Publication - ialTWq2jDsUHGPLhseEW01pE7jP2

Default

en-US-TonyNeural

From farm to retail, the threat of trade barriers is already impacting the food supply chain.
Spring has sprung, and you can tell by looking at Dig’s online menu. The fast-casual chain known for its bountiful salads and bowls is promoting a new sandwich for the spring — the “avo smash,” wherein a hearty piece of chicken or tofu is embraced by a brioche bun, pesto aioli, and plenty of bright-green avocado.
The lunch spot’s seasonal menus are planned at least three months in advance, said Andrew Torrens, Dig’s director of supply, meaning the avo smash has been in the works for a while. However, if the United States decides to escalate a global trade war next month, Dig will have to come up with a backup plan fast.
“If avocado prices explode, what’s our backup? How do we pivot?” said Torrens on a recent phone call.
Since his inauguration in January, President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada — creating confusion for restaurant owners, food distributors, grocers, and consumers who rely on the United States’ neighbor to the south for fruits and vegetables year-round. On February 1, the president signed an executive order levying a 25 percent tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico. However, he has twice pushed back the start date; earlier this month, he paused tariffs on most goods coming in from Mexico and Canada until April 2. What will actually happen on that date — which Trump has dubbed “Liberation Day” — is still largely unclear.
A tariff on goods from Mexico, the single largest supplier of horticultural imports to the U.S., would almost certainly mean higher prices at the grocery store. It could also, according to experts, increase food waste along the supply chain.
Dig sources most of its avocados from Mexico, where the warm climate is ideal for growing these fruits. This is common — in fact, about 90 percent of avocados consumed in the U.S. come from Mexico, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “We rely on imports, from Mexico in particular, on things like fresh fruit and vegetables in order to meet year-round consumer demand,” said David Ortega, a professor focused on agricultural economics and policy at Michigan State University. Tariffs have the potential to send those prices soaring by raising the cost of production. But the lack of clarity around U.S. trade relations is already impacting operations in the food and beverage industry.
“There’s so much uncertainty, you don’t know how to operate your business and you don’t know how to plan for it,” said Torrens. “If you knew what the new reality was, you’d adapt to it.”
Other food chains are reeling from the Trump administration’s policies. In an annual filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the salad chain Sweetgreen listed “international trade barriers” as one factor that could spike the cost of ingredients like avocados; it also mentioned the threat of mass deportation of undocumented workers as a supply chain disruption. Asked about tariffs, Scott Boatwright, the CEO of the Mexican-inspired burrito giant Chipotle, told reporters that the company would not pass on higher costs to the customer. “​​It is our intent as we sit here today to absorb those costs,” Boatwright told NBC Nightly News on March 2, just days before Trump announced a one-month pause in tariffs for goods covered by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, the trade agreement he negotiated during his first term.
Much has been written and said about the economic impacts of tariffs. One lesser-known side effect — which could also have environmental consequences — is the potential for more food loss and waste. This can happen at various points along the food supply chain, from the farm to the U.S.-Mexico border to grocery store shelves. “I think tariffs are a bit of a supply chain disruption,” not unlike the ones felt during the pandemic, said Brenna Ellison, professor of agribusiness management at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The trouble stems from the fact that fruit and vegetables are highly perishable.
“If we’re having trouble getting them in the country because it costs more, if that creates more hesitation among U.S. buyers to get those products into the country, the clock is ticking really fast,” said Ellison. Items that normally would make their way to U.S. consumers will “go to waste quickly unless we can find some alternate use for them.”
Food loss and waste are measured by looking at how much edible food grown for human consumption doesn’t end up feeding people — whether that’s at the harvesting and processing stage or further along the way to the consumer, like in stores or kitchens. When organic matter, like fruits and vegetables, is thrown out, it often winds up in landfills — where it emits methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, as it rots. In the U.S., a majority of wasted food — about 60 percent — goes to landfills, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA also found that every year, 55 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents are emitted from food waste in landfills.
During the pandemic, there were reports of farmers leaving food to rot in the fields, as restaurants shut down and growers lost access to their regular customers. Ellison states this could happen again, if tariffs raise the price of agricultural goods to the point that growers are not confident they’ll be able to sell as much product as they’re used to and recoup the cost of harvesting.
But she noted that it does not necessarily mean those crops are sent to a landfill. “In some cases, depending on the crop, it can be tilled back into the soil,” sending plant nutrients back to the earth, said Ellison.
However, more waste can happen further along the supply chain — on the way to market or in grocery stores. If tariffs lead to delays in processing at the border, that could lead to more produce spoiling before or as it meets the consumer, said Ortega. He also mentioned that when the Trump administration first announced tariffs, “a lot of importers started to do what we call ‘front-loading’; they started to get as much product over the border in an effort to beat the tariff.”
Ordering fresh produce in excess means you have to sell it. Multiple Whole Foods Market stores in New York City in mid-March had a promotion on Mexican produce, including avocados and mangos. Whole Foods did not respond to a request for comment about whether the sale was related to tariff announcements. United Natural Foods Inc. — the importer for Whole Foods — had no comment, said Kristin Jimenez, the corporation’s vice president of corporate communications.
When food is left on grocery store shelves, it can also lead to food waste, said Ellison at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. That can happen when retailers over-order produce and can’t sell all of it — or when prices go up and “people just can’t afford” to buy it, Ellison added.
There’s also a chance that consumers could end up seeing more limited availability of goods as retailers try to switch up their sourcing to avoid tariffs.
While Trump campaigned on lowering the cost of goods at the grocery store, a 25 percent tariff on goods from Mexico could make basics like fruits and vegetables even more expensive. That has hunger relief organizations worried, too.
“We’re obviously concerned that anytime there’s a potential disruption in the supply chain, particularly with fruits and vegetables, it could impact our ability to feed those in need,” said Jen Cox, the chief development officer at Food Forward, a food rescue operation focused on redistributing fresh produce to food banks, after-school programs, and more. She added that tariffs could exacerbate an already challenging cost-of-living situation for many people in the U.S., leading to an increase in hunger.
The U.S. set a goal of cutting food waste in half by 2030 — we’re nowhere near that. Should tariffs drive an increase in food sent to landfills, it will be one of multiple knock-on effects that trade barriers will have on consumers. “It’s sort of a conflation of all of these situations,” said Cox. Those compounding crises — economic, social, and environmental — mean that organizations like hers could have their hands full in the coming months, working to fill the gaps that “America First” trade policies will likely create.

