The Biggest Climate Problem You Aren't Thinking About

An interview with Michael Grunwald about his new book, "We Are Eating the Earth."

The following is an interview with journalist Michael Grunwald about his new book, We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate. You can listen to the audio right here, or get it wherever you get your podcasts — just search for The Cross Section and subscribe. A transcript is also below.

TRANSCRIPT:

Paul Waldman: When you think about the sources of climate change, you probably think about power plants burning coal and natural gas, or cars and trucks with internal combustion engines spewing greenhouse gases out of their tailpipes. What you probably think less about is the production of the food we all eat. Well, my guest today is Michael Grunwald, a journalist who spent years writing about politics for the Washington Post and Politico and other publications, and then a few years ago, he began to focus his reporting on climate change. His new book, which is going to be released in a few days (available for pre-order now) is We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate. Mike, thank you so much for joining me.

Michael Grunwald: It's great to be with you, Paul.

Paul Waldman: So one of the themes of the book is that land is not free. Can you explain why that is such an important idea to understand how climate is affected by the need to feed all eight billion humans?

Michael Grunwald: It is true, land has a cost. Right now, two of every five acres on the planet are either cropped or grazed. That's what I mean when I say we are eating the earth. It all used to be natural, and now it's agricultural. And that's really the transformation of the planet. All that natural land used to store a lot of carbon. It also used to absorb some of the carbon that we pump into the atmosphere with our fossil fuels.

And when we clear it, we lose their carbon and we also lose their ability to absorb more carbon in the future. I say that trying to decarbonize the planet while you're continuing to vaporize trees, it's like trying to clean your house while you're smashing your vacuum cleaner to bits in the living room. That's really what this is about. And ultimately, the way we've analyzed our emissions, our climate problems – and this started with biofuels. My main character was just a wetlands lawyer who thought corn ethanol seemed like a dumb idea because he didn't like corn. But he realized that the various sort of analyses, they call them life-cycle analyses that show whether this stuff makes any sense for the climate, were ignoring land. They were treating land as if it were free.

They were ignoring this idea that if you use land to grow fuel, you can no longer use it to grow food. It has an opportunity cost. And of course, probably what's going to happen is that somewhere else you're going to grow more food and it's not going to be in a parking lot. It's going to be in a forest or a wetland. And really it was this kind of eye-opening notion that, gosh, for biofuels we're completely ignoring land. And it turns out that biofuels are eating about one Texas worth of the earth, but agriculture is eating 75 Texases worth of the earth. And we've had really a similar blind spot when it comes to considering what that means for the planet and particularly the climate.

Paul Waldman: And at least agriculture gets you something you want, which is food. The biofuels question was something that I found kind of eye-opening. I had always just figured, well, it doesn't seem like it gets you very much. There really is no real environmental benefit to biofuels like ethanol. Presidential candidates go to Iowa every four years and talk about how great ethanol is. But what I didn't realize until reading your book is that it's actually terrible for the environment. It's not just that it doesn't get you very much. It's actually bad.

Michael Grunwald: Yeah, it's really bad. And now, course, since electric cars are sort of threatening the ethanol program, right? Because really all of our ethanol programs that all of the candidates agri-pander about in Iowa are just about increasing the price of corn and other grains, which is of course great for the corn farmers and bad for those of us who eat or use fuel.

But now with electric vehicles, they're really worried that there's going to be no demand for that, so they're trying to put grain into our planes. And in fact, in the Big Beautiful Bill, which as you know takes about a trillion dollars in cuts to various clean energy subsidies that are actually clean, but there's 50 billion dollars in new money for “sustainable aviation fuels.” And along with that, they've put in some language that prohibits the people analyzing the climate impact of these biofuels from looking at land use. So again, it's sort of like corn and soy wasn't penciling out, so they're essentially telling the government to put down their pencils.

Paul Waldman: Now, one of the things you talk a lot about in the book is beef. The problem seems to be that people really love beef. And maybe you could explain why it is so problematic from a climate standpoint compared to other kinds of food.

