A Climate Change with Matt Matern Climate Podcast

We had gotten rid of a South America worth of forest before the Industrial Revolution. And again, it’s not because people are evil or people hate nature. It’s because people like to eat. I always say that my book is kind of about how to feed the world without frying the world. We’re pretty good at feeding the world. We know how to do it, and if you know we have a problem, we can just cut down more trees and expand the world’s agricultural footprint. The problem is that doing it without frying the world, and that’s going to require change.

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host, I’ve got a great guest on the program. Michael Grunwald, Michael, welcome to the show.

Oh, thanks so much for having me. Matt,

well, you’ve got a new book. We’re eating the earth the race to fix our food system and save our climate. Michael’s got a great background. Staff Writer, political, Politico, former staff writer what the Washington Post Time Magazine, The Boston Globe, contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, as well as a couple other books, one notably the swamp, the definitive book on the Everglades, the politics and environmental of environmental destruction. I want to definitely hit that one at some point in the time of the conversation. But why don’t we start off with the new book. We’re eating the earth. What was the genesis of this story with this book?

Oh, well, thanks. I mean, look, I’m I’ve been in writing about the environment pretty much since the swamp, right? So, a little bit more than 20 years, and, you know, during this time, obviously climate’s been the big story, which meant that I was an energy reporter. You know, I was always covering energy and climate. And I’m not saying energy and fossil fuels aren’t a big deal, but I realized maybe five, six years ago, that food in the food system is about a third of the climate problem.

And it also turns out that it’s the leading driver of water pollution, of water shortages. It uses 70% of our fresh water. It’s, you know, it’s the major cause of deforestation and biodiversity loss, and I didn’t know squat about it, you know. And I figured, you know, there are 1000 books about about how fossil fuels are brawling the planet, but if I’m this spectacularly ignorant about food and agriculture, probably other people are too and and that was the beginning of my five year journey.

Well, yeah, I mean, I’ve certainly had some guests on the program who’ve tried to enlighten me on this area. And yes, it does seem to be a gargantuan problem, and something certainly we need to be working on. One of the things that you know you kind of bring up in the book, is there, there’s some things that we thought there were reasons for maybe hope, and they didn’t kind of work out as well as planned, like the veggie burgers and stuff like that. What? What happened to veggie burgers and Beyond Meat? And we thought that that might be a game changer, but maybe not sure.

I mean, I guess the first thing I would say is like, yeah, I write about dozens of solutions in the book and and none of them really have a lot of traction yet, including the alternate proteins. You know, the the argument for them is really powerful, right? Because when I say that, you know, basically, agriculture is what’s eating the earth, and most of it is animal agriculture. You know, farms and pastures now cover a third of the planet, and they are by far the leading driver of not just deforestation, but agricultural emissions.

And again, it’s partly from, you know, crop dusters and diesel tractors and the regular carbon emissions, and partly from the burping and farting cows. But it’s mainly from deforestation, from this, the eating of the earth. And so, if you can make, you know, if you can make meat, which we ate 500 million tons of last year without animals, and you don’t have to feed those animals, you know, that would be an incredible thing for the planet. So I actually started reporting this book in 2019 I went to the Good Food Institute, which is kind of the sort of the group that puts together all the different fake meat companies, whether it’s made of plants or made out of animal cells or fungi. And at the time Beyond Meat had just gone public, and it was like total exuberance.

People thought they were going to get rid of the entire meat industry in 10 years. My joke was that I thought I was going to accidentally raise a series, a round on. The drinks line. And now, of course, beyond meats gone from $250 a share to $1 and so everybody’s like, Oh, it was just a fad. It was dumb. I got to admit, the dogs didn’t like the food, right? You know, it turns out that if you make make a veggie burger, that’s 80% as good as a regular burger, and only costs 50% more.

That may be an incredible technological achievement, but it’s not a really good business model, but so again, so they have not been very successful, but I think people have written them off. And what I always like to point out is that the cow is a pretty mature technology, and this stuff isn’t and it can still get better, it can still get cheaper, it can even get healthier. So I don’t think it’s dead right.

And in terms of any evidence that people are eating less meat, other than maybe the two of us have tried to cut down on our meat intake, I heard that you not eating red meat, or maybe lamb stuff.

I don’t eat beef and lamb, right? The short answer is, nope. It’s, it’s, you know me, it’s delicious, right? And most people aren’t writing a book about food and climate, and even I still eat chicken and pork. It turns out that beef and lamb is about 10 times more emissions and uses, you know, 10 times more land per per calorie or gram of protein than poultry or pork. But just in general, I feel like you know, the vegan activists have been sort of shaming people and screaming at people, and also educating people about what goes on in factory farms for years, and every year, the world is eating more meat, and we’re on track to eat 70% more meat by 2050 as remember, the first thing people tend to do when they stop being poor is they start eating meat.

