This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Globally, humanity is producing more food than ever, but that harvest is concentrated in just a handful of bread baskets. More than one-third of the world’s wheat and barley exports come from Ukraine and Russia, for example. Some of these highly productive farmlands, including major crop-growing regions in the United States, are on track to see the sharpest drops in harvests due to climate change. That’s bad news not just for farmers, but also for everyone who eats—especially as it becomes harder and more expensive to feed a more crowded, hungrier world, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. Under a moderate greenhouse gas emissions scenario, six key staple crops will see an 11.2 percent decline by the end of the century compared to a world without warming, even as farmers try to adapt. And the largest drops aren’t occurring in the poorer, more marginal farmlands, but in places that are already major food producers. These are regions like the US Midwest that have been blessed with good soil and ideal weather for raising staples like maize and soy. But when that weather is less than ideal, it can drastically reduce agricultural productivity. Extreme weather has already begun to eat into harvests this year: Flooding has destroyed rice in Tajikistan, cucumbers in Spain, and bananas in Australia. Severe storms in the US this spring caused millions of dollars in damages to crops. In past years, severe heat has led to big declines in blueberries, olives, and grapes. And, as the climate changes, rising average temperatures and changing rainfall patterns are poised to diminish yields, while weather events like droughts and floods reaching greater extremes could wipe out harvests more often. > “That’s like everyone giving up breakfast … about 360 calories for each > person, for each day.” “It’s not a mystery that climate change will affect our food production,” said Andrew Hultgren, an agriculture researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “That’s the most weather-exposed sector in the economy.” Farmers are doing what they can—testing different crop varieties that can better withstand changes in the climate, shifting the timing of when they sow, tweaking their use of fertilizers and water, and investing in infrastructure like water reservoirs. The question is whether these adaptations can continue to keep pace with warming. To figure this out, Hultgren and his team looked at crop and weather data from 54 countries around the world dating back to the 1940s. They specifically looked at how farmers have adapted to changes in the climate that have already occurred, focusing on maize, wheat, rice, cassava, sorghum, and soybean. Combined, these crops provide two-thirds of humanity’s calories. In the Nature paper, Hultgren and his team reported that in general, adaptation can slow some crop losses due to climate change, but not all of them. And, the decrease in our food production could be devastating: For every degree Celsius of warming, global food production is likely to decline by 120 calories per person per day. That’s even taking into account how climate change can make growing seasons longer and how more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can encourage plant growth. In the moderate greenhouse gas emissions scenario— leading to between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100—rising incomes and adaptations would only offset one-third of crop losses around the world. “Looking at that 3 degrees centigrade warmer [than the year 2000] future corresponds to about a 13 percent loss in daily recommended per capita caloric consumption,” Hultgren said. “That’s like everyone giving up breakfast … about 360 calories for each person, for each day.” The researchers also mapped out where the biggest crop declines—and increases—are likely to occur as the climate warms. As the world’s most productive farmlands get hit hard, cooler countries like Russia and Canada are on track for larger harvests. The map below shows in red where crop yields are poised to shrink and in blue where they may expand: Some of the biggest crop-growing regions in the world are likely to experience the largest declines in yield as the climate changes.Nature The results complicate the assumption that poor countries will directly bear the largest losses in food production due to climate change. The wealthy, large-scale food growers may see the biggest dropoffs, according to the study. However, poor countries will still be affected since many crops are internationally traded commodities, and the biggest producers are exporters. A smaller harvest means higher food prices around the world. Less wealthy regions are also facing their own crop declines from disasters and climate change, though at smaller scales. All the while, the global population is rising, albeit much more slowly than in the past. It’s a recipe for more food insecurity for more people. Rice is an exception to this trend. Its overall yields actually are likely to increase in a warmer world: Rice is a versatile crop and unlike the other staples, it benefits from higher nighttime temperatures. “Rice turns out to be the most flexibly adapted crop and largely through adaptations protected from large losses under even a high warming future,” Hultgren said. That’s a boon for regions like South and Southeast Asia. Decreasing the available calories isn’t the only way climate change is altering food, however. The nutrition content can change with shifts in rainfall and temperature too, though Hultgren and his colleagues didn’t account for this in their study. Scientists have previously documented how higher levels of carbon dioxide can cause crops like rice to have lower levels of iron, zinc, and B vitamins. So the food we will be eating in the future may be more scarce and less nutritious as well. And while climate change can impair our food supply, the way we make food in turn harms the climate. About one-third of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions stem from food production, just under half of that from meat and dairy. That’s why food production has to be a major front in how we adapt to climate change, and reduce rising temperatures overall.

