radiofree.asia

Category: Business

  • 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.

  • Another coal project. BHP spins mine approval as pumped hydro ‘coal lakes’

    Mt Arthur coal mine. Image BHP

    The government has approved a giant coal project, the extension of Australia’s biggest coal mine, BHP’s Mt Arthur mine in the Hunter Valley. BHP is spinning it as pumped hydro. Michael West reports.

    Besides putting energy consumers on the hook for funding Eraring, extending Australia’s biggest biggest coal-fired power station, the government has approved BHP extending the biggest coal mine in Australia, Mt Arthur, and BHP has spun it as a green deal.

    “BHP has partnered with renewable energy and infrastructure company ACCIONA Energía to explore the development of a pumped hydro energy storage project at Mt Arthur Coal.

    “As part of the planned pathway for closure, BHP has gained approval from the NSW Government to extend mining activities at Mt Arthur Coal for an additional four years, from July 2026 to June 2030.”

    However, technical experts have said the larger pumped hydro scheme is not feasible, telling MWM the Hunter Valley ‘coal to lakes’ idea faced immense regulatory challenges; for a start, the environmental and First Nations’ approvals which would be required to flood the area, potentially putting indigenous heritage under water.

    BHP had been canvassing local communities with the idea that the pumped hydro project would be part of a larger ‘coal to lakes’ project in line with the transformation of the former coal mine region in East Germany. More on this later.

    Labor’s hat-trick: three coal mine approvals in one day

    Mt Arthur Coal, the largest thermal coal mine in Australia, has been granted the four year extension by the state and federal governments. Adjacently, the recently held NSW Inquiry into Productive & Beneficial Land Use in Mining has concluded with its key recommendations which show the mining behemoth has bulldozed its way through the ‘red tape’ to continue to earn huge revenues for at least another 4 years.

    Detailed within the approval are understood to be ‘tight expectations’ outlined by the Environment Protection Authority (EPA) which has been working with BHP, other agencies and the local community, in the lead up to the approval announced yesterday.

    According to a BHP source, the approval “isn’t really a surprise considering the necessity for a sustainable transition and the time needed to balance up the energy grid, as Labor’s renewables charge continues throughout regional Australia.

    “While many mine workers will be pleased with the news, blowback will be expected from various lobby and stakeholder groups who have been contesting the extension for a number of years. 

    “This does not look to be the agencies involved in the approval as even common lingo is now being adopted for key decision makers, such as Tony Chappel (CEO Environment Protection Authority). Terrific to see BHP and state government collaborating and working as one.

    A done deal already?

    Interestingly, Mt Arthur signed a 5 year agreement with Thiess prior to the modification, the NSW Inquiry into Production & Beneficial Post Mining Land Use concluded recently with key enabling recommendations to progress BHP’s ambition, and NSW Minister Courtney Houssos visited the Mt Arthur site in May 2023 and released a press release that aligned perfectly with the recent recommendations coming out of the Labor led inquiry.  

    Also the scuttlebutt, said the BHP source, around the announcement is that feasibility study of a Pumped Hydro future land form is being progressed. “If we cast your minds back to the James Joseph whistleblower release (Dec 2024), technical experts were quoted that pumped hydro was found to be ‘not feasible’. So, what’s changed?

    While the heat continues to ratchet up around the government protecting whistleblowers, Joseph was recently informed that despite BHP failing to report his medical injury (PTSD due to whistleblower retaliation), BHP would be let off the hook with a ‘formal caution’.

    Mr Joseph’s injury investigation went for 13 months and according to sources he is now being denied any investigation materials under the Freedom of Information laws, saying that if it were to be released, others might be reluctant to participate in safety investigations in the future. 

    According to the same sources, it is understood that Mr Joseph was informed by the NSW Resources Regulator (who also report up to Minister Houssos and the former EPA Secretary Georgina Beattie), that despite it being likely of a prosecution, it would cost the state too much money to ‘hold them to account’ all for “an insignificant fine”.

    Joseph continues to allege BHP continues its retaliation against him, including the company holding on to his personal entitlements. The company has also refused to comment over revelations in these pages of a wage theft scandal which affected thousands of coal workers, including some of the 26,000 former and current employees of Mt Arthur.

    Coal to lakes?

    Further to the feasibility of pumped hydro at Mr Arthur, ecologist and water scientist Peter Hughes told MWM earlier this year the Lakes proposal was a “pipe-dream”, at least the recreational part. 

    “With the Lakes proposal and the use of the mine voids, I’ve reviewed at least 4 proposals and every few years the NSW Minerals Council does a report. There is no new data. I’ve seen proposals that all of the mine voids can be used. It’s not viable for any recreational use and never will be.

    “The groundwater in the Hunter is highly saline and very high in heavy metals. It’s highly toxic for animals. I’ve written letters to them explaining this to them. In Germany it is different. The groundwater must be much cleaner, and there’s high rainfall.

    The BHP whistleblower and the secretive plan to turn Hunter Valley coal into lakes

     

    Not only do experts believe the community consultation by BHP in relation to pumped hydro and the ‘coal lakes’ proposal has been poor but they say a pumped hydro project is unlikely to work on a technical basis.

    Peter Hughes, who worked 25 years with the NSW EPA and done Environmental Impact assessments on every coal mine in the Hunter Valley and written most of the Environment Protection Licences.

    “There is potential for pumped hydro. There was a CSIRO report into the potential for pumped hydro which found it plausible. All you need is a hill more than 100m high. We’ve put the kibosh on the recreational proposal at least four times. Pumped hydro is potentially viable but they have a major problem with it – the water quality. The water is highly corrosive which would clog up the machinery. So technically I think it is unlikely.

    “I would say they are trying it on again. They have probably submitted again to the EPA but it’s a dog with fleas.”

    To ever get it approved, says Hughes, they would have to get DA consent under EP&A Act, an Environment Protection Licence from the EPA, Water Access Licenses under Water Management Act, and possibly Aboriginal relic destruction licences from NPWS.

    To make the water quality viable, what they would have to do is put it through a purification plant before they pump it back up the hill to the turbine. We are talking about a reverse osmosis desalination plant which is extremely expensive and power hungry. It could eat up the majority of the power which the pumped hydro plant is producing.

    A Snowy job

    The sheer scale of the proposed transition deal makes it a sensitive issue. If you use Snowy Hydro as an example, that’s already at $12B from original price estimates of $2B.

    Former HR executive at Mt Arthur James Joseph knew in April 2023 that confidential pumped hydro talks were underway. “I was accountable for shaping the NSW workforce strategy as HR manager and I was kept in the dark. Now I know why they never wanted to have this conversation or share the information with myself and other managers, because what they were doing was questionable – amounting potentially to competition breaches.”

    Then there is the political sensitivity. China is at the vanguard of pumped hydro technology yet the political implications of doing such a large deal with the Chinese, let alone any foreign group, are significant. China already has its foot on a lot of assets in the Hunter Valley including mining and wineries.

    Same Job, Lame Pay: BHP and the black coal wage swindle

    This post was originally published on Michael West.

  • How Trump’s war on climate and equity is impacting ‘woke investing’

    Environmental-, social-, and governance-related shareholder proposals are down 34 percent this year as the Trump administration galvanizes the movement against “woke investing,” according to an annual report by the shareholder advocacy groups As You Sow and Proxy Impact.

