Big meat companies and lobbyists for the industry have plans to be out in full force at the COP28 climate conference, bringing with them a message of meat as “sustainable nutrition,” documents from the Global Meat Alliance (GMA) reveal, according to a press release from DeSmog.
The GMA documents disclose that JBS, the biggest meat company in the world, will be joined by other major industry members like the North American Meat Institute and the Global Dairy Platform to push their pro-meat message at the climate summit in Dubai.
“These companies are stepping up their game because the exposure they are facing is stepping up,” said Jennifer Jacquet, a University of Miami environmental science and policy professor, in the press release. “It used to be that they were caught on the back foot, but now they’re completely prepared.”
Farming will be a big feature at COP28, with a “food and agriculture” agenda pressing governments to work with industry to come up with solutions to food insecurity exacerbated by climate change, the press release said.
GMA members are urged to promote the idea that meat will help “feed the world” and that it is good for the environment.
It has been estimated that the planet’s three largest meat companies produce more emissions than the BP and Shell oil companies, and that the 3.4 percent of emissions that come from the dairy industry is more than that of aviation.
According to DeSmog, trade groups will also “push” for “positive livestock content” by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) at the climate conference. Recently, industry pressure resulted in censorship of reports by FAO on the contribution of livestock to greenhouse gas emissions.
“Any credible action to reduce emissions in the food sector will inevitably lead to a reduction in the total volume of meat and dairy products produced,” said Nusa Urbancic, CEO of the nonprofit Changing Markets Foundation, as reported by The Guardian. “The industry is terrified of that and has been deploying multiple tactics to delay the inevitable.”
Raising animals for human consumption is the world’s biggest source of methane emissions. Agricultural emissions are putting the planet at risk of permanently breaching the 1.5 degrees Celsius planetary temperature threshold that would lead to catastrophic climate-related disasters like rising ocean temperatures, the melting of Arctic sea ice, drought, wildfires, extreme weather, flooding and coastal erosion.
“It is hard to understand why decision-makers would allow companies like JBS to have a seat at the table at climate negotiations,” Urbancic said in the press release. “They are simply not credible partners in these crucial talks, especially now when the time for action is rapidly running out.”
According to Urbancic, big meat producers are mimicking the oil industry’s strategies of using voluntary pledges to delay action on climate, all the while promoting science funded by the meat industry.
The GMA documents also revealed that the meat and dairy industry plans to collaborate with governments and major meat-producing countries to advance their agenda in Dubai.
Government support of animal agriculture is believed by some academics to be a significant factor in the industry continuing to have power over meat and dairy alternatives, the press release said.
For instance, a study from earlier this year found United States meat and dairy farmers received 800 times the public funding of novel alternative sources of protein, and in the European Union it was 400 times higher than that.
Brazil, Australia and the U.S. are the three biggest exporters of beef worldwide, with their respective governments holding a considerable economic interest in the industry’s growth.
“Typically, the talk is about demand side interventions, like you can get schools [or] individuals to give up meat,” Jacquet said in the press release. “But I’m a little worried that some of this [meat] production is so baked into subsidies and policy, that even with decreased demand, this apparatus will just keep flowing. We need the animal agriculture equivalent of ‘keep it in the ground’ for fossil fuels. It’s really about production at the end of the day.”
Ozawa Bineshi Albert wants the world to stop relying on fossil fuels. So last year, the co-executive director of Climate Justice Alliance flew from the U.S. to Egypt to make her voice heard at COP27, the international conference on climate change where world leaders gather to negotiate new commitments to battle the climate crisis.
But at COP27, Albert, who is Anishinaabe and Yuchi, noticed that Indigenous peoples like herself were outnumbered by fossil fuel lobbyists. She was also struck by how many people touted nuclear energy as an alternative to burning oil and gas.
“Nuclear is one of the most dirty, damaging energy sources, particularly for Indigenous people,” she thought. “It touches Indigenous communities all along its lifecycle from where it gets mined, to where it gets processed, to where nuclear power plants are placed, to where nuclear waste gets stored.”
That observation was just one indication of how the perspectives, and experiences, of Indigenous peoples aren’t always reflected in the broader environmental movement. As COP28 kicks off in the United Arab Emirates this week, hundreds of Indigenous advocates are making their way to Dubai with the hope of ensuring that their communities aren’t overlooked by global leaders.
Though the conference doesn’t officially begin until Thursday, the work has already started. Jennifer Tauli Corpuz is Kankanaey-Igorot from the Philippines and is managing director of policy at Nia Tero. She spent eight hours Tuesday in an auditorium with about 350 fellow members of the Indigenous Peoples Caucus, a delegation representing Native peoples, working on the details of a two-minute opening statement that the Caucus will be allowed to give during COP28’s opening ceremony. Corpuz says it’s not easy to distill everyone’s perspectives and issues into such a short statement and the work required interpreters in five languages.
Apart from ending fossil fuel reliance, Indigenous advocates at COP28 want to ensure that funding to offset the impacts of climate change reaches their communities; ensure Indigenous knowledge is seen as a solution to climate change; and prevent governments and private actors from violating their rights, especially as those actors pursue green energy projects.
Corpuz said the caucus plans to approve advocacy papers outlining their positions Wednesday. Then comes the work of convincing negotiators to listen. But it’s not easy.
The estimated 350 Indigenous peoples at COP28 is an attendance record for Native advocates, but it’s still far fewer than the 600 fossil fuel lobbyists who attended COP27 last year. As well, the most important work at the conference, negotiating the exact language of international climate change treaties, gets done behind closed doors among designated representatives from United Nations member countries.
Corpuz estimates that perhaps 20 of the 350 Indigenous people at COP28 this week have government badges that allow them access to negotiations. But even then, because they aren’t credentialed delegates representing a negotiating party, they are only able to watch and listen, not speak, she said.