Few have felt the whiplash of President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs with China more than American farmers. The US is the world’s largest exporter of agricultural products, from corn to soybeans, wheat, and cotton. And the largest importer of America’s farm products? China. The two countries have engaged in a back-and-forth series of escalating levies since Trump imposed tariffs on the country in April. Those tariffs were then deemed illegal the following month by a US trade court, and the administration is currently appealing that decision. One of the many farmers caught in limbo is Bryant Kagay, who raises cattle and grows soybeans, corn, and wheat. Kagay says he voted for Trump last year even though Trump promised that as president, he would place tariffs on the very products Kagay sells to China. But now, Kagay questions whether the president has a long-term trade strategy and is increasingly concerned about what the market will look like come harvest time this fall. “I like to think that my corn is really good, but as far as the markets are concerned, my corn doesn’t really look any different than anybody else’s,” Kagay says. When a farmer from a country with low or no tariffs can sell corn cheaper than Kagay’s on the global market, he adds, that farmer will win out. As the US and China continue negotiating, Kagay talks with host Al Letson about how tariffs from Trump’s first term affected his farm, why he voted for Trump in 2024 knowing tariffs could jeopardize his business, and why farmers are often hesitant to take government subsidies—yet often accept them anyway. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe. This interview was edited for length and clarity. Al Letson: So tell me about your farm. From what I understand, you weren’t living in this area, you weren’t living in Missouri for a while, and then you and your family came back. Bryant Kagay: Yeah, well, I’m the fourth generation on our family farm. I guess my great-grandfather, he started a very small operation and then my grandfather has grown it, really, mostly in the 60s and 70s and 80s. But yeah, following college, I had a corporate job, lived in several different states, but in 2018 my wife and I decided to come back and work into the farm, more in a management-type role, management trainee, if you will, type role. And I’ve continued to take more responsibility since coming back. How many employees do you have on the farm? Yeah, so it’s myself, my dad, my 87-year-old grandfather is still involved as much as he can be. And then we have two full-time employees and currently one part-time employee. So we’re a fairly small operation as far as manpower goes. What do you produce? So our main products, corn, soybeans, wheat, and then we also have a cattle operation. Many will refer to it as a cow-calf, so we have cows, produce calves from them, but then we also have, often referred to as a beef feedlot or a finishing operation that we feed cattle to get them right up to the point of them going to the meat processor for them to become the finished product. So you’re running a family business that depends on international trade. We’ve been following President Trump’s trade war with China. What would really steep tariffs mean for your farm? I think that what they mean for our farm is, it’s not that different from what they would mean to everybody. We live in a very global economy, a global market. So many of the products that we purchase, both on the farm and within our households and within any business you run, often come from overseas. Those trade networks and industries have been set up, many of them have been in place for decades. Chinese manufacturing, we’ve been making things in China for years and years, and they’ve gotten pretty good at it. They’ve got pretty good systems to get them shipped here. I think steep tariffs will, at least for the foreseeable future, will mostly raise the prices that everyday Americans and farmers spend on the things that they buy. So I think that’s how it affects all Americans. Now, how does it affect me differently? Well, many of the products I sell that get shipped into overseas markets or international markets, now they are looking to buy that commodity from somewhere else. And what I’m selling is a commodity. I like to think that my corn is really good, but as far as the markets are concerned, my corn doesn’t really look any different than anybody else’s. So if mine is now 20% higher or 120% higher, whatever these tariffs are, I’ll buy it somewhere else, because it’s the same stuff. Are you scared that if these tariffs continue that it will basically put you out of business? If China can buy soybeans from Central America at a much cheaper price than what they would buy them from you, how is that going to affect your farm in the long term, especially if these tariffs stay up? For our farm, personally, we try to manage things very financially