And we’re expecting billions of people around the world to stop getting poor over the next, you know, the next couple decades, which is great, but it is going to mean a lot more stress on the planet. And just historically. You know, human beings are not that awesome at making big sacrifices for the good of the planet and future generations, but we are pretty awesome at inventing stuff.

So in some ways, I have, I have more confidence in, you know, these incredible scientists and engineers and entrepreneurs who are working on alternative meats and alternative dairy than I do in activists and even politicians kind of yelling at people to stop eating meat, because, you know, our ancestors started eating this stuff, like, 2 million years ago, and we literally evolved to enjoy it. You know, that’s when we started getting bigger brains to find meat and smaller stomachs, because we didn’t have to digest as many plants, right?

Yeah, you, you did talk about in the book about ag production. Ag production needs to increase by 50% over the next 25 years to feed 10 billion people. And I guess the main reason is because we’re going to be eating more meat. And so is this going to be possible to do in a way that doesn’t destroy the planet. You know, throwing another idea out there that I hear people saying they’re shooting for is to increase the amount of land we set aside for nature, up to 50% of the planet. So I could we do both things? Is that possible with current technology.

Well, well, with current technology really hard, but just in general, like it’s all of this is hard, right? If it were, if it were easy, we would have solved it already. So I do, I do like to point out that when I started writing about energy and climate, like 20 years ago, there were no alternatives to fossil fuels, right?

Wind and Solar were like, oh, point 1% of the global energy mix, and now we’re having this extraordinary, extraordinary clean energy revolution where, you know, more than 90% of the new power plants that were built around the world last year were zero emissions. And when I, when I finished the swamp, a documentary had just come out called Who Killed the Electric Car and how? And now, like, 25% of global auto sales are electric cars. So it’s, you know, come back from the dead. So, so this is an extremely hard problem. And unlike energy, it’s getting worse.

We’re we’re tearing down a soccer field worth of tropical forest every six seconds for agriculture. So that makes it really hard to preserve more nature when we are tearing it down right now, agriculture covers a landmass the size of all of Asia plus all of Europe. So it’s like 40 times as big as our cities and suburbs. It’s really. Big, and it’s getting bigger. So, you know, we are going to have to change, you know, on the demand side, particularly in the rich world, like we’ve in the United States, we eat four times the global average of beef.

That’s going to have to be a little less, and we’re going to have to stop wasting a quarter to a third of our food. Because right now, you know, when you waste food, you waste the land and water and fertilizer used to grow that food. Right now, the world uses a land mass the size of China to grow garbage, so that’s not good, but we’re also going to have to make more food with less land and fewer emissions and and that is, tell us difficult but not impossible.

Tell us how we’re doing in the US, in particular, because our agricultural industry is much more advanced than pretty much anywhere else on the planet. Are we using, are we creating a lot more ag land in the US, or are we just getting more productive, basically, year over year.

Yeah. I mean, the US does have high yield agriculture, right? And that’s, and that’s great, right? We since the Green Revolution began, you know, about a little more than half a century ago, right? And that’s, you know, we have these high yield seeds. We have, you know, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. We have these great irrigation projects. We have these highly automated and efficient factory farms, the giant tractors that are now like, you know, some of them are even self driving, and they drop fertilizer only where it’s needed, all kinds of incredible technologies. And that’s tripled our yields globally, but particularly in the United States.

So, you know, since, since the 1960s and remember, like, if it wasn’t for that, we would need three times as much land to produce the amount of food we’re making. We would literally need a planet B, right? Like, like the enviros are always saying that, said, I mean, it could still be more efficient. And you know, I write in the book about alternative pesticides, where they use the RNA technology behind the covid vaccines to constipate beetles to death, and alternative fertilizers, where they gene edit microbes to snatch nitrogen out of the air and feed it to crops so you don’t have to bomb the field with, with, you know, with natural gas manufactured fertilizer that ends up in the Gulf of Mexico. And, you know, the University of Illinois, there are scientists who are trying to reinvent photosynthesis, right?

It’s been going pretty, pretty good job of maintaining life on earth for the last 3 billion years, but turns out to be pretty inefficient at making crops, and they are using artificial intelligence and gene editing and big data to try to engineer away some of those inefficiencies, and they think they can increase crop yields 50% over the next 20 years. So there’s a lot of exciting possibilities out there. You know, I wrote this book because, you know, it’s sort of like, Hey, here’s this giant problem with food and agriculture and the climate that nobody is really focusing on, nobody’s grappling with. And my idea was like, Well, maybe if I write this, people will focus and grapple. So now I’m kind of running around saying, like, hey, focus grapple.

Well, say, down in Brazil, we know their change of administration down there, and it’s allegedly deforestation has decreased under the current administration in Brazil, is it enough to save the Amazon, or are they taking effort, taking the right steps to slow deforestation enough?