Still, it’s an improvement over past years when Indigenous peoples’ representatives were locked out from even more rooms, said Corpuz. At least now Indigenous representatives will be able to hear the details of the negotiations, the perspectives of international representatives, and carry the information back for advocates to lobby government delegates. “A lot of the work of the Indigenous Caucus happens in the hallways,” Corpuz said.
A key question that’s expected to be decided this year is how much money wealthy nations like the U.S. should pay in order to cover the costs of climate disasters in the Global South, an initiative known as the loss and damage fund. One study estimates that nations in the Global North are responsible for 92% of excess carbon emissions each year, compared with 8% in the Global South.
“What’s at stake is how these finance mechanisms are going to impact and be accessible to Indigenous communities and other impacted communities, how they will be funded, and to what levels will they be funded,” Albert said. “And will those resources actually get to communities and not be taken up by agencies that will administer them?”
Eriel Deranger of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in Canada and executive director of Indigenous Climate Action, thinks that it makes sense that wealthy countries would be paying for climate impacts, but Deranger also wants the money to be available to Indigenous people no matter what country they live in due to already extreme climate impacts, many of which are exacerbated by colonization and land theft.
“If Canada, for example, or the U.S. is contributing to the loss and damage fund and we don’t have access to it as Indigenous people in North America or in the Global North, where are we going to see those kind of climate reparations and restitution for the damages that we are facing from the climate crisis?” Deranger asked.
But money is only part of the equation, said Kandi White, a citizen of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nations in the U.S. and program director at the Indigenous Environmental Network, which sent a 25-member delegation to Dubai. “For Indigenous peoples, it’s not just about the money, but it’s also about the return of our sovereignty over our lands,” said White.
Both Deranger and White, who are in Dubai this week, also hope to establish a grievance procedure through which Indigenous peoples whose rights are infringed upon could hold governments accountable. “We need there to not just be lip service of, ‘We recognize Indigenous rights,’ but we need to see language that has teeth,” Deranger said.
But securing that level of accountability may be an uphill battle. Even when world leaders make promises, they don’t always fulfill them: wealthy countries blew a 2020 deadline to spend $100 billion a year to help poorer nations cope with climate impacts and make progress toward decarbonization. One study suggested that goal may have been met last year, two years late, even as the world hurtles toward 3 degrees of warming.
The combined challenges—a lack of access to negotiating tables and tepid commitments by global leaders—have fueled disillusionment. Moñeka De Oro, who is Chamorro from the Mariana Islands and co-executive director of the Micronesia Climate Change Alliance, says that last year at COP some Indigenous Caucus members discussed boycotting the convention, “no longer being a part of these processes that continuously degrade our input,” she said.
“If you’re going to continue to continuously be ignored and continuously be just erased from the entire process, I don’t know how much longer we want to be complicit in attending these sorts of things,” she said.
The power imbalances can be discouraging but Ozawa Bineshi Albert still feels determined.
“COP is not a place that we go to thinking we’re going to get everything we want,” she said. To her, the overarching question is: “How can we make sure that we at least hold the line and make sure the least amount of damage and the least amount of harm is caused to frontline and Indigenous communities?”
Editor’s note: Nia Tero is a funding partner with Grist. Funding partners have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
The year 2023 is already expected to be the hottest on record, following a record-hot summer. But despite this, the U.S. is expected to reach record numbers in fossil fuel production for the year.
Liquified natural gas exports from North America are expected to double through 2027, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently reported. Most of the liquified natural gas projects under construction in North America are in the U.S., particularly concentrated in the Gulf of Mexico, where a major oil spill with over 1 million barrels of crude oil was recently discovered.
The latest short-term energy outlook from EIA forecasted that for 2023, crude oil production in the U.S. will reach 12.9 million barrels per day, up from 11.27 million barrels per day in 2021 and 11.91 million barrels per day in 2022. Further, the administration estimated that in 2024, U.S. crude oil production will reach 13.15 million barrels daily.
Overall, U.S. officials predict that oil and gas production will likely continue reaching near-record levels year after year to 2050, The Guardian reported.
“It’s particularly alarming to see the projections of record U.S. oil and gas production year after year until 2050,” Michael Lazarus, a senior scientist at Stockholm Environment Institute, told The Guardian. “The U.S. is locking in production for years that makes it hard to meet climate goals. It’s out of sync and it needs reckoning.”
Globally, countries are slated to be producing 110% more fossil fuels by 2030, despite many countries having pledges to reach net-zero emissions, a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report found.
The U.S., which has targeted net-zero emissions by 2050 and is expected to see declines in coal production by 2030, is the top producer of oil and gas in the world, according to the Production Gap Report.
While fossil fuel production is increasing in the U.S., EIA expects gasoline consumption in the U.S. to decline in 2024, but only by 1%. Still, EIA said that if gas consumption declines 1% next year, it will be the lowest gasoline consumption per capita in 20 years. The administration noted that remote work, improving fuel efficiency in vehicles, higher gas prices and high inflation could contribute to this decline in consumption.
U.S. emissions are expected to decline about 3% for 2023, from around 4,939 million metric tons of carbon emissions in 2022 to 4,786 million metric tons in 2023, EIA reported.
“We expect slightly less emissions this winter than in recent winters,” EIA shared in a report. “Less-than-average winter emissions are the result of several factors, including higher-than-average temperatures, improvements in energy efficiency, and decreases in the carbon intensity of electricity and space heating.”
U.S. carbon emissions are expected to fall by 1% in 2024. But the decline in emissions is not happening quickly enough to reach the country’s net-zero targets by 2050, The Guardian reported.
A recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report found that globally, countries are “severely off track” to limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Global emissions need to decline by 43% by 2030, compared to 2019 levels.
The global population is growing by 1% every year, and is projected to reach 9.8 billion by 2050. Vertical farming could provide a solution to cultivating enough food.
Vertical farms can be built in many unconventional indoor spaces, including warehouses, skyscrapers, shipping containers, old industrial buildings and factories.
Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) regulates temperature, humidity, lighting, water, nutrition and even carbon dioxide to create a perfect indoor microclimate for growing.
Most vertical farms use hydroponic, aquaponic or aeroponic growing methods.
Vertical farms use 95% less water and 99% less land than traditional farmland to create the same amount of food.
Without pests or weeds threatening the success of crops, vertical farms are often 100% organic, using no pesticides, herbicides or synthetic fertilizers.
High value, fast-growing crops like herbs, leafy greens, tomatoes and strawberries are among the most common crops grown on vertical farms.
High energy usage, limited crop variety and the highly technical nature of vertical farming are some of the drawbacks of this method.
What Is Vertical Farming?
What if you could walk into your grocery store in February to buy fresh tomatoes, strawberries, herbs, and leafy greens — all fresh and locally grown in the middle of winter? With vertical farming on the rise, that might just become a reality.
The vertical farm Innovatus uses data-driven lettuce cultivation and tailor-made LED light recipes in Fuji City, Japan on Sept. 24, 2019. Jonas Gratzer / LightRocket via Getty Images
Vertical farming is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a horticultural method of farming on vertical surfaces rather than horizontal ones. Vertical farms can be built in many indoor spaces, including warehouses, skyscrapers, shipping containers, old industrial buildings and factories. This highly precise method of farming utilizes LED lighting and smart growing systems to control factors like temperature, light, humidity, water, etc. in an enclosed space. It often employs other methods of farming as well, like hydroponics or concepts from other large-scale controlled agriculture operations.
History of Vertical Farming
Vertical farming as we know it is relatively new, but the concept itself is ancient. The Babylonian Hanging Gardens were built 2,500 years ago and remain one of the earliest examples of an advanced agricultural system that maximized space by growing upwards. The gardens were erected on vaulted terraces and likely were irrigated by a system of buckets and pullets that delivered water from the Euphrates River to a pool at the top. The Aztecs also used vertical farming practices with chinampas: an agricultural system of growing plants on floating, marshy rafts suspended in lakes and rivers. The ground was too swampy for growing crops, so they covered these rafts with soil, and let the roots of the plants grow through the bottom of the rafts into the water. In the 1600s, French and Dutch farms grew fruits against cold stone walls. Even though the Northern European climate was too cold to grow most fruits, the stone captured the day’s heat and released it during the night.
Flash forward to 1999. In a class led by Dr. Dickson Despommier at Columbia University, the modern vertical farm was conceptualized when the class sought solutions to feeding New York City using rooftop farming. In 2009, the first vertical farm was built in Singapore — Sky Greens farm had 100 towers to grow produce, each at 9 meters tall.
The Sky Greens Vertical Farming System in Singapore. Sky Greens
How Does Vertical Farming Work?
Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA)
Vertical farms differ from conventional agriculture mainly in that crops are grown in highly regulated environments: a concept called Controlled Environmental Agriculture. This type of agriculture is defined by its controlled approach to growing plants by manipulating the indoor environment to provide optimal growing conditions for specific plants. Temperature, humidity, lighting, water, nutrition and even carbon dioxide are customized and monitored. CEA essentially creates a perfect microclimate for growing — similar to a greenhouse environment, but much more exact. This method of farming has a lot of benefits — without the threat of flood, drought or other adverse and unpredictable environmental conditions, it allows for faster harvest cycles and predictable yields. It can also provide plants with the exact levels of nutrition, water and sunlight they need, wasting no resources in the process.
System Structures of Vertical Farming
In these controlled environments, advanced farming technologies also used outside of vertical farms are employed to cultivate plants.Hydroponic, aquaponic and aeroponic systems are the most commonly used system structures on vertical farms.
In hydroponic farming, plants are grown in a nutrient-rich aqueous solution. It’s the most popular method of vertical farming for its efficiency and versatility, and the initial technology costs are lower than most other systems. This method isolates the nutrients and minerals in soil that are beneficial to plants and adds them directly to the water, eliminating the need for soil entirely. Hydroponics usually employs a soilless growing media to support a plant’s roots while it grows — usually something like coconut coir, vermiculite, perlite, peat moss or rockwool.
The Growing Underground GU1 vertical subterranean farm uses hydroponic technology and LED lighting powered by renewable energy to produce fresh vegetables, in London, England on Sept. 29, 2020. Peter Dazeley / Getty Images
Aquaponic farming is similar to hydroponic, but uses water from fish tanks to support plant life. Water from the tanks contains nutrient-rich fish waste, which is then filtered and supplemented before being used by the plants. The water is oxygenated through this process and then sent back into the fish tank. Basically, there is a co-cultivation of both fish and produce by this method, each system benefiting the other.
In aeroponic farming, plants are provided with a nutrient-rich mist rather than water or soil. The plants grow on foam (which holds the plant in place), and the roots extend into a chamber filled with the mist. AeroFarms is one of the largest companies using this method, and successfully grows 550 kinds of vegetables.
Why Is Vertical Farming Beneficial?
There are notable environmental, economic and social benefits of vertical farming, all of which have contributed to its growth as a method of farming in recent years.
Requires Less Space and Land
You need a lot less space to create a vertical farm than a traditional farm, which requires huge swaths of fertile farmland to grow crops. In the last 40 years, we have lost more than 30% of arable land — that is, land that can be used for growing crops — to erosion and pollution, and are running out of land to meet the caloric needs of our growing population. Because of this massive need for space, farming is also the largest human cause of deforestation. Globally, 38% of land surface is used for agriculture. Razing ecosystems for farmland impacts biodiversity and the species that thrive there — rainforests especially are being cut down and replaced with monocultures, and more than half have already been destroyed. Vertical farming could present a solution to this crisis of space. By some estimates, 700 acres of farmland can be condensed into a supermarket-sized building with vertical farming.
