According to a new report by The Washington Post, last month at his private Mar-a-Lago club Donald Trump bluntly proposed a “deal” to more than 20 oil executives from some of the largest oil companies in the United States, suggesting they donate $1 billion to his presidential re-election campaign.
In exchange, Trump promised that once he was back in office, he would immediately reverse dozens of environmental regulations implemented during President Joe Biden’s presidency and prevent the passage of any new ones.
The offer followed one oil boss’ complaint about how — even though oil executives had contributed $400 million in the past year to lobby the Biden administration — the sector was still facing environmental rules that hampered operations.
Trump said the $1 billion gift from the petroleum CEOs — which included those of Exxon, Chevron and Continental Resources — would be considered a “deal,” considering the regulation and taxes the companies would be avoiding, people privy to the meeting said on condition of anonymity, as The Washington Post reported.
Trump is “putting the future of the planet up for sale,” Christina Polizzi, Climate Power’s deputy managing director of communications, told The Guardian. “He is in the pocket of big oil – he gave them $25bn in tax breaks in his first term – and now it’s clear he is willing to do whatever big oil wants in a potential second term.”
Meanwhile, the Biden administration has overturned 27 of Trump’s actions related to the fossil fuel industry, a Washington Post analysis said, and has been racing to implement new ones ahead of the November election.
“You’ve been waiting on a permit for five years; you’ll get it on Day 1,” Trump told them, the attendee recalled, as reported by The Washington Post.
Trump promised to get rid of Biden’s electric vehicle (EV) “mandate” — referring to recent rules finalized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that require automakers to reduce tailpipe emissions, rather than calling for a specific technology like EVs.
“Donald Trump is selling out working families to Big Oil for campaign checks. It’s that simple,” said Ammar Moussa, Biden campaign spokesperson, in a statement, as The Washington Post reported. “It doesn’t matter to Trump that oil and gas companies charge working families and middle-class Americans whatever they want while raking in record profits — if Donald can cash a check, he’ll do what they say.”
Climate Power senior oil and gas adviser Alex Witt said that with Trump “everything has a price. They got a great return on their investment during Trump’s first term, and Trump is making it crystal clear that they’re in for an even bigger payout if he’s reelected.”
Vitor Martinez, a 25-year-old musician and community organizer, lives in Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul — the southernmost state in Brazil. Martinez’s neighborhood borders Guaíba Lake, around which Porto Alegre’s main attractions are clustered. On a sunny, 80-degree Fahrenheit day in late March, people biked, ran, and strolled along the promenade that surrounds the lake. Shoppers flocked to a mall on the bottom floor of a brand new Hilton DoubleTree hotel in the middle of the neighborhood. More than 23,000 people from all over the world gathered a few miles away at a conference center near the city’s historic downtown to talk about the future of technology and business in South America. That version of Porto Alegre — manicured and prosperous — is a distant memory now, Martinez said.
“There’s no precedent in Brazil for the crisis we are experiencing at the state level,” Jonatas Rubert, another resident of Porto Alegre, said Thursday evening. “The apprehension about what will happen in the next few days is immense.”
Martinez has been sheltering in his small apartment with his mother and grandparents, who were forced to evacuate their homes as the floodwaters advanced. The apartment, situated on elevated ground, was spared the worst of the flooding. In Porto Alegre and other parts of the state, people who lost their homes to the floodwaters are surviving on limited food supplies and dwindling sources of clean water. “Because the water is so high, we don’t know yet how many people have died,” Martinez said.
The flooding in Rio Grande do Sul is shaping up to be one of the worst environmental disasters in Brazil’s history. On Thursday, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced a 50 billion reais ($9.7 billion) relief and redevelopment package to be deployed in southern Brazil right away — a historic investment that represents the “first” round of aid, he said.
Aerial view of the flooded Beira-Rio stadium of the Brazilian football team Internacional in Porto Alegre. Anselmo Cunha / AFP via Getty Images
Aerial view of a bridge partially destroyed by floods in Encantado, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil on Sunday. Gustavo Ghisleni / AFP via Getty Images
Many factors helped produce a catastrophe of this scale. Experts have named climate change and the El Niño, the natural weather phenomenon that periodically changes oceanic and atmospheric conditions, as chief culprits for the intensity and rapid onset of the flooding. But a series of decisions by the local, state, and federal government in Brazil over the past decade have also contributed to the devastating effect the flooding has had on communities in Rio Grande do Sul, shaped the inadequate humanitarian response to the ongoing suffering there, and limited Brazil’s broader capacity to adapt to the worsening impacts of climate change.
Experts told Grist that the astronomic scale and cost of the floods may mark an inflection point in the way Brazilians think about environmental policies and climate change, particularly climate change adaptation — systemic adjustments that can safeguard against future impacts.
“This is going to shake the mindsets of voters,” said Carlos R. S. Milani, senior fellow at the Brazilian Center for International Relations, a think tank, and the Brazilian Scientific Development Council, a government organization. Whether the disaster affects decisions made by their elected representatives is still an open question.
