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Category: Business

  • Smart meters not so smart for underpaid installers

    Smart Meter install

    Sparkies say the companies handling the smart meter rollout are pushing down wages to the point of putting lives at risk. Zacharias Szumer investigates.

    Australia’s smart meter rollout could end in tragedy for workers or a member of the public unless standards and rates are lifted, industry insiders say. The industry is plagued by such poor rates that qualified electricians are stuck between cutting corners on safety or making a pittance, MWM has been told.

    MWM has seen evidence that meter installers in NSW are sometimes making less than $100 per day, or half the minimum wage of $24.95 per hour.

    While the rollout is basically finished in Victoria, other states and territories lag behind.

    Smart Meter rollout status by state

    State or TerritorySmart meters installedInstallation rate
    ACT93,34440.27%
    NSW1,929,05739.17%
    QLD1,285,29942.63%
    SA488,32546.49%
    TAS279,29678.06%
    VIC3,247,63899.12%
    Nationwide7,322,95956.96%
    Data source: Australian Energy Market Commission, 28 November 2024

    The government wants every house in Australia to be fitted with a smart meter by 2030.

    Electricity Scams | The West Report

    Current conditions

    Over the past fortnight, MWM has talked to over ten electrical contractors working on the smart meter rollout. NSW-based contractor Mike* told MWM that electricians are promised that they’ll make between $700–$1000 a day installing smart meters.

    MWM has also seen promotional material that promises, “Long-term term reliable work, no crawling under floors or in roof spaces and career growth opportunities.”

    Given these promises, many sparkies get set up with the required company structure plus additional qualifications and equipment – something that “often exceeds” $10,000, Mike said, adding,

    These substantial up-front costs can leave metering contractors feeling trapped in the role, despite the lower-than-expected income.

    While contractors sometimes earned between $800-$1000 per day, such days were few and far between, he added. It was far more common to make less than $500, and that’s before you subtract costs like fuel, vehicle insurance and everything else.

    MWM has seen evidence Mike was sometimes paid under $100 a day.

    “The pay rates must be designed by an algorithm that’s been programmed to only factor the most favourable installation conditions they could have ever dreamt up,” Mike said, adding that business expenses “aren’t considered at all” in set rates,

    The focus is solely on the time it takes to complete the job, without factoring in the true cost of running our businesses.

    Another electrician, Sam, said he’d experienced multiple days of being paid $150-$300 before finally giving up and leaving the industry.

    A noose around the neck

    Most sparkies said the main cause of such days is the number of jobs that can’t be completed.

    A range of factors can prevent meter installation, from old buildings with electrical faults to anti-smart meter residents who don’t let electricians into their properties. Payslips shown to MWM show that contractors are paid between $26 and $36 for attending jobs that can’t be completed.

    This rate is fixed even though it may take well over an hour to reach a destination and discover the reason a job can’t be completed, several contractors told MWM.

    Mike said:

    These tactics are driving technicians to rush work under unsafe conditions that could lead to serious injury or death.

    “I’ve spoken to a few techs that I’ve met while driving around, some tell me that they have heard that techs are skipping the initial testing procedure to speed up the job,” he added.

    Another contractor,  Pete*, said he was aware of several incidents that had already occurred. 

    “One guy turned on a circuit breaker that was originally off and became financially liable when the owner’s kitchen burnt down,” he said.

    “One guy didn’t tighten any connections on the meter he installed, which could’ve led to a fatality or fire.”

    Other contractors, while not sharing details of incidents, agreed with Mike’s sentiments, “The rates aren’t in line with the work required … [so] contractors are putting themselves at risk by skipping steps,” said Eric*.

    “We’re in a rush … because the margins are so low, it’s easy to miss something. People do take shortcuts; I was taking shortcuts,” Sam* said, while Allen* said the low piece rates made it “financially unviable” for contractors to issue defect notices at every house where they found electrical faults.

    The advertised earning rates just weren’t consistently achievable without burnout or corner-cutting, he said. In terms of getting the rollout completed safely and on time, “They’ve tied a noose around their necks.”

    Give ’em an inch, they’ll take a meter

    Like much of today’s economy, the metering industry is a vertically disaggregated beast. Here’s a little chart to illustrate the parts that are relevant here:

    Retailers: The ones who send you your electricity bill. They don’t own the meters.

    Energy retailers

    Metering providers: They own the meters and contracts with the retailers to install them.

    Meter owners

    Field service providers (FSPs): Paid by providers to recruit electricians to install smart meters.

    Field Service Providers

    Those are some pretty big players involved in the metering game.

    Canadian multinational giant Brookfield has over a trillion dollars in assets. IFM Investors, owned by 28 Australian not-for-profit pension funds, has about $86 billion.

    As Mike told MMW, “There’s a reason world-class asset managers own the meters,”

    because nothing beats a captive customer base and predictable, growing margins.

    Sham contracting

    Electricians mainly deal with field service providers (FSPs), who employ them as contractors.

    However, several contractors told MWM that the arrangements with FSPs verge on ‘sham contracting’.

    MWM has seen evidence that independent contractors are not permitted to switch to a new FSP without either a month’s stand-down period or a letter from the previous FSP.

    Multiple FSPs simultaneously introduced the stand-down period to ensure that contractors couldn’t jump between them to seek better wages, Mike said.

    Another contractor, Andy*, said the contract’s electricians’ sign is “not worth the paper they are written on as job conditions, procedures, and rate schedules can get changed with a day’s notice and no negotiation”.

    “If the work volume drops, then they will drop the rates, because they know the contractors are desperate to keep their roles,” he said, adding that in his eyes, FSPs were employing dirty money-making tactics.”

    *All names have been anonymised to protect identities.

    MWM contacted Skilltech and Service Stream for comment, but didn’t receive any response.

    BHP wage theft cover-up in the shadows of Christmas

    This post was originally published on Michael West.

  • Co-op to stop sourcing goods from Israel, Iran and 15 other countries

    Retailer says ‘internationally recognised’ abuses take place in nations including Russia and Syria

    The Co-op is to stop sourcing goods from Israel, Iran and 15 other countries where it says there are “internationally recognised” rights abuses and violations of international law.

    The mutual, which operates about 2,300 grocery stores in the UK, has drawn up a list of about 100 products affected by the change, including Israeli carrots and mangos from Mali.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Boosted by Trump, banks resume their love affair with fossil fuels

    For the first time since 2021 — the start of the Biden administration — banks have ramped up their financing of fossil fuel projects, a changing tide that reflects the Trump White House’s close ties to and energetic support for Big Oil. That’s based on the annual “Banking on Climate Chaos” report, which analyzes the lending patterns of the 65 largest banks in the world, and some 2,730 firms with fossil fuel interests that they’ve lent to.

    The report, published June 17 and authored by a group of eight environmental nonprofits, found that banks financed oil fields, pipelines, and coal mines to the tune of $869 billion in 2024 — up by $162 billion, or almost 25 percent, from 2023. Over the past eight years, the 65 banks profiled in the report financed almost $8 trillion in fossil fuel expansion.

    Meanwhile, in 2024, the world passed the much-feared 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming target set by the 2015 Paris Agreement, which Trump again withdrew the U.S. from almost immediately after returning to office. Experts attribute the increase in many natural disasters to climate change; in the U.S. alone, 27 separate natural disasters in 2024 individually surpassed $1 billion in damages, with a cumulative 568 fatalities and $182.7 billion in costs.

    But banks abandoned net-zero and climate-friendly pledges in droves last year, in addition to backing fossil fuels. “This year, banks have shown their true colors,” said Lucie Pinson, one of the co-authors of the report.

    With President Trump’s pro-fossil fuel executive orders, even more commercial lenders ditched climate agreements in the first half of 2025. Sierra Club’s Jessye Waxman described the retreat as a “clear capitulation to political pressure.”

    Overwhelmingly, the report found, both the banks financing fossil fuels and the companies they financed were U.S.-based. Four of the 5 top banks investing in fossil fuels were also U.S.-based.

    Liquid natural gas is the fastest-growing fossil fuel in the world, and the U.S. is its largest exporter. When calculating the 20-year emissions footprint of both liquefied natural gas, or LNG, and coal, researchers have found that LNG has a 33 percent larger footprint than coal.

    Climate impacts aside, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis says that there’s no need for more LNG projects — and that the “glut” of projects will likely lead to higher gas prices for consumers in the long run, in addition to community impacts zeroed in on by the “Banking on Climate Chaos” report.

    In Mozambique, for example, four active LNG projects have forced hundreds of families to relocate, with a Mozambican NGO receiving more than 1,000 complaints about compensation, resettlement, and housing from families forced to relocate. TotalEnergies, one of the project’s owners, helped fund a paramilitary to “ensure the security of Mozambique LNG project activities,” which investigations have found abused and killed residents. Fifteen separate banks finance the four projects, including a subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase.

    A 2024 report from the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice catalogued parallel harms to U.S. communities near natural gas projects, finding that predominantly low-income communities of color near such developments had higher rates of pollution, emissions, asthma, and cancer.

    “Facilities [are] being sited in our most vulnerable communities and placing our most vulnerable populations at risk — while providing the lion’s share of economic benefits to more affluent populations and communities,” said Dr. Robert Bullard, the center’s head.

    “I dream of a time when we don’t have to produce this report any more,” said Diogo Silva, one of its co-authors and a campaigner with the nonprofit BankTrack, “as we would finally be protecting present and future generations from catastrophic living conditions.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Boosted by Trump, banks resume their love affair with fossil fuels on Jun 21, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Want to try lab-grown salmon? The US just approved it.

    For the first time ever, a lab-grown seafood company has met the United States Food and Drug Administration’s requirements for demonstrating the safety of a new cell-cultured product. Wildtype’s cultivated salmon is now for sale in Portland, Oregon. 

    This marks the first time that lab-grown seafood (also known as “cultivated seafood” or “cell-cultured seafood”) is available for sale anywhere in the world, according to the Good Food Institute, a think tank that advocates for alternative proteins — substitutes for conventional meat made without relying on industrial animal agriculture. It’s a major milestone for the emerging cultivated protein industry, which aims to deliver real meat and seafood at scale without replicating the environmental harms of large-scale livestock operations. 

    It’s also a sign that the Food and Drug Administration under the second Trump administration is allowing the regulatory process around lab-grown meat to continue without political interference, despite widespread Republican skepticism of the technology.

    Wildtype, which manufactures sushi-grade salmon by cultivating fish cells under laboratory conditions, is the fourth cultivated protein company to receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, to sell its product in the U.S. The company first reached out to the FDA to discuss the safety of its cultivated salmon during the first Trump administration in 2019, said co-founder and CEO Justin Kolbeck, adding that Wildtype underwent eight rounds of questioning from the agency over the next six years. Kolbeck described the experience as “a science-driven, data-driven process” and said the team of regulators working with Wildtype stayed largely the same across the three presidential terms.

    “Did it feel like a long time in the lifespan of an early-stage startup? Yes,” said Kolbeck. “But it is completely appropriate, in my opinion. And the reason is that this is a new way to make food. And I think consumers have a right to feel like our food authorities turned over every stone that they can think of.”

    In a letter to the company, the FDA stated that it had “no questions” about Wildtype’s conclusion that its cell-cultivated salmon is “as safe as comparable foods produced by other methods.” However, the agency did add that if Wildtype’s manufacturing processes change, it should contact the FDA again for further consultation. The FDA did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.

    a piece of lab-grown salmon plated sashimi style on a large plate
    Wildtype’s salmon is the first cultivated seafood ever available for sale. Wildtype

    The company is now partnering with Kann, a Haitian restaurant in Portland helmed by the James Beard Award-winning chef Gregory Gourdet. The restaurant began serving Wildtype’s salmon weekly on Thursdays this month; in July, the fish will be on the menu full-time. 

    Kolbeck said that Kann sold out of all its cultivated salmon portions on the first night of service. “I don’t think people saw this as some crazy, wild new thing,” he said. Instead, it was “another option on the menu, which is ultimately what we’re working for. We want to provide consumers with another option for seafood.”

    Consumers have an increasing number of choices for alternative proteins at grocery stores and restaurants — from plant-based burgers and chicken nuggets to faux meat made from fermented fungi. Like other alternative protein companies, cultivated protein brands often position their means of production as more sustainable than animal agriculture, the leading source of methane emissions in the U.S. But cultivated meat differs from other alternative proteins in that it’s not vegan; it is meat, just without the mass animal slaughter.

    Even though federal regulators have approved only a handful of these products for sale, there has been growing political backlash to cultivated meat. 

    Last month, three states with Republican-led legislatures enacted bills banning or temporarily banning the sale of such products: Nebraska, Montana, and Indiana. They join three other states with similar bans: Mississippi, where a law prohibiting cultivated meat sales unanimously passed in both the state House and Senate earlier this year; Alabama; and Florida. 

    The governors of these states have framed these laws as necessary to protect consumers from “fake meat” (as the Nebraska governor’s office puts it) and ranchers from unfair competition in the marketplace. This posture casts doubt not just on the safety of cultivated foods, but also their legitimacy as meat. The Montana bill defines cultivated meat as “the concept of meat … rather than from a whole slaughtered animal.” 

    However, recent outcry from ranchers suggests these state officials do not speak for all agricultural producers and consumers; in Nebraska, for example, ranchers have welcomed competition from cultivated protein companies. 

    Madeleine Cohen, who heads the regulatory team at the Good Food Institute, argued these states are sacrificing a chance to create jobs and tax revenue. “There are a small number of states that have chosen to put political wins over consumer choice and over our general free market system,” said Cohen. “And they will now kind of be sitting on the sidelines, and they will miss out on economic opportunities.”

    Two slices of raw, orange salmon rest atop mounds of sushi rice on a wooden surface
    In May, three states with Republican-led legislatures enacted bills banning or temporarily banning the sale of cultivated proteins. Wildtype

    But Kolbeck and other proponents argue that biotechnology is needed to meet the rising demand for meat and seafood without depleting the world’s natural resources. Both overfishing — which happens when wild fish are harvested at a rate faster than they can reproduce — and warming temperatures pose risks to global food security. Research has shown that climate change has already impacted fish and shellfish populations around the world. Fish farms are an increasingly common alternative to wild fisheries, but these energy-intensive operations can pollute waterways.

    Kolbeck framed cultivated salmon as a way to reduce the food system’s impact on aquatic ecosystems, protecting them for “future generations so that people can continue to fish sustainably.”

    “How do we take a little bit of pressure off of wild fish stocks and keep these places beautiful?” he said, referring to areas like Bristol Bay in Alaska, where the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery is located. 

    Suzi Gerber, head of the Association for Meat, Poultry, and Seafood Innovation, or AMPS, a cultivated protein trade group, expressed optimism about the industry’s future. She noted that Trump recently released an executive order calling to boost U.S. seafood production.

    “The timing is perfect,” said Gerber. “Wildtype and other seafood producing members of AMPS are very happy to answer this call and to ensure a bright future for American seafood alongside our agricultural colleagues in aquaculture, wild, and farmed fisheries.”

    Eric Schulze, an independent consultant for cultivated meat companies and a former federal regulator, said that the FDA’s thumbs-up to Wildtype should put Americans’ mind at ease about cultivated meat. 

    “The U.S. produces some of the safest food in the world — conventional and cultivated — and this clearance only elevates food safety and enhances consumer choice,” said Schulze. “Everyone wins.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Want to try lab-grown salmon? The US just approved it. on Jun 20, 2025.

  • PM says Dfat will upgrade Middle East travel advice ‘very soon’ – as it happened

    This blog is now closed

    Update on apartment building explosion

    Fire and Rescue NSW superintendent Adam Dewberry said there was just one injury after the explosion and all other residents were accounted for.

    A number of these people will be displaced and will not be able to go back into their accommodation due to the damage to the structure.

    We are not sure at this stage how this explosion has occurred. There is no fire.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Qantas’ new strategy. Unions bristle as Hudson shuts Jetstar Asia

    Vanessa Hudson

    CEO Vanessa Hudson’s strategy of making Qantas a majority low-cost airline has become with the closure of Jetstar Asia subsidiary. The unions are not happy, Michael Sainsbury reports.

    Vanessa Hudson’s strategic vision is facing pushback from increasingly restive pilot unions as Qantas continues to quietly move mainline routes to Jetstar and other subsidiaries, where flight deck and cabin crews are paid about 30% less.

    A spokesperson for the Australian Federation of Airline Pilots (AFAP), which covers about 80% of Jetstar pilots, told MWM, “Jetstar Enterprise Bargaining Agreement negotiations are underway. Both parties are approaching discussions in good faith, and meetings have been going well to date with Jetstar management.”

    However, the EBA does not expire until November, and things can go south quickly for the pilots when negotiating with Qantas’ aggressive industrial relations team. Qantas Freight pilots have moved a step closer to industrial action with the Fair Work Commission approving an application for protected industrial action on Thursday (June 11), with a pilot vote to begin Monday.

    Qantas Freight holds contracts with Australia Post and FedEx, and strike action would severely interrupt the delivery of online purchases.

    “After six months of negotiation, Qantas has refused to improve an offer that in some cases would see pilots paid less than if they were employed under the Air Pilots Award 2020 and would entrench poor work-life balance. A successful Protected Action Ballot Order would give more than 100 pilots the right to take industrial action,” The AFAP spokesperson said, “Qantas has based its offer on outdated aircraft that no longer fly,”

    and in the last round of negotiations, threatened to remove back pay.

    The cost benefit for Aussies as airline axes Asian arm

    Jetstar losses

    Meanwhile Qantas has admitted that Jetstar Asia would lose $35 million this year as it signalled the closure of the Singapore-based airline, the second of four planned Jetstar spinoffs to get off the ground and fail since Jetstar Pacific in 2012.

    Jetstar Hong Kong failed to even gain a licence despite the backing of mainland airline China Eastern and being chaired by Pansy Ho, daughter of Macau gambling mogul Stanley Ho, and four years of lobbying at a reported price tag of $300 million.

    All that’s left is a 30% stake in Jetstar Japan, which is controlled by rival Japan Airlines, and of course Jetstar Australia.

    Jetstar Asia should have been closed years ago, but wasn’t, perhaps because it was seen as Alan Joyce’s vanity project.

    The timing was triggered by a string of commercial imperatives including Qantas’s aircraft shortage, due to Joyce’s trade off between starting Jetstar Asia and ordering more planes for Qantas, and a looming capacity battle with soon-to-be-cashed up Virgin, as well as angry, highly profitable mining customers in Western Australia who want better, on-time planes from Qantas.

    Wrong-headed and poorly executed, the Asia misadventure has been a bit of a schemozzle, highlighting the company’s misreading of the difficulties and nuances of doing business in Asian nations.

    Jetstar Asia was always a much better experience than its domestic parent. But the Asian strategy, which allowed Joyce to swan around Asia capitals and rub shoulders with the likes of the Ho family, was prioritised over ordering new aircraft for its domestic and mainline international business, and it was always going to be outmatched by local low-cost carriers like Air Asia, Scoot and Vietjet.