    The report counted 355 such proposals as of February 21, compared to 536 proposals filed by the same time last year. Wariness over anticipated changes at the Securities and Exchange Commission contributed to the decline, the authors said, as many investors opted to postpone resolutions until it became clear whether they would be blocked by new SEC leadership.

    “We’re a little bit in a pause mode,” said Andy Behar, As You Sow’s CEO. He said a “right-wing crusade” against socially responsible investing has left shareholders in limbo as they figure out how to navigate the shifting political climate. 

    The term ESG — shorthand for an investment approach that prioritizes environmental, social, and governance issues — dates to 2004 and doesn’t have a fixed definition. Generally, it represents the idea that investors should buy shares in companies that factor social and environmental issues into their decision-making on the theory that such companies are more likely to prosper in the long run.

    Investors promote ESG principles via shareholder resolutions, brief proposals that are put up for a vote by everyone who owns stock in a company during their annual meeting. These resolutions typically ask a company to issue a report about how some aspect of its operations, like its greenhouse gas emissions, may affect the company’s future profitability. All of the shareholder proposals submitted to a company during a given year are compiled onto a “proxy statement,” and the time of year when voting occurs — usually around May — is called proxy season. 

    Progressive critics of ESG have argued that the concept is so vague as to be meaningless, and that exaggerated claims of corporate responsibility are a distraction from the systemic reforms needed to address societal problems. But the more aggressive criticism has come from the political right, which sees corporate diversity and environmental policies as “woke” interference with capitalism.

    These criticisms escalated during the Biden administration. In 2022, red-state regulators began naming and shaming financial institutions for an alleged “boycott” of fossil fuels companies and investigating big banks for their ESG practices. Last year, 17 red states passed legislation restricting corporate decision-making based on ESG priorities, and institutional investors like BlackRock grew more tepid in their support for ESG proposals. 

    Donald Trump looks to the left, with half of his face in shadow.
    President Donald Trump speaks to the media during a visit to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images

    President Donald Trump’s broad attacks on climate policy and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have further chilled ESG efforts, inspiring several major banks to withdraw from a climate initiative in the lead-up to Inauguration Day.

    Experts quoted in the As You Sow and Proxy Impact report said government attempts to limit ESG investing amount to an attack on shareholders’ right to make policy recommendations through proxy voting, guaranteed under the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934. “An anti-shareholder movement — often mislabeled as ‘anti-ESG’ — is silencing the voice of everyday investors in the U.S.,” reads one statement from Rick Alexander, CEO of the nonprofit The Shareholder Commons.

    Behar said ESG opponents are unduly manipulating the market. “They don’t like capitalism, they don’t like free markets, they don’t like democracy,” he said. “This is problematic for all the shareholders who are trying to keep our companies proceeding into the future.”

    Trump’s reelection has also prompted changes at the SEC, the federal agency charged with protecting investors and enforcing laws against market manipulation. It normally has five commissioners, no more than three of whom may belong to the same political party, but two of its Democratic members voluntarily stepped down after Trump was elected, and their seats are currently vacant. Two of the three sitting commissioners — one Republican and one Democrat — were nominated by Trump. The third, a Republican, was nominated by former president Joe Biden.

    In February — after the majority of the ESG shareholder resolutions included in the report had been filed — the SEC announced two new policies that complicated these resolutions and could make it more difficult to file resolutions next year. First, the agency placed tighter deadlines and more onerous reporting requirements on large investors asking companies to, for example, disclose their climate risks or boost gender equality on their boards. 

    Second, the SEC made it easier for companies to exclude shareholder proposals from their proxy statements if those proposals were deemed not “significantly related” to their business. The SEC gave companies an extra opportunity to convince regulators to allow specific proposals to be excluded on the basis of this new policy, but it has not afforded investors a similar opportunity for additional explanation.

    “It was clearly a biased decision stacked against shareholders,” said Michael Passoff, CEO of Proxy Impact and a co-author of the report.

    In light of the growing anti-ESG movement, Behar said some companies have grown more willing to engage in dialogue with investors, perhaps hoping to avoid the publicity generated by a proxy vote. This, he said, is how shareholder advocates prefer to make change — by persuading companies to take action voluntarily in exchange for the withdrawal of a proposal. According to the report, 22 percent of ESG-related shareholder proposals were withdrawn as of February 21, compared to 7.7 percent at a similar time in 2024, suggesting that companies were negotiating behind the scenes with investors.

    The side of a building, with the words Securities and Exchange Commission on it.
    The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission building in Washington, D.C. Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

    However, companies have also been emboldened to ignore shareholder proposals. One way to measure this is by looking at the number of “no-action” requests prompted by shareholder resolutions. These are requests companies make to the SEC asking for confirmation that the agency will not take action against them if they omit a proposal from their proxy statements. Even with fewer proposals filed as of early March this year, 221 had prompted no-action requests, compared to just 94 around the same time last year.

    While the As You Sow and Proxy Impact report identified fewer climate- and environment-related shareholder proposals filed this season, the nature of those that were filed did not change much from previous years. The largest chunk ask companies for information about the decarbonization strategies or to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Some new ones ask financial institutions to set investment ratio targets for clean energy infrastructure compared to fossil fuels; for insurance companies to report and reduce the climate pollution associated with their underwriting; and for mining companies to disclose their policies for deep-sea mining, in the absence of international rules governing this activity. 

    Frances Fairhead-Stanova, a shareholder advocate for the environmentally responsible mutual fund Green Century Capital Management, said the As You Sow and Proxy Impact report raises concerns that affect many shareholders. However, she reported that the presidential election results and anticipated changes at the SEC did not prompt her organization to file fewer resolutions. She noticed more no-action requests, but said it’s unclear whether the SEC will grant a greater proportion of them compared to previous years.

    So far, Green Century has withdrawn 6 of the 27 climate- and environment-related resolutions it filed, in exchange for some sort of action or reporting. Starbucks, for example, agreed to share more information about its transition to reusable cups and to remove any recycling labels it deems misleading, following an internal assessment. TD Bank agreed to an audit of its board of governance policies with the aim of improving climate risk management.

    Five companies filed no-action requests, and the SEC has rejected two of these. The others are still pending.

    “We’re not panicked about any changes,” Fairhead-Stanova said. “We are just continuing to do our work.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How Trump’s war on climate and equity is impacting ‘woke investing’ on Apr 9, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • ‘Not an extension of Australia’ – Trump’s tariffs ‘reinforces’ Norfolk Island’s independence hopes

    By Caleb Fotheringham, RNZ Pacific journalist

    Norfolk Island sees its United States tariff as an acknowledgment of independence from Australia.

    Norfolk Island, despite being an Australian territory, has been included on Trump’s tariff list.

    The territory has been given a 29 percent tariff, despite Australia getting only 10 percent.

    It is home to just over 2000 people, sitting between New Zealand and Australia in the South Pacific

    The islands’ Chamber of Commerce said the decision by the US “raises critical questions about Norfolk Island’s international recognition as an independent sovereign nation” and Norfolk Island not being part of Australia.

    “The classification of Norfolk Island as distinct from Australia in this tariff decision reinforces what the Norfolk Island community has long asserted: Norfolk Island is not an extension of Australia.”