conservative. So do I feel that a trade war would put us out of business? No, probably not, because if a trade war puts us out of business, it’s going to put a whole lot of other people out of business first, and there are business owners that have probably taken on more risk. And at the end of the day though, if there are, let’s just put it in simple terms, a hundred units of soybeans produced globally and China uses 50 of them, whether they get 50 from the United States or 50 from everywhere else, all the soybeans are probably going to go somewhere and get used. It’s that friction that gets added in the system for tariffs that, well, now instead of sending multiple large container ships to China with soybeans, I’ve got to send a hundred smaller container ships to multiple other countries to make that same sale. So you lose that economic efficiency the more hurdles you put in this trade deal. So what do you think of Trump’s reasons for imposing these tariffs? Well, it depends what day you get. So someday, one day, it may be, “I’m going to impose these tariffs because I want to bring American manufacturing back.” And you think, “Well, I could get behind parts of that in some industries.” But for that to happen, we’ve got to have consistent tariffs for a long time because I’m not going to come build a factory tomorrow, it’s going to take years. There’s whole supply chains that have to be built up around it, and if I’m an investor or a business owner, I don’t want to build a factory when tomorrow he may say, “Well, tariffs are off. We worked out a deal.” On one side, this long-term play that, “I want to get manufacturing and jobs back to the United States.” Which yeah, I think, I don’t know too many of us that would argue with that, but there’s a lot of hurdles to doing that and that’s a long-term play. And then the other side is, “Well, I’m just using it as a bargaining chip. I’m going to get him to the table and get better deals.” And he’s maybe done some of that. I don’t know. I’m not a hundred percent confident that he has a really clear vision for exactly how this plays out. I think, I don’t know, it’s been so uncertain whether, are these short-term, we’re going to try to get short-term deals, or is this a long-term strategic, we’re going to rebuild American manufacturing? And I don’t know where it is because it changes every week. And when we talk about, is it a long-term goal, I’ve done a lot of reporting on manufacturing in the past, and the thing that keeps coming to me is that it may be a long-term goal that is really unrealistic in the sense that I can’t imagine Americans going to work in manufacturing plants where the pay is not going to be the type of pay that… The reason why all the manufacturing is in different parts of the world is because their economies are different and people will go in there and work for a couple dollars an hour, whereas, here in America, people would need government aid to survive off of working in a factory if we were paying the same amount to workers that they do in China. So it doesn’t feel like a realistic goal to me, it feels like manufacturing at that scale is in our past and not really in our future. Yeah, I completely agree. I just think, yeah, if you want to talk automobile manufacturing or some of those higher level, more advanced type manufacturing. Yeah, and maybe there’s a national defense reason we need more computer chip manufacturing in the country, but if you think we’re going to have a Nike sneaker factory in the country, come on. These other countries have been doing this for decades. They’re good at it. They’ve got systems set up, they’ve got the people to work there. I don’t know any of my neighbors who want to go sit at a sewing machine and make t-shirts all day. That’s not what this country’s going to do. It’s probably not realistic. Yeah. So all that being said, in 2024 you voted for Trump knowing that this may be what he would do. How did you come to the decision to vote for him? That is a very good question, and it was something that I struggled with, to be a hundred percent honest, I was not thrilled with either candidate. I’m a little bit embarrassed that on the global stage, these are the best two candidates that we could come up with out of this great country. I was very uncomfortable with the Harris campaign on some social issues, some other things. I was very uncomfortable with the Trump campaign on a lot of, I guess, his personal character issues that I am very uncomfortable with. I don’t think it represents our country very well, what we stand for very well. Ultimately, because you look at what a president can do, I felt like his policies long-term were probably more in line with what I wanted, but this was not something that I was really sold on either way. So I did know that these trade wars were possibly coming. I also felt that his business experience, I guess I felt, much like he says, some of the time that he would use these type of things as a bargaining token, but at the end of the day, I do feel he’s got a decent business acumen and would recognize that, yeah, we’re not going to bring a bunch of manufacturing back to this country. Maybe we should use our power on the global stage to get some better trade deals. I was hopeful that amidst all the rhetoric and all the talk that he would use them maybe more wisely than I feel he has to this point. Let me run down some numbers for you here to… Because I want to focus up that you said that he’s got a good business acumen. In 1991, his casino, the Taj Mahal, bankrupt. In 1992, Trump Plaza Hotel, bankrupt. Castle