    Qantas said it would redirect the closed airline’s 13 A320 planes, and their destination is telling: nine to Jetstar and four to Perth-headquartered subsidiary Network Aviation.

    As Qantas’ mainline domestic fleet has remained static at 75 for almost two decades, it has steadily increased capacity at its lower-cost, jet-flying subsidiaries Jetstar, National Jet Systems (NJS) and Network Aviation. Jetstar’s fleet now stands at 77, with another 29 on order for delivery by 2029.

    Unhappy mining customers

    The crisis amongst Qantas mining customers is very real, Perth-based Qantas sources told MWM. Vanessa Hudson and QantasLink chief Rachel Yangoyan flew to Perth last month to meet with mining bosses demanding better aircraft and on-time service, or they would walk away.

    Network’s ancient Fokker 100s, Australia’s oldest commercial aeroplanes, are falling apart, and spare parts ceased to be manufactured long ago.

    As part of its recent announcement, Qantas said it will retire four of the aircraft, and insiders say new replacements, in the form of second-hand Embraer E190S, are only weeks away. Network Aviation now has 14 A320S, second-hand and sourced from Jetstar and Jetstar Asia and 6 A319S, 20-year-old planes from US carrier Spirit, designed to service shorter runways found in WA mining airports.

    WA miner, MinRes, has already started up its own airline, and others are understood to be eyeing the model. Rio Tinto recently secured service guarantees akin to the EU airline customer guarantees.

    In an internal staff email obtained by MWM, Hudson said that the extra planes for Network would “…allow us to accelerate the retirement of a small number of F100s, increase our operational resilience and provide more capacity for our critical customers [miners] during peak periods.”

    Virgin is also threatening Qantas’ FIFO business with an order of new E190 jets starting to arrive next year. As part of its upcoming IPO, Virgin said it would spend $1 billion on new aircraft and also has access to leased aircraft from 23% owner Qatar.

    Pilots said the move has been planned for a while, with subsidiary Network Aviation recruiting pilots and cabin crews in recent months.

    What’s next?

    One Perth-based pilot told MWM, “It was clear something was happening, we just didn’t know what. Qantas has been investing in Perth with a new training centre, and in a meeting with staff on Wednesday, Hudson said that the company would be filling 100 new crew positions.”

    Both NJS and Network Aviation have slowly been taking over Qantas’ mainline routes. Last month, it was revealed that Network would begin flying from Perth to Hobart, an existing Qantas route, resume flying Perth to Darwin and fly a new route: Perth-Newcastle. According to the pilot,

    The problem is that we are flying old Qantas routes but they are paying us much less and in older planes.

    NJS is the home to the smaller A220s that are now flying capital city routes such as Melbourne-Brisbane and Melbourne-Canberra, as well as more popular regional routes. NJs previously operated 20 B717s that were retired last year. In their place, the company has ordered 29 A220s, seven of which have now arrived.

    The 717s had a capacity of 110 or 125 seats while the A220s had a capacity of 137 seats, a total capacity increase of 65%.

    While Qantas is getting new aircraft to renew its 737 fleet, it has only ordered 28 out of 75 so far, a possible sign that the mainline service will shrink over time. Pilots predict that the mainline domestic airline would be used mainly for capital city trunk routes from Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, whose fleet may possibly shrink even as Australia’s population continues to expand, and a further expansion of low-cost Jetstar both domestically and internationally.

    Packing them in

    Meanwhile, the Federal government seems happy to sit back and let the duopoly dictate terms and prices in the Australian aviation market, with no consumer guarantees or price caps.

    The evidence is clear in the rising yields in Australia. Data released recently by the International Air Transport Association showed seat capacity in Australia has shrunk by 2.2% compared to a year earlier, yet revenue per kilometre increased by 2.4%.

    Any real competition in the sector now appears to be a pipe dream after the collapse of Bonza last year and the shrinking of Rex to a regional player after it was tipped into administration a year ago.

    Canberra has remained silent on what is happening with Rex, having tipped in $130 million of taxpayers’ money already and only three weeks out from the end of its administration. Neither Qantas nor Virgin has any interest in getting into a price war. Qantas shares are at record highs, and Virgin’s float is oversubscribed.

    So it’s the usual SNAFU: shareholders and executives continue to win as airline frontline staff and passengers lose.

    Fleet delays the high price of Qantas soaring profits

     

    This post was originally published on Michael West.

  • Governor grants Rockliff’s request for early election – as it happened

    This blog is now closed

    Wong says statement behind sanctions just as important as sanctions themselves

    Wong also appeared on ABC News this morning, adding:

    The most important thing to note … is that we are acting with others. You’ve heard me speak about the fact that Australia can’t shift the dial on the Middle East by ourselves …

    It means that they won’t be able to travel to Australia, and if there are any assets held in Australia, they will be frozen, and people won’t be able to provide them with financial support.

    But obviously it is the statement that is being made, that is as important as the effect of the sanctions. And I think the fact that the countries who have imposed these sanctions are countries who have historical relationships with the state of Israel, does demonstrate the level of concern that we have about what is occurring.

    It is important together to send a very clear message that these activities and the impingement on the rights and human rights of Palestinians in the West Bank are not acceptable.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ‘Gutting the Ponsonby community’: Locals say post office should stay open

    By Aisha Campbell, RNZ News intern

    Ponsonby’s post office is shutting shop next month despite push back from the local community.

    A sign on the storefront, which is at the College Hill end of Ponsonby Road, said the closure would take place on 4 July but the post boxes would be “staying put”.

    Ponsonby local and author John Harris said New Zealand Post’s decision to close the store was “ill-considered” and it should “try harder” to cater for the people who use the shop’s services.

    “They’ve got to be mindful of the vital role that post shops like this one play in glueing the community together,” Harris said.

    “If you go down to the post shop you’ll see it’s buzzing with activity; people popping in to post parcels or to get forms filled out and so forth . . .  they’ve got to think about the effect on small communities and this is like gutting the Ponsonby community.”

    Viv Rosenberg, a spokesperson for the Ponsonby Business Association, said the group is saddened by the decision to close the shop.

    ”Our local post office has been part of the fabric of our community in Three Lamps for several years and we regard the team there as part of our Ponsonby family. We are working alongside others to try and keep it open.”

    Plan but no timeframe
    In 2018, NZ Post announced its plan to close its remaining 79 standalone post offices but did not give a timeframe on when the final store would be shut.

    NZ Post general manager consumer Sarah Sandoval said customer data and service patterns were analysed to determine where NZ Post services were best placed.

    “The Ponsonby area is well serviced by existing postal outlets, and to remove duplications of services, we’ve decided to make this change.”

    The Asia Pacific Report story about the impending Ponsonby post office shop closure
    The Asia Pacific Report story about the impending Ponsonby post office shop closure published earlier this month. Image: Asia Pacific Report

    She also said that there were nearby options available, including on Hardinge Street 1.4km away, and NZ Post Herne Bay, 1km away.

    The NZ Post website said “store closures are given very careful consideration”.

    “[Reasons for closure] can include a decline in customer numbers or services which significantly affect the economic viability of the store,” NZ Post said.

    Harris emailed NZ Post CEO David Walsh expressing his disapproval of the decision to close the shop and requesting it be reconsidered.

    He said a response by the NZ Post general manager consumer stated the closure followed a close look at customer data and that there were other stores serving the Ponsonby community, which was an unsustainable way for the business to operate.

    “Herne Bay, Hardinge Street and Wellesley Street are either a challenging walk or you hop in the car and add to the grid,” Harris said.

    “They’re only thinking about the sustainability of the New Zealand Post itself not the community.”

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • In California, a biomass company’s expansion raises fears of more fires

    Wood pellets, by design, are highly flammable. The small pieces of compressed woody leftovers, like sawdust, are used in everything from home heating to grilling. But their flammable nature has made for dangerous work conditions: Since 2010, at least 52 fires have broken out at the facilities that make wood pellets across the U.S., according to a database of incidents compiled by the Southern Environmental Law Center. 

    Of the 15 largest wood pellet facilities, at least eight have had fires or explosions since 2014, according to the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit founded by a former director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 

    At the same time, the world’s largest biomass company, Drax, is cutting down trees across North America with a promise to sell them as a replacement to fossil fuels. But even its track record is checkered with accidents. 

    In South Shields, UK, wood pellets destined for a Drax plant spontaneously combusted while in storage at the Port of Tyne, starting a fire that took 40 firefighters 12 hours to extinguish. In Port Allen, Louisiana, a Drax wood pellet  facility burst into flames in November 2021.

    Now, despite finding itself in the midst of a lawsuit over accidental fire damages, Drax is pressing on with a new business proposal; it involves not just cutting down trees to make wood pellets, but, the company argues, also to help stop wildfires.

    In October 2023, after purchasing two parcels of land in California to build two pellet mills, one in Tuolumne County and another in Lassen County, Drax’s partner organization, Golden State Natural Resources, or GSNR, “a nonprofit public benefit corporation,” met with residents of Tuolumne County to address concerns about its vision for how the process of manufacturing wood pellets can mitigate wildfire risk. 

    GSNR has since touted its close work with community members. However, according to Megan Fiske, who instructs rural workers at a local community college, residents living close to the proposed pellet mill sites were not always aware of the plans. “People who were a hundred feet away from the [proposed] pellet plant had no idea about it,” said Fiske.

    Both of the proposed mills are in forested areas that have been threatened by wildfires. When asked about the risks that manufacturing wood pellets poses, Patrick Blacklock, executive director of GSNR, told Grist, “We sought to learn from those incidents. The design features can go a long way to mitigating the risk of fire.” 

    If county representatives approve the plan, loggers will be allowed to take “dead or dying trees” and “woody biomass” from within a 100-mile radius of the pellet mills within the two counties, which overlap with the Stanislaus National Forest and the Yosemite National Park.

    Fiske said she’s seen instances, unrelated to Drax, where loggers weren’t trained properly and ended up taking more wood than should have been allowed under a wildfire resilience scheme. “The difference between what [the loggers] are told and what happens on the ground is very different,” said Fiske. “[You have] inexperienced or young people who are underpaid, maybe English isn’t their first language, so there are a lot of barriers.”

    Residents of Lassen and Tuolumne counties are fighting against Drax’s plans to build the pellet mills, telling Grist that making wood pellets in forested areas and thinning the forests at the same time would only compound the risk of fires in their communities. “They are downplaying the scale of this over and over again,” said Renee Orth, a Tuolumne County resident pushing back against development plans. 

    In January 2024, Drax formalized its partnership with GSNR with a memorandum of understanding. Several months later, the company announced that it was creating a new subsidiary, called Elimini, to take over the work in California and focus on “carbon removal” in the United States. But before Elimini and GSNR can build their mills, they are hoping to secure a viable plan for transporting the wood pellets. GSNR intends to build a facility in Stockton, about 100 miles west of the pellet mills, to transport the wood pellets overseas. That plan has been met with strong opposition.

    Little Manilla Rising — a community-led group of mostly south-Stockton residents — has decided to take a stand against Drax, which needs approval from the city before it can begin building its transport facility.

    “Right now, our community has the opportunity to determine if we even want an industry at our port that has a proven recent track record of fires, explosions, and fugitive wood dust emissions,” said Gloria Alonso Cruz, environmental justice coordinator with Little Manila Rising.

    Cruz believes that GSNR is “counting on a marginalized community’s voice to go unheard.” “We are not going to let that happen.”

    A Drax spokesperson told Grist that “no decision has been made on any potential end market or on any future arrangement with GSNR,” but GSNR said that it has not signed any other MoU with another company. The draft environmental impact report states that Europe and Asia are the intended end markets for the wood pellets.

    The EU, along with Japan and South Korea, subsidise wood pellets as a renewable fuel, based on carbon accounting which assumes that the trees will grow back and replace the CO2 that was burned after the trees were removed. But over the past few years, evidence has emerged that the burning of U.S.-sourced wood is currently releasing annual greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to between 6 and 7 million passenger vehicles. One study suggested it can take between 44 and 104 years for new trees to reabsorb the carbon that was emitted during clearcutting for wood pellets, and in a 2018 letter sent to members of the European Parliament, a group of 772 scientists concluded that: “Overall, replacing fossil fuels with wood [for biomass] will likely result in 2-3x more carbon in the atmosphere in 2050 per gigajoule of final energy.”

    To move forward, GSNR has to first wait for approval from the Port of Stockton. The port’s director Kirk DeJesus says they are waiting for the environmental impact report to be completed before signing any agreement. GSNR released the Draft Environmental Impact Report on October 22, 2024 with a 90-day review period, where comments are submitted and incorporated into an amended version, which will be sent back to Golden State Finance Authority — the non-profit that owns GSNR —  later this year for approval. After that, GSNR will also have to get local permits for Tuolumne and Lassen counties and demonstrate compliance with the California Environmental Quality Act.

    Climate activists block the entrance to Drax's May 2025 annual general meeting in London.
    Climate activists block the entrance to Drax’s May 2025 annual general meeting in London. Photo by Lab Ky Mo/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

    In its Draft Environmental Impact Report, GSNR says it anticipates the “Biomass Only Thinning Projects will treat approximately 85,779 acres of forested land annually on average once the proposed project is fully operational.” If the project is greenlit, then approximately 2,640 square miles would be logged over a 20-year period, the equivalent of a mile-wide strip of forest stretching from Sacramento to Boston. Blacklock told Grist the organization based its wildfire project off research known as the Tamm Review, which found that thinning combined with prescribed burns can reduce wildfire severity by 62 to 72 percent.

    But climate scientist Dominick DellaSala said the authors of the Tamm Review miscited their own work and ignored 37 papers contradicting their findings. “The forest is no longer a forest,” DellaSala added. “The fire-thinning question has been very narrowly scoped to get a preconceived outcome … None of them look at the collateral damages to ecosystems and the climate — only if fuels are reduced enough to lower intensity.” 

    Kim Davis, research ecologist with the USDA Forest Service and lead author of the 2014 Tamm Review study, said she stands by the findings that mechanical treatments can reduce future fire severity when combined with prescribed fires, adding that the 37 studies DellaSala cited were not included because they did not meet sufficiently strict scientific standards. “This research underwent rigorous statistical, technical, and peer review,” said Davis. “We respectfully disagree with the statement that our work improperly cited or misrepresented studies and data.”

    In any case, the U.S. Forest Service already cuts down dense areas of forest it believes are particularly at risk from wildfires and burns them in controlled areas, known as slash piles. Blacklock said that the partnership between Drax and GSNR shares this same objective. From GSNR’s perspective, and that of many local politicians, using wood which would otherwise be needlessly burned in wood-pellet facilities is a win-win.

    But campaigners say that, in other markets, Drax and its subsidiaries have extended their operations beyond slash piles, cutting down healthy trees to make wood pellets. In 2022, the BBC uncovered that wood used in Drax facilities had come from clear-cut primary forests in Canada, which can take thousands of years to grow back. A year later, after residents of a town in British Columbia, Canada, asked Drax to help clear nearby slash piles, Environment Ministry employees told The Tyee that tens of thousands of trees from healthy forests were being turned into wood pellets. 

    Large trees of the kind chopped down in Canada act as wind buffers, according to DellaSala. When these trees are removed in logging operations, like opening the air vent on a wood stove, the increased ventilation can cause a fire to spread quickly. “If a fire occurs it can spread rapidly through the forest due to higher wind speeds and drying out of the understory by tree canopy removals,” said DellaSala. “Hence the forest is over-ventilated and more prone to fast moving, wind spread fires.”

    The pellet mills, which have a history of setting on fire and producing piles of combustible dust, have to be built in clearings within forests so that woody fuel can be delivered. Although GSNR assured residents it follows strict fire protocols, the proximity to the forest made some residents nervous, and has compounded worries that the wildfire treatment plan will make fires more likely, not less.

    Drax’s involvement has also not reassured them. The company has recently come under scrutiny from regulators. The UK energy regulator Ofgem slapped the company with a $25 million fine in August 2024 for misreporting sustainability data. Three months later, Land and Climate Review reported that Drax has broken U.S. environmental rules more than 11,000 times according to public records. The breaches have spurred action from communities across the Golden State, with 185 organizations asking California to reject the wood-pellet proposal.

    Orth, one of the Tuolumne County residents Grist spoke with, captured the argument against Drax and GSNR very succinctly: “It’s greenwashing through and through,” she said.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In California, a biomass company’s expansion raises fears of more fires on Jun 10, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Trump’s second term is creating ‘a limbo moment’ for US battery recyclers

    In a recycling facility in Covington, Georgia, workers grind up dead batteries into a fine, dark powder. In the past, the factory shipped that powder, known in the battery recycling industry as black mass, overseas to refineries that extracted valuable metals like cobalt and nickel. But now it keeps the black mass on site and processes it to produce lithium carbonate, a critical ingredient for making new batteries to power electric vehicles and store energy on the grid.

    From Nevada to Arkansas, companies are racing to dig more lithium out of the ground to meet the clean energy sector’s surging appetite. But this battery recycling facility, owned by Massachusetts-based Ascend Elements, is the first new lithium carbonate producer in the nation in years — and the only source of recycled lithium carbonate in North America. The company is finalizing upgrades to its Covington facility that will allow it to produce up to 3,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate per year beginning later this month. Right now, the only other domestic source of lithium carbonate is a small mine in Silver Peak, Nevada.

    Since January, President Donald Trump has taken a sledgehammer to the Biden administration’s efforts to grow America’s clean energy industry. The Trump administration has frozen grants and loans, hollowed out key agencies, and used executive action to stall renewable energy projects and reverse climate policies — often in legally dubious ways. At the same time, citing economic and national security reasons, Trump has sought to advance efforts to produce more critical minerals like lithium in the United States. That is exactly what the emerging lithium-ion battery recycling industry seeks to do, which is why some industry insiders are optimistic about their future under Trump. 

    Nevertheless, U.S. battery recyclers face uncertainty due to fast-changing tariff policies, the prospect that Biden-era tax credits could be repealed by Congress as it seeks to slash federal spending, and signs that the clean energy manufacturing boom is fading.

    Battery recyclers are in “a limbo moment,” said Beatrice Browning, a recycling expert at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, which conducts market research for companies in the lithium-ion battery supply chain. They’re “waiting to see what the next steps are.”

    To transition off fossil fuels, the world needs a lot more big batteries that can power EVs and store renewable energy for use when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining. That need is already causing demand for the metals inside batteries to surge. Recycling end-of-life batteries — from electric cars, e-bikes, cell phones, and more — can provide metals to help meet this demand while reducing the need for destructive mining. It’s already happening on a large scale in China, where most of the world’s lithium-ion battery manufacturing takes place and where recyclers benefit from supportive government policies and a steady stream of manufacturing scrap. 