Tariffs won’t just hit your wallet. They could also increase food waste.

Extreme weather wiped out billions in crops last year — but most federal aid may end up going to the wrong farms.
As Earth heats up, the growing frequency and intensity of disasters like catastrophic storms and heat waves are becoming a mounting problem for the people who grow the planet’s food. Warming is no longer solely eroding agricultural productivity and food security in distant nations or arid climates. It’s throttling production in the United States.
Farmers and ranchers across the country lost at least $20.3 billion in crops and rangeland to extreme weather last year, according to a new Farm Bureau report that crowned the 2024 hurricane season “one of the most destructive in U.S. history” and outlined a long list of other climate-fueled impacts.
Texas experienced the highest losses for the third year in a row. Extreme drought, excessive heat, and high winds took out more than $3.4 billion worth of crops like cotton and wheat, and damaged rangeland. Flooding cost Minnesota some $1.45 billion in corn, soybeans, and forage, among other crops. California endured nearly all the same weather challenges as the south-central U.S. and the upper Midwest, costing its agricultural sector $1.4 billion.
And then there was the one-two punch of hurricanes Helene and Milton that tore through the Southeast. Georgia’s agricultural sector sustained over $459 million in losses as Helene wiped out crops like peanuts, pecans, and cotton. The same storm destroyed some $174 million worth of tobacco, blueberries, and apples in North Carolina. Florida’s ag industry lost nearly twice that to the two hurricanes, adding to the problems pummeling citrus production, all of them caused by previous storms, water scarcity, and disease.
Those tallies are but a snapshot of the economic impact of last year’s disasters on U.S. farm production, as they only account for damages wrought by major weather events such as billion-dollar disasters. They also don’t figure in most livestock or infrastructure losses following Helene and Milton, which significantly hike up total agricultural economic impacts for states like Georgia and Florida.
By the end of the year, farmers from coast to coast were left with diminished income, unpaid bills, and little recourse. Those financial stressors were compounded by inflation, surging labor and production costs, disruptions to global supply and demand, and increased price volatility. So in December, Congress authorized nearly $31 billion in emergency assistance to help struggling producers.
Last week, the USDA opened those disaster aid applications and said it was expediting disbursements. But there’s a catch: The funding pot the agency is gearing up to distribute makes up just a third of the assistance Congress approved.
That $10 billion is intended for farmers growing traditional commodities, such as corn, cotton, and soybeans, and is available to those who experienced most any kind of loss, not just those stemming from extreme weather. Payouts are determined by multiplying a flat commodity rate, based on calculated economic loss, with acres planted. It significantly limits eligibility, said Billy Hackett, policy analyst at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, and funnels help away from smaller farmers into the pockets of industrial-scale operations. Fewer than 6 percent of U.S. farms sold more than three-fourths of all agricultural products between 2017 and 2022. “[The program] works exceedingly well for the largest farms, but leaves behind smaller farms,” said Hackett.
The USDA has not yet said when or how the remaining $21 billion will be distributed. That funding was, in fact, allocated for producers impacted by weather-related disasters in 2023 and 2024. But unlike the package structured for commodity growers, which had a 90-day timeline for implementation, Hackett noted that the USDA doesn’t necessarily have to act quickly on it. The American Relief Act that authorized the funding gives the USDA 120 days to begin reporting on its implementation progress, but no hard deadline for actually disbursing money. That means the $21 billion program isn’t on the same ticking congressional clock.
Ultimately, lawmakers did not provide clear reasoning for why they split the pot and crafted different disbursement mechanisms, with one measure of relief pushed through over the other. Hackett noted that it could be a reflection of who policymakers in Washington are hearing from most: “Who is the loudest? Who has the most meetings? It doesn’t always reflect who is in the most need.”
That lack of a deadline also doesn’t mean the agency shouldn’t move quickly, said Hackett. The $21 billion program is primed to help many more farmers, he said, particularly those that are underserved and passed over by other federal programs such as crop insurance. Farms without crop insurance tend to be small and medium-sized, while the bulk of larger farms have coverage. Speciality crop farms — those producing fruits, vegetables, nuts, horticulture, and nursery crops — are also less likely to be covered than those that produce commodities. Just 15 percent were insured in 2022, compared to nearly two-thirds of oilseed and grain farms.
Hackett worries that the application process may end up being unduly demanding or complicated, and that small or uninsured operators and historically excluded farmers that have faced issues with federal disaster relief eligibility and coverage in the past will be shut out. That has been the case with previous supplemental disaster relief programs, including the Wildfire, Hurricane, and Indemnity Program enacted in 2017 under the first Trump administration.
In a briefing last week, Brooke Appleton, the deputy undersecretary for farm production and conservation, told reporters that more information on the $21 billion program should be “coming soon.” This followed remarks Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins made late last month when she noted the agency would hit the congressional deadline of March 21 for sending out the full $31 billion — despite that deadline not applying to two-thirds of the money. The USDA did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.
Meanwhile, farmers like Daniel Spatz are left wondering what’s next. Last spring, he lost roughly $20,000 because “intense” rain waterlogged his central Arkansas fields, leaving him unable to plant 70 acres of rice. The year before, a prolonged drought cost him much more. Spatz is among the 13 percent or so of farmers with crop insurance, but recouped no more than $2,000 after the heavy rains. He’s unsure if he’s eligible for this disaster aid program, which he sees as another sign that the Trump administration is supporting large farmers “at the expense” of small operators like himself. Above all, he’s concerned about calamities yet to come.
“It appears to me that we’re depending more and more on the government to bail us out of these climate-induced disasters,” he said. The USDA shelled out more than $16 billion to farmers from 2022 through 2024 for crops lost to extreme weather events alone. “My question to the Trump administration would be, ‘How much do we have to spend as a society, bailing out people, rebuilding and putting public funds into rescuing people, citizens? What does that price tag have to be before climate change is understood as real, and a public threat, a threat to our future?’”