Soldiers from the Brazilian Air Force prepare donations to be sent to flood victims in Rio Grande do Sul at Brasilia Air Base, Brazil on May 10, 2024.
Evaristo Sa / AFP via Getty Images
“I have no doubt that climate change has to do with it,” said Raissa Ferreira, campaign director for Greenpeace Brazil, referring to these recent events. “The greenhouse gas effect is getting more potent.”
A ferry boat stranded due to drought in Manaus, a city in the Brazilian Amazon, last year. Michael Dantas / AFP via Getty Images
The climate impacts of the past 12 months should not have caught Brazil’s government by surprise. In 2014, the administration of the president at the time, Dilma Rousseff, commissioned a strategy document titled “Brazil 2040: Scenarios and alternatives for adapting to climate change.” The report was prescient, if overly conservative: Many of the climate impacts it projected, including extreme flooding, have come to pass more than 15 years ahead of schedule. The center-left Rousseff administration ultimately buried the report, and subsequent governments have failed to take up the mantle. The result is that Brazil, the sixth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases and an emerging global power, has a climate adaptation strategy in name only. “Climate adaptation needs to be implemented,” Ferreira said, “but we see very negative signs in Brazil that that is a political priority.”
Rio Grande do Sul, a state that is highly dependent on agricultural production, especially of rice and soybeans, twice voted for former Brazilian president and ardent climate denier Jair Bolsonaro by a substantial margin. Porto Alegre’s mayor and Rio Grande do Sul’s governor, both right-wing politicians, have stripped the local and state budgets of environmental and civil defense funding.
“The word on the street is that the governor left 50,000 reais for the possibility of a catastrophe like this,” said Giordano Gio, a 31-year-old filmmaker in Porto Alegre. “This is, like, the cost of a Honda Civic.” In a poll this week, 70 percent of Brazilians said infrastructure investments could have lessened the risks of the recent flooding.
Aerial view of floods in Eldorado do Sul, a city in Rio Grande do Sul.
Carlos Fabal / AFP via Getty Images
The floods raise a number of questions about what happens next in Rio Grande do Sul and Brazil in general. Before the floods hit, Lula’s government was trying to rebalance the federal budget, reduce the national deficit, and reinvest in Brazil’s middle class. The crisis may scramble those efforts. The floods, said Mauricio Santoro, a political scientist and professor at Rio de Janeiro State University, are “going to have a serious impact in terms of inflation, in terms of food prices in Brazil. It’s very bad news to the Lula government in a moment when the president already has many challenges on his plate.” One of those challenges, and a priority for Lula, is reducing the rapid deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. Rainforest deforestation, much of it in service of exposing more arable land for agricultural production, is responsible for half of Brazil’s carbon emissions.
The influx of federal funding to Rio Grande do Sul will help rebuild the state, but experts Grist spoke to and people on the ground in Porto Alegre wonder what happens next from a climate preparedness perspective. “Lula was elected in a big coalition that has a lot of right-wing people in it,” said Gio, the filmmaker. Left-wing parties control only a quarter of the seats in Brazil’s House and Senate, which hinders Lula’s ability to pass climate change legislation. “There’s a lot of things going on politically that might affect” potential climate policy, Gio said.
More environmental disasters will affect Brazil in the coming months. High temperatures this year are expected to produce even more severe drought in the Amazon, for example, and the states that surround the rainforest are among the poorest in the country. Rio Grande do Sul, one of the wealthiest states in Brazil, is better positioned to recover from an event of this magnitude than most other regions of the country. “If this could happen in a richer area of the country, what if it happens next in a very poor one?” asked Milani. “The capacity to adapt, to respond, is much less.”
That question — what happens now? — will linger long after the floodwaters have receded. “I would have the intuition as a political scientist that climate and environment will very much be at the heart of debate in many municipal elections all over the country this year because of this event in Rio Grande do Sul,” Santoro said. “This is a political struggle more than anything else right now.”
In Porto Alegre, Martinez has been manning his local soup kitchen and working with his fellow community organizers to develop systems to handle the influx of relief aid they have been receiving from people all over the world. For him, watching people in his community help each other has been a small silver lining in the midst of the ongoing horror. “Local governments have abandoned us,” he said. “We will not watch our neighborhoods get destroyed and do nothing.”
Scotland’s climate hasn’t historically been supportive to large mosquito populations, as it tends to be cooler. But now, scientists have discovered widespread populations of mosquitoes around Scotland, and they fear warming temperatures could lead to increasing public health risks from mosquito-borne diseases.
Scientists at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Virus Research found 16 different types of mosquitoes around Scotland. In these findings, scientists discovered one of the most common mosquitoes in the world, the Culex pipiens, in Scotland for the first time.
A Culex pipiens mosquito. Ouwesok / Flickr
The leader of the research, Heather Ferguson, told the BBC that the research team was surprised by the widespread presence of mosquitoes in Scotland and warned that the population numbers could continue rising amid climate change.
According to the Central Massachusetts Mosquito Control Program, mosquitoes prefer temperatures around 80 degrees Fahrenheit (27 degrees Celsius), but they can’t function at temperatures below 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius). As Wilderness Scotland reported, the average warm-weather temperature for Scotland is about 64 degrees Fahrenheit (18 degrees Celsius), while cooler seasons average 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius).