    Norfolk Island previously had a significant level of autonomy from Australia, but was absorbed directly into the country’s local government system in 2015.

    Norfolk Islanders angered
    The move angered many Norfolk Island people and inspired a number of campaigns, including appeals to the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, by groups wishing to re-establish a measure of their autonomy, or to sue for independence.

    The Chamber of Commerce has taken the tariff as a chance to reemphasis the islands’ call for independence, including, “restoration of economic rights” and exclusive access to its exclusive economic zone.

    The statement said Norfolk Island is a “sovereign nation [and] must have the ability to engage directly with international trade partners rather than through Australian officials who do not represent Norfolk Island’s interests”.

    Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters yesterday: “Norfolk Island has got a 29 percent tariff. I’m not quite sure that Norfolk Island, with respect to it, is a trade competitor with the giant economy of the United States.”

    “But that just shows and exemplifies the fact that nowhere on Earth is safe from this.”

    The base tariff of 10 percent is also included for Tokelau, a non-self-governing territory of New Zealand, with a population of only about 1500 people living on the atoll islands.

    Previous tariff announcements by the Trump administration dropped sand into the cogs of international trade
    US President Donald Trump’s global tariffs . . . “raises critical questions about Norfolk Island’s international recognition as an independent sovereign nation.” Image: Getty/The Conversation

    US ‘don’t really understand’, says PANG
    Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG) deputy coordinator Adam Wolfenden said he did not understand why Norfolk Island and Tokelau were added to the tariff list.

    “I think this reflects the approach that’s been taken, which seems very rushed and very divorced from a common sense approach,” Wolfenden said.

    “The inclusion of these territories, to me, is indicative that they don’t really understand what they’re doing.”

    In the Pacific, Fiji is set to be charged the most at 32 percent.

    Nauru has been slapped with a 30 percent tariff, Vanuatu 22 percent, and other Pacific nations were given the 10 percent base tariff.

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


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • New modelling reveals full impact of Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs – with US hit hardest

    ANALYSIS: By Niven Winchester, Auckland University of Technology

    We now have a clearer picture of Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs and how they will affect other trading nations, including the United States itself.

    The US administration claims these tariffs on imports will reduce the US trade deficit and address what it views as unfair and non-reciprocal trade practices. Trump said this would

    forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America’s destiny was reclaimed.

    The “reciprocal” tariffs are designed to impose charges on other countries equivalent to half the costs they supposedly inflict on US exporters through tariffs, currency manipulation and non-tariff barriers levied on US goods.

    Each nation received a tariff number that will apply to most goods. Notable sectors exempt include steel, aluminium and motor vehicles, which are already subject to new tariffs.

    The minimum baseline tariff for each country is 10 percent. But many countries received higher numbers, including Vietnam (46 percent), Thailand (36 percent), China (34 percent), Indonesia (32 percent), Taiwan (32 percent) and Switzerland (31 percent).

    The tariff number for China is in addition to an existing 20 percent tariff, so the total tariff applied to Chinese imports is 54 percent. Countries assigned 10 percent tariffs include Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

    Canada and Mexico are exempt from the reciprocal tariffs, for now, but goods from those nations are subject to a 25 percent tariff under a separate executive order.

    Although some countries do charge higher tariffs on US goods than the US imposes on their exports, and the “Liberation Day” tariffs are allegedly only half the full reciprocal rate, the calculations behind them are open to challenge.

    For example, non-tariff measures are notoriously difficult to estimate and “subject to much uncertainty”, according to one recent study.

    GDP impacts with retaliation
    Other countries are now likely to respond with retaliatory tariffs on US imports. Canada (the largest destination for US exports), the EU and China have all said they will respond in kind.

    To estimate the impacts of this tit-for-tat trade standoff, I use a global model of the production, trade and consumption of goods and services. Similar simulation tools — known as “computable general equilibrium models” — are widely used by governments, academics and consultancies to evaluate policy changes.

    The first model simulates a scenario in which the US imposes reciprocal and other new tariffs, and other countries respond with equivalent tariffs on US goods. Estimated changes in GDP due to US reciprocal tariffs and retaliatory tariffs by other nations are shown in the table below.

    The tariffs decrease US GDP by US$438.4 billion (1.45 percent). Divided among the nation’s 126 million households, GDP per household decreases by $3,487 per year. That is larger than the corresponding decreases in any other country. (All figures are in US dollars.)

    Proportional GDP decreases are largest in Mexico (2.24 percent) and Canada (1.65 percent) as these nations ship more than 75 percent of their exports to the US. Mexican households are worse off by $1,192 per year and Canadian households by $2,467.

    Other nations that experience relatively large decreases in GDP include Vietnam (0.99 percent) and Switzerland (0.32 percent).

    Some nations gain from the trade war. Typically, these face relatively low US tariffs (and consequently also impose relatively low tariffs on US goods). New Zealand (0.29 percent) and Brazil (0.28 percent) experience the largest increases in GDP. New Zealand households are better off by $397 per year.

    Aggregate GDP for the rest of the world (all nations except the US) decreases by $62 billion.

    At the global level, GDP decreases by $500 billion (0.43 percent). This result confirms the well-known rule that trade wars shrink the global economy.

    GDP impacts without retaliation
    In the second scenario, the modelling depicts what happens if other nations do not react to the US tariffs. The changes in the GDP of selected countries are presented in the table below.

    Countries that face relatively high US tariffs and ship a large proportion of their exports to the US experience the largest proportional decreases in GDP. These include Canada, Mexico, Vietnam, Thailand, Taiwan, Switzerland, South Korea and China.

    Countries that face relatively low new tariffs gain, with the UK experiencing the largest GDP increase.

    The tariffs decrease US GDP by $149 billion (0.49 percent) because the tariffs increase production costs and consumer prices in the US.

    Aggregate GDP for the rest of the world decreases by $155 billion, more than twice the corresponding decrease when there was retaliation. This indicates that the rest of the world can reduce losses by retaliating. At the same time, retaliation leads to a worse outcome for the US.

    Previous tariff announcements by the Trump administration dropped sand into the cogs of international trade. The reciprocal tariffs throw a spanner into the works. Ultimately, the US may face the largest damages.The Conversation

    Dr Niven Winchester is professor of economics, Auckland University of Technology. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Fiji slapped with Trump’s highest tariffs among Pacific countries

    By Caleb Fotheringham, RNZ Pacific journalist

    Although New Zealand and Australia seem to have escaped the worst of Donald Trump’s latest tariffs, some Pacific Islands stand to be hit hard — including a few that aren’t even “countries”.

    The US will impose a base tariff of 10 percent on all foreign imports, with rates between 20 and 50 percent for countries judged to have major tariffs on US goods.

    In the Pacific, Fiji is set to be charged the most at 32 percent, the US claiming this was a reciprocal tariff for the island nation imposing a 63 percent tariff on it.

    Nauru, one of the smallest nations in the world, has been slapped with a 30 percent tariff, the US claimed they are imposing a 59 percent tariff.

    Vanuatu will be given a 22 percent tariff.

    Norfolk Island, which is an Australian territory, has been given a 29 percent tariff, this is despite Australia getting only 10 percent.

    Most other Pacific nations were given the 10 percent base tariff.