The $20 billion question hanging over America’s struggling farmers

The $20B question hanging over America’s struggling farmers

The Department of Transportation considers freezing funding for bike lanes and other pedestrian safety projects as the Trump administration leans into fossil fuels.
The Department of Transportation has ordered a review of federal funding for bike lanes and plans to target recent projects that “improve the condition for environmental justice communities or actively reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
The move, outlined in a department memo obtained by Grist, is part of the Trump administration’s broader goal of steering federal infrastructure spending toward fossil fuels. The restriction of federal funding comes as health experts warn that pedestrian deaths have surged.
DOT officials did not respond to requests for comment.
The undated memo, reportedly sent March 11 to DOT offices, ordered an immediate freeze on all grants made after January 2021, invoking a series of executive orders aimed at dismantling federal diversity and climate initiatives. It instructs agency employees to identify projects that provide “funding to advance climate, equity, and other priorities counter to the Administration’s executive orders.”
It specifically targets any funds for projects “whose primary purpose is bicycle infrastructure,” one of many steps President Donald Trump has taken to boost the fossil fuel industry. It also calls for flagging projects that might prioritize benefits to disadvantaged communities or reduce emissions. This likely includes hundreds of grants awarded through Safe Streets and Roads for All, a $5 billion initiative created by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The goal of these efforts is to help communities address roadway safety concerns, said John Tallmadge, the executive director of Bike Durham, a nonprofit group in Durham, North Carolina. The group is supporting a series of infrastructure improvements in Durham that were counting on funding from the agency’s BUILD grants, also expected to be impacted.
The Durham project would add sidewalks, crosswalks, and bus stops to the city’s busiest transit corridor, which is used by thousands of people each day. “Numerous locations along this corridor have had pedestrian fatalities,” Tallmadge said.
These safety concerns were highlighted in a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which found Americans were 50 percent more likely to die walking in 2022 than in 2013. Its author, Rebecca Naumann, said infrastructure that prioritizes safety over speed — like the improvements Durham hopes to build — are proven solutions that protect everyone.
She notes such designs have helped other high-income countries, like the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada, reduce traffic deaths in recent decades. The opposite is true of the United States, which as of 2022, saw more pedestrian deaths than any of the 27 other countries Naumann studied.
One DOT project manager, who requested anonymity to avoid professional retaliation, told Grist the memo and executive orders will make it “terribly difficult to use federal transportation dollars where it’s needed most.” That’s bad news for more than bike lanes: Sustainable transportation not only makes communities safer, it lowers travel costs; improves access to important services like medical care, schools, and work; and helps mitigate climate change. “It’s frustrating to see these solutions stall when so many communities urgently need them,” he said. As Tallmadge noted, delays and revisions to federal grants will increase the cost of any project — the opposite of government efficiency.
Other funding likely to be caught up in these restrictions include projects within the Active Transportation Infrastructure Investment Program, which supports multimodal travel; the BUILD program, which is designed to meet local or multi-jurisdictional needs; and the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program, which helps communities harmed by past transportation decisions. Grants recently awarded under these initiatives range from $22 million for electric buses in Rhode Island to $157 million for green spaces that connect Atlanta neighborhoods currently divided by highways. “The restriction of funding for projects like the Atlanta BeltLine and its RAISE Grant is an assault on disadvantaged communities,” said U.S. Representative Nikema Williams, the Democrat who represents a wide swath of Atlanta. “These projects improve equity and mobility while spurring economic development.”
The DOT memo follows recommendations outlined in the conservative Project 2025 policy agenda that has shaped much of the Trump administration’s work. It broadly argued that the federal government should not fund local transportation projects. Instead, it suggests “user fees” and enabling “private companies to charge for transportation” through ventures like toll roads, removing air pollution regulations, restricting electric vehicle infrastructure, and eliminating federal funding for bicycle lanes, ferries, and other transportation.
Yet the move to restrict programs like BUILD, which rely on community input, clashes with Project 2025’s emphasis on local decision-making, said Caron Whitaker, the deputy executive director of the League of American Bicyclists. The Atlanta BeltLine project, for example, was supported by private and public entities at almost every level of government in Georgia. “Why are we pulling back grants where local governments choose what they want to do?” Whitaker asked. “If safety is a federal issue, then local fatalities matter,” she added. “If the economy is a federal issue, then local economies matter.”
The League, which is circulating a petition protesting the DOT’s review, recently led meetings with congressional aides to discuss the importance of funding active transportation projects. One former DOT employee who spoke to Grist said the scale of Safe Streets and Roads for All means there will be widespread impacts. “Safety is a bipartisan issue. You see Republican and Democratic representatives and senators touting the announcement whenever they’re awarded,” he said. “I think people just think, ‘Oh, this probably just hurts the coasts and the big cities,’ but there’s definitely rural areas that were trying to improve safety.”
It takes a lot of work for communities to get a federal grant, he said, often alongside finding matching funds. Whitaker agreed. “It puts local governments in a tough position,” she said. Because the Safe Streets program funding was congressionally allocated, explicitly including “bicyclists,” Duffy’s move to cut programs “whose primary purpose is bicycling” may not even be legal. Last week, a coalition of nonprofits and cities sued to reverse the federal freeze on grants, including the March DOT memo. “Since our nation’s founding, the Constitution has made it clear,” wrote the Southern Environmental Law Center, who is litigating the case, that “Congress controls federal spending — not the president.”
These efforts may limit transportation research nationwide. The DOT funds research and technical assistance projects through the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, or NCHRP, which is also subject to review. “If the policy memo is applied broadly to NCHRP, there could be a significant loss in current and future funding,” said Jennifer Dill, director of the Transportation Research and Education Center. “Without more research about countermeasures and solutions to fatalities, it will be hard to reverse that trend.” She worries Duffy’s recent actions will limit states’ ability to effectively use federal money for local priorities.
At headquarters, morale among many of those remaining at the DOT is at new lows. At first, the DOT project manager who spoke to Grist hoped to come up with ways to rephrase grants to avoid triggering words like “equity” and “climate.” But the new restrictions have escalated into an unprecedented level of scrutiny, with the political appointees reviewing every contract.
“It’s gone beyond just switching words to get through the censor,” he said. “It’s not only making people afraid to carry on with good work that was underway, but has a chilling effect on everything we do going forward.”