We are in the middle of a water crisis, driven by climate change and our massive use of water for agriculture. Globally, 70% of water usage is attributed to agriculture. The megadrought in the western United States is in its 23rd year — but vertical farming has been identified as a way to relieve the intense pressure the drought places on farmers. Vertical farms use about 95% less water than traditional farms. Because they operate as a closed system, water can be recycled through the farm and reused. None is lost to evaporation, and water can be targeted directly at the roots so none is wasted. Crops grown on vertical farms also don’t need as much washing before they are consumed, since they’re grown in clean conditions.
Limited Chemicals
Soil on farms needs to be reinforced by organic and inorganic fertilizers over time as its nutrient stores are depleted. When fertilizers are applied to traditional farmland, they often run off into nearby waterways, and the excess nitrogen and phosphorus can create “dead zones” in bodies of water. Vertical farming doesn’t require these fertilizers, so there is no runoff into nearby communities.
Vertical farms also have little or no need for pesticides, since the controlled environment keeps pests from entering the space. One billion pounds of pesticides are used every year in the U.S, and have documented adverse effects on both ecosystems and human health — 10,000 to 20,000 farmworkers in the United States suffer from pesticide poisoning every year. Without soil, there’s also no need for herbicides on vertical farms to target weeds. Thus, many vertical farms are inherently 100% organic.
Higher and More Reliable Yields
In all, vertical farms have much higher yields — as much as 10-20x per acre. Looking to the future, the effects of climate change will certainly impact the ability of farms to produce food, whether it be droughts, floods, higher temperatures or more frequent natural disasters. Because vertical farms aren’t dependent on weather and seasons, they create perpetual harvests that are more dependable, so farmers don’t have to worry about unpredictable losses in quite the same way. Furthermore, since temperature and other conditions can be regulated, they can produce seasonal crops all year round.
Food Access
Leafy plants farmed at Veggitech, a farming start-up utilizing agro technology and vertical farming techniques in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates on Sept. 25, 2023. As a desert nation with significant water scarcity, the UAE currently imports over 80% of its food. Andrea DiCenzo / Getty Images
Food access is a growing argument for the expansion of vertical farms — particularly by bringing fresh, locally grown food to urban areas and food deserts, regardless of their environment.
With an estimated 80% of the world population living in cities by 2050, we will need to find a way to feed all of these people in areas where there is already very limited space for agriculture. The world population itself is projected to reach 9.8 billion by that year too, and food production will need to increase by 70% to feed a population of this size. In terms of acreage needed, this translates to an area roughly double the size of India. Given the small size of vertical farms, they can be built in existing spaces, including rooftops and other unconventional places available in cities. Growing fresh, healthy produce locally could make it more accessible and affordable to local people by eliminating the expensive shipping and storing processes of food that’s transported from far away. The food itself tastes better and is of higher quality, too — since it hasn’t been on the road or stored for weeks or months, the nutrients have had less time to deteriorate or for harmful bacteria like E coli to develop..
Reduced Emissions
Along with these opportunities for crop cultivation in urban areas, vertical farms make it possible to grow crops in places inhospitable to farming, like the Mountain West and glaciated parts of the Midwest. Therefore, out-of-season crops typically grown in warmer climates and shipped over long distances can instead be grown locally. This cuts down on the food miles attributed to a produce. Food miles — the distance that food has to travel before reaching consumers — accounts for about 20% of food system emissions. The food itself is also fresher, which means less food waste, and less rotting food producing methane in landfills.
Better Working Conditions for Farmers
Because there is less variability in vertical farming as opposed to outdoor agriculture, profits are more stable and therefore could mean better job security for workers. Workers aren’t using heavy, dangerous farming gear that can cause injury, and aren’t exposed to chemicals from pesticides and fertilizers, or diseases like malaria that are present on outdoor farms.
What Are the Potential Drawbacks of Vertical Farming?
While vertical farming presents exciting opportunities for the future, it also has its drawbacks — namely its high energy usage, limited crop variety and highly technical systems.
Energy Needs
The intense energy consumption of vertical farms is both an economic and environmental drawback. Given how dependent they are on electricity to function, indoor farms are highly vulnerable to fluctuating energy prices. They do, however, have control over when their “days” and “nights” fall, and can use electricity at times when it’s cheaper. Not all places have access to reliable electricity either, making vertical farming a risk endeavor.
The Vaxa Vertical Farm outside Reykjavik, Iceland, where salads, lettuces and other plants are grown under controlled temperatures year-round inside big vertical structures that use geothermal and hydraulic energy. Giulio Paletta / UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Although some vertical farms do utilize natural sunlight, most are highly dependent on LED lights to grow crops. There is some hope that electricity needs will fall in the future: according to Haitz’s law — which measures the progress of LED technology — every decade, the efficiency of LED lighting systems improves by a factor of 20, so energy usage might fall on vertical farms in time. Renewable energy resources can also be utilized to provide electricity, although most vertical farms are still powered by fossil fuels. There is also an argument that renewable energy sources like solar and wind require large amounts of land, which could counteract the land-saving benefits of indoor farming.
Crop Variety
Unfortunately, not all crops are successful in vertical facilities. Leafy greens, herbs and small vegetables and fruits like tomatoes and strawberries are the most common and successful. These high value, fast-growing crops allow the enterprise to be more profitable, given the faster turnover. Root vegetables, for example, take much longer to mature, and aren’t as profitable. Neither are cereal crops like wheat and corn that grow too tall to be stacked, so they cost much more than their conventionally grown alternatives.
There is also the question of whether indoor orchards are a future possibility, perhaps using dwarf varieties of common fruit trees. Some trees take a very long time to mature, however, which leaves them susceptible to diseases and bacteria in indoor environments.
Highly Technical Systems
Of course, given the highly technical nature of vertical farms, they are susceptible to technological issues. Power outages or other system malfunctions threaten the success of the farm — even a single issue with management of temperature, humidity, or lighting can hinder production. Farms must have highly trained people working on these specialized systems, and must be vigilant against water-borne pests or diseases, since they can spread quickly within the system once introduced.
