These days, the most useful and interesting clean energy stories — again, Canary is all over them — are about the post-Trump future. Like Eric Wesoff’s dive into fusion, “an energy source that has been 40 years away from commercialization for 50 years.” Or Julian Spector’s report on the prospects for turning methane into clean hydrogen. Or Maria Gallucci’s look at the vast potential of geothermal power. The fate of these technologies will probably have a bigger impact on 2050 emissions than Donald J. Trump.
In general, it’s smart not to hyperventilate about every move Trump makes to delay the clean energy transition, because the transition is happening. It really matters how long the transition takes, because energy generates two-thirds of the world’s greenhouse gases, but we basically know where it’s headed: toward a largely electrified economy powered by zero-emissions electricity.
What we don’t know is what the hell is going to happen with the other third of the emissions warming the planet, the greenhouse gases generated by our food and agriculture system. That system has not yet begun making a transition to a climate-friendlier approach. There’s not even a consensus about what that kind of transition would look like.
That will be the subject of my Eating the Earth columns, and also of my book — the title might look vaguely familiar — and I think it will be a far more compelling subject than Trump whining about wind turbines or flacking fossil fuels. With energy, we know what we need to do; with food, we barely even know where to start.
I explained our basic food and climate problem in my first Eating the Earth column: We’ll need to grow about 50% more calories to feed the global population by 2050, and if we stay on our current trajectory, we’ll need to clear two more Indias worth of additional farmland to grow them. That would wipe out much of the world’s forests and wetlands while ratcheting up carbon emissions from the land sector during a time they need to drop about 75% to meet the Paris targets.
So we can’t stay on our current trajectory.
Until recently, there was only dim public awareness of any connection between food and climate — a vague (and, it turns out, incorrect) sense that GMOs, pesticides, and industrial agriculture in general are climate killers, while eating local, natural, and organic is climate-friendly. The 2023 global climate summit in Dubai was the first to devote an entire day to food, and the issue still tends to lurk below the media radar except when climate skeptics are accusing activists of trying to ban cheeseburgers or force everyone to eat bugs. In February 2024, Elon Musk posted on X, “Farming has no material effect on climate change,” but that preposterous lie did not provoke much outrage or interest.
In fact, farming has a huge effect on climate change — more than transportation or industry, nearly as much as electricity. And while the rise of renewables has helped our energy and climate problem start getting a little better, though not nearly fast enough, our food and climate problem is still getting worse. Food is about 25 years behind energy, and we can’t wait another 25 years for it to catch up.
The good news is that there are dozens of promising solutions that could help us eat less of the earth. I’ve written about some of them: using fewer biofuels, eating chicken instead of beef, intensifying cattle pastures, and getting over our fear of high-tech meat substitutes. I promoted technological solutions like low-emissions fertilizers and a miracle tree called pongamia, while questioning whether vertical farming would ever pencil out. (It certainly hasn’t yet!)
Trump, needless to say, does not care. His administration is already trying to shut down President Joe Biden’s $23 billion “climate-smart agriculture” initiative. Then again, it’s not clear whether that initiative’s focus on regenerative farming practices was actually climate-smart, so it’s hard to say what effect this particular knee-jerk anti-climate response will have on global emissions. On the other hand, the Trump team has approved a billion-dollar Biden administration clean-energy loan for a Montana refinery to make “sustainable aviation fuel,” a supposedly climate-friendly alternative to fossil fuel that may well end up eating much more of the earth.
The next four years, when serious climate policy is on hold in the U.S., will be a good time to piece together which of this stuff makes sense. Climate has become a partisan culture-war issue, but food and farming are still nonpartisan. Trump’s unconventional health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is likely to clash with his conventional agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, over issues like seed oils, GMOs, and agri-chemicals, and Democrats are likely to face internal conflicts over those issues as well. Climate progress won’t happen around energy as long as Trump is in charge, but it’s at least conceivable and debatable around food.
At the very least, Trump’s second term will offer an opportunity to fill in knowledge gaps that could come in handy the next time there’s a president who actually wants to do something about global warming. Four years ago, a lot of us envisioned his story ending like Mastodon’s ended in “Squeeze Me” — forced to renegotiate his wife’s compensation for public appearances, relegated to a balcony where he can see how his once-loyal supporters have abandoned his failing resort, oblivious as his bathrobe flops open to reveal “the pale and pendulous details of his frontal topography.”
Instead, Trump’s got more power than ever, and he’s going to use it to block solutions to two-thirds of the climate problem. We might as well try to figure out the other one-third.
