Climate Change’s Agriculture Problem

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Zachary Karabell: What’s one policy you would enact right now if you had a magic wand and could do anything?

Michael Grunwald: I’d like to see a global emphasis on produce and protect, where you tie it together, give developing countries a lot of money so that they can help their farmers be more productive and make more food with less land. But at the same time, the money gets cut off if they don’t protect their forests and other natural resources.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Carrabelle, the founder of The Progress Network, joined as always by Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network. And What Could Go Right? is our weekly podcast where we look at crucial issues of our crucial days through a lens of yes, what could go right.

A lens of, there is a world of problems that we are all acutely aware of. In fact, at every level of human society, it seems to be that we are acutely aware of problems from politics to economics, to social order, to relations, amongst races, genders, you name it, and of course climate and the environment. And one thing that undergirds the last of those issues, namely climate and the environment, is how we produce the food that we eat, How we feed a planet of 8 billion people, maybe going to 10 billion, maybe going to nine, but it’s still going to be a lot of people by mid 21st century. How do we feed them in the way that they have been accustomed to being fed without adding immeasurably to the climate burden?

And we’re gonna talk to today, someone who’s written a fascinating book. Every author that we talk to has written a fascinating book. It almost goes without saying, but I said it anyway. About these issues and a more hopeful look at the potential of human ingenuity, science, technology, and government to ameliorate what are pressing problems, IE, as we have talked about much on this podcast, how do humans solve problems that humans have created? That is the great Hegelian dialectic that we’ve all been dealing with all along, namely. There is a problem, there is a solution. There is a solution that creates a problem. And so it goes on and on and on. Thesis, antithesis, synthesisisisis endlessly, and I think the theme song of this current episode should be, for those of you who remember the musical, Oliver, should be Food, glorious food. We can leave out the hot sausage and mustard, but just as a concept, food, glorious food being a immense driver of human society from time immemorial, including today, that has also created immense challenges.

So Emma, who are we going to talk to today?.

Emma Varvaloucas: Today we are gonna talk to Michael Grunwald. He is a journalist and an author. He writes a lot about politics, public policy, climate, energy, the environment, you name it. He’s had a couple of previous books that we could recommend called The Swamp and The New New Deal. But today, as Zachary mentioned, we are gonna talk to him about his book that just came out, which is called We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate, which is about exactly what the title says.

So we’re gonna go talk to him about both, both the problems and the solutions. May be heavy on the ladder light on the former, but probably not. We’ll see how it goes. Ready, Zachary?

Zachary Karabell: Ready.

Mike Grunwald, what a pleasure to have you on What Could Go Right? And while your book We Are Eating the Earth is a decidedly mixed bag of things that are going wrong with the potential of things going right, it’s still a really dynamic, unique look at the world of global agriculture, how we have fed ourselves, how we are feeding ourselves, and presumably how you think we might feed ourselves in the future.

So, let’s do the obligatory softball question to begin the interview, which is, what do you mean we’re eating the earth? I mean, we’ve always been eating the earth, presumably.

Michael Grunwald: First of all, thank you very much. Those are really kind words and yeah, it’s true. We’ve been eating the earth for about 10 to 12,000 years since agriculture began because agriculture does tend to take up land, and that’s really what my book is about. We now use two of every five acres of this planet to grow our food. We all know it. When you take a cross country flight and you look out the window and you, you see all those squares and circles. The, the area that we live in, our cities, our suburbs, you know, that’s about 1% of the planet and our farms and pastures is about 40%. And the larger our agricultural footprint gets, the smaller our natural footprint gets, and nature is where we store all that carbon that keeps the planet from getting really hot is also where we shelter all that diversity.

Agriculture is our greatest source of water pollution. It’s our greatest source of water shortages, biodiversity loss, as well as deforestation. So when you take a bite of that burger, you’re not just, you know, you’re not just eating a cow, you’re also eating the jaguars and macaws and the rest of the cast of Rio. You know, you’re eating the Amazon and you’re eating the Earth. That’s, that’s kind of the point.

Emma Varvaloucas: Is all agriculture created equally bad for climate? I asked in particular, ’cause I, I looked down at my notes and I realized I just have in all caps, cows are problematic. So I’m wondering though, if you could tell us a little bit about what kind of agriculture is the problem, or is it all agriculture?