Lack of natural pollination is another drawback of growing crops indoors. Even if bees are introduced, it’s hard for them to navigate under the artificial lights. This is because many indoor farms use pink and purple lights — since plants are most successful when exposed to red and blue wavelength light — but bees see differently from us and become disoriented. Workers therefore need to pollinate plants manually that require pollination to grow fruit.
Takeaway
Vertical farming has the potential to grow more food for a growing population, and can do so without the same environmental impact as traditional farming. It’s not just a thing of the future, though — it’s estimated that roughly 2,000 vertical farms are already operating in the United States. Aerofarms is one of the biggest names in aeroponic farming, and Bowery Farming based out of New York City is considered to be the largest U.S.-based vertical farming operation, and uses an AI operating system. Crop One and Farm.One are other big names in Boston and New York, respectively. Even the International Space Station has soilless systems growing cabbage, lettuce and kale in the cosmos. In 2021, vertical farming created a revenue of $3.4 million, and the industry is only expected to grow. By the year 2030, vertical farming companies are expected to grow by more than 25%, according to a 2023 study. So, maybe farm-fresh strawberries and tomatoes in February aren’t too far off.
The cool blades of grass between my toes were prickly, little sticky, teeming with ladybugs.
Growing up, my dad would mow the lawn every weekend in some Sisyphean jockeying for the top spot among neighborhood men.
When people proclaimed their love for that cut-grass smell, I recoiled.
“It’s a warning to other plants and insects, didn’t you read that article?!”
Perhaps they preferred the scent of control.
It’s the 20th anniversary of the lawnmower ban. At 63, the age my father passed, I bury my head in the hill and take a deep breath — the smell of sweet, untouched relief.
— a drabble by Looking Forward reader Caitlin Caplinger
The spotlight
Americans have a great fondness for green, tidy lawns. More than 40 million acres of land in the U.S. are dedicated to turf grass — and to maintain those acres, homeowners apply around 3 million tons of nitrogen-based fertilizers per year and give their yards haircuts with gas-powered lawn care equipment, which spews an estimated 30 million tons of CO2 as well as other harmful substances, like fine particulate matter.
Caitlin Caplinger, who submitted the drabble above, recalls their father mowing the grass every single week when they were growing up. “To what aim, I do not know,” they said, knowing that the grass was only going to grow back. One day, their father came into the house crying, because he had accidentally mowed over and killed a family of bunnies. He skipped a week after that — but then he got back to it.
Caitlin was inspired to write this drabble (their first!) as part of a speculative memoir project, envisioning the world they would hope to see at 63. And we, in turn, were inspired by Caitlin’s writing to look at some of the existing solutions and alternatives moving us toward the future they envisioned, free of the climate ills of lawn care culture.
Bans on gas-powered lawn equipment are already becoming a reality. Maryland’s Montgomery County, where Caitlin lives, recently passed a ban on the sale and use of gas-powered leaf blowers, which will begin to take effect in July.
More than 200 cities and towns now have some sort of restrictions on leaf blowers — though some are noise ordinances that focus on the times that blowers can and cannot run. California is the only state so far to ban all gas-powered lawn equipment, which falls under a broad category of gas-powered, small, off-road engines.
One barrier to the green lawn care transition is the cost. While electric devices are generally on par with or cheaper than gas-powered ones, both upfront and over time, for a small or midsize business like most landscaping companies, the cost of replacing existing equipment could be crippling. That’s why many of the bans include some form of incentives or reimbursement programs. Montgomery County’s, for instance, includes $100 rebates for residents and businesses who switch to electric leaf blowers.
Another growing movement is eschewing manicured lawns altogether. You may have seen the slogan “leave the leaves” on your Instagram or TikTok recently. One user on X joked earlier this month: “Hey, man. The leaves. They fell off your tree. They’re incredibly biodegradable, and will be gone by the end of winter. So you better hurry up and rake them into plastic bags.”
The pressure to take up the rake, or the loud, polluting blower, ties back to our obsession with neat and tidy lawns. But there are other models for landscaping that work with, rather than against, local ecosystems. Pollinator gardens, for example, focus on native flowers and other plants that provide food and shelter to pollinating critters. In wet climates like the Pacific Northwest, rain gardens help to capture and filter stormwater; in drought-stricken or desert climates, dryscaping could be favorable — an approach that focuses on water conservation with mulching and succulents.
Another model would repurpose lawn space to grow something more useful: food. “It’s so obvious, but nobody in the U.S. really does it,” said Heather Jo Flores, a writer and permaculture teacher. In the late ’90s, Flores helped start a movement called Food Not Lawns (in no way affiliated with the weirdly problematic Facebook page “Grow Food, Not Lawns”).
A photo Flores took of a friend’s front-yard garden in Portland, Oregon, in 2015. Heather Jo Flores
Flores has seen interest in growing food blossom over the past two decades, with a particular spike during the pandemic. A free permaculture program that Flores and others compiled online saw 50,000 sign-ups during the first month of lockdowns in 2020. “As soon as people had time off, that was what they wanted to do,” Flores remarked. “They wanted to be in the garden. And I thought that was lovely.”
The pandemic temporarily removed one barrier to starting a home garden: time. Another, more difficult one, is access to land. As Flores pointed out, skyrocketing housing costs all over the country have made it so that many of the people who would like to be spending time with their hands in the dirt don’t have a plot of dirt to call their own.
Even for those who do have a bit of green space, the path away from manicured grass can face roadblocks. Grist’s climate solutions writer Gabriela Aoun Angueira has wanted to convert her yard in Southern California to more drought-tolerant landscaping ever since she moved in about four years ago. “It has always felt extremely wasteful to use water for these lawns,” she said. Last summer, she did let her backyard go brown. But she doesn’t want the front yard to become an eyesore — both for her neighbors’ sake, and because it could land her in trouble with her HOA. Her vision is to replace the lawn with native vegetation that would require much less water than turf grass. But the cost has proved intimidating — as well as the knowledge required to map out a design that would prevent erosion on her sloped yard, and the need to submit a plan for approval from the HOA.