This has kept mosquitoes to a minimum in Scotland. However, as climate change causes rising temperatures, the mosquito populations have better odds of survival. This could also allow non-native mosquito species that carry diseases to spread in areas they haven’t thrived in before.
“Although relatively low in abundance, mosquitoes have been present in Scotland for millennia, and are a natural part of our ecosystems,” Ferguson explained, as reported by The Herald. “While they don’t present a risk to human health here currently, climate change could increase the risk of invasive mosquito species establishing in Scotland. It may also increase the risk for mosquito-borne diseases that are present in some other European countries to establish.”
Scientists found 16 different types of mosquitoes by placing traps at 24 locations all around Scotland. The highest concentrations of mosquitoes were found around Loch of Kinnordy in Angus in eastern Scotland and in Caithness in northern Scotland.
Scientists are asking the public for help with a citizen science project dubbed Mosquito Scotland. As part of the project, the public is being asked to report mosquito sightings via the project website. The Mosquito Scotland project will continue for three years, through 2026.
According to the University of Glasgow, which is leading Mosquito Scotland, vector-borne diseases, like those spread by mosquitoes, account for 700,000 deaths per year. The citizen science project aims to provide more details on mosquitoes and assess risks of mosquito-borne diseases, and this information can also help prepare to handle increased risks to public health.
“At a time of environmental change it is really important to investigate the current and potential risk posed by mosquitoes and mosquito-borne disease,” Dr. Jolyon Medlock, head of the medical entomology and zoonoses ecology team at project collaborator UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), said in a statement. “This programme of research will be crucial in improving our understanding and preparedness as we continue to tackle future threats to public health associated with a changing climate.’’
The five members of the Georgia Public Service Commission are publicly elected officials. That means anyone can attend their meetings, offer public comments, and give feedback on energy affordability, justice, and policy in the state.
Follow and reach out to the PSC
All commission hearings and meetings are open to the public and anyone can attend. You can find a calendar of meetings here. It meets at 244 Washington St. SW, Atlanta, Georgia, 30334-9052
Contact information:
Toll-free in Georgia (outside Metro Atlanta): 800-282-5813
Metro Atlanta: 404-656-4501
Fax: 404-656-2341
Email: gapsc@psc.ga.gov
Commission hearings and meetings also are livestreamed on the PSC YouTube channel, though viewers cannot ask questions or pose comments online. You can also follow the PSC on social media.
Before reaching out to or engaging with the commission, familiarize yourself with the roles and responsibilities of the commissioners, and initiatives the agency is working on so you can frame your request or response appropriately.
Grist and WABE, Atlanta’s NPR member station, are engaged in an ongoing project demystifying energy policy and affordability in the state. You may find these resources may be useful.
Public comments are heard during the first hour of hearings and the last 15 minutes of committee meetings. Sign-up sheets are provided and speakers are called on a first-come, first-served basis.
You can learn more about filing a complaint, inquiry, or opinion to the PSC here. Comments must conform to certain guidelines, including a limit of three minutes at the lectern. Submit written comments here. People who regularly address the PSC say don’t be discouraged if you don’t receive a response right away. Follow up respectfully as time allows, and if you still aren’t satisfied reach out to commissioners through other means, such as calling their offices.
Get involved through community organizations
If you aren’t interested in or comfortable with testifying before the commission, several organizations regularly engage with the PSC and Georgia Power, which is the state’s largest electric utility and regulated by the commission. They include Georgia Conservation Voters, Black Voters Matter, Georgia WAND, and Georgia Watch, all of which offer volunteer opportunities for residents to participate in advocacy.
Local chambers of commerce also send comments to the PSC, as do city and county governments. You can also look into whether your employer is involved, as major employers sometimes appear in front of the PSC or go through trade groups like the Georgia Association of Manufacturers.
What is the value of a tree? It can provide a cool place to rest in the shade, a snack in the form of fruit, lumber to build a home, and cleaner air. But trees are increasingly being prized for one thing: their ability to capture carbon and counteract climate change.
Billions of dollars are flowing into projects to plant and protect trees so that governments and businesses can claim they’ve canceled out their emissions. Saving forests and planting trees are often portrayed as a “triple win” for the environment, economy, and people. According to a major report being presented on Friday at the United Nations Forum on Forests, however, that goal is proving more complicated than expected.
The conversation about how to manage forests “has been overtaken by the climate discussion,” said Daniela Kleinschmit, an author of the report and the vice president of the International Union of Forest Research Organizations, the network behind the research. The result? Indigenous peoples are getting pushed out of their lands because of carbon offset projects. Native grasslands are getting turned into forests, even though grasslands themselves are huge, overlooked reservoirs of carbon. And offset projects in forests, more often than not, fail to achieve all of the emissions benefits their backers had promised.