Michael Grunwald: You know, certainly, you know, the regenerative ranchers love to say, you know, it’s, it’s not the cow, it’s the how and and the how does matter. But that said, it’s mostly the cow. And I think it’s really the same is true for agriculture. You know, Michael Pollan, who is a beautiful writer, and I wish I, you know, you know, had that kind of lyrical style that he does. But I think he’s, you know, he is created this sort of romantic idea that there is good farming, which is kind of bucolic and rustic with, you know, diverse sources, diverse crops, and you know, you’re not bombing it with chemicals. And then there’s kind of bad evil industrial farming with these monoculture fields and the animals have numbers instead of names. And it’s true that when you go from one of those old style, you know, Michael Pollan type farms to an industrial farm, there is an environmental cost, but the real environmental cost is going from nature to the Michael Pollan farm. That’s where you lose the biodiversity, and most of all, that’s where you lose the nature. You lose the vegetation, you lose the microbiome.

And the fact is that a Michael Pollan farm with much lower yields, even though it’s a lot, you know, nicer to look at, and you know, people write nicer poems about them. You’re gonna need more acres of, of that kind of farm to produce the same amount of food as a high yield farm. And that means you’re gonna be taking down more of the Amazon. We don’t notice it as much in the United States because we already deforested the middle of the country in the 19th century. So we say, you know, you’re bad in Indonesia, you’re bad in Brazil. But the fact is they’re just trying to do what we did. So, yeah, pretty much agriculture has always made a mess. The goal should be to make, have it make even more food, but less of a mess.

Zachary Karabell: So I’ve thought a lot about this as well. We’ve talked about this in the midst of writing a book about corn, sort of global history of corn.

Michael Grunwald: I cannot wait for that one.

Zachary Karabell: And for those of you who are watching this, if you see behind me on my right, I, I have a slew of books, many of which I’m sure Michael’s read about food and farming, a lot about corn.

And I am struck by sort of back to this Michael Pollan question, and I don’t, let’s not pick on him. I mean, he is a really interesting, powerful writer who’s brought up a lot of themes and multiple works. But there is a strain within all of this books about agriculture that have been written over the past decades that tilts almost ubiquitously in the direction of we’re destroying the planet, modern industrial agriculture is, as you just said, eliminating biodiversity and GMOs to anybody in Western Europe and any educated person in the United States, and they have a viscerally negative response to the idea of genetically modified crops or organisms that science is part of the whole Franken-food toxic stew that is ruining the planet leading to climate change. And that if we don’t do something radical to change everything, now we’re all fuc. So like where did that come from? As a orthodoxy that is almost unexamined, and I think your book does an incredible job of sort of holding that thesis or view up to a more critical light.

Michael Grunwald: Well, you know, did we say we’re not gonna be blaming Michael Pollan, because I wanna blame him at least a little bit, partly for being such a damn good writer. I mean, he has this incredible. There’s this incredible caveat in the, in The Omnivore’s Dilemma where he is talking about, you know, all the stuff you were saying about, you know, modern industrial agriculture and these chemical drenched fields and you know, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that’s, you know, the size of Connecticut and the algal blooms and the Great Lakes, and you know, the air pollution and water pollution and antibiotics overuse from all these, these factory farms. And, and then at one point he has this, he’s particularly talking about fertilizer, which is, you know, made from fossil fuels, right? It’s made from natural gas, you know, it’s chemicals, it’s toxic, it’s responsible for that dead zone.

And he has this paragraph where he says, kind of, To be sure, there are 8 billion people on Earth and about 4 billion of them might not be here if it wasn’t for fertilizer. And, and, you know, and, and agricultural yields have tripled since the start of the Green Revolution, which, you know, he doesn’t say that. But that would mean we would need three times as much land to make the same amount of food, which essentially wouldn’t need a second, second planet. So he, you know, and then he goes back to sort of all the terrible things. And to his credit, he does at least acknowledge that. But, you know, 4 billion people, that’s a pretty big deal. Like that’s a pretty big to be sure.