I mean, the short answer is no, because, and there are some good things happening, happening in Brazil, you know, in the sort of short in terms of short term deforestation, in terms of law enforcement, cracking down on some of the, you know, the kind of fly by night operations. But ultimately, agriculture, it’s just like a river ends up flowing around rocks, right?

If we won’t need the food, if we you know, agriculture is going to find a way to grow it. And you know, when there is demand for land, agriculture will meet that demand. If we don’t change the way we eat and the way we farm, we are on track to deforest another dozen California’s worth of land by 2050 and you know, maybe if you put a big fence around the Amazon, it won’t be there, but some of it probably will be there. And you know, the rest of it might be in the Congo rainforest. And you know, other really vibrant. Dynamic, important ecosystems.

So I think, you know, we need to have this idea where we’re going to really sort of have carrots and sticks, sort of to help help entire countries and entire regions increase their productivity so they can make more food with less land. But also do the Protect side, so it’s not just produced, but they also, here’s the carrot, we will help you make even more food with less land. But the stick is, if your forests keep coming down, the money is not going to keep flowing.

Well, I think one thing that probably a lot of people don’t know is that most of the US farmland is for animal feed, right? I mean, corn and soybeans that ends up being fed to to animals, right?

Yeah, and biofuels, right? A lot of it ends up in our fuel tanks. We have about 40 million acres of corn in the United States is used to grow ethanol and the Trump, big, beautiful bill is essentially trying to, you know, shove a lot more, a lot more subsidies towards soy biodiesel, to put more soy soybeans into not only our our cars, but our planes. So, yes, that is true, but, um, but that’s because we’re eating a lot of meat, right? And and we have these big biofuel mandates now, the biofuel mandates, and I write about this in the book, I think they’re just stupid, and we should get rid of them. But biofuels right now, and they’re terrible, but they’re only eating about a Texas worth of the earth when agriculture is eating 75 Texas’ worth of the earth.

And you know, the people who are growing corn and soybeans in the middle of the country and in Brazil, you know, they’re not doing it, you know, because they love it. They’re doing it because there’s incredible demand for animal feed. Because, you know, we ate, you know, the average American eats three burgers a week. You know, if we only ate two burgers a week, we would save a Massachusetts worth of land every year. But that isn’t happening yet. So, so they’re gonna, they’re gonna keep growing that stuff. And, yeah, I mean, it’s like, you don’t see as much deforestation in the United States right now. And in fact, in New England, you’re starting to see a lot of reforestation, because people in New England, they stopped farming a couple 100 years ago, and they got in covered wagons and went west to Indiana. But Indiana used to be 85% forest.

So we shake our fingers at Brazil, and we’re like, oh, this is terrible. You have all this deforestation. That’s because we already got rid of our Amazon in the 19th century. So again, it’s just, you know, the demand problem is really hard, and the supply problem stuff too.

Well, I’ve been reading some articles about Iran and recently and the tremendous problems that they’re facing because of their misguided ag policies to become self sufficient, but then they threw like Israeli hydrologists out of the country when the Shah was deposed and and how the country they’re looking at potentially having to to move everybody out of Tehran because the water shortage is so terrible. So that’s beyond cataclysmic.

No, absolutely. And this is where I, you know, I start getting in some trouble with a lot of people who have read Michael Pollan and have their ideas of what good farming is. But take a look at Sri Lanka. What happened there. A few years ago, their president, they decided they were going to become an all organic farming country, they banned all agrochemicals, all pet synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. And you know, a lot of environmentalists and sort of foodies and hippies around the world rejoiced and said, This is going to be wonderful. When a lot of Sri Lankan agronomists said, this is going to be in a disaster.

And it was because their their yields immediately crashed. They were no longer self sufficient in rice. They started to have severe food shortages. Then they had food riots. Then the President, you know, the the government fell. The President had to flee, and they ended up reversing it, because, again, these these technologies, a lot of I understand why people don’t like pesticides and fertilizers, but they’re really good at killing pests and helping crops grow. And if you’re serious about you know the fact that we’re going to have to grow more food over the next 30 years than we’ve grown over the last 12,000 years. Then suddenly, you know, not only from a hunger perspective, and, you know, helping farmers perspective, but from an environmental perspective. You know, making sure that we can grow shit tons of food is really important.

Well, I guess that’s, you know, kind of crashes the hipster dim, you know. Paradise that I live in about organic food here out in Venice, California. I mean, it’s kind of heresy to eat food that’s not organic. So, you know, we would kind of think that that’s the way of the future, and you’re What are you crushing our dream?

A little bit. I mean, you know, I mean, the good news for those of you who have those dreams is that you’re winning, right? I mean, right now it’s not just the foodies and hippies, but you’ve got, you know, sort of, you know, on the right. You’ve got, you know, Robert F Kennedy Jr and Joe Rogan, and you’ve got big ag, companies like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland and big food companies like General Mills and Mars and PepsiCo and Danone, they’re, they’re all talking, you know, you’ve probably seen these, these documentaries like kiss the ground and common ground with the, you know, Jason Momoa and Woody Harrelson, all talking about how our Soil is going to save us, you know, regenerative agriculture, it’s going to take all that bad carbon up in the sky and, you know, put it into good carbon in our soils.