The new report, the first comprehensive assessment of how the world is governing its forests in 14 years, offers some good news — global deforestation rates have slowed down slightly, from 32 million acres a year in 2010 to 25 million in 2020. But what the report calls the “climatization” of forests has led to the rise of carbon sequestration markets that prioritize short-term profits over long-term sustainability, it found. Experts say that it’s possible to pursue the global goal of sequestering carbon in forests while also keeping locals happy — it would just take a more thoughtful approach that considers the tradeoffs and involves the people most affected.
Daniel Miller, a professor of environmental policy at the University of Notre Dame, said that a narrow focus on forests’ environmental benefits misses “a huge part of the story.” Miller’s research has shown that forests can help fight poverty, since the edible goods found in them are often available during times of the year when people might go hungry. Having forests nearby can make land more productive, increasing crop yields by more than 50 percent in some cases. That’s because forests can enrich the soil, increase rainfall, and help with pollination. More than 3 billion people live within 1 kilometer (a little over half a mile) of forests and depend on them for jobs, like harvesting timber, and for food like nuts and mushrooms.
Forests can also help people adapt to a warming world. They regulate floods and landslides and sustain livelihoods that are jeopardized by climate change, said Ida Djenontin, a professor of geography at Penn State.
But what looks like a promising carbon sequestration effort can have unexpected consequences that undermine those benefits. For example, Finland’s ministry of agriculture is trying to fertilize its forests to make them grow faster, in the hope that they will suck up carbon quickly and help the country meet its goal of going carbon-neutral by 2035. But according to the new report, the government didn’t account for the energy-intensive process of producing and transporting fertilizer, a large source of carbon emissions. The report also points out that fertilizing forests can end up hurting reindeer herding, since it stifles the growth of lichen that reindeer eat; one study found that it could also reduce berry production in forests by 70 percent. “It seems that the ongoing climate crisis has, to some extent, legitimized excessive forest management techniques, such as fertilization,” the report concludes.
Many forest offset projects don’t work as intended. An investigation last year found that only eight out of 29 rainforest offset projects approved by Verra, the world’s biggest certifier, had meaningfully reduced deforestation. The rest of the projects “had no climate benefit,” according to The Guardian, partially because the threat of those forests getting cut down had been vastly overstated.
The narrative that forests can save the world from climate change is a tempting one for businesses and politicians — they can seemingly take care of their climate pledges if they’re willing to fork over the money, without having to do the hard work of reducing emissions. It also allows people to skip the hard conversations about cutting down on consumption, Kleinschmit said. The market for voluntary carbon offsets — the ones companies choose to buy — is predicted to grow from around $2 billion in 2021 to $250 billion by 2030.
Another problem is that “carbon cowboys” — a term for those seeking to profit off carbon offset schemes — can end up evicting Indigenous peoples from their homes. In 2015, Cambodian officials set aside more than 1,900 square miles of rainforest in the country’s Cardamom Mountains for a carbon offset project without consulting the Chong people that had lived there for centuries. Villagers were forced from their lands, and some were even arrested for collecting resin from trees, since carbon offset areas were monitored to stop locals from using the forest’s resources. In the United Arab Emirates, the company Blue Carbon has negotiated deals for millions of acres so it can launch offset projects aimed at protecting forests across Liberia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Much of that land has been held by Indigenous peoples. Since 1990, an estimated quarter-million people around the world have been pushed out of their homes in the name of conservation.
Global climate goals, of course, don’t have to come into conflict with local needs. Experts say it’s possible to balance the two effectively. Prakash Kashwan, an environmental studies professor at Brandeis University, said that locals can use resources from trees, at least on a smaller scale, without hurting a forest’s ability to sequester carbon, according to his research. Studies have demonstrated that involving Indigenous peoples and local residents in the process of decision-making is key to better social and environmental outcomes — including carbon sequestration.
“Allowing communities a say in how forests are managed is absolutely vital to more effective, lasting, and just forest governance, and for tackling these big global challenges that we face,” Miller said.
For the past year and a half, you may have heard a lot about butter. It started with a viral video of influencer chef Justine Doiron carefully slathering two sticks of butter directly onto a wooden cheese board, seasoning the thick layer with flaky sea salt and lemon zest, arranging torn herbs and red onion across the surface, and finally finishing the dish with flower petals and a drizzle of honey. This was the butter board, a TikTok trend that quickly reached escape velocity and was featured by The New York Times, CNN, and the Today Show.
On high-end restaurant menus, the once-humble bread-and-butter course snowballed into $38 tableside “butter service,” and 14-inch cylinders of creamy, imported carved-to-order butter earned prominent placement in restaurants’ open kitchens. By early March, New York Magazine could declare that “butter has become the main character.”
A butter charcuterie board with fresh herbs.
Getty Images
What accounts for butter’s spectacular renaissance in American cuisine? According to the U.S. dairy industry, it’s their own public relations campaign that started the spread. The industry marketing group Dairy Management Inc., has claimed credit for the butter board in industry press, because it paid Doiron as a sponsor at the time of her video. While Doiron’s original butter board video did not include an advertising disclosure — and, according to Dairy Management, was not itself technically part of the partnership — the chef posted a Dairy Management ad two days before her viral post and was part of the industry group’s “Dairy Dream Team” of paid influencers at the time. (Doiron did not respond to an interview request, but Dairy Management told Grist that her contract has since expired.)