Hotel Casino, ’92, bankrupt. Trump Hotels, Casino and Resorts in 2004, bankrupt. Trump Entertainment Resorts in 2009, bankrupt. I could go on, there’s more. I would say that the way we have talked about Trump, both in the media… Because I believe that the reality show that he was on where he’s got that great saying, “You’re fired.” It’s myth building. It makes this idea that he is a really great business man, but the truth of the matter is that when you look into his business deals, I mean he had a college that the government had to sanction and shut down because it was ultimately deemed, and I may be putting it in colloquial terms, but it was ultimately deemed a scam. So I mean, how do you feel about that when you think about it, looking at it from this vantage point? Yeah, maybe I should have rephrased my previous statement as he has given us this idea that he has a lot of business acumen. I’ve always questioned whether he really does or not, because I see those things that you’ve mentioned. Apparently he’s been pretty good at running failed businesses and enriching himself, which that is what pointed to a lot of the character issue that I had voting for him to begin with. I mean, that’s one of the character issues. I still think it’s no secret. I live in a very red area and the people I talk to, I think there’s still some that they still are very confident that he has this really good plan that this is all going to work out for the better. And I guess I don’t necessarily… I don’t have that much confidence. I think he’s doing a lot of running his mouth without much of a plan, and maybe it’ll end up okay in the end if he throws his power around enough. But I’m a little more skeptical. So Bryant, your farm has been in your family for a very long time. How have you seen farming change over the years? There have been a lot of changes in agriculture over the long term. When I think about my great-grandfather, he would’ve started with some horse-drawn equipment, likely moved into tractors pretty quickly thereafter, but nothing on the scale of what we use today. There’s a lot of technology that we use to try to make sure every product we use gets put in the right place at the right time, and we are just better at conserving land and water resources as well. I’ve done a lot of reporting with farmers in the past, and the one thing that I think our listeners may not understand or know, is really like the economics of farming. So I’m just curious if you can break down for my listeners, what’s your income like and how do you get that income? Do you get a big check from delivering cows to market? How does all that work? I think from the outside people see, we deliver a lot of high value products, whether it’s right now cattle are at record highs. The checks we receive from selling cattle are very high. The checks we receive from selling grain can be very big. To the average American, that’s a lot of money. The issue is that we have so many expenses tied to producing that crop that really very little of it is profit. As far as the money, when I had a corporate job, I had a paycheck every two weeks. I had so much money that went into my bank account and that was very reliable and consistent. With this, it’s a lot more inconsistent and you find the business can pay for a lot of our living expenses. So my out-of-pocket expenses are less, but I don’t take just regular paychecks. Mostly what we do is we take our profits and invest those back into the business through land and equipment that it’s like this business has it’s built in 401(K) that you’re investing in assets all the time and eventually you hope to get a pretty big asset base, but you don’t do it through collecting a lot of cash in your bank account. It goes elsewhere. When it comes to competition, it seems to me that you are dealing with different factors than your dad had, than your grandfather, than your grandfather had. And I’m thinking of specifically with the rise of big agriculture and these big company farms that I would imagine make it hard to compete because of the resources that they have. Yeah, I think what’s often referred to as corporate farms probably get a lot of bad press. I think there can be some confusion in just because you’re a really large farming operation doesn’t mean it’s not still family owned and operated, but it may not still have that same family feel that I feel our operation does. As you get bigger, you do have to put some corporate structure, mid-level managers, a lot more process and procedure in place. We have seen over the past 10 years, especially some of the very biggest producers have continued to grow, and I think the economics have worked out for them to do that. And they’ve really built systems and as equipment gets bigger, they’re just able to cover a lot more acres. I think for our operation, we decided that our way to improve and build for the future was not necessarily to try to achieve scale at all costs, but to try to focus more on a more diverse operation and also just to produce, let’s say, higher quality over quantity, let’s put it that way. Yeah. So take me back to 2018 when President Trump imposed tariffs on China. This is right around the time when you are starting to come back to the farm. How’d that affect you and your family? Yeah, so that was an interesting year. We had a pretty severe drought that first summer I came back and then trade war with China on top of that. So it was a pretty rough year that first year, but I guess I was still getting my feet under me. So maybe I didn’t fully grasp, I just thought that was normal, but