And again, since my book is about how to feed the world without frying the world, I actually think we’ve become pretty good at feeding the world. The hard part is going to do it, be doing it without frying the world. And we saw what happened in Sri Lanka where they banned agrochemicals because, you know, they were gonna be, you know, great, organic, you know, no chemical society and do it Michael Pollan’s way. And immediately yields crashed and the government fell and it was a complete disaster. So it is absolutely true that there’s definitely some negative consequences to a lot of these Green Revolution chemicals, but fertilizer helps stuff grow. And pesticide, which is also, some of them have been problematic, but they’re pretty good at killing pests. And we do need to feed 8 billion people, you know, without tearing down the Amazon and the Congo rainforests. So that means we’re gonna have to make more food with fewer acres so that we don’t need more acres to make food.

And I do think that’s really been forgotten in this kind of valorization of old style, you know, more natural type of farming. GMOs, I guess are not natural. But you know, the corn we grow today without GMOs doesn’t look very much like the natural corn of a, a few hundred, you know, of the indigenous people.

It’s been bred to be more efficient and, you know, efficiency has become this kind of dirty word that kind of evokes rapacious, corporations dredging dollars out of the dirt. But, you know, efficiency is what makes it so that we can have lots of food and still have some nature too.

Emma Varvaloucas: So I feel like this is gonna be news to a lot of people. I feel like people are pretty much still on the narrative of like, the problem is feeding the, the masses of people that you know are still building up until whatever year it is, 2080 now, I don’t remember.

But maybe you could just explain a little bit about, like, that’s not the problem. It’s the, the frying part. And the part that really surprised me in the book was the fact that even like top climate scientists, climate bodies hadn’t kind of priced in the issue with using land into the climate models correctly. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that. ’cause that was a little bit shocking to me.

Michael Grunwald: Sure. I mean, when, when I say we know how to, how to feed the world, I mean, I guess what I’m saying is that it’s, you know, farmers know how to make more right? And it’s especially easy if you can just cut down more trees and you know, and then grow food there, right? We, we, we certainly know how to do that.

And that’s why certainly, you know, at the beginning of the Green Revolution, when there was the famous bet that Paul Erlich lost and he predicted, you know, these horrible Malthusian famines, that population was gonna grow, we weren’t gonna be able to feed ourselves. You know, it turns out, you know, our, you know, humans, not so great at being nice to each other, you know, not so great maybe at thinking about future ramifications of our actions, but really good at inventing ourselves, inventing stuff and feeding ourselves. And so, yeah, I have a, I have a lot of confidence in our ability when there’s demand for food that will make more, the problem is going to be doing it without, you know, without these land use effects. And, and as you mentioned, I mean, the sort of hero of my story, he stumbled into this through biofuels where there were all these climate studies saying, well, yeah, biofuels are pretty good. They’re incredibly inefficient and it takes almost as much fossil fuel to, to make a gallon of biofuel, as you know, as, as a gallon of fossil fuel. But you know, since you know, then you grow the corn and it’s soaks up carbon from the atmosphere. It’s all a wash, so it ends up being pretty good for the climate.

But of course, what they didn’t take into account is the land use. If you grow fuel instead of food, then somewhere else you’re gonna have to grow more food. And it’s probably not gonna be in a parking lot. It’s gonna be in the Amazon or the Cerrado, or you know, the Serengeti or you know, or, or somewhere that it was already storing a lot of carbon and they just, they were treating land as if it were free. And that’s been a kind of luxury that, you know, because there’s a lot of land, right, so the, the studies never really took it into account. They never thought about the opportunity cost of using land to grow fuel instead of food, or instead of just storing carbon is nature.

And so that was, you know, biofuels today were, you know, they’re eating about a Texas worth of the earth, but agriculture lit writ large is eating 75 Texases worth of the earth. And so you have to really count that when you’re thinking about the, you know, the climate impact of everything we do. And for, you know, a shocking amount of time, it was completely ignored in the climate studies.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, I’ve always been amazed about that because I certainly had the prejudice early on of, oh biofuels, this is great. We’re growing all this food. Why don’t we just use ’em as fuel? Like it just, when you don’t know about the systems and how they interplay, it can seem intuitively like this, Oh is a great solution to an intractable problem. We don’t have to extract dirty fossil fuels and do all these things, we can just grow the food we’re growing anyway and turn them into fuel without recognizing that to grow that food, you needed fuel to grow the food because you needed the natural gas for the nitrogen, for the fertilizers and the phosphates that were gonna allow you to grow the fuel. Then you have to grow it, which requires, you know, pesticides and nutrients and land. And then you have to harvest it and turn it into fuel, which requires refining. And you’re like, by the time you get to a gallon of biofuels, that’s usable, you’ve used X number of gallons of other fuels or other energy in order to get there in the first place.