Dairy Management, whose funding largely consists of legally mandated fees collected from farmers, is one of a constellation of government-supported dairy marketing groups that also includes the Fluid Milk Board, a beverage-focused entity whose promotion arm has paid Emily Ratajkowski, Kelly Ripa, Amanda Gorman, and more than 200 others to promote milk on social media. (The milk board also recently sponsored a section in New York Magazine’sThe Cut, focused on women in sports.) In recent years, Dairy Management has partnered with mega-influencer MrBeast at least twice, filming him as he toured a dairy farm and paying him to promote a dairy-focused competition in the video game Minecraft.
In perhaps dairy promoters’ biggest coup of last year, the limited-run McDonald’s Grimace shake went viral after TikTok users began crafting miniature horror films featuring the bright purple beverage. Dairy Management has a longstanding partnership with McDonald’s; beginning in 2009, it placed two dairy scientists at the fast food chain to help incorporate more dairy into the menu. Less than a decade later, 4 in 5 McDonald’s menu items contained dairy, according to a Dairy Management board member. Dairy Management has even funded research to help improve McDonald’s notoriously glitchy milkshake machines.
“My hope is that farmers, when they see a new milkshake or a new McFlurry at McDonald’s, that they know that it’s their new product,” Dairy Management CEO Barb O’Brien said on a podcast in December.
A spokesperson for McDonald’s told Grist that they could not independently confirm the proportion of their offerings that contain dairy due to variations in local menus, but added that the fast food chain makes its own menu decisions. “Our partnership with [Dairy Management] helps McDonald’s ensure the quality and great taste of the dairy-based items on our menu, and deepen relationships with the thousands of dairy farmers who supply milk, cream, butter, and cheese to restaurants across the U.S.,” the company said in an emailed statement to Grist.
Partnering with food companies to roll out products that contain ever-escalating quantities of dairy is one of the industry group’s tried-and-true strategies. In the last couple of years, Dairy Management has partnered with Taco Bell to launch a frozen drink mixing dairy with Mountain Dew and a burrito with ten times the cheese of a typical taco. The organization also assisted with last year’s rollout of pepperoni-stuffed cheesy bread at Domino’s and supported marketing efforts for General Mills’ Oui line of yogurts.
Thirty years after the era-defining “Got Milk?” campaign — itself a project of the California Milk Processor Board — the U.S. dairy industry’s PR machine appears to be getting a second wind. The point of all these efforts is straightforward: The dairy promotion boards’ mission is to increase demand for their products. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars, collected from farmers and milk processors, on annual research and advertising in hopes of growing the market for dairy domestically and abroad.
Clayton Aldern / Grist
However, as dairy consumption and production continue to grow, so too does the industry’s environmental footprint. In 2019, the EPA estimated that U.S. dairy cattle emitted 1,729,000 tons of methane each year, pollution roughly equivalent to 11.5 million gasoline-powered cars being driven over the same period. A United Nations report found that the dairy sector’s global greenhouse gas emissions rose by 18 percent between 2005 and 2015.
Meanwhile, it’s not entirely clear that all these efforts are helping the average dairy farmer. The number of U.S. dairy farms has fallen by three quarters in the last 30 years, as farmers’ costs rise and milk prices fluctuate. Many small and mid-sized dairy farms have been driven out of business and farmers’ net returns fall below zero year after year. In 2000, farms with more than 2,000 cattle produced less than 10 percent of milk, but by 2016 farms of this size were responsible for more than 30 percent of U.S. production. The diverging trend lines have prompted some farmers to question whether the focus on market growth above all else — which has been accompanied by increasing climate pollution and the collapse of small dairy herds — is still the best policy.
Ever since Congress passed the Dairy Act in the 1980s, farmers have been required to pay 15 cents per hundred-weight of milk (equivalent to a little less than 12 gallons) toward industry promotion programs overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA. Ten cents is sent to local promotion entities and the remaining five cents go to the national Dairy Board, which promotes all dairy products. (Eggs have their own $20 million program.) Farmer contributions to the national program totaled $124.5 million in 2021.
The Dairy Board in turn sends money to Dairy Management Inc. Milk processors work under a similar structure, paying their own assessments to the Fluid Milk Board, which works exclusively on promoting a category that includes milk, flavored milk, buttermilk, and eggnog. The Fluid Milk Board received $82.4 million in processor fees in 2021. Its marketing arm is called MilkPEP.
In an emailed statement, a Dairy Management spokesperson told Grist that “all dairy research, promotion content and information not only complies with all regulations and standards, but also seeks to help consumers make informed decisions about the foods they choose for themselves and their families, including nutritious, sustainably produced dairy.”
The financial structure of these efforts is complicated, but the end result is that these programs, which are known to farmers as “checkoffs,” bring in more than $200 million each year in the dairy industry alone. As a result, the industry takes care to note its accomplishments. For instance, in the first eight years the checkoff of partnered with Domino’s Pizza, the average store increased its cheese use by 43 percent.