And there’s incredible not just energy but money flowing towards this idea that agroecology and regenerative practices and kind of kinder and gentler farming is going to be the solution to our environmental problems. But again, if you you know, if you are making fewer, you know if you’re making less food per acre, you’re going to need more acres to make the same amount of food. You are going to eat more of the earth.

Well, unless you’re eating less meat, because, as you said, most of our land is for meat and it’s only three half of our ag land is for meat and only 3% of our calories, so just beef.

That’s just beef. Half our ag land is for beef and only 3% of our calories.

That is that in the US only, or is that international?

That’s, that’s pretty much globally and and, yeah, it’d be, you know, cattle are just spectacularly inefficient converters of their feed into our food. And so, yeah, that’s a that is pretty much a again, dare. So dairy is bad too, because that’s cattle. But at least cows produce milk like several times a day, while they only produce beef, like once in their lifetime.

So beef is is really, really inefficient. And yes, you know, if we eat less of it, that’ll be less of a problem. But what I always say is, first of all, how’s that going? Right? We’re eating more every year, and it is true, unfortunately that, you know, grass fed, organic, you know, regenerative beef is even worse for the planet and the climate than conventional, factory farmed, you know, green finished beef, partly because it gets them to slaughter weight quicker, so they’re not alive long enough to burp as much methane, but also the main reason is it just uses way more land.

Yeah, it’s that is sad. It’s a harsh fact for anybody who wants to eat a burger. But why don’t we pivot a little bit to something else, which is something I’ve been talking to some guests about, is the rights of nature and, and kind of a bit of a corollary to what you’re talking about, which is preserving land. There have been movements around the country and around the globe about creating rights of nature and, and do you think that that’s something that could could help protect nature more and or is it, or is it not going to move the needle very much?

I mean, I think, I think it’s great, and I think it’s, you know, I mean, anything that makes it sort of harder to destroy really important, you know, ecosystems and natural, wild, beautiful places. You know, I’m for it, where I guess, where I am, you know, again, a little bit of a Debbie Downer on this stuff is that I don’t think you can just, you know, put a fence around nature and say, like, you know, we’re just, we’re just not going to tear down trees anymore. Otherwise, go about your business. The reason you can make it, you can sort of impose a kind of logistical price on land clearing. But ultimately, you know, if it’s profitable to tear down nature and replace it with agriculture, people are going to keep doing it.

And that has been the story of, you know, not just that’s been the story, not just to the last 200 years, but the last 12,000 years, is the story of our natural planet becoming an agricultural planet. We had gotten rid of a South America worth of forest before the Industrial Revolution. Yeah. And again, it’s not because people are evil or people hate nature, it’s because people like to eat and and so I, you know, I always say that my book is kind of about how to feed the world without frying the world. But honestly, we’re pretty good at feeding the world. We know how to do it. And if you know we have a problem. We can just cut down more trees and expand the world’s agricultural footprint. The problem is that, you know, doing it without frying the world, and that’s going to require change. And I don’t think it can just happen on the nature side. It has to happen on the Food and Agriculture side.

Yeah, I guess I look at it and say, Well, if we protect more land, and it mean it may shift to some other country or some other area, that is a possibility, but I guess it starts the process of protecting more of our, of our, you know, our, of our nature, so that it’s less likely that it’s used up by agriculture, or it’s just put aside so it is, you know, there for future generations, which, you know, is valuable

in and of itself, sure. I mean, I think that’s true. But again, it’s like, you know, you see this a lot in Europe, where, you know, they’re putting a lot of rules, partly about, you know, sort of trying to mandate more organic farming and reduce pesticides and reduce the, you know, reduce the size of animal herds. And again, it’s, you know. And the idea is, like, look at this nature we’re preserving in Europe, but it’s essentially outsourcing pollution and deforestation to the developing world, and that’s where and often, you know, if you’re outsourcing your agriculture to the developing world, you’re outsourcing it to a place where it’s less efficient and is going to require even more acres to make the same amount of food. So it’s going to have even more deforestation than it would have in in in the rich world. So I’m, you know…

Yeah, to counter that a little bit, I would say, like, look at whatever it’s, I think it’s the Netherlands, where they do all that farming in, in, like, in closed settings. And, you know, I can’t remember, whereas terrariums, essentially, and they are incredibly productive. I mean, like, they feed a huge amount of people in Europe from a tiny land mass. Isn’t that maybe the future of farming?

Well, look, I mean, Denmark, they in 2025, they passed what I basically call it like, you know, it’s, it’s like the mike Grunwald agricultural reform act. You know, it’s, they sort of did all the things I would like. And in fact, a lot of enviros there were saying, like, hey, we basically, it’s like, too much, too many pigs, too many cows, too much poop. Let’s, let’s cut our ag industry in half. And they did not do that. They were like, Hey, we have, like, the most efficient dairy industry in the world and the third most efficient pork industry.