The government aims to cut funding for safer streets. Here’s who would be hurt most.

Political tensions are threatening the future of the largest freshwater ecosystem on Earth.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist, Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan, and WBEZ, a public radio station serving the Chicago metropolitan region.
Great Lakes Day is an annual summit where politicians and officials of all stripes gather in Washington, D.C., to demonstrate their commitment to the region home to the largest freshwater ecosystem on the planet. For years, leaders from the United States and Canada have met at the event without incident. But earlier this month and amid a tariff dispute between the two nations, the Trump administration abruptly disinvited two Canadian mayors from the long-standing White House meeting.
The last-minute exclusion of Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante and St. Catharines Mayor Mat Siscoe came just 48 hours before the event due to “diplomatic protocols,” according to Christine Maydossian, a spokesperson for the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative, which coordinates the meeting and submitted the names of the two Canadian mayors and one American to White House officials a month earlier.
Neither Canadian mayor responded to a request for comment.
Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump and his administration has repeatedly stoked tensions with Canada, once considered the United States’ closest ally. Along with trade and tariffs, this strife has also raised questions about how the region’s water resources will be managed. Amid the escalating political tensions, some Great Lakes advocates worry the diplomatic snub is a warning sign that one of the world’s most successful examples of water-sharing could become collateral damage in a geopolitical rift.
“We are worried that maybe behind all this is the idea that a country one day will be able to take water out of the Great Lakes and manage water not as an ecosystem that needs to be preserved in its watershed, but as a resource, as a commodity,” said Jérôme Marty, speaking as the director of the International Association for Great Lakes Research.
The New York Times reported earlier this month that in calls with then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Trump had “mentioned revisiting the sharing of lakes and rivers between the two nations.”
“President Trump has made clear the need for Canada to stop ripping off the United States on trade. President Trump will explore any and all actions that put the interests of America first,” said Brian Hughes, a spokesperson with the National Security Council, in an emailed statement to Grist. (The White House did not respond directly to Grist’s questions about cooperation between the two countries concerning the Great Lakes.)
For over a century, the United States and Canada have worked in tandem to manage four of the five Great Lakes that straddle both countries: Superior, Huron, Erie, and Ontario. That cooperative arrangement — with which the countries settle everything from water use to navigation to invasive species to pollution — may now be on the line.
“We cannot let this be sacrificed,” said Rachel Havrelock, a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago who directs the Freshwater Lab, an environmental research initiative focused on the Great Lakes and environmental justice.
“This is the most stable, productive, and mutually beneficial form of binational water governance on Earth,” she added.
The lakes provide drinking water for more than 30 million people spread across both sides of the border. The U.S. and Canada, then under British rule, signed the Boundary Waters Treaty in 1909, a highly-praised water sharing agreement that formed the International Joint Commission, or IJC, a binational organization that aims to prevent and resolve disputes over shared lakes and rivers.
(The arrangements between the two countries long sidelined Indigenous nations, which the U.S.-Canada border artificially bisect. For example, the IJC did not invite Indigenous representatives to participate until the 1980s, despite the sovereign rights of those nations. Indigenous communities often face disproportionate impacts from pollution and climate change, and recent IJC assessments have acknowledged that strengthening relationships with Indigenous governments is key to improving its response to those threats.)
The relationship was further cemented by the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, established in 1955, which coordinates how invasive species and fisheries are managed, and again by the 1972 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, which committed the two nations to “restore and maintain” the health of the lakes.
Those are just three among a layered patchwork of treaties and other agreements between local, state, federal, and tribal governments that determine Great Lakes management. Some don’t necessarily rely on federal involvement, such as the Great Lakes Agreement and Compact, which protects the water from being shipped to other states and regions.
Trump has cast doubt on the stability of these agreements by breaking a series of diplomatic taboos, including calling Canada the “51st state” and halting negotiations on the Columbia River Treaty, after referring to the British Columbia river as a “large faucet” that could be used to solve California’s water crisis last year.
Policy experts say Trump’s recent tack raises a red flag for the future of the Great Lakes.
“The water and the resources don’t recognize international boundaries,” said Mike Shriberg, a faculty member at the University of Michigan who specializes in Great Lakes policy. “You can’t manage things like invasive species from only one country and not the other. You can’t manage harmful algal blooms from one country or the other. The information on the flow of ice and what that means for shipping has to be shared across borders.”
Shriberg said the Trump administration’s funding freeze and staffing cuts related to management of the lakes are impacting how the U.S. will protect them and meet its obligations with Canada — concerns that prompted him to write an op-ed making the case for politicians to unify to protect the Great Lakes.
Some areas have shown signs of revival; the Great Lakes Fishery Commission’s sea lamprey program can begin rehiring U.S. federal workers to control the invasive species, which can wreak havoc on other fish. That means the program will move forward, albeit weeks behind schedule.
But other threats are visible, according to Shriberg: There are more bureaucratic roadblocks to federal scientists working with their Canadian counterparts on everything from harmful algal blooms to flooding — work he said had until this point been “seamless.”
“It’s often not happening because of the chaos within the agencies that’s being caused by all the cutbacks,” Shriberg said.
Those cutbacks have reached the NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, which has been rocked by staffing upheavals, with a fifth of their employees reportedly retiring, resigning, fired, or on leave, including the communications team.
“You’re already seeing a breakdown in capacity to do the basic work that we need to protect the lakes,” he said.

The US and Canada have long managed the Great Lakes together. That era could be ending.