Michael Grunwald: It’s true. People say that the meat is a problem and it is; we eat 350 million tons of meat every year. And I'm not going to pretend that chicken and pork are not worse than beans and lentils. If you can go vegan, that is the best diet for the climate. But it turns out that beef is like 10 times worse than chicken or pork. So if you just cut out beef and lamb like I have, you're basically just as good as a vegetarian because vegetarians tend to eat more and tend to eat more dairy. And really, cows, cattle are the baddies. I'm sure people have heard about how they burp and fart a lot of methane. They also poop and that creates all kinds of problems. But the real problem is how much land they use.

In the United States, we use half of our agricultural land to produce beef that provides about 3% of our calories. Cattle are just incredibly inefficient converters of their feed into our food, which is why grass-fed beef is even worse than feedlot finished beef, because they're a little bit more efficient. Beef really are a problem. Cows are the problem. At least dairy, they're providing food several times a day. But of course, beef cattle only provide food once. If you care about the climate and the planet, there are a million things you can do to try to reduce your impact, but the number one easiest and best is to eat less beef.

Paul Waldman: That brings up another question. When you say the words industrial agriculture or factory farming, most people, even people who eat meat, have negative associations with that. But when it comes to the climate effects of food production, the story is somewhat more complicated. And that gentle family farm may actually be worse for the climate than the factory farm despite all the other things that the factory farm might bring with it that are problematic. But can you explain a little bit what it is about industrial agriculture that actually in some ways is better than the kind of small family farms of the past when it comes specifically to climate change?

Michael Grunwald: No, that's right. And I get why people hate industrial agriculture because it treats animals badly, treats people badly. Most of the people running it, their politics suck, and they're lobbying against environmental regulation and climate action. They use too many antibiotics, which is a public health crisis of its own. And yeah, these factory farms are sort of unpleasant. They dump a lot of poop into the rivers. They do lots of things that people don't like.

That said, they produce a lot of food. This is what factories do. They manufacture cheap commodities in big numbers and the world is going to need 50% more food in the next 25 years. We’re going to have to make more food than we've made in the last 10,000 years. And it's going to have to do that with less land. And that is something that industrial agriculture does pretty well. It's not the only way to have high yields, but high yields are really important.

We need to make more food per acre so that we can use fewer acres to make food. Michael Pollan, who writes beautifully, has created for a lot of us this idea that there's kind of good farming, natural farming, kinder and gentler farming that's more diverse, fewer chemicals, not these horrible industrial chemical-soaked monocultures that people don't like. But the fact is that the real environmental damage that's done by agriculture is that transformation of nature into farms.

Even the nice Michael Pollan bucolic farms, that's when you lose all the biodiversity. That's where you lose all the carbon. And there is an additional cost to intensifying those little farms. It's not so great for the microbiome to be bombing it with chemicals and have only corn and soy. But the fact is, the real damage was when you lose the nature in the first place and industrial agriculture or certainly high yield agriculture can help us use, lose less land.

The Green Revolution tripled our yields since the 1960s. So that this amount of food would take three times more land if we hadn't had this Green Revolution with chemicals and GMO seeds and large-scale irrigation and factory farms and all kinds of things that people don't like.

Paul Waldman: And so are there ways out there to, looking into the future as more and more people around the world, their incomes go up, which means they want to eat more meat, among other things, are there ways to increase those yields that maybe that don't come with a lot of those negative externalities?

Michael Grunwald: Yeah, and this is part of what I talk about in the book is this idea that maybe we can have a greener green revolution. The 20th century was a lot about chemistry. And so you have these fertilizers that are literally manufactured from natural gas. And they're the reason that we have these algal blooms in the Great Lakes and that we have a dead zone the size of Connecticut in the Gulf of Mexico. If I'm still allowed to call it that. I'm sure I am on your pod.

But the fact is that these fertilizers help stuff grow and pesticides are really good at killing pests. So I think in the future, and I write about dozens of potential solutions in my book, but a lot of them have to do with using biology instead of chemistry. I write about a company like Pivot Bio, which is backed by Bill Gates, and they make this kind of alternative fertilizer where they gene edit microbes to essentially grab nitrogen out of the air and feed it to crops instead of pouring chemicals on it. And that's very exciting. It's on 5 million acres in the United States and it's replacing about a fifth of the fertilizer. And that's just great. I write about a bio pesticide where they're actually using the mRNA technology behind the COVID vaccines to literally constipate potato beetles to death.