Other promotional efforts, however, have amounted to slickly-produced flops. Last year, the Fluid Milk Board hired actor Aubrey Plaza to hawk “wood milk” in an apparent effort to lampoon plant-based milk alternatives, which resulted in a formal complaint filed by a group of physicians who advocate for plant-based diets. Another effort involved a Board-funded website featuring Queen Latifah, which was devoted to combating the seemingly fictional phenomenon of “milk shaming.”
‘The Office’ actor Brian Baumgartner poses for a 2023 promotional photo for “Never Doubt What You Love,” a pro-dairy parody news campaign created by the California Milk Processor Board.
Rachel Murray for CMPB / Getty Images
Some recent industry-funded persuasion campaigns have been more subtle. In 2021, the fluid milk checkoff sponsored a wellness weekend for top editors from Bustle, New York Magazine, Marie Claire, and others at a $750-per-night Hamptons resort where they participated in workouts led by a celebrity trainer and “partook in milk-forward meals.” Congressional disclosures indicate that the Fluid Milk Board held USDA-approved advertising and marketing contracts with Vice Media and Food52 in 2021. A spokesperson for MilkPEP told Grist that these were branded editorial contracts to develop milk-inclusive recipe content.
There’s some evidence that all this marketing has worked. A recent USDA report delivered to Congress claimed that farmers earn $1.91 for every dollar spent on “demand-enhancing activities” for fluid milk, $3.27 for every dollar spent promoting cheese, and $24.11 for every dollar spent boosting butter. An independent evaluation by the Government Accountability Office in 2017 likewise found that, between 1995 and 2012, the fluid milk program returned $2.14 for every dollar spent.
After decades of growth, per-capita U.S. dairy consumption reached an all-time high in 2021, though fluid milk consumption has been steadily declining since the 1970s. This presents formidable challenges for climate action: Meat and dairy consumption is responsible for a full 75 percent of the country’s diet-related greenhouse gas emissions, even though animal products account for only 18 percent of calories consumed.
And even setting aside climate concerns, small-scale farmers worry that this emphasis on demand growth might actually end up edging them out of the market. They say that the checkoffs have unfairly benefited a few big producers, supercharging their growth while driving others out of the industry.
“[The checkoff is] set up to be entirely demand-side,” said Wisconsin farmer and former Dairy Board member Rose Lloyd. “You’re not allowed to talk about price, you’re not allowed to talk about supply. It’s a wasted effort.”
Lloyd and her family maintain a herd of 350 cows, and while checkoff assessments represent less than 1 percent of her revenue, she says she feels like she’s paying to reinforce a structure that’s working against her farm and her community. For example, she’s watched a neighboring dairy farm quadruple in size to supply mozzarella to a nearby factory that produces frozen pizzas. The local infrastructure has struggled to contend with the waste produced by all those additional cows.
“We have massive water quality issues,” she told Grist. “It’s a real crisis right now on all the legs of sustainability: ecologically, socially, economically.”
Some farm groups are holding out hope that they can persuade Congress to pass a form of supply-management legislation that limits total milk production, which they are pitching as a win-win for small-scale farmers and the environment. If the government placed a cap on the amount of dairy produced in the United States, the idea goes, such a policy could theoretically ensure that a market exists for all the dairy produced.
A similar model has functioned in Canada for decades. Each year, annual dairy demand is forecasted based on the previous year’s sales figures. The resulting estimate is divided among provincial boards, which in turn distribute production quotas to individual farmers. In exchange for promising not to market more milk than the quotas allow, farmers are guaranteed minimum prices for their products — meaning they’re somewhat insulated from the seasonal price fluctuations and rising costs that plague their U.S. counterparts.
To maintain this delicate balance, Canada prevents an influx of cheap imported milk using high tariffs. In part for this reason, the system is not without controversy. Critics argue that the policy pushes up dairy prices, and the quota licensing system can make it hard for new producers to enter the market.
A farmer moves cows into a barn for their evening milking near Cambridge, Wisconsin, in 2017. Scott Olson / Getty Images
Still, the system has enough admirers that some are hoping it will be adopted in the U.S. Earlier this year, representatives from the National Family Farmers Coalition, or NFFC, flew to Washington, D.C., to try to persuade legislators to adopt supply-management legislation through their proposed “Milk from Family Dairies Act” in the next Farm Bill. The bill would establish price minimums and quota-like “production bases” for farmers. Farmers would have to pay additional fees to export their product, and the policy would raise import fees where possible.
Antonio Tovar, senior policy associate at NFFC, said the proposal has garnered support from environmental groups who see supply management as a means of reducing emissions from feed and trucking.
Nevertheless, Tovar is clear-eyed about the bill’s likelihood of passage, at least in the near term. “I have to be honest with you, I’m a little bit pessimistic about these proposals being included in the next Farm Bill,” he said, citing Congressional gridlock and limited political will to pursue the change.
In the meantime, the dairy checkoff has set its sights on the export market. Specifically, it’s promoting pizza — which one executive called “a strong carrier for U.S. cheese” — in the Middle East and Asia. In Japan, the checkoff and Domino’s launched a “New Yorker” pizza topped with a full kilogram of cheese and served with a packet of seaweed and maple syrup. The New Yorker was subsequently rolled out in Taiwan.