The landmark Juliana v. United States sparked a global movement to defend children's rights to a healthy climate, a campaign that's already scored two wins.
Ten years ago, 21 young people filed a long shot lawsuit against the federal government, arguing that it wasn’t doing enough to protect them from climate change. Their campaign came to an end this week without a court victory, but having made a different kind of impact: They brought an innovative legal approach to the climate fight that has inspired similar cases, at least two of which have been successful.
The case, Juliana v. United States, has “forever changed the legal paradigm,” said Julia Olson, chief legal counsel for Our Children’s Trust, which represented the youth. It “ignited the global youth climate movement,” she said, “and forced a reexamination of children’s rights in the context of climate change.”
The plaintiffs argued that, by supporting the production and burning of fossil fuels, the federal government violated their constitutional right to “life, liberty, personal security, dignity, bodily integrity, and their cultural and religious practices.” The case endured fierce pushback from the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered its dismissal twice — once in 2020 and again in May 2024.
On Monday, the United States Supreme Court declined to reinstate the complaint, ruling that the youth had not shown that they have standing to sue the government. That dashed the last remaining hope that the suit could move forward.
Although Juliana wasn’t the first youth-led climate lawsuit — six were filed worldwide between 2011 and 2015 — it precipitated a rapid increase in such cases. By one count from the nonprofit ClimaTalk, young people filed 18 cases between 2016 and 2020 and at least another half dozen since then. Like Juliana, many argued that governments have an obligation to address climate change to defend individual freedoms, such as the right to life or to a healthy environment.
Michael Gerrard, founder and faculty director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, said Juliana made clear that U.S. “federal courts are not going to embrace a constitutional right to a stable climate system” — a point Judge Andrew Hurwitz of the Ninth Circuit made when he noted in a 2020 opinion that “the plaintiffs’ impressive case for redress must be presented to the political branches of government.” For that reason, Gerrard said, such cases may fare better in states that have written environmental rights into their constitutions.
Those states include Montana and Hawaiʻi, where Our Children’s Trust has won landmark victories. The first came in Montana when a judge ruled that the 16 youth who sued the state over its support of the fossil fuel industry have a constitutional right to a “clean and healthful environment.” The state Supreme Court affirmed the ruling in December when it ruled that the state must consider climate impacts when reviewing fossil fuel projects.
Last June, Our Children’s Trust reached a historic settlement with the Hawaiʻi Department of Transportation that requires it to decarbonize transportation by 2045. The unprecedented agreement also mandates that the agency work to mitigate climate change, align its investments and clean energy goals, and plant at least 1,000 trees annually. Mesina D., one of the 13 plaintiffs in the case, attributed that victory to “the blueprint laid by the Juliana youth plaintiffs.”
“Thanks to these 21 Americans, young people everywhere now know they can raise their voices and demand the protection of their constitutional rights to life and liberty,” she said in a statement.
Many of them are doing just that. Olson said she’s helping Our Children’s Trust litigate or develop eight more state-level climate cases. She’s also working with the Juliana plaintiffs to decide whether to bring their case before an international venue like the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which could issue a nonbinding, but nevertheless symbolic, decision. That would mirror a strategy 16 children attempted in 2019 when they brought a climate change petition against five countries under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. (The U.N. told them in 2021 to begin by suing their native countries and return if they lost.)
That’s not to say anyone’s given up on federal action. Because the Ninth Circuit dismissed the case without prejudice, the plaintiffs are free to try again. “These claims are not closed by any means,” Olson said. Our Children’s Trust is already working on a federal case that she hopes to launch soon.
James May, an emeritus law professor and founder of the Global Environmental Rights Institute at Widener University Delaware Law School, agreed that another lawsuit is worth a shot so that constitutional rights claims can be heard on their merits.
He also believes the Juliana case was a “huge missed opportunity” for the Biden administration, which talked a lot about the need to address climate change but whose Justice Department repeatedly asked judges to dismiss the case. The administration “didn’t have to agree that there was a constitutional right that had been violated,” May said, but it could have settled the case by agreeing to take concrete steps to address greenhouse gas emissions.
“The Obama, Trump, Biden, and [second] Trump administrations fought this case harder than any case in American history,” May said. “It sounds so dramatic, but it’s true. Never before has the federal government sought interlocutory relief to the extent it did in this case.”
In a statement, the Department of Justice welcomed the Supreme Court’s decision as the end of what it called a “long saga” that “has tied up the United States in litigation.” Adam Gustafson, the acting assistant attorney general of the department’s environment and natural resources division, also said in the statement that “the Justice Department is enforcing our nation’s environmental laws and safeguarding America’s air, water, and natural resources. Cases like Juliana distract from those enforcement efforts.”
Despite the setback, the work of those 21 youth and the pioneering case they brought radically reshaped the climate fight by engaging young people and more broadly mobilizing the environmental movement. Since 2015, more than 80 members of Congress, including senators Jeff Merkley, Cory Booker, and Bernie Sanders, have endorsed legislation affirming the climate- and environment-related rights of children and filed amicus briefs in Juliana. More than 400 organizations supported the lawsuit, and 350,000 people signed petitions calling for courts to hear it. The case is being taught in law schools, and it has inspired books and the Netflix documentary Youth v. Gov.
“Hats off to the litigants,” May said. “They literally changed the world.”

The world’s biggest youth climate lawsuit lost in court, but it ‘changed the world’