And in a way it's sort of like, it's like sending Jason Bourne into just take out the bad guys instead of just like a nuclear bomb that takes out everybody and all the good bugs as well as the bad bugs. So I think there's a lot of exciting technologies. Scientists at the University of Illinois are literally trying to reinvent photosynthesis, which has done a pretty good job supporting life on earth for a few billion years, but turns out to have some real inefficiencies. And they're using artificial intelligence and modern gene editing and big data to try to figure out where the inefficiencies are and edit them out. And they think they can increase crop yields 50% over the next two or three decades. So there's a lot of exciting things happening.

You even mentioned with beef, where I went down to Brazil and I saw these ranches where they were, in some ways, modern industrial ranches where they had the massive tractors and feed lots and they fertilized their pastures in ways that Michael Pollan would hate. But then they also use some of these kinder and gentler regenerative practices that Michael Pollan pushes. Cover crops, and no-till farming, and they integrate, they let the cows eat the cover crops and then they have these mob-grazing approaches to the cows and basically all kinds of things that are sort of not doing it because they read Michael Pollan, just doing it because kick-ass yields are good for farmers and it turns out good for the planet. So I do think there's a lot of hope out there, but I also point out that none of these solutions are very far along and they are going to require some government support.

Paul Waldman: Well, speaking of things that are not very far along, let's talk about fake meat. We've had these kind of up and down hype cycles for a lot of these things, whether it's Impossible Burgers, various kinds of cultivated meat, which is actual meat that is grown in a lab or in something that looks like a lab. But as of yet, none of them have panned out the way people have hoped. Can you talk a bit about why that has happened? What is the cycle that these new products go through when they get all this money from venture capitalists, and then, I feel like in reading your book, the number 98 % kept coming up, that their stock prices went down by 98% happened to one company after another.

Michael Grunwald: Yeah, these are hard times. A lot of these investors are really, really hating life. It's funny, I actually started my reporting this book for this book at the Good Food Institute conference in 2019. They're kind of like the trade group for fake meat of all sorts. And at the time, this was a couple of months after Beyond Meat went public, and at the time, Beyond was worth about a third as much as Tyson Foods.

And the mood at this conference was just like the exuberance was off the charts. People were having serious conversations about whether it would take one decade or two to completely eliminate the meat industry. My joke was that I thought I was going to accidentally raise a series A round in the drinks line. Look, at the time it was like, hey, meat is kind of inefficient, right? Cows have hooves, cows have tails, they poop, they burp, they do all kinds of breathing and have reproductive systems that don't produce meat. Why don't we just replace that, right? Instead of putting 25 calories into a cow, 25 calories of plants into a cow to make one calorie of meat. Why don't we just make it out of plants, sort of recreate that architecture?

The idea was, these aren't going to be the same old hockey puck veggie burgers. And they were better than that. And there was a lot of excitement about that. But they weren't better than meat. Like, meat's really awesome. A lot of my friends told me like, especially since I'm still eating chicken and pork, you're quitting beef, in a month, you won't even miss it. I miss it. You know, when I when I went to Brazil and visited those visited those cattle ranches, I fell off the wagon. I had a bunch of really awesome local steaks. And so I get it.

I went back to GFI, the Good Food Institute conference in 2023, towards the end of my reporting. And there it was all doom and gloom. And it was like, we're screwed, we're never going to make it. This was all a bad idea. What were we thinking? And I again thought that was excessive, right? I mean, it's, like, yeah, you came out with these products. They were not as cheap and not as good as meat. So it did not do very well in the marketplace. But to me, the answer is like just like with Tesla, electric cars, you got to make them better. Now, electric vehicles and solar and wind, they had a lot of government support that helped them get better. And you're starting to see a little bit of that, obviously not in the U.S. right now under Trump, but around the world you're starting to see some government support for alternative proteins, but it's very early.

Cultivated meat has had $3 billion in investment in its entire history, and we put in $250 billion into solar in a quarter. So, I haven't given up on it. And again, this stuff is really important, because it's 90% less land and 95% fewer emissions. So if you're looking for ways to get us to eat less beef, the vegan approach of like “meat is murder, you suck, stop doing that” hasn't really worked so well. Maybe this can.