    A wide shot of an industrial space where red trucks are parked next to a pit containing huge piles of greenish-gray batteries
    Waste batteries are pooled for recycling at a technology park in Jieshou, China.
    Liu Junxi / Xinhua via Getty Images

    When the Biden administration attempted to onshore clean energy manufacturing, U.S. battery recyclers announced major expansion plans, propelled by government financing and other incentives. Under former president Joe Biden, the U.S. Department of Energy, or DOE, launched research and development initiatives to support battery recycling and awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to firms seeking to expand operations. The DOE’s Loan Program’s Office also offered to lend nearly $2.5 billion to two battery recycling companies.

    The industry also benefited from tax credits established or enhanced by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the centerpiece of Biden’s climate agenda. In particular, the 45X advanced manufacturing production credit subsidizes domestic production of critical minerals, including those produced from recycled materials. For battery recyclers, the incentive “has a direct bottom-line impact,” according to Roger Lin, VP of government affairs at Ascend Elements.

    The DOE didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment on the status of Biden-era grants and loans for battery recycling. But recyclers report that at least some federal support is continuing under Trump. 

    In 2022, Ascend Elements was awarded a $316 million DOE grant to help it construct a second battery recycling plant in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. That grant, which will go toward building capacity to make battery cathode precursor materials from recycled metals, “is still active and still being executed on,” Lin told Grist, with minimal impact from the change in administration. Ascend Elements expects the plant to come online in late 2026.

    American Battery Technology Company, a Reno, Nevada-based battery materials firm, told a similar story. In December, the company finalized a $144 million DOE contract to support the construction of its second battery recycling facility, which will extract and refine battery-grade metals from manufacturing scrap and end-of-life batteries. That grant remains active with “no changes” since Trump’s inauguration, CEO Ryan Melsert told Grist. 

    Yet another battery recycler, Cirba Solutions, recently learned that a $200 million DOE grant to help it construct a new battery recycling plant in Columbia, South Carolina, is moving forward. At full capacity, this facility is expected to produce enough battery-grade metals to supply half a million EVs a year. Cirba Solutions is also still spending funds from two earlier DOE grants, including a $75 million grant to expand a battery processing plant in Lancaster, Ohio. 

    An aerial view of a large industrial space containing neatly arranged barrels, boxes, and storage bins
    Barrels containing used batteries are stored in a Li-Cycle facility in Germany.
    Klaus-Dietmar Gabbert / picture alliance via Getty Images

    “I think that we aligned very much to the priorities of the administration,” Danielle Spalding, VP of communications and public affairs at Cirba Solutions, told Grist. 

    Those priorities include establishing the U.S. as “the leading producer and processor of non-fuel minerals,” and taking steps to “facilitate domestic mineral production to the maximum possible extent,” according to executive orders signed by Trump in January and March. Because critical minerals are used in many high-tech devices, including military weapons, the Trump administration appears to believe America’s national security depends on controlling their supply chains. As battery recyclers were quick to note following Trump’s inauguration, their industry can help.

    “Critical minerals are central to creating a resilient energy economy in the U.S., and resource recovery and recycling companies will continue to play an important role in providing another domestic source of these materials,” Ajay Kochhar, CEO of the battery recycling firm Li-Cycle, wrote in a blog post reacting to one of Trump’s executive orders on energy. 

    Li-Cycle, which closed a $475 million loan with the DOE’s Loan Programs Office in November but is now facing possible bankruptcy, didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment.

    While Biden’s approach to onshoring critical mineral production was rooted in various financial incentives, Trump has pursued the same goal using tariffs — and by attempting to fast-track new mines. Although economists have criticized Trump’s indiscriminate and unpredictable application of tariffs, some battery recyclers are cautiously optimistic they will benefit from increased trade restrictions. In particular, recyclers see the escalating trade war with China — including recent limits on exports of various critical minerals to the U.S. — as further evidence that new domestic sources of these resources are needed. (China is the world’s leading producer of most key battery metals.)

    “There is a chance that limiting the amount that is being imported from China … could really strengthen” mineral production in other regions, including the U.S., Browning said.

    Trade restrictions between the U.S. and key partners outside of China could be more harmful. Today, Browning says, U.S. recyclers often sell the black mass they produce to refiners in South Korea, which don’t produce enough domestically to meet their processing capacity and are paying a premium to secure material from abroad. Trump imposed 25 percent tariffs on Korean imports in April, before placing them on a 90-day pause. If South Korea were to implement retaliatory tariffs in response, it could cut off a key revenue stream for the U.S. industry. However, recycling companies Grist spoke noted that there are currently no export bans or tariffs affecting their black mass, and emphasized their plans to build up local refining capacity. 

    Two hands wearing turquoise latex gloves hold a glass lab dish that contains a dark powder
    A scientific employee holds a glass dish that contains black mass from dead batteries.
    Robert Michael / picture alliance via Getty Images

    “The short answer is that we see the tariffs as an opportunity to focus on domestic manufacturing,” Spalding of Cirba Solutions said. 

    While battery recyclers seem to align with Trump on critical minerals policy, and to some extent on trade, their interests diverge when it comes to energy policy. Without a clean energy manufacturing boom in the U.S., there would be far less need for battery recycling.

    Today, nearly 40 percent of the material available to battery recyclers in the U.S. is production scrap from battery gigafactories, according to data from Benchmark. Another 15 percent consists of used EV batteries that have reached the end of their lives or been recalled, while grid storage and micromobility batteries (such as e-bike batteries) account for 14 percent. The remaining third of the material available for processing is portable batteries, like those in consumer electronics.

    In the future, as more EVs reach the end of their lives, an even greater fraction of battery scrap will come from the clean energy sector. If a large number of planned battery and EV manufacturing facilities are canceled in the coming years — due to a repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax incentives, a loss of federal funding, rising project costs, or perhaps all three — the recycling industry may have to scale back its ambitions, too. 

    The budget bill that passed the House in May would undo a number of key Inflation Reduction Act provisions. Some clean energy tax credits, like the consumer EV tax credit, would be eliminated at the end of this year. The legislation was kinder to the 45X manufacturing credit, scheduling it to end in 2031 rather than the current phase-out date of 2032. But the bill could face significant changes in the Senate before heading to Trump’s desk, possibly by July 4. 

    Despite uncertainty over the fate of IRA tax credits, Trump’s actions have already put a damper on U.S. manufacturing: Since January, firms have abandoned or delayed plans for $14 billion worth of U.S. clean energy projects, according to the clean tech advocacy group E2.

    While the battery recyclers Grist spoke with are putting on a brave face under Trump’s second term, some are also looking to hedge their bets. As Ascend Elements ramps up lithium production in Georgia, it has lined up at least one buyer outside the battery supply chain. The battery industry accounts for nearly 90 percent of lithium demand globally, but the metal is also used in various industrial applications, including ceramics and glass making.

    Integrating into the EV battery supply chain remains “the ultimate goal,” Lin told Grist. “But we are looking at other plans to ensure … the economic viability of the operation continues.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump’s second term is creating ‘a limbo moment’ for US battery recyclers on Jun 10, 2025.

  • Ponsonby community up in arms over impending post office closure

    Asia Pacific Report

    The community is up in arms over another local post office in Aotearoa New Zealand about to be closed down, this time in the iconic and historic Auckland inner city suburb of Ponsonby.

    A local author and founder of Greenstone Pictures, John Harris, has led a pushback against plans to close the Ponsonby post office branch in Three Lamps next month with an undated open letter to the chief executive David Walsh.

    Saying he was “surprised and dismayed” to see the “closing soon but staying put” sign in the Ponsonby NZ Post shop, Harris pointed out that the small office gave “great service to dozens of businesses” in the area, and hundreds of residents.

    “It is misleading on your poster to claim that people will be able to obtain the same services at nearby post shops like that in Jervois Road,” Harris said.

    “Will they be able to pay their bills and car registration there? Collect mail and parcels? Buy courier bags and send mail and parcels?

    “And do you expect them to walk there?  It is not helpful to say this closure ‘might mean a few minutes extra drive’.

    This assumed that all clients were using a car, not elderly or young who were on foot.

    Parking in busy streets
    “And people are expected to try and find parking on other busy streets — Jervois Road, Karangahape Road, Wellesley Street.”

    Harris said: “The Ponsonby post shop is a vital part of the network that binds the community together.

    “To close it is like removing part of the community’s nervous system:  an ill-considered stab at the heart of a community which has always been vibrant, socially aware and productive.”

    The NZ Post website proclaims that “we provide customers with the solutions and products to help them communicate and do business.”

    However, said Harris, this planned closure for July 4 did not match those promises.

    Harris also pointed out that NZ Post made a $16 million operating profit for the last six months of 2024.

    The Ponsonby protest letter from a local community advocate
    The Ponsonby protest letter from a local community advocate to the NZ Post. Image: APR

    “Congratulations. I’m pleased you are keeping NZ Post viable. But it shows there is a bit of ‘wriggle room’ to keep the Ponsonby store open.”

    Digital services use
    In response to the call to reconsider the decision, a customer services officer replied on June 6 on behalf of chief executive Walsh, saying that the NZ Post Office needed to “ensure our physical locations are in the right places and operating efficiently” in an age where more people used digital services.

    “In some areas, including Ponsonby, we’ve had more than one store serving the same neighbourhood. That’s not a sustainable way for us to operate, so we’ve had to make some changes.”

    However, critics of the decision to close the Ponsonby store say the reasoning  was “not credible”, stressing that all claimed alternative postal stores are several kilometres away.

    A year after chief executive Walsh was appointed in 2017, it was announced that NZ Post would close almost 80 local post offices across the country and replace some of them with franchises.

    Harris, a children’s author with a strong association with the local community stretching back to the 1970s and a former editor of West End News in Freemans Bay, acknowledged that the Ponsonby  PO boxes lobby was being kept open, “but what about the ordinary rank-and-file residents and small business owners who value the other everyday services offered at the store?”

    He said he had written to local MP, Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick and the Ponsonby Business Association seeking their support.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The sneaky way even meat lovers can lessen their climate impact

    It is virtually impossible for the world to achieve the Paris Agreement’s climate targets without producing and consuming dramatically less meat. But demand for plant-based alternatives, like the imitation burgers sold by Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, has steadily declined in recent years — all while global meat consumption continues to grow.

    The problem with plant-based alternatives, for the moment, is that most consumers just don’t seem interested in buying them instead of conventional meat. This year alone, U.S. retail sales for refrigerated plant-based burgers fell by more than a quarter. 

    But there are signs that consumers might be perfectly happy to reduce their meat consumption in other ways. New research shows that meat eaters already prefer the taste of some “balanced proteins” — items like hamburgers and sausages that replace at least 30 percent of their meat content with vegetables — over conventional meat. While that may sound like a small change, the climate impact could be surprisingly large at scale: Initial research suggests that, if Americans replaced 30 percent of the meat in every burger they consume in a year, the carbon emission reductions would be equivalent to taking every car off the road in San Diego County. 

    Taste and price are often listed as reasons for sluggish consumer interest in plant-based proteins. That’s where Nectar, the group that conducted the new research, comes in: Part of the philanthropic organization Food System Innovations, Nectar conducts large-scale blind taste tests with omnivores to determine exactly how much consumers prefer meat over veggie options, or vice versa. 

    To be clear, balanced proteins — sometimes called “blended meats” — are a far cry from the vegetarian or vegan options that are most climate-friendly. Balanced proteins are still meat products, just with less meat. These novel foods incorporate plant-based protein or whole-cut vegetables into the mix. Companies experimenting with balanced proteins — which include boutique brands as well as meat titans like Purdue — frame these additions not as filler, but as a way to boost flavor and sneak more nutrients into one’s diet. It may not be a hard sell; after all, Americans are among the most ravenous meat consumers in the world, and they are estimated to eat 1.5 times more meat than dietary guidelines recommend.

    What Nectar found in its latest research is that the balanced protein category is already relatively popular with meat eaters: Participants reported they were more likely to buy balanced protein product than a vegan one. That means that balanced proteins could serve as one way to get consumers to eat less meat overall, lowering the carbon footprints of omnivores reluctant to give up burgers entirely.

    In other words, while profit-minded companies like Purdue might sell blended meats as a win-win for consumers looking for better taste and higher nutritional content, the fact that substituting these products for conventional meat could cut down on greenhouse gas emissions is an unspoken perk for the planet.

    “Taste has to be at the forefront” if animal protein substitution is going to take off, said Tim Dale, the Category Innovation Director at Food System Innovations.

    Mixing vegetables and whole grains directly into meat products is nothing new. Onion, garlic, and parsley often appear in lamb kofta; breadcrumbs help give meatballs their shape and improve their texture. Dale noted that chefs sometimes mix mushrooms into burgers to keep their patties from drying out. Replacing one third of a sausage with, say, potatoes and bell peppers, is “just doubling down on that logic and doing so because of this new motivation of sustainability,” he added.

    a photo of a burger made partially with mushrooms set on a white dinner plate
    A blended burger made partially with mushrooms. Ben Hasty / MediaNews Group / Reading Eagle via Getty Images

    To gauge how consumers perceive balanced proteins, Dale and his team designed a series of blind taste tests in which participants sampled both traditional meat products — burgers, meatballs, chicken nuggets, and a half-dozen other popular meats — as well as balanced protein options of the same type. The consumers then responded to survey questions asking them to evaluate flavor, texture, and appearance. (Like previous studies done by Nectar, the taste tests were done in a restaurant setting, rather than a laboratory.)

    Nearly 1,200 people — all of whom reported eating their product category (say, meatballs) at least once every month or two — participated in these taste tests. The results revealed that participants preferred the taste of three balanced protein brands — the Shiitake Infusion Burgers from Fable Food Co., the Purdue PLUS Chicken Nuggets from Purdue, and the Duo burger from Fusion Food Co. — over that of the “normal” all-meat alternatives. A fourth item, the BOTH Burger from 50/50 Foods, was ranked evenly with an all-meat burger, reaching what Nectar calls “taste parity”. 

    Dale called balanced proteins “a re-emerging category,” one that has been around but might be well-positioned to pick up steam in a climate-changing world as both consumers and producers of meat struggle to make more sustainable choices. Nectar likens balanced proteins to hybrid cars, because they represent a midpoint on the path to going meatless. Cara Nicoletta, a fourth-generation butcher who founded Seemore Meat & Veggies, experimented with sneaking vegetables like bell peppers, mushrooms, and carrots into her sausages for a decade before launching her business around 2020. She has said that, while working as a butcher, the amount of meat she saw her customers purchase day in and day out did not “seem like a sustainable way to eat.”

    While brands may not spell it out in their marketing, the reason why cutting the amount of beef or pork or chicken in your sausage is better for the environment is because raising meat for human consumption is a massive source of greenhouse gas emissions. In 2024, the United Nations found that the agrifood system is responsible for one third of global greenhouse gas emissions; in that same report, the U.N. stated that livestock was the single largest source of these emissions within the food system, followed by the deforestation required for the farmland and pasture that support omnivorous diets. This is difficult to talk about, and brands rarely do. (Purdue’s line of blended chicken nuggets instead highlights its hidden cauliflower and chickpea content as a nutritious plus for kids.)

    For the climate-minded, of course, there’s no better way to reduce meat consumption than by cutting it out entirely. “Ideally, I’d love to see a future where we moved away from animals in the food system completely,” said Brittany Sartor, who co-founded Plant Futures, a curriculum at the University of California, Berkeley, geared towards preparing students for careers in the plant-based alternatives industry. (Sartor was not involved in the Nectar study.)

    But she added that Nectar’s findings on balanced proteins are promising, and she believes these items “have potential to reduce animal consumption and its related health and environmental impacts — especially among certain consumer demographics.”

    Dale put it this way: Whether people give up meat entirely or not, framing the veggie-forward option as superior can start with centering taste: “We are trying to promote and say that the sustainable choice is the more delicious way to cook.”

    So far, meat eaters agree.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The sneaky way even meat lovers can lessen their climate impact on Jun 4, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • The Real Reason You Love Trader Joe’s Isn’t What You Think

    At the Trader Joe’s on Hyperion Avenue in Los Angeles, there’s a ritual that locals know well. Shoppers brave the parking lot—voted one of the worst in the city—sometimes before the sun rises, for first dibs on seasonal items: everything from tiny tote bags to that cultish green goddess salad dressing that never seems to stay on shelves long.

    The store’s narrow aisles, humming with classic ’80s tunes and filled with Hawaiian-shirt-clad crew members, are cramped in the charming way Angelenos have come to love and expect. There are no self-checkouts, no coupons, no loyalty apps—just a cashier who asks what you’re making for dinner.

    Trader Joe’s secret to success

    Trader Joe’s has become one of the most paradoxical success stories in American grocery retail: a billion-dollar business built not on abundance but restraint.

    While the typical supermarket carries upward of 30,000 items, Trader Joe’s keeps its shelves stocked with only around 4,000. That includes everything from basics like peanut butter and bread to offbeat house-label hits like pickle-flavored popcorn and soy chorizo. 

    VegNews.traderjoesbananas.traderjoesTrader Joe’s

    The constraint is deliberate. By drastically limiting choice, the company eliminates the decision fatigue that often paralyzes shoppers in conventional chains.

    And the formula works. According to industry research firm Placer.ai, Trader Joe’s stores see some of the highest foot traffic per square foot in the grocery category, routinely outperforming bigger-format competitors. The average Trader Joe’s is about 15,000 square feet—less than a third the size of many mainstream grocers—yet its revenue per square foot hovers near the top of the industry, at an estimated $2,000 to $2,300 depending on location. This puts it ahead of its nearest competitor, Whole Foods, whose per-square-foot revenue lags closer to $900.

    That density is by design. Instead of expanding through larger stores or new tech integrations, Trader Joe’s has doubled down on physical intimacy. Its layouts are less about merchandising and more about movement: a choreography of bottlenecked carts, obstructive end caps, and rotating product selection. Where a typical supermarket might offer fifteen brands of peanut butter, Trader Joe’s will sell three. Where other chains have entire aisles of cereal, Trader Joe’s limits its selection to a few small, manageable rows. 

    The point isn’t to be everything to everyone. It’s to offer what its customers need, and only that. The store may feel loud, but its secret is delivered like a whisper: you don’t need as much as you think.

    House brands

    This scarcity is psychological as much as it is logistical. Researchers have long documented the paradox of choice: that more options often lead to less satisfaction. Trader Joe’s seems to have internalized this principle with near-religious commitment. A 2016 Harvard Business Review case study of the company emphasized that its limited SKU count contributes to a faster, more pleasurable shopping experience. The result is less browsing, more buying, and a higher conversion rate per shopper.

    VegNews.TraderJoesHallofFame.ChorizoTrader Joe’s

    Another driver of Trader Joe’s minimalism is the dominance of private label products. More than 80 percent of Trader Joe’s inventory carries its own branding. This not only boosts margins but also sidesteps national brand slotting fees and advertising costs. In exchange, customers get prices that consistently beat higher-end markets, with quality that often rivals them.

    It’s also allowed Trader Joe’s to spin seasonal scarcity into a kind of cultural event. Shoppers know that the beloved Candy Cane Joe-Joe’s or Everything but the Bagel seasoning won’t be on shelves forever—so they stock up.