For now, she’s approaching the project in phases: She replaced two strips of her backyard with drought-tolerant plants, for a total of about $300, and installed a sprinkler-control system that she can monitor and adjust from an app on her phone. “That was an interim solution that I think really made a difference in my water use, while I’m still traveling along this journey,” she said.
For Caitlin Caplinger, control has also been a limiting factor. They now live in a condo where the landscape is maintained by an industrial lawn care service. Sometimes it’s so loud that even their noise-canceling headphones won’t drown out the din. They joined their condo board so they could start a sustainability committee, although so far, the idea of saying goodbye to lawnmowers hasn’t been popular.
Caitlin added that another crisis was also on their mind when they wrote the drabble above: the bombardment of Gaza. The Israeli military’s relentless tactics have been referred to as “mowing the grass.” In the drabble, they noted that the colors of the ladybugs and grass evoke the Palestinian flag, and the scene shows a future where all life is valued and protected. The lawnmower ban is both a literal lawnmower ban, and a metaphor for peace — both of which they hope to see in their lifetime. They said, “I want that to be a thing that we celebrate for years to come.”
— Claire Elise Thompson
P.S. Got a drabble of your own to send in? We would love to read it! And we’d like to feature more of them in the newsletter like this. Email us anytime at lookingforward@email.grist.org to share your 100-word vision for our climate future.
A resident in Pasadena, California, converted his grass lawn to mulch and drought-tolerant plants last summer, when the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California issued strict limitations on outdoor watering.
Every year, world leaders gather under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to assess countries’ progress toward reducing carbon emissions and limiting global temperature rise. The most famous of these so-called Conferences of Parties, or COPs, resulted in the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement, which marked the first time the world’s countries united behind a goal to limit global temperature increase. That treaty consists of 29 articles with numerous targets, including reducing greenhouse gas emissions, increasing financial flows to the most climate-vulnerable countries, and establishing a carbon market.
This year’s COP, which commences in Dubai on Thursday, is all about determining whether that agreement succeeds or fails. For the first time since the Paris accords, the negotiators assembled at COP28 over the next two weeks will conduct a “global stocktake” to measure how much progress they’ve made toward those goals.
While activists up the ante with disruptive protests and industry leaders hash out deals on the sidelines, the most consequential outcomes of the conference will largely be negotiated behind closed doors. In the coming weeks, delegates will pore over language describing countries’ commitments to reduce carbon emissions, jostling over the precise wording that all 194 countries can agree to. (In past years, negotiations have been saved by shifting a single comma.)
With more than 70,000 participants expected — not just national negotiators but also academics, activists, and civil society representatives — this year’s meeting promises to be particularly contentious. The conference is being hosted by the United Arab Emirates, the world’s fifth-largest oil producer, and is being presided over by the CEO of the country’s oil company, Sultan al-Jaber. Recent media reports suggesting that he has been using the COP28 presidency to push oil and gas deals have further stoked fears that he may not be a neutral arbiter to oversee the proceedings. Against that backdrop, countries will be negotiating the precise language that signals the world’s transition away from fossil fuels.
Countries are also expected to decide whether they can commit to tripling renewable energy use and doubling energy efficiency, measures that al-Jaber is pushing and are widely seen as a barometer of a successful COP. But a number of other major issues loom over the conference. Here are the big-ticket items to watch as negotiations get underway.
– Naveena Sadasivam
Will world leaders commit to a phaseout of fossil fuels?
In 2015, the international community agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to try to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. But it wasn’t until 2021, at the COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, that a U.N. climate deal explicitly referenced fossil fuels — the biggest contributor to climate change — for the first time. In that conference’s final decision text, which sums up the outcomes of COP discussions, diplomats agreed to pursue a “phasedown of unabated coal power” and a “phase-out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.” Last year at COP27, diplomats repeated the same commitment, leaving this language mostly untouched.
At both negotiations, governments fiercely debated whether to agree to a phaseout or a phasedown of coal — a subtle difference with major policy implications. Some countries, including small island nations, advocated for a full “phaseout,” which refers to a complete displacement of coal with renewables. Oil-exporting countries like Saudi Arabia and coal-reliant economies like India instead pushed for a “phasedown,” which would dramatically reduce coal use but stop short of eliminating it entirely. Efforts to limit all fossil fuels — and not just coal — have also failed in the last two years.
These debates will likely continue at COP28, according to climate policy experts. A State Department official told reporters in November that whether it’s “phasedown,” “phaseout,” or a completely different phrase altogether, the final decision of the conference will likely have some reference to the transition away from fossil fuels. In a recent joint statement, the United States and China agreed to develop renewables to “accelerate the substitution for coal, oil, and gas generation,” offering another potential wording option.
Adding to the complexity is disagreement over the use of the word “unabated.” Abated fossil fuels refers to coal, oil, and gas projects that use carbon capture technology, which the International Energy Agency recently characterized as “expensive and unproven at scale.” Wealthy nations including the U.S. and those in the European Union have called for a “phase out of unabated fossil fuels” — wording that Barbados, Finland, the Marshall Islands, and others have argued would leave the door open for “abated” fossil fuels. Those countries have instead called for a plain “phase out of fossil fuels.”
Will developing countries be paid reparations for the loss and damage wrought by climate change?
At COP27 last year, against the backdrop of devastating floods that left one-third of Pakistan underwater, countries united behind a landmark climate reparations fund. While it was a triumph decades in the making, negotiators ultimately did little more than agree to set up a fund to pay for the “loss and damage” suffered by the world’s most vulnerable countries, who have emitted relatively little carbon but are poised to suffer outsized climate impacts. This year, countries are gearing up to figure out the nitty-gritty details of putting the fund into action.
“Loss and damage is the main event at COP, to be honest,” said Avinash Persaud, a climate envoy from Barbados.