that first trade war, it did severely affect the price of soybeans, primarily because China is such a huge buyer of US soybeans. We produce a lot of soybeans, and when your largest customer, the harder you make that to do trade with them, that directly affects our bottom line. And then on top of that, they come through with these direct payments from the government that I think are a touchy subject amongst farmers. I’m not going to tell you we turned ours away. You feel like it’s a competitive market. You can’t reject it on principle, but at the same time, I don’t think any of us feel like that’s how we want markets to operate. We try to be self-sufficient and run our business in a way that can be profitable and let me do that. I don’t need the government to come in and write me a check to make sure I stay in business. Yeah, that’s what I was going to ask you is why do you think it’s a touchy subject? Well, I think if you ask many people, in the parts of the country I live, about welfare programs, SNAP, they might look at those with a negative light. This idea that, “Hey, I work really hard to support myself. I don’t need the federal government coming in and doing that for me.” And then all of a sudden I’m a farmer and I’m taking this check from the government because government-induced tariffs reduce the value of my product. At the same time, I don’t know any farmer who turned theirs away who said, “Well, I don’t believe in it, so I’m not going to accept it.” We all took it, but I ultimately think it’s really those programs aren’t administered very well on who actually needs them the worst. And also if you give all a certain number of farmers in the same area, a whole bunch of money, it’s no different than the COVID payments that drove a lot of inflation. You can’t just hand out a bunch of money and not have other effects in the economy. And I think we saw that as well through that. So there’s a lot of debate about whether those payments actually helped or hurt, and I’ll let economists argue over that. The thing that stands out for me when I think about those payments is that when Trump did it, the left complained. And when Biden did it, the right complained. To me, what it tells me is that America has turned politics into sports. Maybe neither party is functioning or serving Americans particularly well, but because of team loyalty, people just go with it and sometimes they vote not for their interests, but for the team that they represent, their home team, the thing that they feel strongly about. Yeah, I think there’s a lot of reasons that our political system has drifted this way. I live in a congressional, like a house district that there’s virtually zero chance that it would ever flip to blue. So I think our incumbent, as long as he continues to say and do right-leaning things, he’s never going to be challenged. And he’s never going to be held to account for how much he actually accomplishes because, “Hey, he’s on my team, so I’m not going to go against something that my team wants.” But it’s something that American politics really has to figure out. I think we continue to go through these cycles where really nothing really happens. And I just think with this many smart people, we have to be able to come together and come up with solutions that maybe the edges of both sides are not thrilled with, but ultimately move our country forward. And I don’t know what it’s going to take to get there, but I too am very frustrated with this polarized, “I pick my team. The other team can do nothing right and my team can do nothing wrong.” Because we just know that’s just not how it works, and it’s just not true. I’m not confident enough in my own abilities, knowledge, biases, to think that I have all the solutions to make all this better. I know we need both sides to be able to come together, but our political system, our primaries, there’s so many reasons why that doesn’t happen. And I don’t know what it’s going to take to break, but you just see these presidential elections that are so evenly split, so much urban rules, so much class-based voting, and it’s not good for our country, and we do need some leaders who can really bridge that and try to bring people together for a greater good. You just gave a great campaign speech. I’m just saying. You are looking for an answer and I think you might be it. I’m just saying. Bryant Kagay, thank you so much for talking to me, and thank you for being open, man. You just have a good conversation. I am going to be thinking about this conversation for days to come. I really appreciate it. Thank you. I enjoy it. I try to be open and honest and I appreciate those kind words. I try to be a reasonable voice amidst all the polarization, so thank you.

This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The “Big, Beautiful Bill” that Republicans are pushing under President Trump would roll back almost all the clean energy incentives that Democrats enacted under President Biden, shredding federal support for solar, wind, nuclear, electric vehicles, and other climate-friendly technologies. But it would make a lavish exception for one supposedly green form of energy that isn’t green at all: farm-grown jet fuels. Aviation, which generated about 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2024, is a notoriously difficult sector to decarbonize, and the US aviation industry has committed to using so-called “sustainable aviation fuels” to reach its net-zero climate goals. But using crops like corn and soybeans to produce fuel instead of food not only increases food prices and global hunger, it