Domestically, there are still some fast-food menu items that haven’t yet been topped with a slice of American cheese or shaken with milk. In a 2022 blog post, Dairy Management Inc., chair Marilyn Hershey pointed out that 80 percent of the 2 billion chicken sandwiches sold in the U.S. each year do not contain a slice of cheese.
The checkoff, she wrote, was engaging with Chick-fil-A, Raising Cane’s, and McDonald’s to change that.
Correction: This story has been corrected to remove language suggesting that dairy promotional groups engage in political lobbying.
As a series of monster rainstorms lashed southeast Texas last week, thousands of homes flooded in low-lying neighborhoods around Houston. The storms dropped multiple months’ worth of rainfall on Houston in the span of a few days, overtopping rivers and creeks that wind through the city and forcing officials to divert millions of gallons of water from reservoirs. Elsewhere in the state, the rain and winds killed at least three people, including a 4-year-old boy who was swept away by flooding water.
Much of the deepest flooding happened in the San Jacinto River, a serpentine waterway that winds along Houston’s eastern edge and empties into the Gulf of Mexico. This area happens to be the site of perhaps the country’s longest-running experiment in the adaptation policy known as “managed retreat,” which involves moving homeowners away from neighborhoods that will become increasingly vulnerable to disaster as climate change worsens. Harris County has spent millions of dollars buying out and demolishing at-risk homes along the river over the past decade. But the past week’s flooding has demonstrated that even this nation-leading program hasn’t been able to keep pace with escalating disaster.
“This is basically the largest and the deepest river within the county, and the floodplain is so deep that really we can’t do projects to fix these areas,” said James Wade, who leads the home buyouts for the Harris County Flood Control District. “We’re trying to get contiguous ownership in these areas so that we can basically convert it back to nature.”
It’s been slow going: Wade says the county has purchased about 600 flood-prone homes along the waterway over the past 30 years, almost all of which would have flooded during the recent storm if they hadn’t been bought out and demolished. There are still more than 1,600 vulnerable homes that the county is trying to purchase, but it has struggled to secure the necessary funds and get property owners on board.
Harris County was one of the first local governments in the United States to buy out flood-prone homes with money provided by FEMA, the federal disaster relief agency. The county has acquired more than 4,000 homes in dozens of subdivisions around Houston since the turn of the century, creating what are essentially miniature ghost towns around the city and its suburbs. Many of these neighborhoods, including the ones around San Jacinto, were so prone to flooding that the county couldn’t protect them with channels and retention ponds, which secure other residential areas.
The county doubled down on this strategy around the San Jacinto after Hurricane Harvey flooded hundreds of homes along the river in 2017, confirming that many residences were “hopelessly deep” in the floodplain, in the county’s words. Not only is the land around the river low-lying and marshy, but it also sits downstream of a reservoir that needs to release water during flood events so it does not overflow.
The county used federal funds to purchase and demolish an entire subdivision called Forest Cove, converting the open space into a “greenway” park with walking and bike trails. Elsewhere, it bought out homeowners who had already elevated their riverside homes as high as 14 feet in the air but had still seen flooding during Hurricane Harvey. These buyouts were voluntary, but after years of advocacy the county managed to persuade most homeowners to leave.
A separate county agency pursued a mandatory buyout in a few subdivisions where residents had been flooded several times, including one large community along the San Jacinto. This mandatory initiative has drawn criticism from residents who accuse the county of uprooting established communities, but the county saw it as a necessary measure to control flood risk in places where no other flood control strategies would work. More than six years after Harvey, officials are still working to close on the last of those homes.
Yet this aggressive program has still left many vulnerable neighborhoods untouched. The county gets most of its buyout funding from FEMA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which tend to dole out grants only after big disasters. It has also floated a $2.5 billion bond to finance flood protection and buyouts, but that sum has proven too little. There are far more flood-prone homes even along the San Jacinto than the county can afford to buy, to say nothing of the rest of the Houston metropolitan area, one of the country’s most populous urban centers.
“Money is obviously the biggest constraint,” said Alex Greer, an associate professor of emergency management at the University at Albany who has studied buyout programs. “They often have far more interested homeowners than they have funds, and the funding comes way too late.” Wade isn’t sure yet whether the flood caused enough damage to meet the criteria for a presidential disaster declaration, which would unlock significant FEMA aid and likely help the county fund more buyouts along the San Jacinto.
Furthermore, buyouts can take years to execute. In most cases, the county has to convince individual homeowners to enroll in a buyout program, then complete months of paperwork to purchase their homes, then wait for the homeowners to move. If there are holdouts who don’t want to leave, the buyouts end up happening in a “checkerboard” pattern, and the government can’t let water retake the land. Some neighborhoods, like those in the more upscale Kingwood area, are fighting for alternate solutions like new upstream reservoirs or dredging projects that could reduce flooding without homeowners needing to leave.