And I was like, oh, wait a minute. That makes far less sense than I thought it made.

Michael Grunwald: And that’s before you get to the land, right? It’s this, this notion of indirect land use change. Right? You know, the protagonist, my story dubbed it iLook, which is, you know, probably like the CLUNKIEST acronym in history, but it just screws up the math because, and when you think about it, it makes perfect sense when you think, gosh, you know, the United States we’re growing, we’re using 40 million acres to grow ethanol that used to be, you know, growing corn for animal feed or Twinkies or, you know, high fructose corn syrup or whatever. You know, maybe we don’t need 40 million acres more to replace the, you know, replace that. Food, but we’re gonna need a lot of acres and, and, you know, well, you know, an interesting, you know, contemporary note is that the, the big beautiful bill that, that Donald Trump is pushing in Congress right now, this is obviously very problematic for biofuels. This kind of, you know, indirect land use change, whether you, you know, give it a high value as you should, or a very low value as the ag industry and its friends in, in government, Democratic and Republican have been pushing for years, but it still makes most biofuels. They don’t pencil out.

So now Congress is essentially telling the government to put down its pencils. It’s saying you can’t even look at indirect land use change when you try to analyze biofuels. You have to pretend that those 40 million acres of corn will never be replaced, which I guess, you know, it’s like Abraham Lincoln’s old joke about how many, how many legs do you ha, how many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg? And his answer was. Four. It doesn’t matter what you call a tail, it’s still a tail. And you know, and there’s going to be indirect land use change from biofuels, whether we acknowledge, whether Congress says it happens or not. And so, but this has always been the way where the politics just hand waves away the science.

Zachary Karabell: Actually, before we go on, why don’t you tell us a little, you’ve alluded to the protagonist of your book, so. Tell us a little bit about the protagonist.

Michael Grunwald: Well, this is a guy named Tim Searchinger, who I first knew about 25 years ago when he was a wetlands lawyer, and he came to me with a tip about the Army Corps of Engineers, about how they were screwing up their studies to basically, you know, justify these preposterous boondoggles that were, you know, incredibly environmentally destructive.

And it led me to write a lot about, about the Army Corps. I spent a year kicking them around at the, on the front page of the Washington Post, and he gave me a tip about the, the, restoration of the Florida Everglades that was all messed up, which led me to move to Florida and write my first book about the Everglades and meet my wife and have a family. And so, you know, he, he was sort of an important guy, but we’d kind of fallen out of touch and I called him because I had written, you know, I was sort of an energy and climate guy, and I had written a story about my own green life where I had, I had bought solar panels and an all electric Chevy Bolt, and, but I had done it, you know, just ’cause I realized this stuff was gonna go mainstream. It was saving me money. And I had a line in the, in the, in my article about how, look, I don’t line dry my laundry, I don’t, you know, unplug my computer at night. I still eat meat. I’m not some kind of eco saint. I’m just an eco mercenary.

Then I went over it and I was like, Wait a minute. I don’t even know if meat is bad for the envi for the climate. I know people kind of say it is. And so I called Tim ’cause I vaguely knew that he was involved in agriculture and, and climate stuff. And I asked him, Tim, is, is meat even bad for the climate? And he was like. Yes. Duh. Which is kind of how Tim is. He says, duh a lot. And, and that was sort of the beginning of my journey and Tim ended up, what I realized is Tim has become, you know, through this journey that started with biofuels and led to food. He’s become the, the leading expert in the world on agriculture and climate.

He is, he still has a legal degree and no scientific degree, but he’s published 10 articles in Science + Nature, which is the kind of thing that, you know, usually you have to be a scientist or a naturalist for that. And he has just realized this, this land idea, this idea that land is not free is really at the heart of our agriculture problems and food problems.

It’s now a third of our climate problem comes from our food system and, and you know, that’s, it gets about 3% of our climate finance and maybe 1% of our climate conversation. And so I wrote about Tim as this guy who’s basically been trying to figure this stuff out and bang his spoon on his highchair about this massive problem that, you know, people aren’t even grappling with and the things they think they know just aren’t so.