spurs farmers around the world to tear down more forests and plow up more grasslands to create new farmland to replace the lost food. That’s why farm-grown biofuels have been a climate problem masquerading as a climate solution for cars, and they would have the same problem in planes. In a particularly egregious policy twist, the GOP bill would not only extend Biden’s tax credit for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) until 2031, it would also ban any consideration of those land-use emissions when calculating which fuels are sustainable. That would be like banning consideration of smokestack emissions when calculating which power plants are sustainable. And in legislation that otherwise slashes energy spending, the biofuels giveaway would cost US taxpayers an extra $45 billion. > Using vegetable oils for a quarter fourth of global aviation fuel, one expert > notes, would require 40 percent of global cropland—an area twice the size of > India. But such is the power of US agricultural interests, which are increasingly worried that electric vehicles will crush demand for corn ethanol and soy biodiesel on the road and have been furiously lobbying Washington to create new demand in the sky. In case there was any confusion about the purpose of the biofuels provision, it’s not in the energy policy section of the Big Beautiful Bill: It’s in the section that claims to “Make Rural America Grow Again.” The political twist is that it’s not just a Republican provision. While the overall bill has no Democratic supporters, and even some Republicans have objected to its assault on other energy subsidies, the biofuels carve-out has strong backing from farm-friendly Democrats, who created the original tax credit for SAFs in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. There’s always been broad bipartisan support for the federal mandate requiring corn ethanol to be blended into gasoline, and even though the overall Big Beautiful Bill aims to dismantle Biden’s climate policies and extend Trump’s tax cuts, its biofuels language was lifted from a bipartisan “Farm to Fly” bill explicitly designed to get ethanol to qualify for SAF credits of up to $1.75 a gallon.  “It’s shocking but it’s not surprising,” says Dan Lashof, a climate scientist and senior fellow at the World Resources Institute. “Agriculture has an extremely well-oiled lobbying machine. So even as Congress guts all these things that reduce emissions to save money, they get Congress to spend lots of money to expand the one thing that increases emissions.”  The impacts on the global landscape could be dramatic. An analysis by the American Enterprise Institute concluded that producing about 10 percent of US jet fuel from SAF by 2030—an explicit Biden Administration goal—would require about half the US soybean crop, occupying enough farmland to cover the state of Nebraska. Princeton senior research scholar Tim Searchinger has calculated that using vegetable oils like soybean for one fourth of global aviation fuel would require 40 percent of global cropland, an area twice the size of India. Flying a plane with corn ethanol would be particularly inefficient; it takes 1.7 gallons of ethanol to make a gallon of jet fuel, and producing ethanol uses almost as much fossil fuel as ethanol replaces. The world is already losing a soccer field worth of tropical forest every six seconds, most of it to agricultural expansion, and heightened demand for feedstocks like corn, soy, canola, and palm could overrun vast swaths of forests and undeveloped land, releasing its sequestered carbon and eliminating its ability to absorb atmospheric carbon in the future. The European Union specifically excludes the use of crop-based fuels for aviation because the land-use effects are so devastating, but even when Biden was still president, the US farm lobby was fighting to make sure that didn’t happen here. At one Biden cabinet meeting in 2023, agriculture secretary and former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack handed treasury secretary Janet Yellen a one-page briefing document, flagging it as a high-priority issue. Yellen’s high-priority issues usually involved inflation, threats of recession, and global economic crises, so she was perplexed to read a page of acronym-laden biofuels-industry talking points about the methodological superiority of the GREET computer model over the CORSIA model for calculating carbon emissions from ILUC. > One environmentalist likened a GOP provision that would disregard land-use > life cycles in emissions calculations to a legislative decree that pi equals > nine.  “Can someone tell me what this is about?” she later asked her top aides.  It was about billions of dollars, because the CORSIA model put enough emphasis on “indirect land-use change” to make crop-based aviation fuels ineligible for tax credits, while the farm-friendly GREET model downplayed ILUC enough to give corn and soybeans a chance to look sustainable. The stakes of this purportedly technical debate were so high that Biden climate czar John Podesta led a boringly named Sustainable Aviation Fuel Lifecycle Analysis Interagency Working Group to hash it out. As I recount in my forthcoming book We Are Eating the Earth, the working group held weekly meetings that were clearly less about improving climate analytics than justifying the creation of a lucrative new market for farmers. “Nobody talked about the elephant in the room,” one administration official recalled. “It was theater of the absurd.”  