No, let’s not do that. Let’s have them make even more food, and we’re going to turn them into a laboratory for a lot of these kind of climate friendly then the government will help, will pay for, you know, say, feed additives that will help the cows burp less methane, and Gene edited crops that will grow in warmer conditions and with higher yields and don’t need as much fertilizer or irrigation water. They’re going to invest in all that stuff. But at the same time, they’re going to tax agricultural emissions. They’re going to convert a million acres of marginal farmland back to nature. They’re going to promote plant based eating and invest in alternative protein throughout the country.

So the idea is, they’re not going to shut down agriculture. They’re going to try to make it even more, even more productive, but they’re not going to outsource their problems elsewhere. They’re going to deal with them in Denmark and take advantage of their productivity and efficiency to, uh, you know, to help the entire world. And hopefully that can be, that can be a laboratory. And as we said, and by the way, they’re also going to have a million acres of rewilded farmland, so they’ll be doing some good stuff for nature in Denmark as well.

So, so in in practice, Europe is doing some really positive things, signs for hope. Why? Why do you think, or tell me, is Europe basically self sufficient? In agriculture, are they importing tons of stuff from from other places, yeah.

I mean, there’s, you know, they have imports. And just like, you know, just like we do, right? And we’re, you know, it’s kind of great. We’re, you know, if you’re eating avocados, or you’re eating, you know, we import, we import plenty of feed food in the United States as well, even though we are a. A net exporter of food, and we are an extraordinarily productive producer of grain and and just crops and and meat generally. So I don’t think the idea isn’t necessarily, you know, that one nation or one content because continent becomes self sufficient. The idea is that wherever we can to sort of, again, make more food with less land and less mess, so that, you know, we can have more nature and, you know, and and fewer emissions. Because that’s really the challenge everywhere.

And so, you know, this notion that kind of every acre is sacred, it can be forest or it can be a farm. But if it’s, you know, if it’s nature, you want it to be like the best kind of nature. And if it’s a farm, you want it to be the most efficient kind of farm. Because, again, like, you know, a farm that’s only, you know, half as productive as another farm requires twice as many acres to make the same amount of food, and that extra acre is probably not going to be, you know, it’s not going to be a parking lot, right? It’s, it’s, it’s going to be a forest or a wetland that we would like to, you know, keep as a forest and wetland, to keep storing carbon and storing biodiversity.

There’s this, there’s this, I think, because, you know, and not to pick on Venice, right, or the whole organic movement, but I think a lot of people who have read Michael Pollan and have this idea of that there were these old, good, rustic, bucolic farms where the soil was treated with love, and the animals had names instead of numbers. And then the big environmental tragedy was their intensification, right, when they became these sort of chemical drenched monocultures, and, you know, intense factory farms, and I’m not like there was some environmental damage from all that, from all these fertilizers and the, you know, the dead zone the size of Connecticut and the Gulf of Mexico and a lot of air pollution and other problems.

But what I’m saying is that the real environmental catastrophe was the transformation of the prairies and the wetlands and the savannas and the forests into those nice Michael Pollan farms. That’s when we lost the biodiversity. That’s when we lost the carbon, and the goal should be to prevent more of that conversion, right?

So do you see other countries in Europe or across the planet taking up the mike Grunwald Act, or, aka the Denmark 2025, act?

You know, it’s hard, right? Like, I know, it’s like, Denmark is like the model nation. You look at every test, it’s like, we’re the happiest people on Earth, Denmark, we’re the healthiest people on Earth, Denmark. It’s like those bastards. They’re like the most beautiful people too, right? But no, I mean, the short answer is no. I mean, this is, this is why I’m banging my spoon on my high chair, about this stuff. You know, 3% of climate finance around the world is flowing into food and agriculture, even though it’s about a third of the climate problem and and most of it, like I said, is flowing into these kind of regenerative agro ecological solutions that I think are, you know, pretty dangerous and can actually make things worse.

So there hasn’t been. And you see, even in the United States, in the current administration, which obviously they don’t care about any climate issues, but you’d think they’d at least because they like farmers, you’d think they’d be investing in agricultural research that can help increase yields, even if it’s not done for climate reasons, but that’s getting slashed too. So this is a, this is not a great time, maybe for the for the, you know, agriculture and climate policy agenda, but you know that’s why, what about at the state level, any states picking up and like California or New York, or, you know, other states?

It’s tough because you know where you have these progressive states, you often have these you know instincts to do, you know the kind of, you know, the sort of Bernie Sanders, you know, Venice Beach, you know Chelly Pingree is the is an organic farmer who’s the most important Democrat on agriculture in the House of Representatives. And there’s this idea that, like, you know, well, we, you know, will be for sustainable farming, which is generally seen as organic farming, you know, I think there’s just, there’s a long way to go, like, even California.