Some of the key questions surrounding the fund began to get settled at a meeting of negotiators in Abu Dhabi earlier this month. The negotiators recommended that the World Bank host the fund and that countries that have polluted the most historically, such as the U.S., U.K., and European Union nations, be the primary donors to the fund.
The recommendations did not please all parties, particularly developing nations who cited the World Bank’s history as a U.S.-aligned, bureaucratic institution that often favors loans over direct grants. A loan system defeats the purpose of a loss and damage fund, said Kishan Kumarsingh, head of multilateral environmental agreements for Trinidad and Tobago.
“It should not be loans against which you have to pay interest because then you’re paying for your own loss and damage,” said Kumarsingh.
Over the next two weeks, COP negotiators will decide whether to adopt the recommendations from the Abu Dhabi meeting. A U.S. State Department official indicated on a call with reporters earlier this month that this was likely. Negotiators are also likely to hash out which country will host the fund and take steps toward appointing a board. Other key points include when the fund will begin paying out, as well as how vulnerable countries will be prioritized for funding. Developed nations led by the United States are also looking to rope in high-emitting developing nations, like China, to contribute to the fund.
The success of the fund depends on how much money it’s able to raise. The global cost of loss and damage is expected to exceed $300 billion a year, and representatives for developing nations have called on wealthy nations to provide a minimum of $100 billion annually by 2030. The European Union has already pledged to make a “substantial” contribution. All eyes are on the U.S. to see if it’ll pony up.
Will a global carbon market save the Paris Agreement — or sink it?
For years, private companies have been using carbon markets to make progress toward their emissions reduction goals. When it’s too difficult to reduce their own climate pollution, they can buy credits equivalent to the amount of carbon dioxide “removal” generated by activities like tree-planting — carbon that allegedly, if not for the credit, would have accumulated in the atmosphere.
Now, the United Nations is trying to create its own carbon market under the Paris Agreement, to help countries reach their individual emissions reduction targets. The stakes are high: According to one estimate, allowing countries to trade carbon credits could allow them to slash 50 percent more emissions at no additional cost. But at the same time, experts are wary of replicating the private markets’ many, many flaws — including insufficient rules and oversight to ensure that sequestered carbon doesn’t escape back into the atmosphere. Some observers have described the private sector’s carbon markets as “riddled with fraud.”
To craft a better system for U.N. member states, a group of experts has been working since 2021 on recommendations for the kinds of projects that should be allowed to generate carbon credits, and how their emissions reductions should be counted. The group finalized its recommendations on November 17, less than two weeks before COP28. Among them: a definition for removals; requirements for these removals to be monitored for “reversals,” in which they release their locked-up carbon; and what to do in case of a reversal.
Now, these proposals will be discussed by a small body of negotiators at COP28 and, if all goes according to plan, presented for approval by the larger group of countries that have ratified the Paris Agreement. There’s significant pressure for countries to at least reach a compromise; if not, the expert group will likely have to wait until COP29 to submit revised recommendations.
Even under the smoothest of circumstances, however, there are still other issues to be resolved before the U.N. carbon market becomes fully functional. Notably, countries need a registry capable of tracking carbon credits as they’re generated and traded. This may not materialize until 2024. Isa Mulder, a policy expert for the nonprofit Carbon Market Watch, said it’s “unlikely” that any credits will be issued before 2025.
Mulder also criticized the expert group’s recommendations for leaving too much up to “further guidance,” meaning it’s unclear whether they’ll adequately address some of the problems that have plagued existing carbon markets.
Pedro Martins Barata, associate vice president of carbon markets and private sector decarbonization for the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, said there won’t be a single moment — a “ribbon cutting,” as he put it — that brings the new carbon market to life, neither during COP28 nor afterward. Rather, COP28 negotiators will “get as far as possible,” he said — far enough, he hopes, for worthy carbon credit project developers to get the ball rolling.
Will negotiators link fossil fuel use to growing public health risks?
COP28 features an official “health day” — a first in the conference’s history — aimed at supporting “the mainstreaming of health in the climate agenda” by bringing together officials from a number of countries, including Brazil, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Kenya, and Egypt, to talk about the health consequences of a warming planet. The World Health Organization and the Wellcome Trust, the international philanthropic organization, are the main organizers of the event.
The fact that health is appearing on the COP agenda at all is evidence that times have changed. According to Kristie L. Ebi, a climate researcher at the University of Washington who has attended every COP since 1997, a colleague told her that every person researching climate and health back then could fit in a phone booth.
That “was not as much of an exaggeration as it should have been,” Ebi said. But it’s different now, both on the international stage and in the research community. “It seems like everybody is getting into climate and health at the moment,” Ebi added. “We need the transformation, we need the attention.”
Like many other facets of the climate crisis, however, health still isn’t being treated with the urgency it deserves. A massive report published in mid-November said climate change is putting the health of billions of people around the world at risk. Weaning the globe off of its reliance on fossil fuels is the only real course of treatment for this diagnosis. Nevertheless, a draft of an official declaration on climate and health written by COP President al-Jaber, which is set to be signed by national ministers of health at COP28’s health day, doesn’t mention fossil fuels a single time.
Millions of health workers endorsed an open letter to al-Jaber in early November demanding negotiators commit to phasing out fossil fuels and exclude fossil fuel representatives from climate and health negotiations. They have done neither, and health researchers attending the conference this year say they are concerned that the day of health sidesteps meaningful action on the subject.
“The sad thing is that time is running out,” said Ramon Lorenzo Luis Guinto, director of the planetary and global health program at St. Luke’s Medical Center College of Medicine in the Philippines. He fears that negotiations in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates will serve up lukewarm takeaways that don’t include enforceable limits or actionable targets on fossil fuel use and production. “I think we in the health sector must not be naive that we are being used to make a potentially disastrous COP look good,” Guinto said.