    This included Tokelau, despite it being a non-self-governing territory of New Zealand, with a population of only about 1500 people living on the atoll islands.

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Reeves says hasty response to Trump tariffs could put ‘prize’ of economic deal at risk – UK politics live

    Chancellor says UK will respond calmly to US tariffs as Keir Starmer attempts to play down fears of trade war

    There will be two urgent questions in the Commons after PMQs. At around 12.30pm a Foreign Office minister will respond to a question from Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, about the Chagos Islands. And then another Foreign Office minister (or the same one?) will reply to a UQ from the Green co-leader Carla Denyer about Gaza.

    After that Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, will make a statement about nursery provision.

    With new US tariffs coming, Welsh businesses face even more uncertainty.

    The UK must make a strategic decision: with 58.6% of Welsh exports going to the EU, we must provide stable access to European markets by rejoining the single market and customs union, allowing us to stand up to Trump’s reckless moves.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Companies used to tout their climate plans. Under Trump, they’ve gone quiet.

    Just a few years ago, pledges to tackle climate change were a staple of corporate PR. Amazon trumpeted its climate pledge and stamped it on the name of Seattle’s biggest arena. Walmart promised to slash a gigaton of carbon emissions from its supply chain, and the world’s largest money manager, BlackRock, with its $11 trillion in investments, pressured companies to come up with a plan to zero out their emissions by 2050.

    Now, many corporations are avoiding the subject altogether. During earnings calls, mentions of many well-known terms related to the climate are down 76 percent compared to three years ago, according to a recent analysis of S&P 500 companies by Bloomberg. The sharpest declines came from financial firms and consumer discretionary companies, the category for those offering optional purchases, like Starbucks and Airbnb. 

    The hesitancy to talk about climate change — sometimes called “greenhushing” — could decrease pressure on the big corporate polluters that have been slow to cut their emissions. The trend has been linked to a growing backlash against sustainable investing, as well as a shifting political landscape with President Donald Trump’s second term underway. “I think large companies in particular today are very, very cautious,” said Hortense Bioy, the head of sustainable investing research for Morningstar, a financial services firm.

    Companies have been caught in a tug-of-war: On one hand, investors are pressuring them to be serious about the risks of climate change to their business. On the other, the mention of any word related to so-called ESG — the polarizing acronym that refers to “environmental, social, and governance” investing — threatens blowback from the Trump administration. The way to thread the needle, experts suggest, is to stay away from flashpoints like ESG and talk specifically about the financial risks that the warming planet poses to companies.

    John Marshall, the CEO of the Potential Energy Coalition, a nonpartisan marketing firm focused on climate action, says that silence isn’t a winning strategy. “We do not think that voters or consumers are at all impressed, regardless of their political stripes, by taking the concept of climate change out of any language,” Marshall said. 

    His research shows that investors and the public want companies to talk about climate change — as an investment risk, not a matter of morality. According to a Potential Energy report from last September, 3 in 4 Americans surveyed think companies have a responsibility to limit their impact on the climate. What’s more, roughly 9 in 10 U.S. retail investors want companies to reduce emissions and prepare for the ways increasingly unpredictable weather could lead to risks like supply chain disruptions and rising insurance costs.

    The first signs of greenhushing appeared in 2023, when the Swiss consultancy South Pole found that a quarter of large companies around the world had decided not to publicize their progress on climate targets. The reason, South Pole later found, was that companies wanted to avoid the legal risks that came with high-profile pledges. It was a response to countries crafting new laws against “greenwashing,” the term for deceptive environmental advertising.

    At the same time, financial institutions were already dealing with the backlash against ESG, which heated up in 2022. Lawsuits targeted asset managers, pension funds, and federal agencies, claiming that “woke capitalism” was putting politics over financial interests. Red states including Florida and Texas pulled billions in state funds out of BlackRock and other ESG-friendly firms. BlackRock, which in 2021 had supported almost half of shareholder proposals to address environmental and social issues, pulled a U-turn. Between July 2023 and June 2024, it only backed 4 percent of them.

    “They were too visible and too vocal about what they were doing in that space,” Bioy said. She expects that companies with big climate plans may now have to disclose the opposition to ESG as a risk in their annual reports. That sense of caution is showing up in the markets, too: Over the last two years, there has been more money leaving sustainable funds in the U.S. than what’s coming in, according to Morningstar’s research. 

    Bioy suspects that trend still has room to run, given Trump’s hostility to climate action. Already, corporations including Apple, Walmart, and Siemens have stepped away from the climate coalition that formed during Trump’s first term. Bioy pointed to the guidance circulating in government organizations warning against using terms like “pollution,” “clean energy,” and “climate science.” “Companies that do business with the administration or any state organization, they will be careful not to use those terms,” Bioy said.

    In the past, some companies have used language around climate change that embraced a moral framing, such as “do the right thing.” But most people don’t think that’s the province of what businesses should be doing, Marshall said. Two-thirds of Americans believe that businesses should avoid taking a stance on political issues, according to his firm’s research. The moral framing provokes backlash because it feels like “forcing an idea on somebody,” Marshall said. “We have seen it’s much more effective to have language in the business community that’s about money and reality.”

    It raises the broader question of how regular people should talk about climate change when many of the terms environmental advocates use can provoke a knee-jerk reaction. “I think that the climate movement needs to be very thoughtful about and strategic about whether or not it is a DEI or ESG initiative,” said Austin Whitman, CEO of The Change Climate Project, a nonprofit offering tools to help businesses cut their emissions. “I think for all of us across the spectrum, regardless of what cause we’re fighting for, we need to distance ourselves from these lightning-rod acronyms and topics that are really easy to just cut down with a single swipe.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Companies used to tout their climate plans. Under Trump, they’ve gone quiet. on Apr 2, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Egg prices hit record highs. Are you ready to try a vegan egg?

    Sometimes, Josh Tetrick will quiz strangers in the dairy aisle. He’ll strike up a conversation with a fellow grocery store patron and ask if they’ve heard about “this egg that’s made from plants?” He might point out the golden-yellow boxes shaped like milk cartons sitting on refrigerated shelves, not too far from the egg cartons. Generally, he finds that people don’t know what he’s talking about. “Most people will be like, ‘What?’”

    The product Tetrick is referring to — which, not coincidentally, he manufactures — is called Just Egg. It’s a liquid vegan egg substitute made from mung beans, a member of the legume family, and it’s designed to scramble just like a real chicken egg when cooked over heat. (The company also sells frozen omelette-style patties that can be heated up in a toaster oven and frozen breakfast burritos.) Along with his best friend Josh Balk, Tetrick cofounded the company Eat Just, formerly known as Hampton Creek, which developed Just Egg over years of testing. On a recent call with Grist, Tetrick described the products — which are meant to look, taste, and cook like real eggs — as “definitely, definitely weird.”

    But lately, Tetrick says the team at Eat Just has been hearing from restaurant owners and chefs overcoming the weirdness to inquire about becoming new customers — in part because avian influenza has sent egg prices soaring in January and February in the United States. Nationally, the average cost of a dozen large eggs rose to about $5.90 last month, up almost 100 percent from a year before, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In expensive cities like New York and San Francisco, a dozen eggs could cost $10 or more. The pressure has raised prices at some bakeries, brunch spots, and bodegas slinging bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwiches — and has made some buyers and consumers more open to alternatives. 