It’s funny, I saw this one study with that looked at, you know, there are, like, a dozen things, dozen ways you could improve manure management that would really reduce both nitrous oxide and methane emissions from manure and make much of a less of a mess in rivers and lakes, where you see all these algal blooms and all kinds of fish kills. Dollars and and they came up with, like, a dozen, a dozen possible solutions. And 11 of them were incredibly cost efficient, you know, you could reduce a 10 of emission, a ton of emissions, for like, you know, a few cents, a few cents, a ton, you know. And some of them are really simple. It’s like, separate the solids from the liquids, or, you know, cleaned your barn more often, these incredible things, simple things.

And then there was one completely ineffective and inefficient solution, and that was these anaerobic digesters that turned manure into kind of like bio gas. And of course, California is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on these bio digesters. So there’s just, there’s just a lot of work to do to the you know, people are not dealing with the problem, and when they are dealing with it, they’re often dealing with it wrong. And it’s partly because there’s so much that isn’t known about this stuff, and then a lot of what people think they know just isn’t so. So, you know, hopefully, is there also pushback from the ag industry and stuff like that, just it seems like that’s not something that they should push back on. Is there pushback on manure management, for instance, by big a

Well, more in, this is a perfect example, actually, in in because of, there was a big lawsuit and over a huge, you know, pollution case with Smithfield, the big pork producer in North Carolina, and they had to contribute, I think, like fit, they had to pay $15 million in fines that started this whole research program. And they came up with some manure management solutions. And what they realized is that, I think it would, it would increase the price of pork by two cents a pound. And basically the state of North Carolina said that’s too much. So they never, never mandated it, which is a long way of answering your question is that the ag industry is fine with anything as long as it doesn’t, doesn’t tell them what to do. And if they do have to do anything, they’re paid. So, you know, there’s just, there’s no appetite for any sticks. There’s big appetites for carrots.

And so, you know, the world spends $300 billion a year on agricultural subsidies. I think there is maybe some hope that, at least, you know, we could attach some strings to some of those subsidies where it’s like, okay, here, if we’re going to keep giving you all this money, at least, you know, use it to do some better things for the environment and the planet. But right now, most of it is just, you know, in the United States, we give 10s of billions of dollars of agricultural subsidies every year. It’s in the form of subsidies and biofuel mandates and disaster aid and conservation payments, but mostly it’s just to help the richest farmers buy new f1 50s every year. And, and, and it’s, you know, is, it’s bipartisan, you know, even though, even though, you know, right now, farm country is voting overwhelmingly for Republicans.

Well, I saw a documentary on Smithfield and other pork producers in in North Carolina and in the southeast part of the country, and it was mind blowing the amount of pollution that was created in that farming of pork and and, you know, these pools of shit that were just, you know, nasty as hell. And it’s unbelievable.

You know, there are very strict rules about human shit, you know, it’s got to be treated before that goes into a river or a lake. But that’s not true for animal shit. And there are, really, you know, we have pretty good rules about, at least, you know, in theory, you know, factories are regulated. They are responsible for their pollution, but not factory farms. And remember, I’m, like, the guy who’s sort of defending factory farms. I’m saying, like, hey, you know, we need, like, they’re pretty efficient. And just like, when you like, factories are pretty good at manufacturing stuff. Factory farms are good at manufacturing a lot of food, and we need to do that. But at the very least, it would be nice if they could do it with a little bit less mass.

Yeah, that seems reasonable. So a lot of articles these days, you hear about shrinking populations in the US and Europe and China, and you know, in some ways, that seems like a good thing, given the things that you’re talking about. That means less mouse to feed. That means less agriculture. I mean, yes, it creates a crisis or a challenge for Social Security payments when there’s only one worker for each retiree. But you know, in terms of the planet, it seems like less stress on the whole planet.

Well, in the long term, yes, that is, and that’s true. And in fact, most of the world, except for Sub Saharan Africa, is sort of on course to head. Towards basically replacement birth rates of, you know, about two kids per woman, or even, as you mentioned, in places like Japan, and, you know, maybe we’re heading that way in the United States, even, even less than that. And that would, in the long term, mean, mean less stress on the planet. But, um, but unfortunately, like a lot of these climate issues, the next 30 years are going to be really important, and even if the entire world got to replacement fertility rates by 2050, it’s only going to reduce demand for food and land by maybe 345, percent.

And that’s because, because of high birth rates in the past, there are already so many women of child bearing age that, you know, a lot of this population growth is already baked into the cake. So you’ve seen some, you know, I’ve seen some projections that maybe, instead of 9.89 point 9, billion people by 2050 we might only have, you know, 9.6 9.7 possibly even 9.5 if the way things are going, but attic, it’s not going to be a dramatic issue change for these, these climate issues. And you know, a lot of you know, maybe ozempic will help, right? You know, you know, maybe this the lone star tick, which when you get bit it, you know, you could get this red meat allergy. You know, maybe that will spread with with climate change.

There are ways that, you know, on the on the demand side, you know, there could be ways to sort of tweak that. But I think the, you know, the big picture, I hear again and again from people who say, like, Oh, we don’t need more food, you know. We just, you know, need to stop eating meat or stop wasting food. And actually, the math is so bad that actually we are going to need to make more food. And even if we could just stop eating meat or, you know, or if you say the answer is, stop wasting food again. How’s that going? You know, what’s, what’s your plan for how we’re going to stop that? And my, my plan is like, we work on that, but we work on how to make, you know, more food with less land too. Because we’re not just going to, you know, assume that, that humans are going to, for the first time, you know, reduce our meat consumption when we’ve been increasing it every year.

Well, I know we work with a nonprofit out here, food finders, which helps get food that would normally go to a landfill to people who need it. And I understand that, like in France, they have pretty strict legislation to prevent food waste and some other countries as well. Do you see that moving the needle much at all?

Yeah, I think that’s a really important and it’s, it’s a great place to start, because, unlike, like, meat is delicious, right? Like, people love meat. And, you know, I quoted one pollster who said that, like, you know, trying to tax meat, or otherwise restrict meat, is, you know, he said it was the least popular policy he’d ever pulled. He said it was, his quote was that it’s like veterans benefits for ISIS, so you don’t want to, but nobody loves food waste, right? So that’s an opportunity, I think, for some bipartisan, you know, action. And, you know, yeah, some of it is, I think there is some education, some evidence that, you know, campaigns to help. You know, to really increase awareness, can help.

There’s a lot of technology that can help. I have a D A mill technologies dehydrator in my home where I throw in all my food waste, and it turns it overnight into chicken feed, so it keeps it in the food system. So I think there’s a there’s a lot of opportunities like that. And you do see like grocery stores are doing, using AI to sort of put food on sale before it goes bad, and, you know, better, manage their inventory. And you can use policy, like you said, Good Samaritan laws, so that nobody gets sued if they’re, you know, if they’re a restaurant and they’re giving, you know, their leftovers to a food bank there, there are a lot. There’s a lot that can be done to reduce food waste, and I think that’s really important.

I don’t think it’ll, it’ll solve the whole problem. But again, the average American waste, American household weighs more than $2,000 a year on food that, you know, they throw out. So that seems like a good opportunity to at least, you know the incentives are correctly aligned.

Yeah, totally. And I read somewhere that if food waste were a country, it would be the third largest polluter behind China and the US, or…

That’s true. So would, so would cattle, by the way, cattle would also like so the cattle Republic and the, you know, and the and the United States of food waste, could like compete for being number three.

I think, wow, yeah, it’s pretty mind blowing. I did want to ask you at least a question. Attitude, before you go about the swamp and and particularly, kind of updated for the new political environment in Florida, and whether you know, I there’s so many problems down there in terms of just getting insurance for a home, given the climate problems in Florida, is there a wake up call that’s eventually going to be answered? I mean, they can’t ignore this forever. This is they can.

What makes you say that insurance companies may be the most powerful engine of change in the environmental space? Because, you know, when those insurance premiums get high enough, it wakes people up, hey, there’s a real problem here. And insurance companies are nonpartisan. They don’t give a hoot about your politics. They just want your money.

I think that’s that’s true. And look, I think you know, there is a insurance crisis in in Florida, you know, along with all our other crises. But I do, I mean, I don’t mean to be flip about it, but I think, you know, what we’re seeing more and more in Florida is these kind of fly by night insurance companies who say, Yeah, sure, I’ll collect your premiums, and then I’m just going to disappear when the hurricane comes. And you know, we’ll count on the federal government to bail you out. So you know, again, Florida has not been a role model for thoughtful public policy the last 30 years, for sure.

And you know, the Everglades is still a popular cause, but you know, the Everglades restoration that I wrote about was supposed to be a 30 year project, and it started 25 years ago, and it’s barely made any progress. So, you know, the only thing that’s really changed is the price tag has gone from $8 billion to $25 billion so I think, you know, I’m I’m always hopeful, you know I and you know better is better than worse. Perfect usually isn’t on the menu. But certainly.

Do you see the current governor down there doing much in trying to preserve the Everglades or just kind of address climate issues in, you know, particularly in South Florida, where they are so existential?

Well, no to climate. He says that climate is a religion. It’s, you know, it’s, you know, he’s not interested in any of that stuff. He has put some money into the Everglades. And, you know, the Everglades has always had this kind of bipartisan support. And the way you can show that you’re, you know, supporting is just to throw more money at it. And don’t get me wrong, it’s good. I mean, you know, I don’t think the money is, you know, it’s not going towards things that are actually making the Everglades worse. I wouldn’t say it’s being spent, as you know, you know, with a ruthless eye for environmental improvement.