    “There’s this kind of stigma that private label is something that you settle for so that you can pay a lower price than you would for the name brand option,” expert Julie Averbach told CNBC. “At Trader Joe’s, the private label products are affordable luxuries.” 

    The loyalty loop

    Even the aesthetic choices reflect the retailer’s stripped-down philosophy. Trader Joe’s famously eschews conventional advertising, preferring its Fearless Flyer newsletter and hand-drawn signage to digital campaigns or television spots. It doesn’t have a rewards program or partner with delivery apps like Instacart or Uber Eats. This simplicity extends to staffing, where the brand prefers generalists over specialists. Crew members stock shelves, ring up customers, and hand out samples in a way that feels more cooperative than transactional.

    VegNews.TraderJoesStoreTrader Joe’s

    Still, the stores are as varied as the monthly roster of new items. “Each Trader Joe’s is very much unique,” Averbach said. “The artwork is very personalized to reflect the local community. They all tap into a sense of local pride and identity, which is something that I think is really unique for a grocery retailer.”

    All of this contributes to an uncanny sense of trust—not just in the store, but in the brand’s intentions. It is not trying to upsell or dazzle with abundance. It wants to get you in and out, well-fed and delighted. And despite its deliberately analog model, Trader Joe’s continues to grow. As of 2024, it operates more than 560 stores across the US, adding around 10 to 12 locations annually, always keeping the same small footprint and tightly edited inventory.

    As retail competitors invest heavily in personalization algorithms and shelf management powered by artificial intelligence, Trader Joe’s has staked its future on something more tactile and human. The line might be long. The shelves might be low-tech. But for many shoppers, that’s exactly the point.

    “Trader Joe’s is encouraging us to slow down and actually enjoy the shopping experience,” Averbach says.

    “And once you slow down and enjoy, you’re also more likely to discover and buy things that weren’t on your original shopping list.” 

    The delicate balance of consistency and surprise may be Trader Joe’s greatest strength. The stores feel timeless, and yet what’s inside is always shifting just enough to keep customers curious. It’s not the endless scroll of e-commerce or the cavernous aisles of a big-box store. It’s something slower, more analog, more human.

    In a retail landscape obsessed with personalization and choice, Trader Joe’s dares to be prescriptive. It’s telling you, with each item, this is what we think you’ll love. And most of the time, it’s right.

    This post was originally published on VegNews.com.

  • How Big Ag thwarted wetlands protections in Illinois and Iowa

    Two years ago this week, the Supreme Court’s decision in Sackett v. the Environmental Protection Agency significantly limited the agency’s ability to use the 1972 Clean Water Act to safeguard the nation’s wetlands from pollution and destruction. The decision determined that wetlands — waterlogged habitats that help filter water and sequester carbon — must be indistinguishable from larger bodies of water to be eligible for protection under the law. 

    The move effectively eliminated federal protection for most freshwater wetlands in the United States.

    The Sackett decision shifted responsibility onto states to protect their wetlands from being demolished in the name of development. Although about half of all states already had their own wetland protection laws on the books, the other half had no state-level wetland protections, according to the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy.  

    A report from the Union of Concerned Scientists found that wetlands in Illinois, Iowa, and other states in the Upper Midwest are particularly vulnerable to overdevelopment due to weak statewide regulations. 

    Illinois appears to be well positioned to protect its wetlands. It’s a blue state with Democratic supermajorites in both state legislative chambers and a governor friendly to climate policy. But last year, a wetlands protection bill never made it to the General Assembly for a vote. And Illinois State Senator Laura Ellman, the primary sponsor of the bill, is pessimistic about pushing the same bill through the legislature this year. 

    One major opponent stands in the way: the Illinois Farm Bureau. “If the Farm Bureau is against it, a lot of legislators from downstate will be against it,” Ellman told Grist. “I think a lot of planets would have to align before we could get this bill passed this session.”

    The Illinois Farm Bureau belongs to the American Farm Bureau Federation, a national organization that bills itself as the “unified national voice of agriculture.” The federation, which boasts nearly 6 million members, is a conservative-leaning group that lobbies for policies that typically limit the government’s ability to restrict farmers’ activities. 

    As such, the group often views wetland rules as overstepping — and its state chapters wield their influence to cut such measures short, according to lawmakers in Illinois and Iowa, two of the nation’s largest agricultural producers. Since the Sackett decision, a handful of states have tried to fill in the gap in federal protections with mixed results. Only one state — Colorado — so far has succeeded in passing legislation restoring its wetlands protections to a pre-Sackett level. Illinois presents an interesting test case: Can agricultural states push wetlands protections through when conservative-leaning lobbying groups oppose regulation? 

    Ellman’s bill is “definitely in a precarious situation this year,” said Jennifer Walling, who runs the Illinois Environmental Council, an organization that advances environmental policy statewide. “This is something that makes so much sense. It should be bipartisan support, and yet it’s getting a lot of challenges.” 

    corn grows along a gravel road leading to a farmhouse in illinois
    Corn growing on a farm in Illinois. Scott Olson / Getty Images

    Wetlands are soggy, muddy interstitial ecosystems like swamps, marshes, and bogs that often bridge the gap between dry land and larger bodies of water. The unifying feature across these landscapes is that they’re all some degree of waterlogged: The ground can be fully flooded or just saturated, and these conditions can vary seasonally. 

    As a result of that water content, wetlands have specialized soils that store plenty of carbon, says Siobhan Fennessy, a professor at Kenyon College and wetland ecologist. Globally, inland wetlands occupy only about 6 percent of the Earth’s land surface but are estimated to hold about 30 percent of the world’s soil carbon. That’s significant, since “there’s more carbon in soils globally than there is in the atmosphere,” Fennessy said. 

    In the United States, wetlands account for less than 6 percent of the surface area of the lower 48 states, approximately half of what existed at the time of the American Revolution. In addition to storing carbon, these sparse habitats provide critical ecological functions like soaking up excessive rains to mitigate flood risks and recharging groundwater. 

    But wetlands have been under attack by corporate interests and those who want fewer bureaucratic hurdles when developing land. The Sacketts, the Idaho couple who gave the 2023 Supreme Court decision its name, engaged in a 16-year legal battle against the EPA to build a lake home despite objections from the agency that doing so violated the Clean Water Act.

    The case concerned home building, but agricultural groups joined in the chorus of opposition. The Illinois Farm Bureau, alongside 19 other state Farm Bureaus, signed onto the American Farm Bureau Federation’s amicus brief backing the plaintiffs’ argument that the federal government was overstepping the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act by regulating wetlands not obviously connected to larger bodies of water. 

    The Trump administration has stepped up efforts to reduce federal protections for waterways. As part of the EPA’s so-called “greatest day of deregulation” earlier this year, agency administrator Lee Zeldin announced plans to further limit the scope of the Clean Water Act by more narrowly defining “waters of the United States.”

    The law firm that represented the Sacketts — Pacific Legal Foundation—is now suing the U.S. Department of Agriculture over a program known as Swampbuster, which gives farmers public funds in exchange for conserving wetlands on their land. 

    Together, these developments have empowered agribusiness groups to “take actions that are profoundly contrary to the public interest,” said Dani Replogle, a staff attorney of the Food and Water Watch, one of the defendants in the Swampbuster case. 

    In Illinois, despite solid Democratic majorities in the state legislature, plans to enshrine wetland protections after the Sackett decision haven’t gotten far. 

    In February of this year, Illinois State Senator Laura Ellman introduced SB 2401, or the Wetlands Protection Act, to the state senate. It was her second time bringing the bill to the state legislature, following its failure to reach a vote last year.  

    Ellman envisioned the measure as a response to the 2023 Supreme Court decision. It would create a process by which landowners would have to apply for and receive a permit before developing on wetlands.

    “It was originally a wetlands and streams act,” Ellman told Grist. But in early conversations with the Illinois Farm Bureau, she received feedback that the way she defined streams in the bill was too vague. The group voiced concern that the bill was too far-reaching and placed an unfair burden on landowners. At that point, she decided, “Okay, we’re just going to focus on wetlands.”

    aerial shot of farmland in illinois next to the ohio river
    Farmland in Illinois by the Ohio River. Jim Wark / Design Pics Editorial / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

    Even after the change, Ellman remembered the Illinois Farm Bureau “turning on their jets”: She and other lawmakers were flooded with calls urging them to oppose the wetland bill. She thinks the unified show of opposition reflects the organizing power of Illinois’ nearly 100 county-level farm bureaus.

    The Illinois Farm Bureau has also wooed city and suburban legislators via its Adopt-A-Legislator program. “People go down and spend the day touring farms and learning about agriculture,” said Illinois State Representative Anna Moeller. “I know a lot of my colleagues really enjoy that.”  

    As an example, the Menard County Farm Bureau posted photos on Facebook post last summer from a cookout in central Illinois hosted by Senate President Don Harmon and State Representative Camille Y. Lilly, both Chicago-area Democrats. According to Lilly’s official Facebook account, she’s hosting the cookout again later this summer.  

    Chris Davis, director of state legislation for Illinois Farm Bureau, told Grist that Ellman’s bill remains “extraordinarily broad and vague in terms of what scope of wetlands it would regulate.” If the bill were to pass, he said it would be “extremely difficult” to assess its impact on farmers — despite the bill exempting agriculture from the permitting process. Under the legislation, farmers would be able to perform activities like ranching, plowing, seeding, and harvesting and drain wetlands and other waterways in the process without a permit. 

    Ellman said that other factors besides agricultural lobbying could also kneecap her measure. A November 2024 memo from Governor JB Pritzker’s office directed all state agencies to oppose legislation that would add to Illinois’ multibillion dollar budget shortfall. The state’s department of natural resources estimated it will cost approximately $3 million to stand up the wetlands permitting program. The state of Illinois’ budget for 2025 is more than $50 billion. 

    Alex Gough, a press secretary for Pritzker, told Grist that the governor “will carefully review this legislation, should it reach his desk.” 

    But environmental advocates say preserving these ecosystems is paramount. 

    “We should be able to respond to rollbacks of the Clean Water Act that threaten our water quality here,” said Robert Hirschfeld, with the Illinois-based Prairie Rivers Network. 

    Across the Mississippi River in Iowa, attempting to pass wetland protections hasn’t been any easier. 

    Today, only about 5 percent of Iowa’s original wetlands still remain, according to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. New research from the Natural Resources Defense Council found that today, Iowa has about 630,000 acres of wetlands that likely fall under the Clean Water Act’s current regulatory definitions. Still, the environmental organization determined that 18 to 97 percent of Iowan wetlands could be at risk of destruction in the aftermath of Sackett. 

    In Iowa, the state Farm Bureau influenced the outcome of another bill that would have helped conserve certain wetlands, according to lawmakers. HSB 83, a measure introduced in January, would have made it easier for counties to finance projects reconnecting wetlands and floodplains and restoring winding bodies of water known as oxbow lakes as a means of mitigating flood risk. 

    Homes surrounded by floodwaters after a storm in Iowa
    Flooding in Iowa due to melted snowpack in 2023. Scott Olson / Getty Images

    Typically, when counties borrow money by issuing bonds to do these kinds of major projects, voters must approve the debt. HSB 83 would have added wetland conservation to the list of essential county purposes for which leaders do not need to seek voter approval.

    The measure was introduced by State Representative Megan Jones, a Republican, whose district experienced severe flooding last summer. The bill never made it out of committee, and the legislative session ended earlier this month without it getting to a vote.

    Several organizations registered in support of the measure, according to the state legislature website, including the Nature Conservancy and the Iowa Farmers Union, an agricultural group that supports conservation efforts. But only one group registered in opposition to the bill, and that was the Iowa Farm Bureau. 

    The organization “had concerns that by allowing these projects, property taxes would increase on farmers,” said State Representative Adam Zabner, a Democrat who supported the bill. After the Iowa Farm Bureau voiced its opposition at a committee hearing, according to Zabner, it became clear the bill would not have the votes to pass. “They were the group that sunk it.” 

    The Iowa Farm Bureau did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

    “It’s just their policy,” said Pam Mackey-Taylor, a lobbyist who represents the Iowa chapter of the Sierra Club, which supported the bill. The Iowa Farm Bureau doesn’t “like any farmland being taken out of production. They don’t like those kinds of heavy-handed regulations, so to speak, affecting private property.” She also pointed out that many state legislators in Iowa are farmers themselves, and may not have wanted to “go that far” with the measure this year.

    Zabner added that the flood mitigation measure could come back in the next legislative session. But, he said, “I am very skeptical, if the Farm Bureau continues to oppose it, that it could get done, unfortunately.”

    The Illinois and Iowa Farm Bureaus are especially influential, according to Austin Frerick, a fellow at the Thurman Arnold Project at Yale University who wrote the book Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry. The Iowa Farm Bureau reported $1.71 billion in assets in 2023 and spends hundreds of thousands on lobbying efforts every year, according to public disclosures. “Illinois and Iowa are in a league of their own,” said Frerick. 

    Hirschfeld, from the Prairie Rivers Network, argued that agribusiness interests like the Farm Bureau have the effect of blocking progressive environmental policy. He compared Iowa and Illinois, specifically — two states with incredibly different politics, but equally active Farm Bureaus. “Iowa can be all red, top to bottom,” he said. Illinois, on the other hand, has a “democratic supermajority.” 

    But “when it comes to ag policy, what is the difference?” If Illinois’ wetland bill fails again, it might confirm his fears: “There’s just not a difference.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How Big Ag thwarted wetlands protections in Illinois and Iowa on May 27, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Business & Human Rights Resource Centre seeks Executive Director

    The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (the Resource Centre) seeks a creative, strategic and inspiring leader ready to drive the next generation of progress in strengthening human rights in business. For more than two decades the Resource Centre has sought to amplify the voices of rightsholders and work collaboratively with allies and partners to strengthen corporate practices and support smart regulation to deliver a just economy, address the climate crisis and counter abuse. The ideal candidate will bring energy and insights to the Resource Centre’s vision of transformational change, which is built on community-led action and enhanced by global partnership. The Executive Director will have a strong understanding of international human rights, labour, environmental and climate frameworks as they relate to business–and how to make change happen through those frameworks. They will be able to work effectively with people and organisations at many levels, including grassroots leaders, government representatives, funders, corporate executives and investors.

    The Executive Director will lead our global team of 80 across 30 locations, operating with a budget of US$6 million and working in diverse alliances and partnerships worldwide.

    KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

    Strategic Leadership

    Management and Organisational Culture

    Thought and Field Leadership

    Resource Mobilization, Budget Oversight and Finance:

    LOCATION AND COMPENSATION

    The successful candidate can work in our offices in London, New York, Berlin, or Bogota, or remotely (home-based) anywhere there is strong and continuous internet access. Our team members are based all over the world, and most of our meetings take place during GMT hours to cover Asia and Latin America. The candidate must be committed to working across time zones, be flexible with respect to participating in early and late calls as needed, and able to work at least four hours that overlap with 09:00 – 17:00 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).

    The role requires frequent travel to all regions of the world (~35%) in order to connect in-person with Global Team members, partners, local communities, board members and funders, and to represent the Resource Centre at global events.

    HOW TO APPLY

    This search is being led by consultant Jenna Capeci, in partnership with the board and staff of the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre.

    Timeline

    Applications are due by Friday, June 13th, 2025. Selected applicants will begin to be contacted for interviews by July 2025. Interviews will be conducted from July through early September. Tentative timing for rounds of interviews are: July 14 – 18, August 13 – 22 and September 3 – 16. Finalists will be asked to create and make a brief presentation.
    Anticipated start date is October/November 2025. Applications may be reviewed over time, so please be patient if you do not hear from us immediately. Applicants not invited for interviews will be notified by the end of August.

    How to apply

    Please apply through this portal. Only applications received in this portal will be considered.

    https://reliefweb.int/job/4153128/executive-director

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • Solar apprenticeships give Virginia students a head start on clean energy

    When Mason Taylor was getting ready to graduate from high school in 2022, he thought he would have to take an entry-level technician job with a company in Tennessee.

    Taylor grew up in the town of Dryden in rural Lee County, in the westernmost sliver of Virginia between Kentucky and Tennessee. He had come to love the electrical courses he took in high school because there was always something new to learn, always a new way to challenge himself. 

    Driving to Tennessee for work would likely mean two hours commuting each day.

    Taylor, now 21, just wanted to work close to home. 

    A summer apprenticeship learning how to install solar arrays helped him get on-the-job training and opened up connections to local work.

    A regional partnership working to add solar panels to commercial buildings in the region aims to train young people as they go, developing workforce skills in anticipation of increasing demand for renewable energy-focused jobs in the heart of coal country, where skill sets and energy options are both changing. 

    Virginia ranks eighth in the nation for installed solar capacity, according to the Solar Energies Industry Association, but so far, major renewable energy projects have been clustered in the eastern and southern regions of the state. Increasing the popularity of solar power in the far southwestern corner of the state depends in part on the availability of trained workers like Taylor.

    A map of clean energy jobs in southwest Virginia
    Cardinal News

    Andy Hershberger, director of Virginia operations for Got Electric, said the electrical contractor firm has had an apprenticeship program nearly since the company’s founding. 

    The company, which has about 100 employees total, with 40 in Virginia and an office in Maryland, has worked with Staunton-based Secure Solar Futures, a commercial and public-sector solar developer, as far back as 2012. 

    More recently, the two companies began working to set up a training program that was more focused on solar. The catalyst was the former superintendent of Wise County schools, a school division that had signed up to put solar panels on its facilities. The superintendent saw the installation as an opportunity to get his students hands-on work on a renewable energy project.

    Approximately three dozen apprentices have signed up for the program since 2022, including about 13 who are currently involved, Hershberger said. They work on a variety of solar projects, including on rooftops, carports, and ground-mounted installations. 

    “We have been utilizing this program to train students coming out of high school and basically growing the workforce side of this thing, so we have the necessary personnel to build these solar projects long term,” Hershberger said.

    On top of hourly pay, apprentices get free equipment and a transportation subsidy, along with nine community college credits at Mountain Empire Community College, which provides classroom training before students step onto the job site. 

    “I mean, pretty much everything you need to know to go out and do any electrical job, you pretty much learned in that apprenticeship program,” Taylor said.

    He was in the first cohort of 10 students who installed solar panels on public schools in Lee and Wise counties in 2022. A grant from a regional economic development authority paid the students’ wages while they earned credit at Mountain Empire Community College, which serves residents of Dickenson, Lee, Scott, and Wise counties, plus the city of Norton.

    He got a job offer from Got Electric at the end of that summer. 

    This summer, Secure Solar Futures and Got Electric will join forces again to install more than 1,600 solar panels on the community college’s classroom buildings. The project was originally slated for 2024 but was delayed due in part to a separate project upgrading fire safety equipment in one of the buildings.

    The 777-kilowatt solar power system will be connected to the electric grid, and Mountain Empire will receive credit for the power it generates.

    Hershberger said he sees interest in solar growing.