    Tetrick has said that Just Egg’s sales are now five times higher than at this time last year, and that a majority of its customers are omnivores. The latest outbreak of avian flu has apparently done what environmentalists and animal rights activists have long dreamed of: made Americans curious about vegan eggs. It’s a development that could indicate how consumers may learn to gradually embrace more environmentally sustainable options.

    The environmental benefits of not eating meat or dairy have long been documented. A quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the way we grow and produce food; within that, livestock — which includes raising animals for eggs and dairy — is responsible for about a third. 

    But brands that have tried to capitalize on the climate case for eating plant-based protein have failed to win over customers. Beyond Meat has struggled to reach profitability, while the CEO of Impossible Foods says the industry has done a “lousy job” of appealing to consumers. 

    Producing eggs has a lower environmental impact than raising beef and other forms of animal protein — but growing feed for laying hens still requires a significant amount of land and resources. Eat Just claims that making its mung bean-based alt-egg uses significantly less land and water than the conventional chicken egg. But Tetrick said its most effective marketing strategy is highlighting the benefits of eating a “healthier protein” for breakfast. For instance, Just Egg contains zero milligrams of cholesterol per serving, while one large chicken egg contains about 180 milligrams. 

    a photo of a carton of a vegan egg substitute next to a plate of scrambled (vegan) eggs on a piece of toast
    Josh Tetrick, CEO of the food tech company Eat Just, said sales of its vegan egg substitute are five times higher than last year.
    Eat Just

    Over the years, Tetrick’s company, which also houses the cultivated meat subsidiary Good Meat, has received criticism for allegedly exaggerating its environmental claims and sales figures. In 2016, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that the company — then called Hampton Creek — removed the climate benefits of its vegan mayonnaise product, Just Mayo, from its website after an external audit found they were inaccurate. Previously, Bloomberg reported that Hampton Creek had instructed contractors to buy back its vegan mayo from stores. Tetrick said that the buybacks were for quality assurance purposes only, but in 2016 both the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission launched inquiries into the company for potentially inflating its sales numbers. The following year, both investigations were dropped.    

    Those in the plant-based industry say that once vegan alternatives taste as good as real meat and cost the same or less, then sales will go up. Entrepreneurs and advocates have focused on developing the technology, supply chains, and economies of scale needed to lower the price of animal-free protein products. But the current situation with vegan eggs suggests that change can also happen when the animal-based option becomes much more expensive. Prices vary from store to store and region to region, but on the online store for the Manhattan West location of Whole Foods, one 16-ounce carton of Just Egg, the equivalent of about 10 small eggs, costs $7.89. Meanwhile, a dozen eggs, depending on the brand, run from about $7 to up to $13. 

    Tetrick said that the newly interested potential customers currently talking to Eat Just aren’t motivated by climate change or animal welfare. Their point of view, in his words, is that they’re tired of the unpredictability of egg prices going up and down. That exasperation, he added, “is probably the most effective lens for change.” Earlier this month, Eat Just launched a campaign in New York City advertising its vegan breakfast sandwiches, sold at bodegas, as a “Bird Flu Bailout.” The company’s website cheekily boasts, “We’re in stock.”

    Founders of vegan egg companies argue that the root cause of price volatility for meat, eggs, and dairy is not any one disease or policy, but the way the United States raises animals. “When you cram animals together in really tight spaces, they’re gonna get sick,” said Tetrick. “It’s not Trump’s fault. It’s not MAGA’s fault. It’s just biology.” 

    A 2023 report by the United Nations Environmental Programme cited alternative proteins — meaning plant-based foods, as well as cultivated meat and fermentation-derived products — as a way to reduce the risk of zoonotic disease outbreaks. Raising animals for human consumption requires a lot of antibiotics, which raises the risk of creating antibiotic-resistant pathogens. It also creates ideal conditions for viruses to spread, evolve, and cross over to new species. Lowering the global demand for animal protein could greatly reduce those risks. Or as Tetrick put it, “You can pack mung beans into tiny little spaces all you want. They’re not getting the flu.”

    Hema Reddy, who developed the vegan hard-boiled egg brand WunderEggs during the COVID-19 pandemic, offered a similar critique of industrial animal agriculture. “If the chickens are crowded together, then disease will follow,” she said. “The only solution,” she posited, “is to change the way we farm. And that’s a big step. It’s like moving the Titanic.”

    WunderEggs are made from almonds, cashews, and coconut milk and are currently sold in stores and online. Like Tetrick, Reddy says she has heard from plenty of newly interested restaurants in the last few months. But she is reluctant to draw long-term conclusions from it, arguing that consumer behavior doesn’t change that quickly. Many people, she argued, “probably want to eat eggs, they’re missing eggs,” and “they’re going to wait for things to get better.”

    signs saying "SOLD OUT EGGS" in front of the egg section at CostCo
    Nationally, the average cost of a dozen large eggs rose to about $5.90 in February, up almost 100 percent from a year before.
    Zeng Hui / Xinhua via Getty Images

    But for some adoptees of vegan egg substitutes, the upsides of ditching chicken eggs is obvious. Chef Jason Hull, director of food services at Marin Country Day School in the Bay Area, has been using Just Egg for years. “They have nailed the delicious flavor of egg,” said Hull. He swaps out regular eggs for the plant-based version in baked goods like cookies, muffins, and quick breads, as well as in dishes like fried rice. There’s virtually no difference, he said. While he’s a longtime fan of the brand, the uptick in egg prices has validated his decision. “Especially with egg prices right now, I’m not going to use chicken eggs for baking or fried rice or things like that any time soon,” he said.

    Hull said some of his peers, especially those in other parts of the country, are potentially less open-minded about vegan egg substitutes. But rising costs may have them reconsidering. Other chefs are “warming up to it, absolutely,” he said. “And the high egg prices are kind of forcing that warm-up.”

    Wholesale egg prices are trending downward as of March, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, so this momentum could be short-lived. But it may only be a matter of time before the next price hike happens. “Because the virus is so ubiquitous in so many different environments … it’s hard to imagine the virus ever completely going away at this point,” said Maurice Pitesky, an associate professor in cooperative extension at University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. 
    Reddy insisted that taking advantage of a cost-of-living crisis to promote her product does not sit right with her, and she prefers to let consumers come to their own conclusions about what’s right for them. But if avian influenza continues to upend egg production in the U.S., that might mean the economic case for going dairy-free could become more and more evident with time. Regardless of what happens in the future, Reddy said, “I really think that now is the time for egg alternatives to shine.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Egg prices hit record highs. Are you ready to try a vegan egg? on Mar 31, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • These vegan meat brands taste almost as good as the real thing. Taste tests prove it.

    Imagine this: You’re hungry. You’ve arrived at the frozen foods section of the grocery store, and you’re faced with two options: a pack of chicken nuggets or a pack of similar-looking nuggets, but made without meat. How do you choose? Do you look at price first or compare ingredient lists? Or maybe, after you do both, do you ultimately go with your gut? You are hungry, after all. 

    A new report highlights the important role that taste plays for consumers when considering whether to buy plant-based protein. Nectar, an Oakland-based initiative conducting research on faux meat, surveyed thousands of meat-eaters in a series of blind taste tests to find out how vegan meat substitutes stack up against the real thing — and got some surprising results. 