Emma Varvaloucas: I know you wrote a whole book on this, and I know the book. Also pulls a lot on a report by Tim that was like 560 something odd pages. So I know this is a hard question to answer quickly, but how are we going to do this? You know, like what, what, what are the maybe top three or something like that. What do we need to do to fix this?

Michael Grunwald: There are kind of two sets of problems, right? There’s the demand side and the supply side, right? And on the demand side, we need to stop our demand for land. And it turns out that, that some of that is meat, though a lot of it is beef. Beef and lamb ruminant animals are a huge part of the problem because they use the most land.

They also have their burping and farting methane problem, which is a real problem. The main problem is that it takes at least 25 calories of feed to put into a cow to get one calorie of beef out. They’re just very inefficient mechanisms for turning their feed into our food, and so part.

Zachary Karabell: If you say “ruminant animals” at a cocktail party, it immediately makes you seem like you know what you’re talking about.

Michael Grunwald: Oh, let me tell you, I am awesome. I am awesome at parties. I mean, I can talk about biological nitrification inhibition. I’ve gotten into stoichiometry, which is the reason why carbon farming is bullshit. I mean, let me tell you, you you wanna, you wanna have me, if you want, if you want a really intimate party, and if you start with a really big party, just invite me and it’ll become really, really intimate.

Emma Varvaloucas: Ruminant cow, to me, sounds like it, it sounds like the cow at the end of a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. You know when he comes out and serves himself, like he’s, that’s what he calls.

Michael Grunwald: Right. 42.

Emma Varvaloucas: He’s ruminating. on his future. Yeah. Anyway.

Michael Grunwald: Oh, okay. Right. Demand side. So yes. So in the rich world, we’ve gotta eat like probably 50% less beef. The good news is that we’re already eating less beef than we used to. We’re just eating tons more chicken, but beef is about probably 10 times better for the climate and for land use than chicken or pork. So that’s actually a sort of inadvertent step we’ve made in the right direction.

And of course, in the developing world, I mean, people will and should eat a little bit more meat because there are billions of people who eat pretty much no meat. And the first thing humans tend to do when they stop being poor is to start eating meat. So that’s gonna be a really difficult challenge. But that’s, you know, that’s certainly the start. And we’re also, we’re gonna have to waste less food. We waste about a quarter of the food that we grow, which means we’re wasting the farmland. You know, about, in a swath of farmland, about the size of China, every year goes to grow garbage. Not to mention all the fertilizer and water that we use to grow all that wasted food. So that’s another example.

But then on the supply side, essentially we’re gonna have to make more food with less land. And that’s gonna mean, you know, getting a lot more efficient with crops. You know, hopefully gene editing will help, you know, different kind of ways of growing it, more precision agriculture where you have these tractors that kind of tell you exactly where to drop the fertilizer and where to put the pesticide and to let you know when there is a disease in your, in your crops. Those are kind of promising solutions.

And on the livestock side as well, you know, you’ve got these like vegan activists who are just kind of like, you know, beef is bad, meat is murder. Just don’t, you know, don’t do it. Then you have a lot of people in the status, you know, the ag status quo, who are just want, like things the way they are, but just as like, you know, Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money is. If we care about emissions, we’re gonna have to have better beef, because that’s where the emissions are.

And you’re starting to see, like particularly in Brazil where these degraded ranches that used to have like, you know, six acres with one cow on them, they’re starting to invest in some industrial solutions where they’re, you know, better feedlots and fertilizing their pastures, but also some regenerative solutions where they’re, you know, rotating their, you know, rotating, rotational grazing. And integrating their cows with their cover crops. You know, there’s, there’s a lot you can do. And soon you’ll see places that have, you know, three or four cows on one acre. And if you’re, if you’re 10 times as efficient, that means you’re using one 10th as much Amazon. So I think, you know, both on the, you know, I get in trouble when I talk about, you know, industrial agriculture and factory farms being part of the solution, but factories are pretty good at making lots of stuff. And even though they often do make a big mess, hopefully we can have some kind of grand bargain where, you know, we’re gonna encourage them to make even more, but with less of a mess.