Even though residents along the beleaguered river have been dealing with floods for decades, Wade says he hopes this most recent flood will convince more of them to join the buyout program, allowing the county to return more land along the river back to nature. Without more money, though, he won’t be able to take advantage of what Greer calls the “window to woo.”
“Right after a flood event, that’s when people are most like, ‘I don’t want to do this again,’” he said. “But then there’s that lag of time between them coming forward and us being able to secure the funds, and they could change their minds.”
Scientists have discovered that the highly intelligent and social chimpanzee continues learning and honing the use of tools well into adulthood. This ability could be vital for the evolution of complicated and varied tool use.
In the study, the researchers said tool use is rare in animals, but they discovered that chimpanzees employed hand grips utilizing more than one finger as they got older.
“Such hand grips emerged at the age of 2, became predominant and fully functional at the age of 6, and ubiquitous at the age of 15, enhancing task accuracy. Adults adjusted their hand grip based on the specific task at hand, favoring power grips for pounding actions and intermediate grips that combine power and precision, for others,” the study’s authors wrote. “Highly protracted development of suitable actions to acquire hidden (i.e., larvae) compared to non-hidden (i.e., nut kernel) food was evident, with adult skill levels achieved only after 15 years, suggesting a pronounced cognitive learning component to task success.”
Humans have the ability to keep learning throughout their lives, and it is thought that this is why they are able to use tools with such flexibility. This ability has been an essential part of the evolution of human culture and cognition, a press release from the Public Library of Science (PLOS) said.
The research team examined whether chimpanzees also have this ability by looking at how their tool techniques evolved with age. They recorded 70 chimps of various ages retrieving food with sticks over the course of several years in the wild at Côte d’Ivoire’s Taï National Park.
The chimpanzees became more skilled at using suitable finger grips in handling the sticks as they got older and continued honing their gripping techniques well into adulthood.
Some more advanced skills like using sticks to pull insects out of places that were difficult to reach or adjusting their grip for different tasks were not completely developed until the age of 15. This suggests the more complex skills are not only a matter of physical maturity, but a product of learning capacities for novel technological methods that progress as they age.
The team found that retention of learning capacity as adults seems to be a useful attribute for species that use tools — an important insight into chimpanzee and human evolution. The authors noted that additional study would be necessary to fully understand the learning process of chimpanzees, such as how memory and reasoning play a role and how important experience is in comparison to instruction from peers.
“In wild chimpanzees, the intricacies of tool use learning continue into adulthood. This pattern supports ideas that large brains across hominids allow continued learning through the first two decades of life,” the authors said in the press release.
The study, “Protracted development of stick tool use skills extends into adulthood in wild western chimpanzees,” by Mathieu Malherbe and colleagues from France’s Institute of Cognitive Sciences, was published in the journal PLOS Biology.
Swiss company Climeworks has opened the biggest operational direct air capture (DAC) plant in the world to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The Mammoth plant, located in Iceland, is nearly ten times bigger than Orca, its second-largest plant.
“Starting operations of our Mammoth plant is another proof point in Climeworks’ scale-up journey to megaton capacity by 2030 and gigaton by 2050,” said Jan Wurzbacher, Climeworks co-founder and co-CEO, in a press release from Climeworks.
The DAC process sucks carbon from the air and stores it, most often underground, where it can no longer contribute to global heating.
With global efforts to reduce fossil fuel emissions inadequate to prevent the worsening effects of climate change, United Nations scientists have estimated that carbon dioxide in the billions of tons will need to be removed to meet climate targets, reported Reuters.
Climeworks’ new DAC plant has an annual carbon capture capacity of 36,000 metric tons. The Mammoth plant, begun in 2022, will be completed by the end of this year.
The company’s first commercial DAC project was also in Iceland — the Orca plant — and has an annual capacity of 4,000 metric tons.
“Mammoth has successfully started to capture its first CO₂. Climeworks uses renewable energy to power its direct air capture process, which requires low-temperature heat like boiling water. The geothermal energy partner ON Power in Iceland provides the energy necessary for this process,” Climeworks said. “Once the CO₂ is released from the filters, storage partner Carbfix transports the CO₂ underground, where it reacts with basaltic rock through a natural process, which transforms into stone, and remains permanently stored.”
Critics of carbon capture technology argue that it uses an enormous amount of energy, is expensive and that focusing on the removal of carbon from the atmosphere could encourage companies to continue burning fossil fuels rather than lowering their emissions. Many critics also emphasize that its effectiveness has not been proven.
Speaking about carbon capture in general, Lili Fuhr, Center for International Environmental Law’s fossil economy program director, said the technology “is fraught with uncertainties and ecological risks,” as CNN reported.
The total carbon removal capacity on Earth can only remove roughly 0.01 million metric tons per year of the 70 million tons that would need to be removed by the end of the decade to meet worldwide climate goals, the International Energy Agency said.
Climeworks — which does not have ties to fossil fuel companies — said it is looking to lower the costs of DAC technology to $400 to $600 per ton by the end of the decade and $200 to $350 a ton by 2040, reported Reuters.
Development is currently in the works for megaton Climeworks hubs in the United States, the press release said.