The GREET modeling implied that all of Iowa’s corn production could be converted to ethanol while inducing virtually no farmers anywhere on Earth to expand their fields to grow more grain, but the results didn’t have to make sense when Biden was declaring at an Iowa ethanol plant that “we want to see facilities like this all over the Midwest.”  In 2024, the Biden administration agreed to use GREET—and since even GREET didn’t make ethanol look quite climate-friendly enough to qualify for credits, Vilsack secured several additional conditions that made the model even more favorable for farm-grown fuels. He barely even pretended the decision was driven by science in his public statement, hailing it as “a great beginning as we develop new markets for…home-grown agricultural crops.” The initial US biofuels mandate for cars, in 2007, unleashed a torrent of deforestation in the Amazon, but Nikita Pavlenko, director of fuels and aviation for the International Coalition for Clean Transportation, says the farm lobby’s influence in Washington helped persuade the White House to ignore fears of a reprise. “We spent two years wrangling,” he says, “and in the end everyone who wanted to take land-use change seriously got steamrolled.”  A technician fills a Virgin Atlantic plane with biofuel before a demonstration flight last year.Virgin Atlantic Today, only 0.3 percent of the world’s aviation fuel is classified as sustainable: Most of it is recycled cooking oil that’s genuinely climate-friendly because it doesn’t use farmland or spur deforestation. United Airlines has an ad campaign touting its commitment to making SAF from waste instead of crop-grown feedstock, featuring Oscar the Grouch as its “Chief Trash Officer.” Environmentalists also hope to see planes fly on “green hydrogen” produced with clean energy; pongamia oil made from the seed of a climate-friendly tropical tree; and electricity, at least for short-haul flights.  But for the airlines, the most scalable alternative fuel opportunity would be subsidized crop-based fuels, which is why they have joined farm interests to push the current Congress to extend the SAF credit and make it even easier for farm-grown SAF to qualify. The Biden team had already diminished the role of indirect land-use change in its emissions analyses—the critics say its ILUC value should have been at least five times higher, and perhaps 40 times higher—and the US has already built enough biorefineries since 2021 to increase its production capacity for crop-based SAF sixfold. Still, the industry lobbyists wanted to make sure that ILUC would pose no threat whatsoever to fuels brewed from crops, and they got what they wanted on page 208 of the Big Beautiful Bill: “The lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions shall be adjusted as necessary to exclude any emissions attributed to indirect land-use change.”  This is like Congress dictating that financial regulators can’t look at how much banks owe their creditors when determining whether they’re solvent; one environmentalist compared the provision to a legislative decree that pi equals nine.  > “It’s hard to build a constituency for addressing an issue that seems so > technical.” “There’s a lot of hype about how this kind of legislation can jumpstart SAF and make a lot of money for farmers, and I think that’s right,” says Dan Blaustein-Rejto, who runs the Breakthrough Institute’s food and agriculture program. “I just don’t think that’s good.” Abraham Lincoln liked to tell a riddle: How many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg? His answer was four: A tail is still a tail, even if you call it a leg. And using farmland to grow fuel still induces the expansion of farmland elsewhere to grow more food, even if emissions analysts aren’t allowed to acknowledge those indirect land-use changes. The brazen ban on even evaluating indirect land-use change could create problems for airlines that want to sell carbon credits for using alternative fuels, since a Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance, funded by Jeff Bezos, is working with environmental groups to make sure the credits are scientifically credible. But it’s not clear how much buyers like Microsoft and Meta really care about scientific credibility. In any case, the biofuels lobby tends to get its way in Washington. The Biden administration issued an “emergency waiver” to get more ethanol blended into gasoline last summer, and the Trump administration plans to issue the same waiver this summer. The first specific item the Trump White House mentioned in a May 8 press release hailing its preliminary trade deal with the UK was increased access for US ethanol, with celebratory quotes from the US Grains Council, the Renewable Fuels Association, and the National Corn Growers Association. Those groups have a lot of influence, and it’s hard to imagine politicians bucking them over the proper way to assess indirect land-use change in life-cycle analyses. “It’s hard to build a constituency for addressing an issue that seems so technical,” Lashof says. “And even if we could, it’s even harder to fight the farm lobby.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In late January, the director of digital communications at the U. Department of Agriculture sent an email to staff instructing them to remove agency web pages related to climate change by the end of the following day.  Peter Rhee, the communications head, also told staff members to flag web pages that mention climate change for review and make recommendations to the agency on how to handle them. The new policy was first reported by Politico.  