A new report finds that while electricity demand skyrocketed, the deployment of new wind, solar, and nuclear power did, too.
The world is grappling with an energy crisis — not one of scarcity, but one created by overwhelming demand. More energy-hungry data centers and AI algorithms are coming online. Developing countries are using more energy to support their people and industries. And as the world electrifies — replacing gas cars with electric vehicles, for instance — it will use ever more power. So the electrical grid doesn’t just need renewables (and batteries to store their energy) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also to meet growing demand.
A new analysis from the Paris-based International Energy Agency puts some hard numbers to the challenge, finding that in 2024, electricity consumption jumped by 4.3 percent worldwide, almost double the annual average over the last decade. Power use in buildings accounted for nearly 60 percent of the growth last year, with other drivers including the ballooning of energy-intensive industries and the electrification of transportation.
“What is certain is that electricity use is growing rapidly, pulling overall energy demand along with it to such an extent that it is enough to reverse years of declining energy consumption in advanced economies,” said Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, in a press release announcing the findings. “The result is that demand for all major fuels and energy technologies increased in 2024, with renewables covering the largest share of the growth, followed by natural gas.”
The good news is that the installation of renewables like wind and solar hit a record in 2024 for the 22nd consecutive year, according to the analysis, while 33 percent more nuclear capacity came online compared to 2023. Renewables and nuclear power combined for 80 percent of the increase in worldwide electricity generation. Together, the two sources handled 40 percent of overall generation for the first time, which meant energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rose by just 0.8 percent last year, compared with 1.2 percent in 2023.
At the same time, the global economy grew by more than 3 percent in 2024. Carbon dioxide emissions, in other words, didn’t keep up with economic growth, so CO2 emissions and economic growth are increasingly “decoupled,” the report notes. Beneath the headline numbers, however, the story varies region to region. While countries like the U.S. can easily deploy more renewables to reduce their emissions and still maintain economic growth — renewables actually encourage that growth — in 2024 the bulk of the rise in emissions came from developing economies. “We can have more energy and less emissions — we need to have more energy and less emissions,” said R. Max Holmes, president and CEO of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, who wasn’t involved in the analysis. “There are encouraging signs in this report that that decoupling is starting to take place.”
Still, no matter the country, renewables aren’t growing fast enough to displace fossil fuels: Oil demand rose by 0.8 percent in 2024 and coal by 1 percent. Natural gas demand went up 2.7 percent, far above the annual growth rate of 1 percent between 2019 and 2023. That was thanks to the growth of heavy industries along with brutal heat waves, especially in China and India. The hotter the world gets, the more people switch on their air conditioners, creating demand that power plants have to meet by burning fossil fuels, leading to even more warming and more AC use.
Even so, the report reveals that the world is making some progress in weaning itself off fossil fuels. In 2024, EVs accounted for a fifth of all car sales around the world. In the U.S., sales of electric heat pumps — which move heat from outdoor air into a home — jumped 15 percent last year, and now outsell gas furnaces by 30 percent. All told, since 2019, the deployment of solar and wind energy, nuclear power, EVs, and heat pumps now prevents the release of 2.6 billion metric tons of CO2 each year. “That’s about half the U.S. economy’s worth of emissions, and that’s just five solutions in five years,” said Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, a Minnesota-based climate nonprofit that wasn’t involved in the report. “We’re still far behind. All the bad news is still true — climate change is still happening, it’s bad, it’s ugly, we’re not doing enough. But I’m seeing an inflection point here.”
The big question in the U.S. is whether the new Trump administration, which has been aggressivelydismantlingclimateprogress in its first two months in office, can kneecap this shift to clean-energy. Experts say that there are fundamental market forces beyond the control of the federal government, namely that renewables are now cheaper to deploy than more fossil-fuel infrastructure. “The world is transitioning away from fossil fuels and toward renewable and non-greenhouse-gas-emitting energy sources, period,” Holmes said. “It is going to happen. What the Trump administration right now is doing can slow that transition, but it certainly can’t stop that transition.”