Paul Waldman: I do wonder if that history and the way it is politicized is an impediment not just to the fake meats that are made from plant matter, but even to the cultivated meat, which is meat. You live in Florida. Your governor, Ron DeSantis, I think it was maybe last year, signed a bill outlawing the sale of cultivated meat in Florida, which was not for sale anywhere in Florida, or I don't even know if it's for sale anywhere. It has these small startups that have produced, you know, one hamburger or one piece of salmon or whatever. And there really is no logical reason why Ron DeSantis should be out there saying, we are never going to give up our beef and, you know, be forced – I think he even said in that press conference something about how we're not going to let the global elite force us to eat bugs, as though that was something that anyone is actually trying to make them do. But it just slots well into that kind of culture war that politicians like him love to wage. And I wonder if you think that's going to be an impediment forever for cultivated meat or if that might fade away, if it actually becomes reasonably priced and you can actually get a real steak or a real hamburger that just happens to have been grown in a vat.

Michael Grunwald: You raise exactly the right question, and I am definitely worried about this. You don't want these things to be “Biden burgers,” just like you didn't want electric vehicles to be Obama mobiles. Ideally, what was it Michael Jordan said? That Republicans buy shoes too. And you want them to buy meat substitutes. That said, as electric vehicles got better and cheaper, they got more popular. And certainly solar is seen as, that's the ultimate “woke” energy. And they're actually trying to ban it on farmland in a lot of rural counties. But the market has really spoken on solar, and the politics can end up delaying the transition, but it's just so efficient and has gotten so cheap that in most of the world, if you're building a new power plant, it's probably a wind or solar plant. And so the hope is that over time, cultivated meat and plant-based meat will get so good and so cheap that it will become this kind of overwhelmingly compelling product that will overcome some of these, “Oh, it's ultra processed garbage, it's a woke burger.” But I'm not going to pretend it's not a challenge. On the list of challenges that these things have, that's a real one.

Paul Waldman: Well, let me ask you, you have probably tried more different kinds of substitute, fake and cultivated meats than almost anyone. Which ones did you find the most tasty?

Michael Grunwald: Well, I will say that a lot of the cultivated meat, you can't tell the difference. That is really extraordinary. And it's not that extraordinary, right? Cause it tastes like chicken because it's chicken. It's made from actual chicken cells. And particularly the ones I've had like at Upside Foods, I’ve had chicken that was a hundred percent chicken. I think the stuff you're going to start seeing in the marketplace, it's going to be blended with plant-based material.

But that was better than chicken because it was made from not these kind of industrial chickens that are bred for fast growth and, all kinds of nastiness, but from the original heritage chickens that certainly taste chicken-ier. So that was incredible. I've had cultivated sushi from Wildtype and lox that was made from salmon cells and that was delicious.

Mission Barns should be on the market very soon. They do a little bit of cultivated fat, pork fat, and they blend it into plant-based meatballs. And I've had their salami as well, which it's really good. And even with the small percentages, partly because fat is such an overwhelming part of the taste of a lot of meat, it turns out. So one thing I've noticed with cultivated meat is that it does sort of send that meat message to my brain, I call it like kind of two million years of evolution saying hi.

On the plant-based side and the mycelium, the kind of fungus-based side, there it's more kind of like they're trying to copy meat. And on things like chicken nuggets, they're just as good. There's no longer any reason to have a chicken-based chicken nugget. I mean, who even knows what's in those things. They're mostly just a vehicle for sauce anyway. But the more complicated you get, I've tried a couple of plant-based and fungi-based steaks and they were just not there yet. I've heard talk that there are a couple of companies that are making a lot of progress there, but again, meat is a really good product. We've been eating it for a very long time. Most people don't care about the climate, so it's going to be very difficult to sort of put together a value proposition where people are like, “Hey, I want this stuff instead of the delicious cheap stuff I've been eating for so long.”