But look, I mean the Everglades, even the one that I wrote about 20 years ago, is now. It’s a very different place. It’s been overrun by these pythons. You know, it’s pretty much the only animal in the Everglades. Now, there are like, a half million pythons that are just breeding like crazy and eating everything in sight, and nobody knows what to do about them. So, and, and, yeah, this, you know, this is an ecosystem that’s basically three feet above sea level, and we’ve had six inches of sea rise already in this century. So, you know, you know, salt water is coming for the Everglades too.

There’s, you know, you don’t see a lot of serious action, you know, right now, climate is, is literally a dirty word at a at the state level, where, you know, they’re scrub it out of their websites, and you know, they’re not allowed, you know, the they have to talk about resilience, or, you know, or whatever euphemism they talk about these days. But there is no interest in climate action at the state level right now.

Well, I saw interesting article about sea level rise, and they were saying that sea level rise in the Gulf of Mexico area and along the, you know, the Atlantic coast is actually higher than in other places for various reasons, and so it has risen more than than a lot of other places, which is even more dangerous given how low level. You know, as you said, there’s not that much difference between the high point.

And and remember, like South Florida, you know what I sort of the idea of the swamp was that, you know, Florida really was America’s last frontier. Or particularly South Florida. And the reason was because it was all wet, and it’s sitting on this, you know, bed of limestone that’s incredibly porous. So there was this very delicate balance between freshwater and salt that made these incredibly beautiful and biodiverse estuaries to the east and west of that kind of Florida peninsula, and those you’ve seen horrible algal blooms and that guacamole glop that was in the news a few years ago where, you know, this kind of big sheet of green covered the St Lucie Estuary.

And meanwhile, you have the salt water rising, and you have counties and cities spending hundreds of millions of dollars to, essentially, you know, put dams in their canals, and, you know, various, you know, retention projects to sort of keep the salt water out. But it’s, you know, there’s only so much money you can add and so many drainage projects you can do. You know, Mother Mother Nature always bats last.

Yeah, and is also a hell of a lot more powerful than we humans. And you know, we kind of learned that out here in California with those wildfires and those winds at 100 miles an hour, there’s no fire crews on the planet that can stop a firestorm in 100 mile an hour wind?

Well, it’s the same thing about a category five hurricane, and we haven’t had one here in Miami in now 33 years. But you know, that’s not gonna last forever. And look, I’m, I’m looking at my it’s, you know, we’re, it’s the middle of December. I’m looking out my window right now, the sky is blue and it’s 73 degrees outside. So, you know, I always write about how Florida is this unsustainable paradise, but, and understandably, people really focus on the unsustainable part, and I feel strongly about it, but it’s also paradise.

And so we’re continuing to get 1000 newcomers every day, and you know, most of them are, you know, mortgage bankers, or they’re, you know, guys who do drywall, or, you know, they’re hotel maids or somebody else whose job depends on bringing in another 1000 people tomorrow. And so the Ponzi scheme continues, and at some point, you know, the music is going to stop and there aren’t going to be enough chairs to mix some more metaphors. But you know, until that happens, it’s really nice here. People are going to keep coming, and most of the time there isn’t a hurricane heading Norway.

Right, when it’s zero degrees in Chicago, where I’m from, and it’s 73 in Florida, it it sounds kind of nice, actually. Yeah.

Everybody’s like, You’re crazy. Why would you want to live in Florida? And then I’m like, Well, you know, it’s, you know, it’s lot nicer than, you know, Buffalo and Boston and certain times of the year and and then, for different reasons, it’s nicer than, you know, Caracas or Port au Prince all year long. So, so, you know, it’s a so people are going to keep coming and, you know, and we’ll, you know, it’s like, I don’t know if you ever saw the Marx Brothers movie duck soup, about the about the original Florida land boom, where he said, you know, he’s like, you can even get stucco. Oh, boy, can you get stucco?

A little climate humor to end the show. Very well done, Michael. Thank you so much for joining us. Everybody should go out and get a copy of Michael’s new book, we’re eating the earth the race to fix our food system and save our climate. And check them out on Politico, great writer. So appreciate the work that you’re doing, Michael, to spread this important message. Any any place else people can connect with you and the work that you’re doing.

Oh, yeah, sure. I’m, you know, you can find me on on x. I’m at Mike Grunwald, blue sky. Same at Mike Grunwald, plus all those other letters, you know, I’m on LinkedIn. I’m even now because I’m, you know, I find that not everybody is buying my 300 page book. So I’m trying to get the message on Instagram and Tiktok too. But you know, hopefully your your listeners, they care a little more about this stuff, and they’ll buy the 300 page book.

Yeah, definitely the great stuff. And look forward to following what you’re doing, and wish you all the best going forward.

Thanks for all you’re doing. This is it’s great that you’re keeping this issue in front of people.

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