    Four vegan products received nearly indistinguishable scores from real meat — and Nectar also found that plant-based products that were rated highly in terms of taste had higher sales volume.

    The report, which was released earlier this month, “underscores a simple but crucial point: Consumers want to eat food that tastes delicious, full stop,” said Abby Sewell, the corporate engagement manager at the Good Food Institute, a think tank that promotes “alternative proteins,” the industry term for plant-based meat substitutes. (The Good Food Institute was not involved in the report and does not have any formal relationship with Nectar.)

    The question of how to increase sales is one that has troubled the plant-based industry in recent years. Plant-based meat saw declining sales from 2021 to 2023, according to the Good Food Institute. In the past few years, ersatz meat brands have made headlines for steep layoffs and talk of potential acquisitions or shutdowns. 

    It’s also a question with potentially significant implications for the climate and the environment. About 80 percent of the world’s agricultural lands are used to raise livestock (taking into account the land used to grow crops for animal feed like soy and corn). Cutting out animal protein would free up agricultural land and reduce demands on water. Adopting a plant-based diet would also help greatly in terms of emissions. Animal agriculture is responsible for 16.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally. Even if we stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow, we would still have to change the way we eat — specifically, we’d have to eat less meat — to avoid the worst impacts of global warming. 

    Plant-based advocates often say that when faux meat products taste as good and cost as little as conventional meat options, then consumers will flock to them. But impartial information about whether vegan protein brands meet consumers’ exacting flavor standards is surprisingly hard to come by. According to Caroline Cotto, the director of Nectar, plant-based meat companies typically only perform taste tests with their own employees or investors — hardly unbiased sources. 

    Four halves of a burger sit equally spaced out on a tray on a table at a restaurant, as part of a sampler platter for a taste test
    Burgers tested as part of Nectar’s survey. Nectar

    Samantha Derrick, who leads an applied learning program on plant-based foods at University of California, Berkeley, said more third-party taste testing is “critical” to growing the industry. Derrick and Cotto both describe Nectar, an initiative born out of and funded by Food System Innovations, a philanthropic organization, as unique in the plant-based industry. When companies do taste tests internally, they typically don’t make the results of those tests publicly available the way Nectar has. 

    This was the second time the organization has conducted blind taste tests with plant-based protein brands. For this round, Nectar solicited more than 2,000 participants who said they eat certain meat products at least once every month or two. They selected 122 vegan products designed to look and taste like real meat across 14 categories — including breakfast sausage, meatballs, pulled pork, and steak — and prepared them alongside their animal-based counterparts. (Participants weren’t told which products were vegan and which contained meat.) The testing was conducted in New York City and San Francisco restaurants instead of sterile white rooms because Cotto wanted to replicate a familiar environment. 

    Nectar also plated the products in conventional ways — hot dogs in buns, pulled pork in sandwich form — instead of presenting each food item in its “naked” form. If participants were testing, say, hot dogs, they could add condiments — as long as they applied the same condiments to every hot dog they tried. 

    Nectar found that 20 plant-based products were rated the same or better than their animal counterparts in terms of overall liking by at least 50 percent of participants. These included five unbreaded vegan chicken fillets, five vegan burgers, and two vegan chicken nugget brands. 

    Four of those products performed so well they almost reached taste parity, which Nectar defines as there being no statistically significant difference in how participants scored the vegan product versus the animal one in terms of overall liking. Those four are Impossible Foods’ unbreaded chicken breast, chicken nuggets, and burger, as well as Morningstar Farms’ nuggets.

    The results show that the plant-based chicken products are leading the industry in terms of closing the flavor gap, said Cotto. It might help that chicken breast is essentially a blank canvas. “From a flavor perspective, I think chicken has a more subtle flavor that’s actually easier to replicate,” she added.

    Two platters of vegan chicken cutlet hors d'oeuvres
    Vegan chicken cutlet samples served at an awards ceremony for the winners of Nectar’s taste tests — products that received the same or better score as their animal counterparts from at least half of the participants. Nectar

    The plant-based products that Nectar found most need to improve on taste — such as bacon — are some of the hardest cuts of meat to imitate. Unlike chicken fillets, chicken nuggets, or burgers, strips of bacon are not generally homogenous in texture and flavor. Mimicking fatty parts of bacon as well as the striated meat is extremely challenging to do with just plants. Sewell, from the Good Food Institute, said additional research and development could help. “Continued investment in alternative protein R&D is essential to accelerating innovation and ensuring these products deliver on flavor and affordability for consumers,” she told Grist. 

    Of course, there’s a difference between liking a vegan product in a taste test and actually choosing to buy it in a grocery store, when there aren’t any researchers around. “Even if taste and price parity are achieved, it’s not a surefire” guarantee that people will choose, say, vegan hot dogs and burgers over the beef kind, said Cotto. In the United States, meat is tied up with national identity and masculinity; it won’t be so easy to win every type of consumer over.

    Still, Derrick, who wasn’t involved in Nectar’s study, says that younger consumers “absolutely” do not want to feel like they’re compromising on taste at the grocery store — and that research like Cotto’s will help brands figure out how to satisfy them. 

    “I think that blind testing is objectively done as the best way to” improve plant-based products, said Derrick. More testing would provide “a road map of what’s possible, what’s better.”

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline These vegan meat brands taste almost as good as the real thing. Taste tests prove it. on Mar 25, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.

  • Soundcheck. Are Australian music festivals really on life support?

    Music festival

    Big-name music festivals are shutting down, ticket sales in free-fall, costs are spiralling. But beyond the dirge there are some upbeat tones. Joshua Barnett reports.

    If you’ve been following the headlines, you might think Australian music festivals are on life support. However, a report published in September 2024 by Creative Australia – Soundcheck Two: Analysis of Australian Music Festival Models and Operations – paints a more nuanced picture, one where the giants struggle while grassroots festivals find a way to thrive.

    First, the big problem: running a festival has never been more expensive. According to Creative Australia, insurance premiums have skyrocketed across all festival types, with some organisers seeing costs rise by over 1,300% since 2019.

    Add in “user-pays policing fees” (which, in NSW, are particularly brutal), staging costs, artist fees, and marketing, and it’s a wonder anyone can afford to put on a festival at all.

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

    Dylan Oakes, organiser of Newcastle’s West Best Block Fest, has seen this struggle first hand. “This particular festival is well over a six-figure festival,” he says, “And we worked for ten months without getting paid.”

    For small operators, numbers like this surely mean that they’re not sustainable. The same goes for the big commercial festivals that rely on huge crowds and international acts; rising costs are making their business models untenable.

    Focused on supporting grassroots music, West Best Bloc highlights homegrown talent while fostering a strong community-driven atmosphere. Now in its fourth year, West Best Bloc Fest has grown into a key event in Newcastle’s live music calendar, attracting a dedicated audience and government support, allowing it to grow while keeping ticket prices affordable.. “We proved ourselves to Newcastle, and now we’re getting funding,” Oakes says.

    The festival is helping to build a thriving musical ecosystem where artists earn enough from a single gig to go on to fund recording sessions, venue owners make money, and audiences remain engaged.