    “I think there’s always been folks that have adopted renewable projects, different types of energy sources. There’s always the standard interest in trying to save money for facilities and campuses and things like that,” he said.

    Mountain Empire Community College offers solar training as a standalone career studies certificate or as part of its larger energy technology associate degree program.

    In southwestern Virginia, a solar installation project is more likely to consist of adding panels to homes and businesses rather than building the large, utility-scale ground-based facilities more commonly seen in the Southside region of Virginia, said Matt Rose, the college’s dean of industrial technology.

    Tony Smith, founder and CEO of Staunton-based Secure Solar Futures, speaks with media at an April event to celebrate Roanoke City Public Schools’ first phase of solar-array installation on six facilities.
    Lisa Rowan / Cardinal News

    On a larger project, a single worker might have a specialized role, performing the same task across a large number of panels. On a smaller project, a worker is more likely to be involved in more aspects of the job.

    “Our students need to have that comprehensive understanding and ability to be able to do it all,” he said.

    Last year, 10 students graduated Mountain Empire with the solar installer certification. Many students who earn the certification perform solar installation work as one part of a more comprehensive job, such as being an electrician.

    Rose said the college’s students typically start out making $17 or $18 an hour but can earn more as they become journeymen and master electricians. 

    Nationwide, the median salary for electricians is about $61,000. 

    In Lee County, population 22,000, the median household income is about $42,000. 

    The number of solar installers in southwest Virginia is unclear. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t collect data on employment by technology, so residential solar installation companies are labeled as electrical contractors, along with all other electrical businesses, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

    Tony Smith, founder and CEO of Secure Solar Futures, measures the success of the company’s apprenticeship program person by person. At an April event to celebrate the completion of the first phase of solar panel installation for Roanoke schools, Smith asked about several of the students from the 2022 cohort from Lee and Wise counties by name. 

    Smith said it’s tough to replicate the apprenticeship program at various school divisions. Doing so requires the work of individual school systems and the regional community colleges, instead of being able to pick up the curriculum from one area and apply it at the next project site.

    And all the partners — Smith’s company, participating schools, and installation firms — face some uncertainty for each project. It’s challenging to pinpoint the timing of projects so that students have the time to participate during the summer months, he said.

    Solar training can give students a ‘head start on everybody’

    “The things I learned in the apprenticeship program I’m still doing day-to-day,” Anthony Hamilton, 21, said. He completed the eight-week apprenticeship in Lee and Wise counties in 2022 alongside Taylor. He didn’t think it would turn into a ful-time job. He doubted anyone really wanted to hire a kid just starting college. 

    He’s been with Got Electric ever since, working as an electrician primarily on commercial jobs. Hamilton’s solar experience has come in handy on recent installation projects at a poultry farm and at a YMCA facility.  

    Hamilton continued going to school at Mountain Empire and graduates this month with two associate degrees in energy technology and electrical. He’s also earned a handful of certificates in solar installation, air-conditioning and refrigeration, and electrical fabrication, among others. With the nine credits he earned in the summer apprenticeship, he “already had a head start on everybody in the program.” 

    It wasn’t an easy journey, though.

    He said he usually started his day around 6 a.m. and went to night classes after work that stretched until 9:30 p.m. Hamilton lives in Coeburn in Wise County, a 45-minute drive to the college campus. He’d get home late, then get up early and do it all over again. But his college was free through a local scholarship program that pays for up to three years of classes at Mountain Empire.

    He’d like to stay with Got Electric and start preparing to take his journeyman’s license, which requires at least four years of practical experience on top of vocational training, plus an exam. From there, he’s got designs on moving up in the company and eventually becoming a master electrician.

    On April 14, he was in the town of Abingdon, a few weeks into a three-month project installing a solar array at a large poultry farm that says it produces more than 650,000 eggs a day. The work so far entailed digging trenches and laying PVC pipe for the ground-mount solar system that will span one section of the farm’s expansive fields.

    Taylor uses similar skills at work each day. But his work site looks a lot different from Hamilton’s.

    It has taken Taylor some time to figure out how to stick close to home while working in his trade. He spent a year working with Got Electric immediately after finishing his summer apprenticeship, then left the company to work as an electrician in a local school system. He eventually returned to Got Electric for a few months, working at Virginia Tech putting solar on three buildings on campus in Blacksburg, three hours from home. 

    He discovered he didn’t like traveling for installation jobs that meant night after night in a motel room.

    “That was the only complaint I had with it, about being away from home,” he said. 

    Now he’s an electrician at a state prison in Big Stone Gap. He has the same shift every day, in the same place, and drives 10 minutes home from work at the end of the day. 

    Taylor has also taken additional classes at Mountain Empire and wants to go back this fall to finish his associate degrees in HVAC and electrical. He eventually wants to open his own business as an electrician working locally. He’d like to be able to do small solar installation jobs. Solar hasn’t really caught on in far southwest Virginia, he said — at least, not yet. 

    Rose, the dean at Mountain Empire, noted that once major solar projects are done, maintenance doesn’t require ongoing jobs, and most students who receive training in solar installation typically make it part of another job, such as being an electrician.

    “We’re starting to see a lot more homeowners interested in [solar] locally as a way to offset increasing energy costs, but overall most of it is just a component of the job because there’s not enough demand,” Rose said. 

    Rose predicts interest in solar will grow as more homeowners and business owners look for ways to offset rising electric bills.

    “As we all look at increasing energy costs, it’s going to make a lot more economic sense,” he said.

    Energy independence, he added, fits with the character of southwest Virginia.

    “We’ve always been resilient people,” Rose said. “We’ve always been adapt-and-overcome people, and what better way than to basically control a little bit of your own power?”

    This reporting is part of a collaboration between the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Rural News Network and Canary Media, South Dakota News Watch, Cardinal News, The Mendocino Voice, and The Maine Monitor. Support from Ascendium Education Group made the project possible.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Solar apprenticeships give Virginia students a head start on clean energy on May 25, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • “Shut the door Spotify”. Artists hit by AI rip-offs on streaming platforms

    @hiatuskaiyote - Instagram

    AI is screaming down the streaming pipe for local musicians, but industry titans such as Spotify are not fixing it. Michael Sainsbury reports.

    When Grammy-nominated Australian musician Paul Bender was innocently checking Spotify for his side project, The Sweet Enoughs – whose most popular track has had more than 6 million streams – he noticed something strange: a track he didn’t recognise had appeared on his artist page.

    Bender is a member of Australian jazz funk band Hiatus Kaiyote which has been nominated for three Grammy awards, in three different categories, over three different years. As well as being sampled by Drake, Kendrick Lamar and Beyonce.

    “It was something I had never seen, recorded, or certainly uploaded to Spotify,” Bender said. “After listening, it was clear the track was generative AI.”

    Alarmed, Bender and his manager, Si Gould, began knocking down doors at their record label and Spotify itself to find out what was happening. Then, last week, two more tracks appeared; again, neither the work of Bender nor anyone associated with him. Both were clearly the product of AI.

    Even more concerning, Bender’s Spotify for Artists app notified him that The Sweet Enoughs had more singles scheduled for release, despite the fact that he was still in the process of recording material for his next album.

    “It’s perplexing. It’s really perplexing to me. And because I had these fake songs appear one after the other, I was like, what the f*ck is going on? And then I did a little bit of digging, trying to find where else this has happened, and finding heaps of stories of it occurring. Then I found a YouTube video where a guy walked through how he did it.”

    The Youtuber video in question –  and we ask that you do not try this at home –  boasts he made more than $3,000 on Spotify by using generative AI to create tracks that were uploaded to Spotify.

    Spotify refuses to admit problem

    After raising the issue on social media, Spotify finally responded, but only admitted to a “mapping” problem – a relatively common issue where songs by artists with the same or similar names are mistakenly posted to the wrong account. However, this explanation did little to address the larger issue at play and is, as Bender says, a ‘’laughable” explanation.

    Bender is not the first artist to fall victim to what Troy Barrott, co-founder of creative industries law firm CornerSoul, describes as the old-fashioned crime of “passing off”. The fraudulent tracks posted to his account have different Spotify codes, meaning any revenue generated flows to the fraudster, not to Bender. 

    While Bender may not be directly deprived of revenue, the negative reaction to the AI-generated tracks could impact his algorithmic standing on Spotify, “potentially depriving him of significant income in an industry where even hundreds of dollars in streaming fees are considered a win”, Gould says.

    Perhaps most alarmingly, Spotify lacks a process of checks and balances on who can post what where on its platform; despite claiming that every track is listened to by human ears, they clearly are not. 

    Bender’s video about the problem, uploaded last Friday on Instagram, quickly received global attention, particularly in the US, where the issue received some media coverage late last year.

    “Yet another annoying issue in the music industry that will not end despite the fact that it could so easily be fixed, and it should very much be fixed,” respected music industry YouTuber Anthony Fantano said in a video on the back of Bender’s post.

    Bender and Fantano are right, the problem of any lack of authentication or robust checking by both the digital service providers (DSPs) – the platforms that artists use to upload music to Spotify – or Spotify itself, has an easy technology fix, but one the industry behemoth appears too cheap to install.

    This also exposes the alarming disregard Spotify and other digital streaming platforms have for the artists and creators whose work has made these companies billions. 

    “If you are just a mid-ranking performer who is making their living, Spotify simply does not care. Bear in mind if you need a million monthly listeners to make a living from Spotify, right!?

    “Right. I know people who do that, and they get their royalties just about pay for the groceries and allow them to do other things,” Barrott says. “The big performers, but only the biggest, get specialised treatment.”

    Yet this fraudulent practice , is just the latest warning sign of the disruption AI is already causing for artists and creators across music, film, photography, and visual arts. As Bender noted, “ the music didn’t sound anything like my stuff but I am sure that is coming soon with AI”.

    Barrott says that Spotify completely protects itself because “when you click the little button that says, yes, I’ve read and agreed to those user guidelines, they wipe their hands of responsibility- in many ways.  You are generally agreeing that the material that you’re uploading, if you’re uploading it directly, is not infringing another artist’s copyright, and the load of warranties around your use of the platform.

    “It gets even stickier where you’ve then got these independent players like Believe that artists need to upload their material onto Spotify, then do the shame thing and absolve themselves. So you would have to find who has loaded up the offending material – and frankly, that could be a bot farm offshore, good luck with that”.

    Tip of the AI iceberg for the music industry

    This problem is  just the tip of the massive AI iceberg for the music and other creative  industries, and a clear signal that Australian governments and regulators need to move much more quickly to establish stronger guardrails to protect creators in the digital age.

    The Australian Performing and Recording Association ( APRA). and Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society (AMCOS) sounded the alarm last year in a landmark report, the largest of its kind in the region, that found that by 2028, 23% of music creators’ revenues – over AUD$519 million – will be at risk due to generative AI. 

    It also found that 82% of creators are worried that AI could make it impossible to earn a living from music. 

    The government’s 2023 cultural policy Revive report into the music sector found that 67% of music in Australia was consumed through online streaming services in 2021, a number that has surely increased.

    With senior Cabinet Minister and avowed music fan Tony Burke retaining the Arts portfolio, Barrott believes the sector is as well placed as it can be to have the Albanese government’s ear.

    Music Australia “no comment”

    But is Spotify too big to poke? The government’s newish umbrella music organisation said, “This isn’t something Music Australia can comment on”, referring MWM back to APRA. The Australian Recording Industry Association chief Annabelle Herd did not reply to a request for comment.

    “From the industry’s point of view, it was good that Labor was re-elected. Unfortunately, legislation and regulators move slowly, and the horse has already bolted,” he said, adding that critically, the Copyright Act needed to “catch up with AI.”

    Spoify has taken the fake songs off The Sweet Enoughs feed but they remain on the site under new artist name still called The Sweet Enoughs. Bender says its more trouble that its worth to get them taken down from less popular streaming sites like iTunes, Tidal and Prime.

    For the “passing off” problem that Bender – and doubtless countless others have encountered, the fix is far less complicated. “Shut the door, Spotify,” Bender says. “If you have a million mosquitoes coming into your house, you don’t leave the door open and try and kill them one by one. Just shut the door.”

    For the bigger AI problem that is coming screaming down the streaming pipe for the music –  and other creative sectors – the fix is far less easy.

    Australian music loses out in shift to streaming, ticketing oligopoly, struggling venues

    This post was originally published on Michael West.

  • Budget 2025: Pacific Ministry faces major cuts, yet new initiatives aim for development

    By ‘Alakihihifo Vailala of PMN News

    Funding for New Zealand’s Ministry for Pacific Peoples (MPP) is set to be reduced by almost $36 million in Budget 2025.

    This follows a cut of nearly $26 million in the 2024 budget.

    As part of these budgetary savings, the Tauola Business Fund will be closed. But, $6.3 million a year will remain to support Pacific economic and business development through the Pacific Business Trust and Pacific Business Village.

    The Budget cuts also affect the Tupu Aotearoa programme, which supports Pacific people in finding employment and training, alongside the Ministry of Social Development’s employment initiatives.

    While $5.25 million a year will still fund the programme, a total of $22 million a year has been cut over the last four years.

    The ministry will save almost $1 million by returning funding allocated for the Dawn Raids reconciliation programme from 2027/28 onwards.

    There are two years of limited funding left to complete the ministry Dawn Raids programmes, which support the Crown’s reconciliation efforts.

    Funding for Pasifika Wardens
    Despite these reductions, a new initiative providing funding for Pasifika Wardens will introduce $1 million of new spending over the next four years.

    The initiative will improve services to Pacific communities through capacity building, volunteer training, transportation, and enhanced administrative support.

    Funding for the National Fale Malae has ceased, as only $2.7 million of the allocated $10 million has been spent since funding was granted in Budget 2020.

    The remaining $6.6 million will be reprioritised over the next two years to address other priorities within the Arts, Culture and Heritage portfolio, including the National Music Centre.

    Foreign Affairs funding for the International Development Cooperation (IDC) projects, particularly focussed on the Pacific, is also affected. The IDC received an $800 million commitment in 2021 from the Labour government.

    The funding was time-limited, leading to a $200 million annual fiscal cliff starting in January 2026.

    Budget 2025 aims to mitigate this impact by providing ongoing, baselined funding of $100 million a year to cover half of the shortfall. An additional $5 million will address a $10 million annual shortfall in departmental funding.

    Support for IDC projects
    The new funding will support IDC projects, emphasising the Pacific region without being exclusively aimed at climate finance objectives. Overall, $367.5 million will be allocated to the IDC over four years.

    Finance Minister Nicola Willis said the Budget addressed a prominent fiscal cliff, especially concerning climate finance.

    “The Budget addresses this, at least in part, through ongoing, baselined funding of $100 million a year, focused on the Pacific,” she said in her Budget speech.

    “Members will not be surprised to know that the Minister of Foreign Affairs has made a case for more funding, and this will be looked at in future Budgets.”

    More funding has been allocated for new homework and tutoring services for learners in Years nine and 10 at schools with at least 50 percent Pacific students to meet the requirements for the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA).

    About 50 schools across New Zealand are expected to benefit from the initiative, which will receive nearly $7 million over the next four years, having been reprioritised from funding for the Pacific Education Programme.

    As a result, funding will be stopped for three programmes aimed at supporting Tu’u Mālohi, Pacific Reading Together and Developing Mathematical Inquiry Communities.

    Republished from Pacific Media Network News with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • PNG journalists warned over lawfare – ‘we don’t have any law to stop SLAPPs’, says Choi

    By Patrick Muuh in Port Moresby

    Journalists in Papua New Guinea are likely to face legal threats as powerful individuals and companies use court actions to silence public interest reporting, warns Media Council of PNG president Neville Choi.

    As co-chair of the second Community Coalition Against Corruption (CCAC) National Meeting, he said lawfare was likely because Parliament had passed no laws to protect reporters and individuals from such tactics.

    Choi said journalists were being left unprotected against Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) — legal actions used by powerful individuals or corporations to silence criticism and reporting.

    “In Papua New Guinea right now, we don’t have any law to stop SLAPPs,” Choi said.

    “Big corporations or organisations with more money can use lawsuits to silence people, civil society and the media. That’s the reality.”

    SLAPPs are lawsuits filed not to win on merit, but to drain resources, silence critics, and stop public debate.

    In some other countries, anti-SLAPP laws exist to protect journalists and whistleblowers. But in PNG, no such legal shield exists.

    Legal pressure for speaking out
    “We’ve seen it happen,” Choi added, referring to ACTNOW PNG’s Eddie Tanago, a civil society advocate who has faced legal pressure for speaking out.

    “He’s experienced it. And we know it can happen to journalists too.”

    journalists are being left unprotected
    Participants in the second CCAC National Meeting in Port Moresby . . . journalists are being left unprotected from corporate lawfare. Image: PNG Post-Courier

    Despite increasing threats, journalists do not have access to legal defence funds or institutional protection.

    Choi confirmed that there was no system in place to defend reporters who were hit with defamation lawsuits or other forms of legal retaliation.

    “Our advice to journalists is simple. Do your job well. The truth is the only protection we have,” he said.

    “If you stick to facts, follow professional ethics and report responsibly, you reduce your risk. But if you make a mistake, you leave yourself open to lawsuits.”

    The Media Council, in partnership with Transparency International under the CCAC, are discussing the idea of drafting an anti-SLAPP law but no formal proposal has been put forward yet.

    Republished from the PNG Post-Courier with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The US government stole the Black Hills. Now it’s clear-cutting them.

    Driving into the Black Hills National Forest, as the road gains elevation, raindrops hitting the windshield slow down and start swirling in the air. It’s snowing in late April, a welcome sight in an area that’s been in a climate change-linked drought. 

    Today, most visitors to the Black Hills will still see lots of big trees that are intentionally left standing by the highways — the “yellowbarks,” trunks lightened by age, standing guard like the buttresses of a cathedral. The Forest Service calls this “scenic integrity”; detractors call it a “green screen.” 

    That’s because if you pull off on side roads, you’ll soon come to wide plots of land that have been commercially logged. Whitetail deer are running freely; the landscape looks more like a field with a few trees than a forest with a few stumps. Invasive grassland species are creeping in, like bromegrass grass, leafy spurge, spotted knapweed, tansy, and Canada thistle.

    Ponderosa pines, the dominant trees here, produce their most viable seeds when they are 60 years or older. That means overcutting, combined with climate change, can permanently change the landscape. In recent decades, the 1.5 million acres of forest sprawling across western South Dakota and eastern Wyoming have weathered a historic beetle infestation and a giant fire, both tied to a warming climate. 

    Now the land faces more threats from the Trump administration. Foresters are seeing their jobs cut as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, lays off federal workers; an executive order on March 1 ordered “immediate expansion” of timber production; and most recently, in April, came a USDA “emergency” directive to fast-track logging on nearly 60 percent of the Black Hills.

    While “climate change” is a forbidden term in the Trump administration, wildfire risk reduction is one of the cited reasons behind the USDA order, with the directive designating almost half the Black Hills National Forest as being under “emergency” wildfire risk levels. This authorizes increased removal of trees. The memo also calls to “streamline, to the extent allowable by law, all processes related to timber production,” such as environmental review. Finally, the USDA has said the Forest Service will “issue new or updated guidance to increase timber production.” South Dakota’s congressional delegation, led by Senate Majority Leader John Thune, has been pushing for more logging too.    

    A large machine piles up logs in a forest
    Logging in Custer State Park, South Dakota. Mike Kline / Getty Images

    Groups like NRDC and NDN Collective, a national Indigenous-rights nonprofit based in the Black Hills, call the directive a hastily constructed disaster. They claim that it mislabels millions of forest acres nationwide, including land that falls within reservation boundaries in many states. It also threatens at least 25 different endangered species nationwide, like the gray wolf, which has been spotted in the Black Hills, while potentially reducing the carbon storage capacity of the forest. 

    The directive also conflicts with a memorandum of understanding signed here just last year between the Forest Service and eight tribal nations of the Oceti Sakowin Oyate, which called for cooperative planning on forest management on issues ranging from climate protection and remediation to workforce development and the protection of cultural resources and sacred sites. 

    “It’s absolutely completely a U-turn,” says Taylor Gunhammer, a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation and a local environmental organizer with NDN Collective. 

    The timber industry is cheering. “The Intermountain Forest Association applauds the recent Executive Order and Secretarial Memo,” said Ben Wudtke of that trade association. “As an industry, we care deeply about the management and sustainability of forests and are proud to play a role in that process.” 

    Yet there’s a big irony: Trump’s push is unlikely to greatly increase timber production. The reason is simple: “We don’t have that many big trees left,” said Dave Mertz, who retired from the U.S. Forest Service in 2017 after 32 years and has since evolved into a conservationist.

    The Lakota named the area Pahá Sápa — ”hills that are black” — for the looming, dark ponderosa pines that have been recorded to live as long as 700 years. When the Lakota and other tribes stewarded the land, they used controlled burns to clear underbrush and manage bison habitat. “Fire is natural, and the colonial mindset that it should adjust to human activity instead of the other way around is not correct,” said Gunhammer. 

    In the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, the United States designated Pahá Sápa as “unceded Indian Territory” exclusively for use by Indigenous peoples. Just six years later General George Armstrong Custer violated the treaty and broke the law by leading an expedition into the Black Hills that spread true but exaggerated rumors of gold. Within the next quarter-century, white settlers, gold prospectors and miners followed Custer, breaking federal law in search of the metal and cutting down three-fourths of the standing trees. 

    The free-for-all came to an end in 1899 when Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the Forest Service, negotiated the first regulated and contracted sale of timber from a national forest. 

    Homestake, the first mining company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, sought to preserve its access to timber, which it needed in large quantities for the insides of its mining shafts. To do so, it pushed Pinchot for regulated transactions to guard the resource from smaller “wildcatters” who were their would-be competitors. “It was one of those deals with the big boys in the smoky room,” said Mary Zimmerman of The Norbeck Society, a volunteer conservation group.

    Homestake bought 14 million board feet — a unit of measurement used by the logging industry — on approximately 1,700 acres in the Black Hills, in a transaction known as Case No.1. Some of the heartwood of the original stumps from that cut can be seen today, gnarled and gray. 

    Since Case No. 1, selling timber has been part of the U.S. Forest Service’s job. The money goes to pay for forest maintenance, and logging companies also sometimes provide services like underbrush clearing in trade. 

    Foresters set an annual overall quota. They mark boundaries of specific “sales areas” on a map that look like big squares cut from the forest. Then they do an environmental review before the timber company can go in and cut. 

    Trees above nine inches in diameter are the main marketable product. Between five and nine inches, they’re good for maybe wood chips or fence posts. Below five inches, it’s “dog hair,” commercially worthless. Sometimes foresters mark specific large trees to be cut, leaving others alone to maintain a certain density. Other times it’s complete removal, taking every big enough and tall enough tree off the land. 

    “I was as aggressive at putting together timber sales as anybody. I didn’t feel guilty about it because I thought I was doing the right thing,” said Dave Mertz, the ex-forester.

    two men stand in a field surrounded by trees
    Former U.S. Forest Service Deputy Chief Jim Furnish talks with retired agency employee Dave Mertz at a logging site in the Black Hills National Forest in 2021.
    Matthew Brown / AP Photo

    During the Great Depression, 30,000 members of the Civilian Conservation Corps both thinned and replanted trees cut by settlers before regulations came into effect. In at least one case, they planted a non-native tree species on 10,000 acres, which became a safety threat and fire risk.

    The volume of timber grew far above historic levels thanks to decades of total fire suppression that followed — as thick as a “shag carpet,” says Zimmerman. The density made the timber industry happy but ultimately made the forest more vulnerable. 

    Right on cue, bugs and fire arrived. In 2000, the Jasper Fire claimed 83,508 acres. It was big and hot enough to form its own pyrocumulus clouds, which can form over volcanic eruptions and cause lightning storms.

    A mountain pine beetle infestation between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s eventually impacted 435,000 acres of the 1.5 million acres of forest. “I was standing under one of our trees as it was being attacked, and it sounded like a rain stick as they all flew in,” Zimmerman said. The beetle plague was directly linked both to the forest’s unnatural density and to climate change, since larvae will die off when the temperature stays at least 30 degrees below zero for at least five days.

    The bugs were great news for loggers. Companies aggressively thinned stands of healthy trees to prevent spread. Foresters called it “beetlemania.” Timber production peaked in 2010. 

    But since then it’s been dropping. Foresters and conservationists say it’s because the big, easy easy-to-get trees are just gone.

    trucks haul logs some marked with blue streaks of paint
    A truck hauls trees from the Black Hills in South Dakota to a to a sawmill in 2012. Several trees are blue-stained, a sign of a fungus introduced into the tree by the mountain pine beetle.
    Veronica Zaragovia / AP Photo

    In 2023 the Black Hills National Forest undertook an intensive Light Detection and Ranging, or LiDAR, project, flying over to map the land at public expense. “This forest probably has more data on it than any in the world,” said Zimmerman. Preliminary results show just what previous surveys have: that marketable trees remaining are few, far between, and small, averaging just over the minimum to be considered sawtimber at all. The remaining big trees are often on steep, rocky slopes, which require special, expensive equipment that might make it uneconomic to log them.

    Neiman Enterprises, the biggest timber company in the area, closed one of its South Dakota sawmills in 2021 and laid off workers from the other one last year.  

    Loggers are also having to cover more area than they used to. Case No. 1, back in 1899, produced 1,500-1,600 cubic feet per acre, but recent sales were just 400 cubic feet an acre. Expanding sales areas mean carving out more logging roads, more disturbance of the soil and plant and animal species, and logging new, harder to reach and less productive areas. But still, in 2024, production was at a quarter of the peak, and well under the quota. 

    Yet the timber industry insists there are still more trees to cut than the Forest Service is allowing. Ben Wudtke, of the Intermountain Forest Association, provides data suggesting that the “standing live volume” of trees in the forest is high. Zimmerman and Mertz argue his numbers don’t account for the diameter of those trees. 

    “It’s almost like they’re flat-earthers,” said Mertz. 

    The Forest Service did not respond to requests for comment.

    The forest now under threat doesn’t belong to the timber industry nor to the federal government. The Lakota won a 1980 Supreme Court case recognizing the theft of this unceded land. The court granted monetary damages, which now amount, with interest, to around $2 billion, but the nation hasn’t touched the money, instead insisting the government return the land. The United Nations also advocates for the U.S. to respect Indigenous rights to the land. “All the Sioux tribes have informed the United States since 1980 that ‘The Black Hills Are Not For Sale,’” Oglala Sioux Tribal President Frank Star Comes Out told the media in April of this year. 

    For Lakota people, a just future is clear: to bring all this land back under Indigenous stewardship, not just because of their legal standing, but because of their centuries of experience managing the forest. Around the world, landback and comanagement agreements have been at the forefront of conservation efforts. 

    In February 2021, several officials of the Oglala Sioux cosigned a letter with the Norbeck Society and other conservation groups to the Forest Service calling for less logging. “Due to past overharvesting and other factors, there are not enough trees left” to meet the timber industry’s allowed quota, they wrote. That winter, tribal leaders from 12 Great Plains Nations argued for the return and protection of the Black Hills in a two-hour closed-door meeting that tribal leaders called “unprecedented” and “historic,” with Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous cabinet member. That meeting seemed to bear some fruit toward the end of Biden’s term when Haaland signed a 20-year ban on mining in a portion of the Black Hills. 

    Two weeks later, Donald Trump took office. Now what Gunhammer called the “U-turn” has begun. Not long after Trump’s Executive Order on forests, two “exploratory” drilling projects were proposed in a different part of the Black Hills for graphite and uranium mines. The proposed graphite project would impact a place called Pe’ Sla, a mountain meadow and religious area that Gunhammer compares to Mount Sinai or the Vatican.

    A single slope of this forest holds the mark of untold centuries. The biggest trees overhead may have sprouted before the Treaty of Fort Laramie was signed. The unassuming tufts of chartreuse lichen underfoot — Letharia vulpina​, the wolf poisoner — can live thousands of years. 

    “Our lifetime is shorter than the life of a forest,” says Zimmerman. “It’s spoken of as a renewable resource, but it’s such a long-term thing that in some ways, it’s not.” 

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The US government stole the Black Hills. Now it’s clear-cutting them. on May 21, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Beyond Meat’s $100 Million Test of Relevance

    Beyond Meat’s $100 million lifeline from Unprocessed Foods, an affiliate of the Ahimsa Foundation, comes at a moment of reckoning for the once high-flying plant-based meat brand. The financing, structured as a senior secured delayed-draw term loan, includes an interest rate of 12 percent until February 7, 2030, rising to 17.5 percent thereafter. It is a high-stakes bet, not just for the company, but for the broader plant-based movement it helped mainstream.

    The deal offers Beyond Meat access to urgently needed liquidity. In return, Unprocessed Foods receives warrants to buy up to 12.5 percent of the company’s current outstanding shares, with an exercise price tied to the company’s stock performance. It is a clear sign of confidence from a mission-aligned investor.

    VegNews.BeyondBurger.BeyondMeatBeyond Meat

    “This facility provides us with additional liquidity as we advance our strategic priorities and invest opportunistically to help us drive our growth plans,” Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown said in a statement. “We are pleased to welcome a new investor who deeply understands our industry and is mission-aligned with our plant-based ethos.”

    But sentiment on Wall Street has been far less enthusiastic. Beyond Meat’s stock, which once traded above $200 in 2019, closed at $2.47 on May 14. It is now worth less than three percent of its peak value. In the first quarter of 2025, Beyond Meat reported a net loss of $54.5 million on $68.7 million in net revenues, down 9.1 percent from the year prior. This marked the company’s ninth consecutive quarter of losses.

    The relevancy struggle 

    Once hailed as the future of food, Beyond Meat has been unable to convert brand awareness into profitability. Its flagship products—plant-based burgers and sausages designed to mimic real meat—are now crowded out by both competitors and shifting consumer preferences. According to the Good Food Institute, US plant-based meat sales fell seven percent in 2024, with unit sales declining by 11 percent. This contraction marks the third consecutive year of declines, suggesting deeper structural issues beyond brand-level missteps.

    VegNews.CarlsJrBurgerCarl’s Jr.

    Retailers have responded accordingly. Dunkin’, Del Taco, and Carl’s Jr. discontinued Beyond Meat items from their stores due to lagging sales; McDonald’s also dropped its plans to offer a Beyond Meat McPlant burger nationally after it failed in test markets. Data from SPINS show a steady erosion of the company’s market share.

    This is not the first time Beyond Meat has leaned on debt to stay afloat. Last year, it amended a previous convertible note agreement of nearly $1.2 billion, and in 2023, the company laid off more than 200 workers and cut its manufacturing footprint. The latest cash infusion may help stave off insolvency in the near term, but it does little to resolve underlying operational inefficiencies and an identity crisis within the plant-based sector.

    Beyond SausageBeyond Meat

    That identity crisis is rooted in the tension between mission and market. Beyond Meat built its brand on values of health, sustainability, and animal welfare—yet its processed offerings have faced scrutiny from nutritionists and whole-food advocates. As consumers gravitate toward cleaner labels and less processed proteins like tofu, lentils, or mycelium-based innovations, Beyond Meat has found itself caught in the middle.

    Efforts to reposition the brand have included a rollout of a reformulated burger with fewer ingredients and improved nutritionals as well as a range of cleaner sausages. But the rebrand has failed to generate meaningful excitement. Foodservice partnerships, long considered a buffer against volatile retail sales, have also struggled to gain traction post-pandemic. The company’s recent Planting Change short film, aimed at distancing itself from processed food, also fell short in generating prolonged buzz. 

    A changing plant-based landscape

    Meanwhile, competitors have capitalized on Beyond Meat’s vulnerabilities. Impossible Foods, its closest rival, has expanded into new categories, including plant-based chicken nuggets and steak bites. Smaller startups, like Juicy Marbles and Chunk Foods, are leveraging fermentation and whole-cut meat analogues to differentiate themselves.

    And yet, the future of plant-based meat is not as dire as it may seem. Globally, the sector is still expected to grow. A recent report by Research and Markets projects the global plant-based meat market will reach $21.8 billion by 2030, up from nearly $9.6 billion in 2024, driven in large part by demand in Asia and Latin America. But in the US, growth may require a pivot away from imitation and toward identity—less about mimicking meat and more about celebrating plants.

    “Beyond Meat is a category-leading business with exceptional products, a strong commitment to nutrition and ingredient integrity, and a globally recognized brand,” said Shaleen Shah, president of Ahimsa Foundation. “This reflects our expectation to be invested in Beyond Meat’s growth and success for the long term.”

    That long term survival may hinge on Beyond Meat’s ability to navigate this shift. It has the brand recognition, infrastructure, and mission-aligned funding to reinvent itself. But reinvention will require more than just cash. Beyond Meat must now define how far beyond faux meat it can actually go.

    This post was originally published on VegNews.com.

  • Indigenous Papuans accuse Indonesian government of ‘land grabbing’ for food security project

    By Caleb Fotheringham, RNZ Pacific journalist

    West Papuans in Merauke claim the Indonesian government is stealing land to build its global “food barn” and feed its population of 280 million.

    Indonesia denies this and says all transactions are lawful.

    President Prabowo Subianto’s administration wants Indonesia to be able to feed its population without imports as early as 2028, with the greater goal of exporting food.

    To get there, Indonesia plans to convert millions of hectares into farmland.

    Wensi Fatubun, from Merauke in Indonesian-occupied Papua close to Papua New Guinea’s border, said forests where he grew up were being cleared.

    “[The] Indonesian government took the land for the [food] security project, it was not consulted with or consented to by Indigenous Papuans,” Fatubun said.

    Prabowo’s goal is a continuation of his predecessors.

    National food estate project
    In 2020, President Joko Widodo announced the establishment of a national food estate project which aimed at opening up new areas of farmland outside the Java main island,

    It is similar to the failed Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate, spearheaded by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in 2010.

    About 1.3 million hectares were set aside in Merauke for it — half for food crops, 30 percent sugar cane, and 20 percent for palm.

    A report from the US Department of Agriculture said it encountered resistance from locals and legal challenges.

    “Approximately 90 percent of the targeted areas were forest, which provided a source of livelihood for many locals. Accordingly, the development plans became a flashpoint for local activists concerned about environmental and biodiversity impacts,” the report said.

    Probowo’s government has a more ambitious goal of opening up 3 million ha of agricultural land in Merauke — two million for rice and one million for sugarcane.

    Human Rights Watch Indonesia researcher Andreas Harsono said President Prabowo had elevated the “so-called food security issue”.

    “[The President] wants Merauke in West Papua to be the so-called national food barn. This deforestation land grabbing is much more deeper in Merauke than in the past.”

    Conflict has escalated
    Harsono said conflict had escalated in West Papua and was now on par with some of the most violent periods in the past 60 years, but he was not sure if it was connected to the President’s focus on food security.

    BenarNews reported that about 2000 troops had been deployed late last year in Merauke to provide security at a 2 million ha food plantation.

    Rosa Moiwend, from Merauke, said the soldiers worked alongside farmers.

    “They are expected to teach local farmers how to use mechanical agriculture equipment,” Moiwend said.

    “But as West Papuan people, the presence of the military in the middle of the community, watching communities activities, people’s movement when they travel from one place to another, actually creates fear among the people in Merauke.”

    Like Harsono and Fatubun, Moiwend said “land grabs” were happening.

    However, she said it still involved a land broker, which created a facade of a fair procedure.

    ‘We do not sell land’
    “Indigenous Merauke, indigenous Marind people like myself and my people, we do not sell land because land belongs to the community. It is communal land.”

    However, a spokesperson for Indonesia’s Embassy in Wellington said all processes and steps involving land sales had been lawful, “always respecting the inclinations of local tribes”.

    “Its development always involving local authorities, especially chief tribes for the consent of their ulayat (traditional land),” they said.

    “There is no land grab without consent, and the government also working on the biodiversity conservation and forestry production to create space harmonisation model with Conservation International, Medco Group, and couple of other independent organisations.”

    Catherine Delahunty at Parliament, 5 April 2023.
    Former Green Party MP now West Papuan campaigner Catherine Delahunty . . . New Zealand and Australia are failing the citizens of West Papua. Image: Johnny Blades/VNP

    ‘They are stripping communities’ – campaigner
    West Papua Action Aotearoa spokesperson Catherine Delahunty, formerly a Green Party MP, said the region was part of the lungs of the Pacific, which was now being destroyed.

    “The plan has been around for a long time but it seems to have escalated under Prabowo,” Delahunty said.

    “They are stripping those lands and stripping those communities who live there from their traditional foods such as the sago palm to turn the whole of Merauke into sugar cane, rice and palm plantations.

    “The effects have been massive and they’re just getting worse.”

    She said New Zealand and Australia — the two “most powerful” governments in the South Pacific — were failing in their obligations to the citizens of West Papua.

    “You could almost justify, because it’s a long way away from other parts of the world, that Europe and the northern hemisphere don’t really understand West Papua but there’s no excuse for us.

    “These people are in our region but they’re not white people. I think there’s a huge element of racism towards Papuans and towards Pacific nations who aren’t perceived as important in the Western worldview.”

    She said there was willingness to trade with Indonesia as a regional powerhouse, and New Zealand did not want to rock the boat.

    That coupled with a media blackout made it easy for Indonesia to act with impunity, Delahunty said.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • As temperatures rise, the US Corn Belt could see insurance claims soar

    In the United States, farmers have access to federally subsidized crop insurance — a backstop that affords them some peace of mind in the face of extreme weather. When droughts, floods, or other natural disasters ruin a season’s harvest, farmers can rely on insurance policies that will pay out a certain percentage of the expected market value of the food, saving them from financial ruin. 

    But that insurance program could become strained as global warming worsens, bringing more uncertainty to the agricultural sector.

    A new study models how harvests in the U.S. Corn Belt — the swath of Midwestern states including Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa that produce the vast majority of the nation’s corn — could fluctuate over the next few decades under a warming scenario projected by United Nations climate scientists. The researchers compared these results to a scenario with no warming, in which tomorrow’s growing conditions are the same as today’s. They found that, as temperatures continue to rise, the nation’s corn growers are likely to see more years with lower yields — and the losses they incur during those years will also be greater. 

    The study projects that the likelihood of corn growers’ yields falling low enough to trigger insurance payouts could double by 2050, creating financial strain for both farmers and the government. 

    The findings demonstrate how growing climate impacts like unprecedented heat could destabilize the business of growing food and the nation’s food supply. Reduced corn yields would be felt widely, as the crop is used to feed cattle, converted into fuel, and refined into ingredients used in processed foods, among other applications. 

    “Corn is so essential to the U.S. food system,” said Sam Pottinger, a data scientist at University of California, Berkeley and the lead researcher of the study. “There’s the corn we eat, but we also feed it to the livestock. It’s just an absolute cornerstone to how we feed everyone in the country.”

    In recent years, climate change has strained the U.S. property insurance market, as insurance companies have raised homeowners’ premiums and in some cases pulled out of risky areas altogether. Pottinger’s study seems to reflect similar cracks in the federal crop insurance system, which wasn’t designed to account for the kind of yield volatility farmers are likely to experience if the rise in global temperatures continues unmitigated. 

    workers use farm equipment to fill a container with corn kernels
    Workers harvest corn near McIntire, Iowa, in 2023.
    Scott Olson / Getty Images

    First established in the 1930s as an agricultural support in the wake of the Great Depression, the Federal Crop Insurance Program, or FCIP, got permanent authorization from Congress in 1980. Not all farms can afford these policies or choose to enroll in them: The program covered about 13 percent of U.S. farms in 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. 

    Data suggests that the way federal crop insurance is currently set up is most attractive to the nation’s largest farmers — for example, as the number of farms insured under FCIP decreased from 2017 to 2022, but the number of acres insured went up. Meanwhile, smaller farms and those that focus on specialty crops such as fruits and vegetables are less likely to have federal coverage. Farmers who go without insurance are on their own when extreme weather strikes, forced to rely on savings to make up for lost income or reach out to other USDA subagencies for support. 

    Rising temperatures have already taken a major toll on the FCIP. Climate change drove up federal crop insurance payouts by $27 billion in the period between 1991 and 2017, according to a Stanford University study. A separate 2023 report by the Environmental Working Group, an activist group focused on pollutants, found that federal crop insurance costs grew more than 500 percent over a roughly two-decade period ending in 2022. 

    Given this astronomical jump, Pottinger was not sure if he and his colleagues would see another significant increase in costs in their projections for the future. The team used a machine learning model to simulate growing conditions under one of the more moderate warming scenarios laid out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N.’s top body of climate scientists. 

    The team’s results were “eye-popping,” said Pottinger, who at one point worried they’d made a mistake in the calculations. To contextualize the results, he mentioned the 2012 to 2013 growing season, which was especially bad for corn farmers, with yields around 23 percent lower than expected. “What our simulations are saying is: That year was bad, but that kind of a bad year is going to happen a lot more often.”

    farmer drives a red combine harvester through a field of corn
    A farmer drives a combine harvester, used to harvest corn, through a field. Scott Olson / Getty Images

    Eunchun Park, an assistant professor focused on agricultural risk at the University of Arkansas, said the paper’s methodology was sound and its findings are “well aligned” with his previous research on crop insurance. (Park did not participate in the study; he is, however, engaged in similar research with one of the study’s co-authors.) 

    Stephen Wood, an associate research professor at the Yale School of the Environment, agreed about the methodology but noted that the study’s loss estimates may be on the high end — since the algorithm used by the researchers didn’t account for farmers planting different crops or changing planting strategies after a bad harvest. “It’s a good analysis, but it’s probably a maximum impact, because there are adaptation measures that could mitigate some of that,” he said.

    Park noted, as the paper does, that the FCIP isn’t prepared for the kind of yield volatility that climate change is creating. Under the program’s Yield Protection plan, for example, farmers can insure their crops up to a certain percentage of their actual production history, or the average of a grower’s output over recent years. If a farmer’s yield falls below that average, say, due to extreme heat or a hail storm, then the plan will make up the difference. 

    But averages do not reflect dramatic dips or spikes in yield very well. If a farmer’s yield is 180 bushels of corn per acre one year and then 220 the next, they have the same average yield as a farmer who harvests 150 bushels per acre and 250 bushels per acre over the same time period. However, the latter scenario costs the insurance provider — in this case, the federal government — a lot more money. 

    Pottinger and his team say lawmakers could ease the financial burden on farmers and the FCIP by tweaking the nation’s farm bill, which governs U.S. agricultural policy roughly every five years, so that the FCIP rewards growers for using regenerative agriculture methods. These practices, like planting cover crops alongside commercial crops and rotating crops from field to field, help boost soil health and crop resilience. 

    Wood’s previous research has found that agricultural lands with more organic matter in the soil fare better in extreme weather events and see lower crop insurance claims. And other research has shown cover crops confer some resilience benefits against droughts and excessive heat. 

    Regenerative agriculture techniques may, however, cause lower yields in the early stages of implementation. “Crop insurance doesn’t have a good way to recognize that right now,” said Pottinger. 

    Both Park and Wood predicted that the Risk Management Agency, the part of the USDA that regulates crop insurance policies, may be reluctant to change its approach to regenerative agriculture. “There’s some resistance there,” said Wood. 

    Pottinger emphasized that while his team recommends making crop insurance more inclusive to regenerative agriculture practices, his report does not try to “dictate practice” for farmers. He thinks growers should decide for themselves whether to try cover cropping, for instance. “Farmers know their land better than anyone else,” he said. “And they should really be empowered to make some of those decisions and just be rewarded for those outcomes.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As temperatures rise, the US Corn Belt could see insurance claims soar on May 14, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • This snack company is trying to change the way you think about chocolate

    When the food company Blue Stripes first began developing recipes in 2018, its CEO and co-founder, Oded Brenner, whirled through the company’s kitchen, tasting everything. Blue Stripes makes snacks out of every part of the cacao fruit — not just the beans, which are the essential ingredient in chocolate, but also the surrounding pulp and husks. From trays of granola to whole-cacao chocolate bars, “he could not walk by his product without breaking off a piece,” said Ben Stone, a former merchandising manager with the company. 

    “It’s obviously cliché to say that he’s like Willy Wonka because of the chocolate stuff,” he added. “But he really is.” 

    “The chocolate stuff” refers to Brenner’s previous venture. In the ’90s, he co-founded Max Brenner, an international chain of chocolate-themed restaurants. There, his decor choices (like factory piping that evoked a chocolate river) and kitschy culinary creations (like a liquid-centered chocolate egg) earned him a reputation as a real-life Willy Wonka. The media ate it up. “I was this chocolate celebrity, doing all these crazy things,” Brenner said. Paula Deen once licked ganache off his head while he was whipping up a recipe on one of her Food Network shows. 

    A bald man wearing all black holds a tray that appear to show bread covered with melted chocolate covered with toasted marshmallows
    Oded Brenner holds a “chocolate pizza” at the Max Brenner location on Boylston Street in Boston in 2011. MediaNews Group / Boston Herald via Getty Images

    That chapter ended in 2012 when the conglomerate to which he’d earlier sold the Max Brenner chain sued him for breach of a noncompete agreement. Brenner has said the situation was more complicated than it looked, claiming he was given verbal permission to start the chocolate-centric coffee shop at the heart of the complaint. The resulting settlement prohibited him from selling or marketing chocolate for five years. 

    Blue Stripes is Brenner’s return to cacao, now without the over-the-top decadence, and instead with a focus on addressing food waste. “I’m totally harnessed to the mission,” he told me. The company, which he co-founded with food-industry entrepreneur Aviv Schwietzer, is one of a growing number seeking to find culinary uses for the parts of the cacao plant that are typically discarded. Blue Stripes sells juice drinks and fruit snacks made of the fruit’s pulp, and whole-cacao trail mixes, granolas, and chocolate products, on Amazon and in premium grocery stores like Whole Foods and Sprouts. 

    “I see the impact,” Brenner said about the company’s approach. “I know it can be something that is pivotal and a huge change to the industry.”

    In Ecuador, where the company buys its cacao, Blue Stripes claims to be boosting the local economy and paring down some of the environmental impacts associated with waste. After raising $20 million last fall from a slate of investors that included The Hershey Company and Whole Foods, the company has its eye on reaching more customers. But will it be able to popularize cacao beyond the bean in a country that largely has no clue chocolate comes from a fruit? And would turning the fruit into a bestseller really make the chocolate industry more sustainable? 

    Every chocolate bar starts with the seeds (or beans) found inside cacao fruits, which sprout from trees in equatorial regions of Africa, Asia, and South America in shades ranging from yellow to burgundy. 

    The pithy pods are split open to access the beans, which are surrounded by a layer of pale pulp that makes them look remarkably like a clutch of alien eggs. These “wet beans” are removed and piled in heaps or in containers so they can dry as the pulp ferments, spurring important flavor changes in the beans. Typically all the pulp is left on the beans, where it then drips away, though a portion is sometimes removed first and discarded. Once all the pulp has dripped off, the beans are roasted, ground, and combined with other ingredients to make all manner of sweets.

    The fibrous husks that surround the pulp and beans are also often treated as waste, leading to planet-warming emissions. Many farmers heap these empty pods in moist, methane-producing piles; in Ghana, this practice creates the equivalent emissions of powering more than 2 million U.S. homes a year. Other farmers let the husks decay in the fields, which acts as a natural mulch but creates emissions, too. Turning husks into a soil-enriching compost sharply decreases emissions and can also replace emissions-intensive fertilizers, but cacao farmers don’t often compost. Molly Leavens, the agriculture and development program manager at Sustainable Food Lab, a nonprofit that works with farmers and food companies to improve farmer livelihoods and advance sustainable agriculture, said it’s “really hard to get farmers to compost because it is a lot of work with relatively little financial return.”

    A brown pod lies next to two piles of brown seeds and one pile of white pulp on a large green leaf
    Cacao pods, beans, and pulp.
    Paolo Picciotto / REDA / Universal Images Group via Getty Images

    Although these emissions are sizable, waste generally contributes a smaller part of cacao’s carbon footprint than deforestation. Farmers often clear-cut jungles to make space for their crops, and this practice is responsible for over 90 percent of cacao’s carbon footprint in Ivory Coast, the world’s top cacao-producing country. But experts consulted for this story said the relative impacts of deforestation and waste vary widely from region to region.

    Chocolate is a more than $100 billion global industry, but selling the beans to intermediaries and traders — who in turn sell them to exporters, processors, or chocolate buyers — is far from lucrative for cacao farmers, most of whom are smallholders. Cacao growers earn, on average, just 6.6 percent of the proceeds from a chocolate bar, which makes any prospect of increasing their revenues compelling.

    Although waste is common on cacao farms, it’s not inevitable. Indigenous peoples in South and Central America have been drinking the sweet-and-sour juice that results from fermenting cacao pulp for thousands of years. Today, chefs in cacao-growing regions across the world turn the pulp, which ranges in flavor from lychee to green apple with a hint of cucumber, into sorbet, jam, fancy Jell-O, sugar, honey, and more. In Ecuador, this kind of local cacao-upcycling know-how helped Blue Stripes get started. 

    Brenner was at a Los Angeles cafe when he first learned the cacao plant could do more than just make chocolate. He ordered a smoothie bowl made with the pulp, which has a texture similar to pawpaw. “I was like, ‘Wow,’” he said. “Twenty years I’m making chocolate, and I obviously knew about the cacao fruit, but I didn’t know you can really use the cacao fruit and make almost like an acai-[like] product.”

    He’d been wanting to start a chocolate business with a healthier feel than Max Brenner, and the cacao plant’s fruity potential felt like the missing piece. He envisioned cacao being used in all sorts of foods, just as different parts of coconut palms are converted into drinks, flakes, sugar, and more.

    But first, he had to find cacao to use. “It was very hard,” Brenner said. He found small bags of frozen pulp at a Brazilian grocery store in Queens but didn’t think the quality was up to snuff. Eventually, he got connected to a cacao farmer and entrepreneur in Ecuador who Brenner said had by that point been working on cacao processing techniques and machinery for a couple years.

    A chocolate bar, partially exposed from its white wrapper labeled 'Blue Stripes,' sits on top of a red cacao pod which itself sits on top of a large chunk of chocolate against a bright blue background
    One of Blue Stripes’ whole-cacao chocolate bars. Blue Stripes

    In 2018, Blue Stripes started working with the entrepreneur, who today is a key partner and owns the processing and some of the manufacturing facilities the company uses in Ecuador. (Blue Stripes said he declined to be named or interviewed in this story, and he did not respond to my request for comment through other channels.)

    Blue Stripes now sources cacao pods from around two dozen farms in Ecuador, Brenner told me. At a factory on the entrepreneur’s cacao farm, a machine slices the pods open and workers remove the pulp-covered beans. Another machine separates most of the pulp, leaving around 10 to 20 percent of it on the beans to ferment. The pulp, which Blue Stripes currently uses far more of than beans or husk, is then bottled into cacao water or turned into dried fruit. The husks are ground and dried to a fibrous flour that gets transported to separate facilities to be incorporated into chocolate bars and other snacks. 

    Brenner shared a graphic on LinkedIn claiming that Blue Stripes’ purchase of the forgotten parts of the cacao pod — 968 tons of them, to be exact — increased farmers’ revenue by $1.5 million between mid-2022 and late 2024. He told me that while the revenue benefit for farmers is small today, the downstream economic impact will grow as the company grows, because “it’s just built into the supply chain.” 

    Blue Stripes pays farmers for final ingredients rather than whole pods. Brenner said that before the cost of cacao beans tripled last year, Blue Stripes paid around $3,000 for every metric ton of beans, pulp, and husk flour, offering the same rate for the parts of the plant that are usually tossed aside as for the beans. Now, he added, Blue Stripes pays a fluctuating rate for beans between $9,000 and $12,000 per metric ton, while the original rates for pulp and husk flour are unchanged. The company declined to put me in touch with one of the farmers it works with, saying the farmers requested not to have their names or information about their farms used in the media.

    Experts on the chocolate industry who aren’t affiliated with Blue Stripes told me that the company’s business model sounds promising. 

    Blue Stripes’s ideas and technology could set a valuable example for countries that are focused on improving cocoa farmer livelihoods, said Amourlaye Touré, senior advisor for Africa at the environmental advocacy organization Mighty Earth. “What they are doing in Ecuador will be useful … to show to other parts of the world,” he said.

    Leavens at Sustainable Food Lab said that localizing processing and manufacturing in the region where cacao is grown is “building out the local economy, and that is really important.” Chocolate manufacturing is generally done in consuming countries, depriving producing countries of those potential jobs and profits. It’s also notable that Blue Stripes says it buys cacao from farmers rather than from an intermediary, since this “direct trade” practice keeps the full earnings from the crop with farmers. Leavens said what Blue Stripes says it’s paying for beans today is about what she’d expect for high-end beans in Ecuador, where she noted that farmers bring home a larger share of the market price than in West Africa, because Ecuador’s government doesn’t regulate the price.

    Will Lydgate, owner of the cacao farm Lydgate Farms in Kaua‘i, Hawai‘i, said that while he wasn’t familiar enough with how Blue Stripes works with farmers to comment on its approach, he supports any model that improves farmer livelihoods. “Anything we can do to get more money in the hands of farmers is a good thing, especially cacao farmers,” he said.

    A person wearing a bright red hat stands a in shadowy jungle while reaching forward to cut a large maroon pod off a tree with a knife
    A farmer cuts cacao pods from a tree in Cuernavaca, Colombia, in 2021. Jan Sochor / Getty Images

    Reducing the environmental impact associated with cacao waste is another reason Leavens said she “very much support[s]” what Blue Stripes is doing. In addition to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, waste prevention also conserves the water, energy, and other resources used to grow the husk and pulp. The environmental impact of Blue Stripes’s method is hard to quantify without a detailed study like a life-cycle assessment, which Brenner said he hopes to eventually undertake. Such a study would also detail any emissions saved or created during later stages like processing and transport.

    Beyond limiting the ecological impact of waste, cacao upcycling ventures like Blue Stripes could also help prevent deforestation once they reach sufficient scale, though certain conditions would have to be met in the cocoa-producing region for that to happen. Touré explained that if cacao farmers earn more money from the same crop, they’ll be less pressured to clear additional land for farming. He added that there is a risk, however, that if the crop is more valuable, it could paradoxically drive more deforestation, so protections like forest monitoring by local governments and watchdog groups must be in place to make higher earnings work as a deforestation deterrent rather than an accelerant.

    The experts I spoke to for this story said they couldn’t comment on whether those conditions are met in Ecuador, though cacao farming has historically driven very little deforestation there compared to other producing countries. Blue Stripes also recently had all its products certified by Rainforest Alliance, whose labeling scheme prohibits sourcing from farms on lands that have been deforested since 2014. The label is well known for indicating social and environmental responsibility at a glance but, like other voluntary certification schemes, has faced criticisms, such as for only conducting in-person certifications of farms considered medium- or high-risk.

    Whether Blue Stripes can scale up further will depend in part on whether it can get people onboard with eating whole cacao, which is no small task, since the fruit is still mostly unfamiliar in the United States.  

    The company’s strategy to draw in new customers leans heavily into health messaging, with language like “superfood” and “clean ingredients” prominent in its promotional videos and on its product labels. Brenner also cited the flavor and versatility of whole cacao as reasons people might become whole-cacao converts. “It tastes like heaven,” he said, and “there’s so many things you can do with it.” 

    An arm wearing a pink sleeve holds a green and black grocery shopping basket full of Blue Stripes-branded snacks
    A selection of Blue Stripes’ snacks and beverages. Blue Stripes

    Blue Stripes sent me a box of their drinks and snacks to try for this story, and I thought most were tasty, though many of the chocolate bars were unremarkable. I especially liked the company’s cacao-fruit snacks and cacao-water drinks, the latter of which tasted like zingier versions of lychee. Two friends with whom I shared the drinks liked them too and said they’d drink them again, but that a whole bottle would be too much. “It’s a sipper,” said one friend. I couldn’t detect the fibrous cacao husk flour in the products it featured in, like granola and trail mix, which is probably a success, all things considered. 

    Just how widely Blue Stripes will be able to popularize whole cacao remains to be seen. But Lydgate, whose cacao farm sells small-batch chocolates and teaches people about the fruit, said he’s glad to see Blue Stripes reaching for the mass market. The company “is drawing awareness to cacao as an ingredient,” he said. “And I’m really happy that Blue Stripes is doing that.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This snack company is trying to change the way you think about chocolate on May 13, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Labour MP says Starmer’s ‘island of strangers’ warning over immigration mimics scaremongering of far right – as it happened

    PM unveils new policies meant to drive down net migration by end of this parliament

    Q: If you want to grow the economy, won’t these plans make it harder because it will be more difficult for people to get UK citizenship?

    Starmer says he does not accept the argument that high immigration is always good for growth. The last government had high immigration but stagnant growth.

    I promise that [net migration] will fall significantly, and I do want to get it down by the end of this parliament, significantly.

    Continue reading…

  • How Trump’s latest rollback could raise your utility bills 

    The federal Energy Star program is among the most successful government initiatives in modern history. Its signature blue label is now nearly as recognizable as the Nike swoosh or a Coca-Cola can, and appliances bearing it save American consumers some $40 billion annually in energy costs — or about $350 for every taxpayer dollar that goes in. 

    This week, however, President Donald Trump’s administration moved to kill it, The Washington Post first reported. Grist reviewed an Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, document obtained by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that shows the program is slated to be “eliminated.”

    “Energy Star has saved American families and businesses more than half a trillion dollars in energy costs,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), the ranking member of the committee, in a statement to Grist. “By eliminating this program, [Trump] will force Americans to buy appliances that cost more to run and waste more energy.”

    Launched in 1992, during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, Energy Star sets efficiency specifications for products ranging from dishwashers to entire homes. Those standards are beyond government-mandated minimums, and Energy Star website says the goal is to provide “simple, credible, and unbiased information” people can use to make better decisions. 

    While Energy Star certification is voluntary, most major manufacturers participate. According to the government, around 9 out of 10 households recognize the Energy Star label. Depending on the year, as many as 80 percent say the label “very much” or “somewhat” influenced their purchases. Overall, consumers have bought more than 300 million appliances with the Energy Star label and the program has cumulatively helped avoid 4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions. 

    “Energy Star remains one of our most effective bipartisan tools for ensuring energy reliability, affordability, and American competitiveness,” said Paula Glover, president of the nonprofit coalition Alliance to Save Energy. She noted the broader economic impact of the program as well, including creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in the manufacturing, retail, real estate, and energy services industries. “Shutting it down is a risk to those jobs.”

    For years, though, President Trump has complained about efficiency benchmarks for appliances. Lower-flow shower heads, he said, make showers “five times longer.” LED lightbulbs make him look orange. People are flushing efficient toilets”10 times, 15 times” and, with dishwashers, “the electric bill is ten times more than the water.” These claims are, by and large, inaccurate. 

    Veracity aside, Trump’s efforts play into a larger culture war against appliance standards — one that The White House has continued to aggressively wage since his second term began. In February, the Department of Energy announced it was delaying efficiency regulation of appliances ranging from central air conditioners and freezers to washing machines and dryers. In March, it said it was withdrawing four efficiency standards that the Biden administration had proposed, and was pushing back the implementation date of others. Last month, Trump issued an executive order titled, in all caps, “MAINTAINING ACCEPTABLE WATER PRESSURE IN SHOWERHEADS.”

    The Energy Star rollback would likely be the most visible attack yet on appliance efficiency, and it even has manufacturers worried. Last month more than 1,000 companies, cities, and groups wrote a letter to EPA administrator Lee Zeldin urging him to support the program.

    “This would be a very big deal,” said the representative of one manufacturer, who asked not to be named given the sensitivity of the potential closure. Energy Star, they explained, helps companies market and move higher volumes of high-efficiency products. “It’s an odd thing that you would jettison a voluntary public-private partnership that costs a rounding error in EPA’s budget and affords consumers billions of dollars of value.” 

    Beyond eliminating staff, the EPA’s exact plans and timeline for any Energy Star rollback remain unclear. The agency did not respond directly to questions about the program’s future but, in an emailed statement, told Grist the “EPA is delivering organizational improvements to the personnel structure that will directly benefit the American people.”

    Losing Energy Star could have a range of ripple effects. In addition to making selecting products more confusing for consumers, it could hinder their ability to qualify for federal, state, or utility incentives that are tied to the certification. There is, for example, a federal tax incentive for building Energy Star homes. Appliance rebates are also often linked to the designation. 

    “How are those programs now going to know which kinds of appliances they want to give a rebate to or a tax incentive for?,” said Glover. States or utilities could conceivably fill that void with their own standards, creating a patchwork of regulation and incentives. “Having Energy Star that gives a federal standard makes far more sense. It’s certainly easier for consumers to understand what their options are.”

    These are among the many details that would have to be worked out if the Trump administration proceeds with its plan. 

    “I don’t think they expected this kind of pushback,” said Steve Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, about the media attention that the latest change has garnered. “This is getting a lot of publicity.”

    The move could also face legal challenges, he said, pointing to the Energy Policy Act of 2005 as one possible road block for the administration. It directs the EPA and Department of Energy to, among other things, “promote Energy Star compliant technologies as the preferred technologies in the marketplace for” and “preserve the integrity of the Energy Star label.”

    Another possibility is that the Department of Energy takes over as Energy Star’s primary administrator. But as with other aspects of President Trump’s ambitious agenda, it could take time to sort out real world impact. 

    If Energy Star is ultimately eliminated, Nadel says the labels would eventually go away, as would potentially billions in consumer savings.

    But, he added: “Nothing is done yet.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How Trump’s latest rollback could raise your utility bills  on May 7, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Australia’s Bisalloy Steel sells to IDF in violation of UN Arms Treaty

    Armoured Toyota with a gun

    ASX-listed Bisalloy Steel continues to export Australian-made armoured steel for vehicles regularly used by the Israeli Defence Force killing machine, in contravention of Australia’s treaty obligations. Yaakov Aharon with the investigation.

    MWM can reveal which armoured vehicles Bisalloy Steel manufactures parts for and how the IDF uses them to kill Palestinians. The covert vehicles are “ideal for Special Forces” and equipped with a low-visibility weapons mount.

    This is in contravention of the UN Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), of which Australia is a signatory, as well as a violation of the International Court of Justice’s preliminary determination against Israel’s war in Gaza.

    It is no secret that Bisalloy Steel Group (ASX:BIS) manufactures armoured steel for military use and exports it to Israel. Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and former ambassador to Israel, now Senator, David Sharma, are both shareholders.

    CEO Rowan Melrose told investors at the 2024 AGM that exports to Israel account for 0.6% to 1.9% of Bisalloy’s $153 million annual revenue. As Australia’s only manufacturer of high-strength quenched and tempered steels, the company’s role in the global arms trade is almost irreplaceable.

    In 2023, Bisalloy partnered with Israeli company Plasan Sasa (simply ‘Plasan’) to provide the Royal Australian Navy with nine frigates.

    Protests as Malcolm Turnbull backed Bisalloy Steel sells armour to the IDF

    Killer Toyotas

    In 2018, Bisalloy signed a $900,000 contract to provide Rafael – a company owned by the Israeli government – with armour for military vehicles. That same year, Bisalloy announced its partnership with Plasan Re’em, a subsidiary of Plasan Sasa.

    Toyota armoured vehciles

    Plasan Reem armoured vehicles equipped with Bisalloy armoured steel. Source: Bisalloy

    Australia exports significant quantities of parts for four-wheel-drive military vehicles to Israel, according to government documents published by Declassified Australia.

    In a 2018 statement, Bisalloy said, “Based on commercially available models, the vehicles are also designed with appearance and anonymity in mind. To the untrained eye they look like standard vehicles, which means they are suitable for covert use.”

    The modified vehicles are in serial production at Plasan Re’em and are regularly used by the IDF. They are designed to have the “same appearance, different characteristics” from an original Toyota model. The IDF tests the durability and ballistic performance of the Re’em J-79, which can withstand two grenades.

    The vehicle’s “highlights” include a low-visibility roll bar that unfolds into a weapons mount. The “special features” are the tie-down accessories and modified suspension, making it suitable “for internal transportation within CH47 and CH53 helicopters.”

    For a nighttime ambush, the blackout headlights use a special lens to cast a beam visible to the driver but invisible to enemies standing a short distance away.

    Albanese’s false claim

    “There is no Australian weaponry involved in what is going on in Gaza,” Prime Minister Albanese said at the Sky News Leaders’ Debate. “That is just not the case.”

    Two days later, ABC News published photos of Israeli defence officials standing next to their brand new Australian-made Remote Controlled Weapons System (RWCS). The Albanese government explained it had sold the weapon to America, which then sold it to Israel without Australian approval.

    MWM has attempted to contact the Department of Defence to clarify details about Bisalloy’s exports to Plasan Re’em. If a product fits the definitions supplied by the Defence and Strategic Goods List (DSGL), exporting it requires approval from Defence.

    We also contacted Bisalloy to clarify details regarding its exports for Re’em’s armoured vehicles. The response was evasive but said that Bisalloy’s products are exported internationally “with the appropriate government approvals.” The company further insisted it “does not manufacture steel products for the use in bullets, missiles, or similar weapons.”

    Defence and Strategic Global List

    The legal definition of munitions provided by the DSGL is far broader than bullets and missiles.

    Part 1 of the DSGL concerns the Munitions List (ML), which includes goods that are adapted for military use or are inherently lethal.

    Part 2 concerns ‘dual-use’ items, which are developed for civilian purposes but which may be used as military components. Dual-use items are still defined as arms.

    Benedict Coyne, an expert in international human rights law, told MWM, “The information available on the public record appears to indicate that Bisalloy has been providing military-grade steel armoured plates to Plasan Re’em”.

    The armoured vehicles exceed almost all of the DSGL’s criteria relevant to section ML6, Ground vehicles and components. However, a footnote in the legislation states that this section does not apply to “civil vehicles designed or modified for transporting money or valuables.” This refers to cash-in-transit vehicles, and Bisalloy’s response alluded to this footnote, stating that its armoured steel protects “people, property and valuables”.

    Bisalloy does sell armoured vehicles for cash-in-transit purposes, but the product brochure does not mention Plasan Reem, which is only referred to in the military grade category.

    Orwell revisited. The Government playing word games with weapons to Israel

    Violations of international law

    Rawan Arraf, Executive Director of the Australian Centre for International Justice (ACIJ), told MWM, “If Australian-made steel is being used in the manufacture of armoured vehicles deployed to sustain illegal settlements or the broader occupation, regardless of whether the goods are classified as dual-use or non-lethal,

    this raises serious concerns about complicity in violations of international law.

    He continued, “The International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) Advisory Opinion of July 2024 is unequivocal: States must not engage in trade that entrenches Israel’s unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” He also noted that the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion not only apply to States but to corporations, too.

    In 2022, Israel Defence magazine reported that a Re’em Hilux was “involved in the elimination of the terrorist in the recent attack that took place in Kiryat Arba,” an illegal Israeli settlement within Hebron in the occupied West Bank.

    “While the terrorist was shooting in all directions, the security coordinator who was driving the car attacked him and ran him over to death. While the terrorist was shooting in all directions, the security coordinator who was driving the car attacked him and ran him over to death.”

    Greens Spokesperson for Defence, Senator David Shoebridge, told MWM, “The Albanese Government has chosen to muddy the waters and pretend they are not complicit. This defence is now looking even more paper-thin as the evidence against them piles up.”

    “We have watched in horror over the past year and a half a genocide unfolding in front of our eyes. Millions of people have been calling on the Government to do all it can to be a force for peace.”

    “The call is very clear, end the two-way arms trade. Other countries have taken steps to do this, and it’s what international law makes clear we need to do.”

    Bisalloy making a killing

    The price of Bisalloy’s shares has soared by 119% from October 7, 2023, until the end of 2024. It has since fallen to $3.38, still up by a tidy 64% since the Hamas attacks.

    MWM asked Bisalloy if it had conducted a risk assessment into whether Plasan Re’em’s vehicles may be used for war crimes. We did not receive a response.

    Benedict Coyne says, “The onus is on Bisalloy, Plasan Re’em, and the Israeli Government and Israeli Defence Forces to provide evidence to establish that this is not, in fact, the case. If it is the case,

    then it amounts to a direct violation of international law by Bisalloy.

    “Smorgasbord of thousands” – Australia’s military aid to Israel revealed

    This post was originally published on Michael West.

  • Democracy & Capitalism: A Failed Experiment? | Bloomberg’s Stephanie Flanders on Economy & Business


    This content originally appeared on Laura Flanders & Friends and was authored by Laura Flanders & Friends.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • A simple tweak to tax law has helped bring solar power to the communities that need it most

    Last year, the Boston Community Solar Cooperative announced plans for its first community solar project: 81 kilowatts of panels atop an affordable housing complex in a low-income, historically Black Boston neighborhood. The success of the project depends, in large part, on tax credits the Inflation Reduction Act established in 2022. Because the solar panels will sit on a subsidized apartment building in a low-income community, up to 50 percent of the project’s cost could ultimately be recouped through tax credits. But, in all likelihood, once the project’s completed, the Boston Community Solar Cooperative won’t actually receive those credits — and that’s by design.

    Instead, the cooperative intends to sell its tax credits as soon as it can, said Gregory King, the organization’s president. This will bring in more cash early on, reduce the amount of debt required, and improve the financial outlook of the project. 

    In the past, a scheme like this would have required whoever purchased the credits to retain an ownership stake in the project for at least five years — an unthinkable prospect for a cooperative that aims to provide its member-owners, primarily Black and brown residents of disinvested areas of Boston, with a modest passive income from the energy generated by the panels. But the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, not only revamped old tax credits and introduced fresh ones, it also made these credits transferable. In other words, anyone developing a clean energy project who didn’t have enough tax liability to take full advantage of the tax credits could sell them to a company that did, without ceding ownership.

    This change has enabled countless clean energy projects to get off the ground. Wind farms, geothermal plants, large-scale battery facilities, electric vehicle charging banks, manufacturing projects, and even mining operations for critical minerals have all taken advantage of the tax credits markets that emerged and matured in just a year and a half after transferability went into effect. Crux Climate, one of the companies that built a platform to facilitate tax credit transfers, estimates that $24 billion worth of IRA-related credits were exchanged in 2024 alone.

    A person wearing jeans and a tool belt carries a solar panel across a roof, with a deep blue sky behind them
    A worker carries a solar panel for rooftop installation in Las Vegas in 2023. David Becker for the Washington Post via Getty Images

    “Before the IRA passed, it was very difficult for a lot of renewable energy developers to take full advantage of the tax credits,” said Charles Harper, a senior policy lead with the climate advocacy nonprofit Evergreen Action.

    This is because tax credits work as a form of discount on a business or individual’s annual tax bill, allowing them to cut a chunk out of what they owe the government based on the dollar value of the credit. This can save a lot of money — if you owe enough taxes in the first place. “Tax credits are only good if you have enough tax liability that you owe the government to remove,” Harper said.

    The IRA made it easier for project developers without major tax liabilities, like the Boston Community Solar Cooperative, to sell their credits at a discount before breaking ground on a solar or wind project. This allows the developers to bring in much-needed cash to pay for equipment and labor. Meanwhile, buyers — which can include banks, companies, and even some high net-worth individuals — get an additional write-off on their own hefty tax statements.

    It was technically possible to shift tax credits from one entity to another before the IRA, but the process was complicated and onerous, meaning very few players had the appetite to sell or buy credits. “The largest banks make up the overwhelming share of that market,” said Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux Climate. This limited how many developers could actually sell their tax credits and often made the deals inaccessible to small developers and community-based projects.

    “Transferability was a godsend in many ways, because it simplified the process,” said Derek Silverman, co-founder of Basis Climate, another site for trading tax credits. 

    Before a clean energy developer can list a credit for sale on an exchange like Crux Climate, they must first get their credits pre-approved by the Treasury Department. To do so, they need to submit paperwork showing that they control the site where the project will be developed and that they have a contract with a customer who will purchase the electricity once it’s flowing.

    The process isn’t frictionless, but it’s no longer as difficult as it was before the IRA. Now, instead of navigating complex legal agreements to move tax credits from developer to investor, “it’s like going and buying a Walmart gift card for 85 cents on the dollar,” said Jon Abe, CEO of the clean energy investment firm Sunwealth, “but with a lot more paperwork.”

    That 85-cents-on-the-dollar discount is what attracts buyers to these markets. On Crux Climate’s platform, the actual per-dollar markdown shifts based on the size of the transaction, from 89 cents or less for the smallest deals to 95 cents for the largest. 

    But even if the developers of smaller projects sell their tax credits for a deeper discount, it can still make a pronounced impact. Based on King’s estimates, Boston Community Solar Cooperative could bring in around $150,000 from its tax credit sales. And last year, Basis Climate helped the solar service provider Navajo Power Home sell credits for $355,000 to support a project that is bringing solar and battery systems to Navajo Nation and providing electricity to more than 100 homes that would otherwise have to rely on diesel generators.

    “Solar is pretty capital-intensive. So to the degree that you could use someone else’s money and not have to take on debt to bring that capital to your project,” King said, “you’re much more likely to have projects that pencil,” or make financial sense.

    A white man in a blue suit wearing glasses holds out his right arm while speaking into a microphone. He is standing in a hallway, with several people crowded around him.
    Speaker of the House Mike Johnson speaks to reporters after the House passed a Republican blueprint for budget reconciliation in early April.
    Andrew Harnik / Getty Images

    In addition to making material improvements in disadvantaged communities, the transferable tax credits have spurred private investments that create jobs and expand domestic manufacturing, all while helping big businesses lighten their tax load. Yet these tax credits are under threat as congressional Republicans work through budget reconciliation, a special legislative process that allows Congress to fast-track spending legislation and bypass the Senate filibuster. (The IRA itself was adopted through budget reconciliation.) 

    Right now, the main priority for Republicans in this process is extending tax cuts worth $4.5 trillion over a decade that would primarily benefit the wealthy, and reducing federal spending by at least $1.5 trillion to make up some of the difference. It’s not yet clear what might get cut, but the IRA tax credits are being considered. In February, House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that his approach to repealing the IRA would “be somewhere between a scalpel and a sledgehammer.”

    But an estimated 85 percent of IRA-related investments have flowed into Republican districts, inspiring four Senate Republicans to come out in favor of the tax credits this month. This came after nearly two dozen House Republicans co-signed a letter in March in defense of the law’s tax provisions. “If at least a handful of those 21 House members are serious about protecting investment and jobs in their districts that the [IRA tax credits] are providing,” said Harper, “then that would be huge.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A simple tweak to tax law has helped bring solar power to the communities that need it most on Apr 22, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Uyghur rights group calls on hotel chains not to ‘sanitise’ China abuses in Xinjiang

    Growth in international hotels coincides with government effort to push region as a tourism destination

    Almost 200 international hotels are operating or planning to open in Xinjiang, despite calls from human rights groups for global corporations not to help “sanitise” the Chinese government’s human rights abuses in the region, a report has said.

    The report by the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) identified 115 operational hotels which the organisation said “benefit from a presence in the Uyghur region”. At least another 74 were in various stages of construction or planning, the report said. The UHRP said some of the hotels also had exposure or links of concern to forced labour and labour transfer programmes.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.