Renewables surged in 2024 — but so did fossil fuels

To address climate change, we're going to need a whole lot of metal.
This story is part of the Grist series Unearthed: The Mining Issue, which examines the global race to extract critical minerals for the clean energy transition.
In the decade since the world pledged to combat climate change under the Paris Agreement, global energy systems have undergone a revolution. The United States experienced a sixfold increase in solar power, and wind power more than doubled. And there are now more than 40 million electric vehicles on roads worldwide.
But ending our dependence on fossil fuels and adopting this new, greener technology requires a whole lot of metal.
It takes lithium and cobalt to build the batteries that power electric vehicles and e-bikes, nickel and rare earth elements to construct solar panels and wind turbines, and copper to build the wires that move renewable energy from the sunny and windy places it’s generated to the cities and factories where it’s most needed.
The faster we move away from fossil fuels, the more desperately we will need these metals and other so-called critical minerals. In an ambitious energy transition, global demand for them will quadruple by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency. That means digging vast new open-pit mines, building powerful new refineries to distill raw ore, and opening new factories to manufacture batteries and turbines.
Just as the 20th century was defined by the geography of oil, the 21st century could be defined by the new geography of metal — in particular by snarled industrial supply lines that often flow from the developing world to the developed world and back again.
On his first day in office, U.S. President Donald Trump signed two separate executive orders that mentioned so-called critical minerals, saying the country was mining them at a pace “far too inadequate to meet our nation’s needs.” He has since tried to fast-track permitting for domestic mining projects, while at the same time looking abroad for more supply — including in Greenland, which he has said should be under U.S. control, and in Ukraine, where he has attempted to secure mineral access in exchange for protection against Russia.
Though Trump is taking every step he can to stymie the development of renewable energy, his fixation on these resources reflects an undeniable reality: The world’s growing need for critical minerals has huge implications for geopolitics, as well as climate and environmental policy.
Below, Grist demystifies critical minerals and the race to extract them. We outline the ways the world currently mines, refines, and deploys a few key metals that are essential for renewable energy and electric vehicles. Bringing order to the world’s mineral chaos will be no easy task, but the fight against climate change depends on getting it right.
The minerals
A renewable energy product, like an electric-vehicle battery or solar panel, contains dozens of minerals. Many of them aren’t difficult to find: Copper, for instance, which is a primary component in transmission wires, has been mass-produced around the world for more than 100 years. But many others needed for the technology are far more difficult to access, and governments and companies around the world are now rushing to shore up their supplies. Here’s the state of play for four of the minerals that are most critical to the energy transition: lithium, cobalt, and nickel, which are key components of energy-storing batteries, and rare earth elements, which help power wind turbines.
Hover over the gold circles below to see which minerals power modern society.
Wind turbine
29
Cu
Copper
30
Zn
Zinc
60
Nd
Neodymium
59
Pr
Praseodymium
66
Dy
Dysprosium
65
Tb
Terbium
Solar panel
29
Cu
Copper
13
Al
Aluminum
Electric vehicle
3
Li
Lithium
27
Co
Cobalt
60
Nd
Neodymium
59
Pr
Praseodymium
66
Dy
Dysprosium
65
Tb
Terbium
28
Ni
Nickel
29
Cu
Copper
13
Al
Aluminum
E-bike
3
Li
Lithium
27
Co
Cobalt
60
Nd
Neodymium
59
Pr
Praseodymium
66
Dy
Dysprosium
65
Tb
Terbium
28
Ni
Nickel
29
Cu
Copper
Grid scale battery
3
Li
Lithium
27
Co
Cobalt
29
Cu
Copper
Power line
29
Cu
Copper
13
Al
Aluminum
 Magnetic rare earth elements — a class of elements that are essential components in electric motors — include neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium.
LITHIUM
Lithium is essential to clean technology because it can contain huge amounts of energy, making it the ideal basis for the batteries that juice up EVs and store the power produced by solar and wind. While the element is somewhat common around the world, it’s only economical to mine it in a few places where deposits are large and easy to access. Australia is by far the world’s largest producer of lithium, accounting for around 50 percent of global supply. In 2021, the nation’s massive Greenbushes mine produced around one-fifth of the world’s raw lithium. Miners have been digging it in former tin quarries on the country’s southwest coast since the 1980s, well before it was a keystone of the energy transition, when the metal was mostly used for nuclear technology and to make items like heat-resistant glass. The country now sees lithium as a key substitute for threatened exports like coal.
Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile, make up the so-called “Lithium Triangle.” These three South American countries produce a relatively small amount of the mineral now, but together they hold well over half of the world’s proven lithium reserves. Unlike the hard rock resources in Australia, the deposits in Bolivia sit in the massive Uyuni salt flat, an ecological marvel that is also home to the Aymara, an Indigenous people. The left-wing government of Evo Morales has vowed that the state will lead lithium production and redistribute the benefits — his plan is called “¡100 percent Estatal!” — but residents in Uyuni have protested the idea, saying they’re concerned about the environmental impacts of mining on the playa.
The United States’ ambitions to create its own lithium supply chain rest to a large extent on a remote desert in northern Nevada. The area, known as Thacker Pass, is home to one of the world’s largest known lithium deposits, estimated to contain more than 40 million recoverable tons of the metal. A company called Lithium Americas is now constructing what will be the nation’s largest lithium mine there. The project received support from both the Biden and first Trump administrations, as well as more than $600 million in financial commitments from General Motors, which has sole rights to the first mineral product from the mine. It too generated protests and lawsuits from Indigenous tribes as well as local ranchers — efforts that were ultimately unsuccessful.
COBALT
The Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC, dominates world production of cobalt, another critical ingredient of lithium-ion batteries. The DRC makes up 80 percent of global cobalt output, but China either owns or is a major stakeholder in the vast majority of the country’s mineral infrastructure, which has grown rapidly in recent years. Mining operations have forced thousands of people out of their homes, polluted the air with toxic cobalt dust, and dumped poisonous tailings into rivers and streams. The mines rely extensively on human trafficking and child labor, according to human rights groups.
A key dilemma is that no other country contains comparable reserves of cobalt. The DRC contains more than half of the world’s untapped land supply of the mineral, twice as much as Australia, which is next highest on the list. The other countries with known deposits, like Russia and Canada, only have enough proven supply to provide around one year of world cobalt production at current rates. Assuming that there are no major discoveries in other countries over the next few years, the path to a successful energy transition will likely run through the DRC.
International waters, however, are another thing. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a wide stretch of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaiʻi and Mexico, contains what are perhaps the world’s most robust reserves of cobalt. The region’s seabed, more than 10,000 feet below the surface, contains an estimated 50 million tons of cobalt, at least several times more than what can be found in the DRC. But even if the depth wasn’t a factor, dozens of countries have called for a ban on deep-sea mining, and members of the International Seabed Authority last year voted in a leader who was critical of the practice.
NICKEL
Nickel is the Swiss army knife of energy transition minerals: It’s used not only in EV batteries but also in solar panels, wind turbines, and even in the production of green hydrogen. Thankfully, supplies of the metal are far more distributed around the world than is the case for lithium and cobalt. All kinds of countries, from Russia to Australia to Brazil to Indonesia, boast huge nickel resources — and even some small island states like the French overseas territory of New Caledonia have gobs of the metal as well. Because nickel has long been used in stainless steel and other alloys, there are far more mature and production-ready mines than there are for cobalt.
Indonesia, the world’s fourth-most populous country, currently accounts for half of global nickel production. The country has been mining the metal since it was a Dutch colony at the turn of the 20th century. Here, as in other countries, the global nature of the supply chain has proven politically contentious: The country depends on China to refine its raw nickel ore and invest in its mining infrastructure. In an effort to reduce this dependence, Indonesia imposed a ban on the export of raw nickel ore in 2020, forcing producers to invest in smelting resources in the country.