Paul Waldman: Well, let's turn to politics. So the Biden administration put a lot of its climate effort in the legislation that it passed – the Inflation Reduction Act, the infrastructure bill – into agriculture. And this was, I think, in part an effort to show red America that they were interested in their welfare too. That's where a lot of their other climate efforts went. The vast majority of spending on things like subsidies for green industries went into Republican areas. But that was true of agriculture too. And I wonder as that stuff has developed (and obviously now a lot of it is being repealed by the Trump administration and Republicans, we can talk about that in a second), but what was your assessment of that package of policies as it related to agriculture and what the Biden administration was trying to do?

Michael Grunwald: Well, they definitely had a theory of the case. And you sort of alluded to it. They put like 20 billion dollars into what they called climate smart agriculture. And so, again, the theory was it's going to be all carrots, no sticks, that there's no point in trying to tell these guys in rural America, you have to do this, that they're skeptical of climate stuff anyway. They're just going to rebel and they have too much political power. You've got to give them an incentive. You basically got to say, here's some money, try to do some good stuff with it. And the idea was that these kind of Republican farmers wearing the John Deere hats are going to be like, “Hey, this actually works. It's pretty good.” And sort of embrace it.

There were real debates inside the White House. One of Biden's aides was really pushing for, you want to work on nitrous oxide, you want to work on methane, because these are basically like trying to incentivize them to use less fertilizer, try to incentivize them to manage their manure better, things that we actually know how to do a little bit and are not that complicated and could actually really move the needle quickly. But the administration, [Secretary of Agriculture] Tom Vilsack and some of his aides were really in love with this idea of carbon farming, this idea that you could get these guys to do these regenerative practices that you might've seen in movies like Kiss the Ground or Common Ground. And the idea is that essentially by kinder and gentler farming, you're going to take some of that carbon that our fossil fuels have pumped into the sky and kind of magically move it underground to our soils.

The science on it really sucks. But the compromise was, okay, we're going to go ahead and do it, we're going to throw billions of dollars at it, but we're also going to put some money into measuring it. So we'll at least see if it works. And that actually was a reasonable compromise. But of course, as you say, the experiments are going to be a waste of time because they didn't get far enough to really see if they work. There was some money for, I write about, there's a methane reducing project on rice fields. That's been a massive success. Instant reductions in emissions. And I feel like if they had done more of that, where they could have shown some results? And that project, now they're selling their emissions reductions in the carbon markets, they’re going to be able to continue to do it and expand their program without government subsidies. That's how it's supposed to work. That's how the Obama stimulus really did with clean energy, while this was really kind of trying to make “fetch” happen with this carbon farming stuff, and so far it has not happened.

Paul Waldman: And the all carrot, no stick approach, that seems to be a general conclusion of the entire environmental movement across all issues. We're not going to do carbon taxes. Let's just make this nice and easy for people. They get so spooked by the idea that they're asking people to make any kind of sacrifice that they figured that if we can just throw a bunch of carrots in front of people, then maybe we can get to the same kinds of climate goals that we were trying to with those other means.

Michael Grunwald: And it's not a crazy idea, particularly with the power of the agriculture industry, which is throughout my book. I tell stories about the kind of absurd amount of power they have and the ridiculous length that members of Congress will go to pander to them. That said, from a democratic perspective, there's really bipartisan support for a lot of these biofuels, for farm subsidies and for every kind of farm subsidy, for crop insurance and loan deficiency payments and conservation payments that are often just to like help farmers build fences and put lids on their manure, lagoons and all kinds of things that we wouldn't really think is like major environmental investments.

Around the world there are six hundred billion dollars worth of agricultural subsidies every year, and why should the United States be any different? But from a Republican perspective, it's terrible, it's certainly not conservative. And it's, in my opinion, terrible public policy. But at least Republicans are getting votes out of it. They're dominating even more and more in rural America. Well, Democrats seem to be happy to throw just as much, in some cases, even more money at these farmers. And they're getting nothing for it.

I always like to point out that when you look at the Farm Bureau, their manifesto about what we stand for, the number one thing they stand for is that marriage is between a man and a woman. And so it has nothing to do with farming, but they know who their people are. And to me, that just is a suggestion that this idea that throwing more money at them is going to somehow be good politics, I've been very skeptical of that.