Zachary Karabell: So why aren’t synthetic proteins an answer to this conundrum in the next, maybe not in the next five years commercialized, but after 10 years, there’s certainly some evidence of edible. I think part of the problem has been aesthetics, like a lot of the synthetic proteins look like sludge, so it’s kind of a combination of getting people to eat them and being able to produce them at scale.

But clearly if you transitioned from grown meat to lab grown produced meat, a huge swath of these problems if you could get adaptation, is it? Is that in the realm of possibility in the next decade plus.

Michael Grunwald: Yeah, no, I’m very excited about them. I think, you know, I actually started my reporting for this book in two. 2019 at the Good Food Institute Conference, which is kind of the trade group for alternative proteins. This was shortly after Beyond Meat plant, you know, pea based burger company had just gone public. And it was like, it’s still the biggest-popping IPO of the 21st century. And it was like insane. I thought I was gonna accidentally raise a Series A on the drinks line. I mean, it was like everybody, people were talking about it like whether it was gonna be 10 years or 15 years until they completely got rid of the meat industry. The irrational exuberance was completely off the charts.

And then when I was near the end of my reporting, I went back to the Good Food Institute Conference in 2023, and it was like all doom and gloom. It was like, what the hell were we thinking? This was all just a fad. Nobody’s investing anymore. Beyond Meat has gone from $250 a share to $2 a share. Lab grown meat hasn’t even made to market. But the answer, I think, you know, and Zachary, you know better than anybody about these, you know, these hype cycles where you have your peak of inflated expectations and then the trough of disillusionment. But I do think, you know, we’re gonna get out of it and you know, this stuff makes a lot of sense, right? The idea of, you know, growing meat instead of growing an animal where you have to provide energy to into hooves and tails and breathing and reproductive stuff and keeping it alive, you know, it’s a lot more efficient to just grow the meat. You know, it was used, so you don’t have a chicken that clucks and has feathers and a beak. I do think that that is gonna be inevitable.

Right now, like you said, the initial plant-based products have not been good enough or cheap enough, or at least not as good or as cheap as meat, which is a really tough competitor, ’cause meat is delicious and our species and our ancestors have been eating it for 2 million years. So it’s gonna be hard and it’s gonna take government investment and research, but I think there’s been a lot of progress being made already. There’s already no reason to eat a chicken nugget anymore, if there ever was. The plant-based ones are just as good, you know, in blind taste tests, they do fine.

You know, on the lab grown side or cultivated meat, the costs have gone down like 99.9% and they probably need to come down 99.99% before they’re actually competitive with even sort of premium styles of meat. But I’m pretty confident that they’re gonna get there and that, as you suggest, I think that could be a real kind of a new agricultural revolution.

Emma Varvaloucas: And you feel pretty optimistic that that’ll actually drive behavior change, ’cause I, I was laughing because like, I, I started reading your book like a few days ago to prepare for this, right. And in the last few days I was like, I don’t think I should eat beef. And like, I haven’t, in the last few days, you know, I’ve been really strong, you know, I have not had any beef.

And I think you mentioned the book too, that you like gave up beef while you were writing this, and then you went to Brazil and you were like, oh, the steak though. The steak. I guess I’m curious like even if the, the plant-based stuff or the cultivated lab grown stuff. Is as good as me and at the same price, are people still not gonna be able to get over the fact that it’s like quote unquote, not the real thing, you know, that they feel kind of freaky the way they feel freaky about GMO and things like that?

Michael Grunwald: You know, I, I try not to predict human behavior too much ’cause right? ‘Cause humans are weird. But, you know, we do like delicious and cheap things. And certainly there’s been a, there’s been a very effective campaign, particularly against the plant-based stuff, sort of portraying it as ultraprocessed garbage. I think that has been effective, particularly people who, I mean, this stuff isn’t health food for one thing, but you know, I think some people thought like, oh, eating plants is better than eating meat. And broadly, it slightly is. But again, you know, my feeling is that Americans seem to eat plenty of ultra processed garbage. So I wouldn’t think that is in itself gonna be a deal breaker.

I have a lot of confidence in technology. As I mentioned earlier, we seem to be pretty good at it as a species. I have this thing in my pocket that like I can video chat with anyone on the other side of the world and look up any fact known to mankind in seconds and also use it as a flashlight. So I tend not to say like, Oh that’s impossible. It’ll never happen. It isn’t there yet. There’s been a lot of progress, but, and, and I’m sure you’re right, that some people, it will, you know, their behavior will be stickier than others.