The result is that an unknown number of web pages—including some that contained information about federal loans and other forms of assistance for farmers and some that showcased interactive climate data—have been taken down, according to a lawsuit filed this week on behalf of a group of organic farmers and two environmental advocacy groups. The plaintiffs are demanding that the USDA stop erasing climate-related web pages and republish the ones taken down.  “Farmers are on the front lines of climate change,” said Jeff Stein, an associate attorney with the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice, who is representing the plaintiffs. “Purging climate change web pages doesn’t make climate change go away. It just makes it harder for farmers to adapt.” One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit is the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York (NOFA-NY), a group that helps educate and certify producers in organic farming practices. The organization has a hotline that often directs interested farmers to USDA websites as a starting point for more information.  > “The Trump administration is demonstrating itself to be the most anti-science > administration in history.” “All of a sudden, it’s like anything marked with climate is starting to disappear,” said Wes Gillingham, the board president of NOFA-NY. According to the complaint, the Farm Service Agency and Farmers.gov, both part of the USDA, removed information about how farmers could access federal loans and technical assistance to start adopting practices that help reduce emissions and sequester carbon, known as climate-smart agriculture.  The speed with which websites were taken down encouraged NOFA-NY to move quickly when it came to filing a lawsuit. “We want to prevent good science and information that farmers need from disappearing, especially this time of year,” Gillingham added, since the colder winter months are when farmers plan for the growing and harvesting seasons ahead.  Gillingham emphasized that access to scientific information about drought, extreme weather, and other climate impacts is essential to farmers’ ability to stay in business. “Farmers are constantly trying to improve their situation. They’re under immense economic pressure,” he said.  One tool that allowed farmers to assess their risk level when it came to climate impacts was an interactive map published by the US Forest Service, which combined over 140 different datasets and made them accessible to the general public, said Stein. Land managers could see how climate change is expected to impact natural resources throughout the country; for example, they could look up which watersheds are projected to face the greatest climate impacts and highest demand in the future. But this tool is no longer available. (As of late Monday evening, a link to information about the map on the Forest Service’s website was dead.) When tools like this go offline, they disrupt farmers’ ability to protect their lands and their livelihoods. In New York, where Gillingham’s group is located, the majority of farms are small: under 200 acres. “The margin of error to be successful, it’s pretty slim already,” said Gillingham. “So taking away information that allows farmers to make decisions about their business, and that also protects the planet, protects their soil, enhances their crop yields, it’s really insane to be doing that.” In its complaint, filed Monday, Earthjustice referred to emails sent on January 30 by Rhee, the director of digital communications at USDA, instructing staff to remove web pages. These emails were obtained by multiple news outlets last month. It’s unclear how Rhee’s directives were meant to be implemented—if all web pages that were taken down also had to be sorted and flagged for review, or if the staff received further guidance on which ones to unpublish and which ones to leave online. To date, neither Rhee nor the Department of Agriculture has publicly acknowledged the emails or the removal of climate-related web pages. “That’s problematic for a number of reasons, including that we don’t know the full scope of the purge,” said Stein. Larry Moore, a spokesperson for the USDA, said the agency is working with the Department of Justice, or DOJ, on court filings, and directed inquiries to the DOJ. The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.  Jason Rylander, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity who is not involved in the lawsuit, said that the agency’s move serves to diminish the public’s confidence in climate science, and the scientific community more broadly. “Once again, the Trump administration is demonstrating itself to be the most anti-science administration in history,” he said. The loss of dedicated web pages for climate research, mitigation programs, and datasets “holds back scientific inquiry and public knowledge,” he added. In addition to NOFA-NY, the other plaintiffs in the complaint are the National Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Working Group, an activist group focused on toxic pollution.  A hearing date is still pending. Rylander argued it’s likely that more complaints will be filed over the removal of climate information from other federal agency websites, like the Environmental Protection Agency. He also said the Center for Biological Diversity may look into these purges. Gillingham referred to these moves as part of “an indiscriminate political agenda scrubbing climate” from any government website. “We can’t sit by and just wait to see what happens. You know, they should not be doing what they’re doing. So it has to stop. And the courts are the only option right now.”