I'm not sure I have a better idea, other than don't do that. I'm not sure how to bring rural America on board with the Democratic Party, somebody smarter than me is going to have to figure that out. But certainly, we all know what the definition of insanity is and Democrats seem pretty committed to doing the same thing over and over and getting nothing for it.

Paul Waldman: That's a whole topic that I've written lots about that we could go on about.

Michael Grunwald: I've heard, should we discuss white rural rage?

Paul Waldman: Well, it is now out in paperback. Briefly, my position has been that the problem Democrats have is that they haven't been willing to really attack Republicans. And even though there is consensus on things like farm subsidies, you see now how many different ways the Trump administration is harming people in rural America who were some of Trump's most devoted supporters. And it's happening in a lot of different ways. Things like cutting Medicaid, which is a dire threat to rural hospitals. About 200 rural hospitals have either closed completely or dramatically reduced their services in the last 20 years or so. And when you go to rural communities, the two biggest employers are always the closest hospital and the local school district. And so people depend on them, not just for healthcare, but for jobs.

That's just one example. There are all kinds of different ways that that rural America is being harmed. Lots of programs that are being cut. Rural development programs and things like that. The problem Democrats have is that when they come back into those rural areas, which a lot of which in a lot of cases they have abandoned, which left it so that Republicans didn't have to do anything to win elections, they do so in a very apologetic way. And the recommendation that they always get from rural liberals is, you have to show up, and you have to be respectful and show people that you understand where they're coming from. And that is maybe necessary, but not sufficient.

And what they haven't done is really waged any kind of full-on attack on the ways that the Republicans who were elected in those areas from every office, president down to dog catcher, have failed those people. And so I think Democrats have to talk more about that and they have to be more frank, and to say, you have been sold a bill of goods. The people that you’ve been electing have betrayed you. And if you are not going to vote for Democrats, at the very least, you ought to get yourself some better Republicans.

Michael Grunwald: I think that's right. I’m coming at this more from a farm policy perspective, but it's not like the money that they're showering on these really rich, big farmers is really doing much for rural communities. It does something. I come back to this a lot, there used to be this kind of this sort of grand bargain: Urban people can have their food stamps and rural people will get their farm subsidies and everybody will go along with it. But since Republicans are now backing off the food stamp deal, you'd think that now more than ever, this is a time for Democrats to at the very least say, hey, if we're going keep throwing all this money at you, we've got to at least have some responsibility here. There has to be a grand bargain. We'll even help you make more food.

Trump is running around cutting agricultural research when we should be going in the opposite direction. But the fact is, we want you to make a lot of food, but you've got to do it with less of a mess. And that's really what has to happen with agriculture around the world. And it's going to be hard. But I do give the example of Denmark –which, I know, I know, it’s Denmark – but they just passed a massive agricultural reform, partly because their climate policy has been so aggressive in other areas that their energy sector is pretty clean. And now their agriculture sector is an outlier. But instead of doing what the enviro wanted, which was to kind of shut down the Danish dairy and pork industries, which are really efficient and just would have essentially outsourced their emissions abroad, there's going to be a lot of investment in helping them get even more efficient, but also cleaner with all kinds of new technologies.

At the same time, there's going to be a tax on agricultural emissions. There's going to be a national effort to promote sort of plant forward eating. And they're going try to rewild like a million acres of farmland, turn it back to nature. That would be hard in the United States, like a tax on emissions. I talked to one guy, a pollster who said that taxes on meat are the least popular policy he had ever polled. He said it was like veterans benefits for ISIS.

So these things are hard. If it were easy, somebody would have done it long ago. And these are really pressing problems, not just for foofy climate people, but for people who care about feeding the world, for hungry people and for people who just care about the Amazon. It would be nice to have the lungs of the earth and we’re cutting it down really fast. We're losing a soccer field worth of tropical forest every six seconds. I know that's not going to be the number one priority in American politics, but probably ought to be a priority.

Paul Waldman: Well is a great place to end. Mike, thank you so much for joining me. Again, the name of the book is We Are Eating the Earth, the Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate. Michael Grunwald, thank you so much.

Michael Grunwald: Thanks for all your good work, Paul.

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