Brazil is home to among the largest untapped nickel deposits in the world, but political turmoil has made the future of this resource uncertain. Much like the United States, the country has swung between left-wing and right-wing leaders with radically different environmental policies. The current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has positioned himself as a defender of the Amazon rainforest and an environmental champion, unlike his conservative predecessor — but he seems to be warming to the industrial giant Vale, which hopes to invest billions of dollars in expanded copper and nickel mining.
RARE EARTHS
So-called rare earth elements are essential for modern wind power. They are major components of the ultra-powerful and long-lasting magnets through which turbines generate energy. While the substances aren’t quite as rare as we thought when we gave them that name, well over half of global production is concentrated in China, which has a stranglehold over the rare earth supply chain. The country has been mining the elements for decades, including in massive open-pit mines in inland areas such as the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia. In Jiangxi province, which had a rare earth boom in the 1990s during the first tech boom, mining operations denuded forests and left behind contaminated wastewater pits.
China is far from the only country with a significant share of rare earth metals, but the other countries that have huge stores of the minerals have yet to extract much of them. Take Vietnam, for instance: The country has 22 million tons of rare earths underground, about 20 percent of the world’s known supply and enough to build millions of wind turbines, but it produced a relatively microscopic 600 tons in 2023 — the very same year it entered into an agreement with the U.S. to develop the sector. With corruption scandals implicating top executives at domestic mining authorities, Vietnam is not poised to emerge as a serious alternative to Chinese rare earth supply in the near future.
President Donald Trump appears to be serious about trying to seize Greenland from Denmark. The apparent aim of Trump’s recent diplomatic onslaught over the far northern territory is to secure a strategic military outpost in the Arctic, but the purchase would also have the added effect of giving the United States access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of rare earth metals. The European Union and China have also eyed these reserves.
Annual global mineral production
 Today 2050 (estimated)
 Li
Lithium
180,000 metric tons
Rare Earths
72,000 metric tons
 Co
Cobalt
230,000 metric tons
 Ni
Nickel
3,600,000 metric tons
 A note on our methods
Because of inconsistencies in our datasets, a number of data sources were used for this series.
Data for current production of lithium, cobalt, and nickel comes from USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2024. All 2050 projections come from IEA 2024 Global Critical Minerals Outlook. This report only includes data on the small subset of magnetic rare earth elements used in clean energy: neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium. For this reason, data for current production of rare earth elements is sourced from IEA, and only includes those four magnetic rare earth elements.
The supply chain
The bare rock that miners scrape out of the earth in a place like Australia or Indonesia is just at the beginning of its useful life — and it’s a long way from helping to spin a wind turbine or start up an EV. Once a chunk of something like lithium ore leaves the ground, it must undergo a complex refining process to become an adequate conductor of electricity, and then it must travel to a factory where workers can integrate it into a battery pack. These refining and manufacturing processes almost never happen where miners pull the minerals out of the ground, which creates something like a global game of hot potato.
Minerals: Where are they now?
 Nickel
 Cobalt
 Lithium
 Rare Earths
 Annual Production Reserves
Loading world map data…
 A note on our methods
Because of inconsistencies in our datasets, a number of data sources were used for this series.
Data for the map comes from USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2024. For proprietary reasons, current lithium production data was withheld from that dataset. Because of this, current U.S. lithium production came from The Energy Institute’s 2024 Statistical Review of World Energy. That U.S. figure (600 metric tons) was added to lithium’s global total.
REFINING
In their raw, rocky form, minerals like lithium and nickel are useless for the energy transition. In order to become component parts for EV batteries and wind turbines, these metals must be refined down to purer substances, often through energy-intensive smelting processes. This is the source of the world’s largest energy transition bottleneck: Virtually all mined metal, whether it comes out of the ground in Indonesia or Canada, must travel to China in order to be refined. The country controls 90 percent of the world’s rare earth refining capacity, around two-thirds of its lithium and cobalt refining capacity, and around a third of its nickel refining capacity.
Why is China such a refining behemoth? It’s simple: It has a massive head start. The Chinese state recognized early that critical minerals would be key to a future where fossil fuels were on the wane, and it has poured billions of dollars over the past few decades into the construction of new refineries, setting aside environmental concerns that led to the offshoring of some industrial plants from the United States. The country also invested in the upstream production of these minerals in other developing countries through its $1 trillion Belt and Road initiative, enabling it to achieve vertical integration through the supply chain for certain minerals.
As its foreign relations with China deteriorate, the United States has made halting attempts to build its own lithium refinery fleet, but it’s a slow grind. Thanks to the protectionist nature of U.S. climate policies — the Inflation Reduction Act restricts EV subsidies to cars made with battery material produced and refined in the United States — the entire U.S. energy transition is somewhat dependent on this halting progress. However, there are some large projects in the pipeline, such as Stardust Power, a 50,000-ton lithium refinery being built in Oklahoma. The state has also secured refinery projects for cobalt, nickel, and rare earth metals, but these projects require significant state and federal subsidies to get off the ground: Stardust is eligible for federal and state subsidies totalling around $257 million, almost a quarter of its $1 billion overall cost. Whether these subsidies will be enough for the U.S. to refine all the lithium it needs is very much an open question.
MANUFACTURING
The most promising effort to make the United States competitive in the minerals supply chain may not be a mine, or a refinery, or a factory — but a recycling plant. The startup Ascend Elements opened its first large facility for the recycling of lithium-ion batteries in Covington, Georgia, in 2023. Each year the facility crushes up battery packs containing the equivalent of the lithium in 70,000 spent EVs, and it uses a liquid solution to turn the ground-up dust into new cathode material. If the approach can scale up substantially, it could reduce U.S. reliance on the labyrinthine mining supply chain.
While refining is China’s biggest advantage, the country is also a major player in the manufacturing of batteries, cars, and wind turbines — the final destination industries for all the raw metals we’re mining around the world. Tariffs have prevented the country’s main car makes from going mainstream in the United States, but the affordable BYD (BuildYourDreams) brand now makes up around 15 percent of the global EV market — and just overtook Tesla as the world’s most popular electric car. On wind energy, the country is even more dominant: It produces 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines.
The fact that one of Tesla’s largest factories is located in Germany, thousands of miles away from lithium mines and lithium refineries, is a stark demonstration of a key irony in global development: Wealthy countries like the United States and Germany have done their best to retain well-compensated heavy manufacturing jobs, but they now rely on the developing world for the minerals that supply their manufacturing sectors.
Read the full mining issue
 A guide to the 4 minerals shaping the world’s energy future
 Chile’s lithium boom promises jobs and money — but threatens a critical water source
 Most critical minerals are on Indigenous lands. Will miners respect tribal sovereignty?
 Beneath Greenland’s ice lies a climate solution — and a new geopolitical battleground
 Digging for minerals in the Pacific’s graveyard: the $20 trillion fight over who controls the seabed
 Mining is an environmental and human rights nightmare. Battery recycling can ease that.
 Trade-offs of the green transition: Is mining critical minerals better than extracting fossil fuels?
 Why Biden and Trump both support this federal mineral mapping project
 The weirdest ways scientists are mining for critical minerals, from water to weeds
 In the race to find critical minerals, there’s a ‘gold mine’ literally at our shoreline

My Project Name's Audio Catalog

https://grist.org

Tariffs won’t just hit your wallet. They could also increase food waste.

March 28, 2025

Recent Episodes: