motors that have sold hold more than 200,000 electric vehicles over their life, over their lifetime as a company would lose the tax credit on December 31st of this year. Under the new Senate text, basically all companies lose eligibility on the same day. And given what we anticipate the legislative timeline for this bill being, which is that the goal is to get it out of the Senate by July 4th into the President's desk by August recess. We don't. But those are like the optimistic deadlines that could potentially go later that would push that D day for all EV tax credits into 2026, into potentially January or February of 2026. The longer it takes them to pass this legislation, farther in time that D day goes. And so potentially these big automakers like Tesla, GM could get another month or two of eligibility for their electric vehicle, but Rivian will lose like 10 months, 11 months of eligibility for their electric vehicles. And that's really important for those companies because Rivian, for instance, is trying to bridge to the debut of its cheaper EVs in late 2026. And it needs this like, financial bridge. But it's also important for Tesla and GM to get as many EVs out the door as they can between now and when the tax credit goes away.

[Jesse Jenkins]

Yeah, I mean, because that exemption, the 200,000 vehicle exemption, only applied to the personal EV tax credit. I'm not sure it's that useful for Rivian as a bridge because most of their vehicles don't qualify under the provisions.

[Robinson Meyer (co-host or guest host)]

Right.

[Jesse Jenkins]

Under the personal EV tax credit, a truck or SUV can't cost more than $80,000 and the buyers can't earn more than $150,000 for a single filer or 300 for joint filers. If you look at the folks buying Lucid airs or Rivian R1s, they're going to trip one of those requirements. Right. Either the vehicle itself is over $80,000 in most cases, or they're going to earn too much. But Rivian is launching its R2 at some point in 2026, which would qualify under the House version of the bill. And that could be really important to get that vehicle out the gate with a lot of sales early on with that $7,500 discount. So let's talk about the other key sector here and the other key changes that were made and that's the electricity sector sector. In the House bill. The language for the clean electricity investment and production tax credits, which are the major drivers of business deployment of particularly large scale solar and wind and batteries, those were cut very much short in the House bill. So they added a requirement that projects needed to commence construction within 60 days of passage of the bill and be placed in service before the end of 2028 in order to qualify for the credits. After that they're gone. With the exception of nuclear power, which got a bit of a longer Runway in the House version of the bill in the Senate, there's slight improvement here. It's not huge, but it is meaningful. The solar and wind have a little bit longer to claim the credit. They can commence construction before the end of 2025 and still claim the full value of the tax credit. And then they add two more years of a ramp down of the credit. For projects that commence construction in 2026, the tax credits are worth 60% of their full value. And in 2027 they're worth 20% of their full value after that. If a project doesn't begin construction before the end of 2027, the tax credit is no longer available. There is no placed in service deadline. That's important because those place in service deadlines introduce a huge amount of regulatory risk because you don't know exactly when your project might actually get finished. If they hit a supply chain delay or a permitting delay or an interconnection delay, you can easily miss that window. And if there's any risk of that, the tax credit basically not usable because banks won't count on it. You can't use it to get financing. And so removing that place in service deadline is a really important change. Because if once you commence construction of a project, which technically means spending about 5% of the project costs on site preparation or substation development and things like that, your safe harbored meaning you can claim the value of that credit credit as long as you're placed in service up to four years after the point where you commence construction. So that means that projects that can turn a shovel and spend enough money in 2025 or even 2026 at their 60% value could be completed through the end of the decade and still take advantage of those credits. So this could have a more meaningful impact than you would think just from the dates. Meaning that we could see more wind and solar projects able to monetize these credits built over the next three, four, five years. Whereas the House bill makes that almost impossible because you have to commence construction basically immediately. And it adds this major risk factor of the placing service deadline in 2028.

[Robinson Meyer (co-host or guest host)]

The other big change in the Senate bill from the House version is that the House bill cut off basically all technologies within 60 days except nuclear, which allowed to take advantage of the tax credits through 2028. The Senate bill takes a very deep different approach to all non wind and solar technologies. So actually all zero carbon generating technologies that are not wind and solar under the Senate text will retain their tax credits through the mid-2030s. The Senate bill adopts the phase out period that was used by the IRA with one change, and I'll get to that change in a second. But what that means is that new nuclear projects, fusion, geothermal and most importantly batteries will retain full access to the IRA credits through the middle of next decade. I want to emphasize two things here. First of all, the most complimentary I'm going to be here, which is I appreciate what the Senate drafters did here, which is that they left the tech neutral tax credits, the tax credits in the IRA that basically say any technology that generates electricity while emitting zero carbon qualifies through these tax credits. They left them legislatively into hacked with the exception of wind and solar. And that's actually quite important. And you'll see reporting that's wrong about this. There's some reporting out there that summarizes this legislative text by saying nuclear geothermal now qualify for these tax credits. But what actually happened is that they carved out wind and solar from the tax credits. And what that means is that any technology will retain these tax credits through the middle of next decade. I think that's the right policy path. I want to praise the Senate finance finance legislative drafter for figuring out that this was the best way to do it because it means that the Senate text doesn't have a problem that the House text did, which is that if you fail to mention a specific technology such as as the House text did, fusion, which generates zero electricity in America today, but could potentially be important if you failed to mention a technology in the House text, it was going to not qualify. Well, in the Senate everything qualifies except for wind and solar. The second big change in the Senate text Which is a big let down down and which takes out a really underappreciated but far sighted part of the ira. Which is the IRA pegged the removal of those tax credits not to a certain year, but to a point when effectively US power sector greenhouse gas emissions were 95% lower than they were from their all time high. It effectively said these tax credits will remain in place until greenhouse gas emissions from the US power sector are effectively eliminated. And what that meant is that those power sector tech neutral tax credits in the IRA were going to be in place for decades to come. Because we don't anticipate the decarbonization of the U.S. power sector until the 2000-40s or the 2050s under the Senate text that clause, which again and in a really underappreciated way pegged a US tax credit US subsidy to the decarbonization of a US economic sector. Something that remains really underappreciated about the ira. That provision is gone. And instead the Senate adopts the IRA's alternative phase out timeline for those credits which is that they begin to phase out after 2033 and then phase out by 25% for the successive few years after that. But projects that enter service in 2033 can continue to claim 10 years of production tax credits after they enter service. But it does not offer the long term certainty to say new nuclear developers or advanced nuclear fusion developers that the IRA tax credits once might have done.

[Jesse Jenkins]

Yeah, I mean again it is a commenced construction before the end of 2033 not placed in service. So if you are able to begin your nuclear project in 2030 or 31 or 32 with certainty that you can safe harbor this credit, that's pretty important. Again, the House version set that deadline only for nuclear. No other technique technologies at the end of 2028. Good luck starting too many new nuclear projects by the end of 2028. This extends that Runway for another five years out into the future. That's really important for the nascent nuclear sector. And as you said, it's tech neutral. So geothermal, commercial fusion and long duration storage and even lithium ion batteries have a much longer eligibility here that pushes out into the mid-2030s. That's pretty important. And if that's what ultimately becomes becomes law is a major improvement over the House version of the bill.

[Robinson Meyer (co-host or guest host)]

Can I ask one question, which is the other big change in the Senate text that I kind of alluded to is that it extends eligibility for batteries that long as well for grid scale batteries. That to me seems actually like, you know, wind and solar developers. Clean energy advocates are obviously very upset about the Senate text, but it does seem to me like extending batteries is a bigger deal than we might realize. And I'm not trying to put a happy face on this, but just we are beginning to hit a problem in certain grid. What extending coverage for batteries means does not mean to be clear that if you build a big project and it has some batteries and it has some solar, you can claim the whole tax credits for the whole thing. But what it does mean is that if you have a lot of batteries on a grid and you have a lot of solar, as we're seeing in Texas, by the way, you retain value from the midday solution solar, you retain value from wind that generates during periods where we might not need that wind. And so it seems to me like extending subsidies for batteries is number one, like quite a grid resilience increasing policy. But number two is better like is good for renewables, is it as good for renewables as extending the tax credits for wind and solar? Obviously not, but it allows electrons generated by renew renewables to retain a lot more value on the grid than they would otherwise. There's obviously ways this legislative text could continue to improve from an emissions standpoint, but I don't want to leave out how significant that is from a grid policy or even from a getting more renewables on the grid standpoint, because it seems to me, and this is what I'm curious, Jesse, do we have any sense of what the value is for continuing tax credits for batteries but discontinuing them for renewables? Like how does that work out on a kind of power sector?

[Jesse Jenkins]

I don't know the answers for that yet, but we will soon as we run the model for the repeat project on this version of the bill. So we'll put a pin in that and come back to that in the future. But you're right, having more storage on the grid is good for integration of renewables. It's good for grid resilience, it's good for making the most out of existing transmission because we can improve the utilization of the grid by buffering with storage at times when the grid is constrained. And and most new solar projects, many of them and even some wind, are co located with storage now because it allows you to get a lot more value out of the solar that you're generating. And that's going to help make those projects pencil as well. Again, not because you can claim the credit for the solar side, but because the batteries are cheaper, you can build a bigger battery. That means you can get more value out of your solar farm. So, yeah, definitely a substantive improvement over the House bill. Again, this is the sort of juggle you have to keep in your head. If your bar is the House bill, this is a substantive improvement. If your bar is as current law, this is an utter shit show. So it just depends which mindset you're looking at. I think for me, you know, I've spent the time since the November election adjusting to the fact that the baseline is probably full repeal and we're going to see what we can save in the process. And this is a market improvement from where we landed on the House side. It's still got a ways to go from here, and so we'll keep close tabs on how it evolves. Just want to quickly run through a couple of other notable changes as we wrap up here. One, transferability of these tax credits is maintained. That was something that was removed after 2026. I think in the House version that's really important. That means that you don't need to have tax liability yourself to take advantage of a credit. You can sell it on an exchange to anybody else who has tax liability. That's going to be important to making these tax credits work. There was foreign entity of concern language added to all of these tax credits in the House version of the bill. That is also true in the Senate. That's designed to keep China and Chinese firms out of our supply chains that are claiming the tax credits credits. There's still a lot of details to sort through, but what I'm getting the sense from folks in industry is that the Senate language is quite a lot more workable than the House version, which was totally unworkable from most people said, meaning that the Senate bill is something that industry probably can comply with, although there's still probably some important improvements that could be made to that language before it becomes law. Finally, there was a fee added in the House bill, an annual fee for EV owners and hybrid owners owners, $250 per year for EVs and $100 per year for hybrids. That was meant to raise money to go into the Highway Trust Fund and replace the fact that people driving EVs aren't paying gas taxes. That is not present in the Senate Finance Committee draft at all. So no fees, no new fees on EVs or hybrids. And the Alternative Refueling Infrastructure tax credit, that's the EV Charger tax credit, expires 12 months after enactment as opposed to the end of 2025. And so that could give us another six, eight, nine months of EV charger tax credit eligibility relative to the House bill as well. Everything else that we didn't talk about on here is still just as bad as it was in the House version, I think, particularly residential leasing of solar and storage, which is a big business model that is explicitly excluded from the longer lifespan of the business investment tax credit. So the residential rooftop solar and storage business is is very concerned about this draft. There may be a chance to improve that further. But at the moment, this bill, like the House bill, would basically end the solar and storage leasing business model that we've seen emerge over the last few years.

[Robinson Meyer]

That will do it for us today. But before we go, some programming news. Next week we're going to start a new special series on this podcast we call Shift Key Summer School. Now, we know that a lot of people out there may follow climate and energy and economic policy closely, but you might not be versed on the engineering basics of how the electricity grid or energy system work. So starting next week, we're going to turn this podcast into a classroom. We will have the podcast equivalent of introductory classes about the power grid, about how to understand electricity units, and about the history and operation of the most important types of power plant in the US and around the world. World We've been recording these episodes over the past few weeks and they've been so much fun. I hope you enjoy them. You can find them in the same time and same place. You always find Shift Key episodes in whatever podcast app you like on Wednesday morning. And if you hate them, then don't worry. We'll be back in mid July with more traditional Shift Key episodes for you. Until then, Shift Key is a production of heatmap News. Our editors are Gillian Good and Nico Lauricella. Multimedia editing and audio engineering is by Jacob Lambert and by Nick Woodbury. Our music is by Adam Cromalow. Thank you so much for listening and.

[Robinson Meyer (co-host or guest host)]

See you next week.