    Small festival success

    So why are the likes of Splendour in the Grass, Falls Festival, and Good Things hitting the wall? It’s not just the costs, it’s changing audience behaviour.

    According to Soundcheck Two, younger audiences are buying tickets later than ever before Large festivals, which need to sell around 70% of tickets in advance to avoid cancellation, are now rolling the dice on whether punters will show up. More often than not, they don’t.

    Dylan Oakes believes the failure of major festivals isn’t due to a lack of talent, but a generational shift. “The people who grew up on those festivals are now getting a little bit older, starting families, moving on from the music scene,” he explains. Meanwhile, younger music fans are gravitating towards smaller, niche festivals with stronger community ties.

    Dylan Oakes of West Best Block Fest

    Dylan Oakes of West Best Block Fest

    For every failed major festival, there’s a smaller, independent festival quietly kicking goals. Soundcheck Two found that small not-for-profit festivals and grassroots events are the most likely to be financially sustainable.

    Their lower overheads, local lineups, and community backing allow them to survive in a market where big-budget events are collapsing.West Best Block Fest is one of these success stories, as Dylan Oakes explains:

    “The funding and financial outlay is definitely towards the artists. That’s what’s going to keep them coming back. And that’s what the next generation that are in school want to play at West for.

    “It’s not about the money… but my whole theory on this particular festival is if they can play our festival for one day, they should earn enough money to then go to a studio.

    “And then the studio gets work, and then they record a single, and then they have to go back into our venues and they have to do a single release. So in my world, I create like a little economy for us.”

    The Live Nation Elephant

    Live Nation’s grip on the Australian music industry has been profound and controversial. Through strategic acquisitions, the entertainment giant has entrenched itself across ticketing, event promotion, festival ownership, and venue management, raising concerns about monopolistic practices.

    Investigations by MWM, ABC’s Four Corners, and The Guardian have detailed how Live Nation’s dominance has stifled competition, leaving independent operators struggling to survive.

    Dynamic ticket pricing: Aussie concert fans hit by Live Nation’s ‘In Demand’ cash grab

    Despite being a multibillion-dollar corporation, Live Nation has received over $24m in federal and state government grants intended to support Australia’s live music sector. These funds were meant to sustain struggling festivals, yet several Live Nation-owned festivals, including Splendour in the Grass, Falls Festival, Spilt Milk, and Harvest Rock, have been canceled in recent years.

    None of the cancelled festivals have yet to announce a return date.

    In addition, Sydney City Limits and Download Festival, which also received government funding, have not gone ahead since 2018 and 2020, respectively.

    Live Nation has not returned any of the public funding, instead stating that the money was redirected toward staff retention and other events during the pandemic. Critics argue that taxpayer dollars should not be subsidising a multinational corporation with the resources to weather financial downturns, especially when many independent festivals and live music venues have collapsed due to rising costs and lack of support.

    Live Nation’s market dominance has also played a role in the decline of small and mid-sized live music venues. Since COVID, over 1,300 venues have closed, accounting for nearly a third of the sector. Industry analysts point to Live Nation’s ability to dictate ticket prices, artist availability, and festival operations, making it increasingly difficult for independent operators to compete.

    In response to mounting concerns, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is being urged to investigate Live Nation’s business practices, with calls for stricter regulations to curb anti-competitive behavior.

    Government intervention

    The Australian government has responded to the crisis with initiatives like the Revive Live program, which offers grants of up to $200,000 for music festivals But while funding helps, many in the industry say policy and regulation need an overhaul.

    Dylan Oakes points to licensing and government red tape as a major hurdle: “The relationship between councils, state governments, and licensing police is terrible,” he says. “Parts of council don’t even know what the other parts are doing. If small festivals are going to thrive, they need not just funding, but less bureaucratic interference.”

    We have all these different regulatory bodies, liquor licensing, police, councils, but there’s no one single task force that actually facilitates communication between all of them.

    “Instead, they just drag their feet and throw obstacles in our way.”

    Community-driven, locally-focused festivals are proving to be the most resilient part of the live music industry. The old model, massive lineups, inflated ticket prices, international headliners, may no longer be viable. If policymakers are serious about saving live music, they need to rethink how festivals are taxed, regulated, and insured.

    And for punters? It might be time to forget the dream of a Splendour comeback and embrace the local, independent scene, because that’s where the real music is still playing.

    Shows are Shutting Down – The West Report

    This post was originally published on Michael West.

  • Farmers and small business owners were promised financial help for energy upgrades. They’re still waiting for the money.

    This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist, BPR, a public radio station serving western North Carolina, WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station, WBEZ, a public radio station serving the Chicago metropolitan region, and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.

    The Trump administration’s freeze on funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate law from the Biden era, has left farmers and rural businesses across the country on the hook for costly energy efficiency upgrades and renewable energy installations.

    The grants are part of the Rural Energy for America Program, or REAP, originally created in the 2008 farm bill and supercharged by funding from the IRA. It provides farmers and other businesses in rural areas with relatively small grants and loans to help lower their energy bills by investing, say,  in more energy-efficient farming equipment or installing small solar arrays. 

    By November 2024, the IRA had awarded more than $1 billion for nearly 7,000 REAP projects, which help rural businesses in low-income communities reduce the up-front costs of clean energy and save thousands on utility costs each year. 

    But now, that funding is in limbo. Under the current freeze, some farmers have already spent tens of thousands of dollars on projects and are waiting for the promised reimbursement. Others have had to delay work they were counting on to support their businesses, unsure when their funding will come through — or if it will.

    REAP is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Secretary Brooke Rollins said the agency is “coming to the tail end of the review process” of evaluating grants awarded under the Biden administration.

    “If our farmers and ranchers especially have already spent money under a commitment that was made, the goal is to make sure they are made whole,” Rollins told reporters in Atlanta last week.

    But it’s not clear when the funds might be released, or whether all the farmers and business owners awaiting their money will receive it. 

    For Joshua Snedden, a REAP grant was the key to making his 10-acre farm in Monee, Illinois, more affordable and environmentally sustainable. But months after installing a pricey solar array, he’s still waiting on a reimbursement from the federal government — and the delay is threatening his bottom line. 

    “I’m holding out hope,” said Snedden, a first-generation farmer in northeast Illinois. “I’m trying to do everything within my power to make sure the funding is released.”

    In December, his five-year old operation, Fox at the Fork, began sourcing its power from a new 18.48 kilowatt solar array which cost Snedden $86,364. The system currently offsets all the farm’s electricity use and then some.

    REAP offers grants for up to half of a project like this, and loan guarantees for up to 75 percent of the cost. For Snedden, a $19,784 REAP reimbursement grant made this solar array possible. But the reimbursement, critical to Snedden’s cash flow, was frozen by Trump as part of a broader review of the USDA’s Biden-era commitments.

    A man rakes leaves in a field.
    Joshua Snedden is a first-generation farmer who said he will continue whether or not he gets the federal funding for solar. Courtesy of Joshua Snedden

    Snedden grows the produce he takes to market — everything from tomatoes to garlic to potatoes — on about an acre of his farm. He also plans to transform the rest of his land into a perennial crop system, which would include fruit trees like pears, plums, and apples planted alongside native flowers and grasses to support wildlife. 