Humans eat a stunning amount of meat every year — some 800 billion pounds of it, enough flesh to fill roughly 28 million dump trucks. Our carnivorous cravings, particularly in industrialized, beef-guzzling countries like the United States, are one reason the planet is warming as fast as it is. Raising animals consumes a lot of land that would otherwise soak up carbon. Cows, sheep, and goats spew heat-trapping methane. And to grow the corn, soy, and other plants that those animals eat, farmers spray fertilizer that emits nitrous oxide, another potent planet-warming gas.
For all those reasons, and many more, activists and scientists have called for people to eat less meat or abstain altogether. At last year’s United Nations climate conference in Egypt, activists chanted slogans like “Let’s be vegan, let’s be free.” At this year’s conference, which starts November 30, world leaders are expected to talk about ways to shift diets toward plant-based foods as a way to lower animal agriculture’s climate pollution, the source of 15 percent of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Cutting out meat can be an effective tool: The average vegan diet is linked to about one-quarter the greenhouse gas emissions of a meat-intensive one, according to a paper published in Nature in July.
But what would happen if everyone actually stopped eating meat tomorrow?
“It would have huge consequences — a lot of them probably not anticipated,” said Keith Wiebe, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute.
Such a quick shift probably wouldn’t cause the sort of turmoil that would come if the planet immediately ditched fossil fuels. But still, the upshot could be tumultuous, upending economies, leaving people jobless, and threatening food security in places that don’t have many nutritious alternatives.
Livestock accounts for about 40 percent of agricultural production in rich countries and 20 percent in low-income countries, and it’s vital — economically and nutritionally — to the lives of 1.3 billion people across the world, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. One-third of the protein and nearly one-fifth of the calories that people eat around the world come from animals.
Researchers say the economic damage caused by the sudden disappearance of meat would fall disproportionately on low-income countries with agrarian economies, like Niger or Kenya, where farming and raising livestock are critical sources of income. Niger’s livestock industry makes up about 13 percent of the country’s gross domestic product; in the U.S., the entire agricultural system accounts for only around 5 percent.
Niger is home to 4 million livestock breeders, according to the World Bank. Issouf Sanogo / AFP via Getty Images
It’s tough to predict exactly what the economic shock would look like on a global level. There has been “relatively little” research on how phasing out meat would affect employment around the world, Wiebe said. “It’s an issue that deserves a lot more attention.”
Millions of people would lose jobs, but demand for other sources of calories and protein might rise and offset some of those losses. Some workers might be drawn into agriculture to grow more crops like legumes. That shift in labor, some researchers hypothesize, could slow economic growth by pulling people out of more profitable industries.
Still, the effects would vary across cultures, economies, and political systems, and they aren’t as clear-cut as, say, the amount of methane that would be saved if cows ceased to exist. “It depends on the species of livestock. It depends on the geographic location,” said Jan Dutkiewicz, a political economist at the Pratt Institute, in New York City. “It’s very difficult, if not impossible, to talk in universal terms about addressing those kinds of things.”
It’s easier to talk in broad terms about another challenge with getting rid of meat: nutrition. Eliminating livestock overnight would deprive many people of essential nutrients, especially in regions like South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where meat comprises a small but crucial sliver of the average person’s starch-heavy diet. Animal-based foods are high in vitamin B12, vitamin A, calcium, and iron. That’s why researchers say preserving access to meat, milk, and eggs is key to keeping people healthy in low- and middle-income countries right now, where nutritious plant-based options are harder to come by.
And then there’s the issue of cultural damage. Taking away meat, according to Wilson Warren, a history professor at Western Michigan University, would do more than just deprive Americans of hot dogs and hamburgers and Italians of salami.
“Historically, the way that most people understood animals was through farming and having close contact with their livestock,” said Warren, who’s also the author of Meat Makes People Powerful, a book about the global history of meat. “You get rid of that sort of close connection, [and] I envision people in some ways being even less environmentally in touch.” (Warren grapples with this idea in a self-published novel called Animeat’s End about a future world in which eating meat is a serious crime.)
Many researchers agree that phasing out meat entirely, let alone immediately, isn’t an ideal solution to the climate crisis. It would be plenty, they say, to reduce consumption methodically and to focus on the countries that eat the most, particularly wealthy ones like the United States that have no shortage of alternatives.
It might be easier for the average American, who eats about 220 pounds of red meat and poultry each year, to trade a daily hamburger for a bowl of lentils than for someone in rural sub-Saharan Africa, who eats 10 times less meat, to give up the occasional goat or beef stew for something less nutritious. Such a shift in beef-loving countries also might reduce heart disease and cancer linked to eating a lot of red and processed meat.
Dutkiewicz suggested using guidelines established by the EAT-Lancet Commission, an international group of scientists who have designed a diet intended to give people the nutrients they need without destroying the planet. It consists of roughly 35 pounds of meat per year. Adopting that diet would require a drastic reduction of cows and chickens in countries like the United States, Australia, China, Brazil, and Argentina, and a slight increase in parts of Africa and South Asia.
Gradually replacing meat with plants could have immense benefits for the planet. “It would be a huge net win for the environment,” Dutkiewicz said. By one estimate, a complete phaseout of meat over 15 years would cut as much as one-third of all methane emissions and two-thirds of all nitrous oxide emissions. Water use would fall drastically. Biodiversity loss would slow. Animal welfare advocates would be happy to see fewer animals packed into tight pens wallowing in their own poop awaiting slaughter. And there would be ample opportunity to rewild abandoned rangelands and pastures at a scale that would sequester a whole lot of carbon — as much as 550 gigatons, enough to give us a pretty good shot at keeping warming below catastrophic levels.
Given the complexities and pitfalls of a complete phaseout, researchers and advocates have pointed instead to a more modest goal: cutting meat production in half. Replacing it with plant-based alternatives would lower agricultural emissions 31 percent by 2050, a recent study found.
“It doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing approach,” Raychel Santo, a food and climate researcher at the World Resources Institute, said in an email.
The solution, in other words, lies somewhere between culling cows in Niger and gorging ourselves on factory-farmed flesh.