    A solar array was always part of his plans, “but seemed like a pie in the sky” kind of project, he said, adding he thought it might take him a decade to afford such an investment.

    The REAP program has been a lifeline for Illinois communities struggling with aging infrastructure and growing energy costs, according to Amanda Pankau with the Prairie Rivers Network, an organization advocating for environmental protection and climate change mitigation across Illinois. 

    “By lowering their electricity costs, rural small businesses and agricultural producers can put that money back into their business,” said Pankau. 

    That’s exactly what Snedden envisioned from his investment in the solar power system. The new solar array wouldn’t just make his farm more resilient to climate change, but also more financially viable, “because we could shift expenses from paying for energy to paying for more impactful inputs for the farm,” he said. 

    He anticipates that by switching to solar, Fox at the Fork will save close to $3,200 dollars a year on electric bills. 

    Now, Snedden is waiting for the USDA to hold up their end of the deal. 

    “The financial strain hurts,” said Snedden. “But I’m still planning to move forward growing crops and fighting for these funds.”

    Man and woman stand closely to each other.
    Jon and Brittany Klimstra are both scientists who are originally from western North Carolina. They returned to the area to start a farm and an orchard and are waiting for solar funds they were promised. Courtesy of Jon Klimstra

    At the start of the year, Jon and Brittany Klimstra were nearly ready to install a solar array on their Polk County, North Carolina farm after being awarded a REAP grant in 2024.

    As two former scientists who had moved back to western North Carolina 10 years ago to grow apples and be close to their families, it felt like a chance to both save money and live their values.

    “We’ve certainly been interested in wanting to do something like this, whether it be for our personal home or for our farm buildings for a while,” said Jon. “It just was cost prohibitive up to this point without some type of funding.”

    That funding came when they were awarded $12,590 from REAP for the installation. But, after the Trump administration’s funding freeze, the money never came. 

    “We were several site visits in, several engineering conversations. We’ve had electricians, the solar company,” said Brittany . “It’s been a very involved process.”

    Since the grant is reimbursement-based, the Klimstras have already paid out-of-pocket for some costs related to the project. Plus, the farm had been banking on saving $1,300 in utilities expenses per year. In a given month, their electricity bill is $300-$400.

    red apples in a gray wooden box
    Apples from the orchard run by Jon and Brittany Klimstra. They were ready to install a solar array when the federal funding was frozen. Courtesy of Jon Klimstra

    Across Appalachia, historically high energy costs have made the difference between survival and failure for many local businesses, said Heather Ransom, who works with Solar Holler, a solar company that serves parts of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio.

    “We have seen incredible rate increases across the region in electricity over the past 10, even 20 years,” she said.

    Through Solar Holler, REAP grants also passed into the hands of rural library systems and schools; the company installed 10,000 solar panels throughout the Wayne County, West Virginia school system. About $6 million worth of projects supported by Solar Holler are currently on hold.

    In other parts of the region, community development financial institutions like the Mountain Association in eastern Kentucky combatted food deserts through helping local grocery stores apply for REAP.

    Solar Holler also works in coal-producing parts of the region, where climate change discussions have been fraught with the realities of declining jobs and revenue from the coal industry. The program helped make the case for communities to veer away from coal and gas-fired energy. 

    “What REAP has helped us do is show people that it’s not just a decision that’s driven by environmental motives or whatever, it actually makes good business sense to go solar,” Ransom said. In her experience, saving money appeals to people of all political persuasions. “At the end of the day, we’ve installed just as much solar on red roofs as we do blue roofs, as we do rainbow roofs or whatever.”

    A man with gray hair and a blue ball cap walks along a field wearing a brown vest and holding a cup of coffee.
    Jim Lively has a local food market just minutes from the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in northern Michigan. He’s waiting for the federal money he was promised so he can put solar on the roof and offset the costs of opening up a campsite for RVs in this field. Izzy Ross / Grist

    The Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in northern Michigan draws over 1.5 million visitors every year. Jim Lively hopes some of those people will camp RVs at a nearby site he’s planning to open next to his family’s local food market. He wants to use solar panels to help power the campsite and offset electric bills for the market, where local farmers bring produce directly to the store. 

    Lively helped promote REAP during his time at an environmental nonprofit, where he’d worked for over two decades. So the program was on his mind when it came time to replace the market’s big, south-facing roof.

    “We put on a metal roof, and worked with a contractor who was also familiar with the REAP program, and we said, ‘Let’s make sure we’re setting this up for solar,’” he said. “So it was kind of a no-brainer for us.”

    They were told they had been approved for a REAP grant of $39,696 last summer — half of the project’s total cost — but didn’t feel the need to rush the solar installation. Then, at the end of January, Lively was notified that the funding had been paused. 

    The interior of a grocerys tore with shelves of food and the back of a woman stocking the shelves.
    The interior of the Lively NeighborFood Market, where owner Jim Lively likes to feature local produce. He was hoping to install a solar roof this year, but the funding has been stalled. Izzy Ross / Grist

    The property runs on electricity, rather than natural gas, and Lively wants to keep it that way. But those electric bills have been expensive — about $2,000 a month last summer, he said. When they get the RV site up and running, he expects those bills to approach $3,000.

    Selling local food means operating within tight margins. Lively said saving on energy would help, but they won’t be able to move ahead with the rooftop solar unless the REAP funding is guaranteed.

    Continuing to power the property with electricity rather than fossil fuels is a kind of personal commitment for Lively. “Boy, solar is also the right thing to do,” he said. “And it’s going to be difficult to do that without that funding.” 

    The grants aren’t only for solar arrays and other renewable energy systems. Many are for energy efficiency improvements to help farmers save on utility bills, and in some cases cut emissions. In Georgia, for instance, one farm was awarded just under $233,000 for a more efficient grain dryer, an upgrade projected to save the farm more than $16,000 per year. Several farms were awarded funding to convert diesel-powered irrigation pumps to electric.

    The USDA did not directly answer Grist’s emailed questions about the specific timeline for REAP funds, the amount of money under review, or the future of the program. Instead, an emailed statement criticized the Biden administration’s “misuse of hundreds of billions” of IRA and bipartisan infrastructure law (BIL) funds  “all at the expense of the American taxpayer.” 

    “USDA has a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of the American people’s hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar spent goes to serve the people, not the bureaucracy. As part of this effort, Secretary Rollins is carefully reviewing this funding and will provide updates as soon as they are made available,” the email said.

    Two federal judges have already ordered the Trump administration to release the impounded IRA and BIL funds. Earthjustice, a national environmental law organization, filed a lawsuit last week challenging the freeze of USDA funds on behalf of farmers and nonprofits. 

    “The administration is causing harm that can’t be fixed, and fairness requires that the funds continue to flow,” said Jill Tauber, vice president of litigation for climate and energy at Earthjustice.

    Rollins released the first tranche of funding February 20 and announced the release of additional program funds earlier this month. That did not include the REAP funding.

    The USDA announced Wednesday it would expedite funding for farmers under a different program in honor of National Agriculture Day, but as of March 20 had not made an announcement about REAP.

    Rahul Bali of WABE contributed reporting to this story. ​​

    Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

    This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Farmers and small business owners were promised financial help for energy upgrades. They’re still waiting for the money. on Mar 21, 2025.

    This post was originally published on Grist.