You know, my last book about Obama, I wrote a lot about, about the sort of clean energy revolution that I believed was really quite imminent, and some people have talked to me afterwards and been like, oh, you nailed it. You were, you know, you, you saw that solar and wind and electric vehicles were gonna be huge. And I, of course nod, and say thank you, but if you actually go back and look, I didn’t quite nail it. I was, in fact, I was overly optimistic for the same reasons I’m kind of suggesting now. I was kind of like, this stuff is gonna get cheap and it’s gonna get good, and then everybody’s gonna. You know, why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t you just go solar? And it turns out that people, as you suggest, are a little stickier than that. And food is so much more, you know, it’s closer to our heart. It’s so part of our culture that maybe that will be even stickier. But I still think that, you know, even if it isn’t, like I thought that like, yeah, we’re just all gonna go solar like that. Maybe we won’t all go, you know, plant-based and lab graze, lab grown meat like that.

I think over time, particularly if because of these climate problems and other problems, meat starts to get more expensive and the alternatives start to create more problems. I will say this stuff at least does solve a problem, and obviously I think it’s a problem we really need to solve. So I think, you know, as the products get more compelling, people have already shown that they’re willing to try ’em, not to keep eating them if they’re not, if they’re not as good as the competition. But I think if they do get as good at the competition, enough people for them to, for it to really make an, to move the needle on climate issues.

Zachary Karabell: So you’ve written a lot in your books, in your reporting on the role of government in shaping and at times warping incentives for society, mostly for American society. Agriculture is one of these areas where urban people have tended to not be as acutely aware of just how much government money and subsidies go to agriculture.

And again, this is not just an American phenomenon. The Japanese do it with rice farmers, the Europeans do it with whatever their domestic grains are. It’s kind of an endemic government thing. And of course, we in the United States have a whole massive department of agriculture that buys crops, guarantees, prices, makes sure farmers are paid, whether fields are fallow or whether the the yield is great or terrible. I wonder about the incentives in terms of these kind of next generation more efficient food. Are there and, and what role you think government can play? I mean, we know that government regulations about GMOs throughout the world have created this really bizarre patchwork of what markets they’re allowed to be in and what markets they’re not. The gene editing issues, CRISPR technology to manipulate the genome of different brains is, doesn’t seem to, to raise the Franken food specter quite as much, maybe because you’re not injecting foreign DNA into it. But even there, like the European Union sits around and the regulators try to figure out how many gene edits can you make to a genome of a, of a plant before you’ve created a new plant, I mean, literally they’re sitting there going, you can make seven edits, but you can’t make 11 edits because 11 means you’ve made a new plant, and seven means you’ve altered your current.

Michael Grunwald: Some of this lab grown, lab grown meat could be the next frontier, right, with this same sort of thing where you’re starting to see, you know, states in the United States, banning, banning it and you know, and all these kind of Bobby Kennedy now in charge of the FDA and is clearly not a fan of this stuff. I do think you, you’re right to, you’re right to flag this as an issue.

Zachary Karabell: Is government largely now a retardant to these things, to, to the solutions that you are proposing? Or could it be a propellant?

Michael Grunwald: That’s a great question. I mean, look, ag policy sucks and it pretty much sucks everywhere, and it’s, and it’s essentially because of this outsized power of the, you know, ag and agribusiness industry, right? I think we all, we all kind of know that they’re the ones who pay attention to ag policy and they’re the ones who control it.

And you know, I always say like, like, you know, 99% of Americans are not farmers anymore. We used to have this agrarian society and thanks to these, you know, let’s thanks to the 1%. You know, they make it so that we can do podcasts and, and write books about, you know, problems with agriculture and, you know, be doctors and bankers and, you know, and influencers and all, and all the other things like, you know, we do as, as they like to remind us, you know, we do owe the farmers a great debt, but the fact is, you know, they’ve been, they’ve been running the show and globally the world spends about $600 billion a year on subsidies to, to agriculture. 300 billion of that is just literally direct handouts to farmers. I sort of despair when I think of like, oh, we just need to fix that because, ’cause like the politics are terrible. And in the United States where farmers all vote for Republicans, it’s like shocking how Democrats pander just as hard to these same agricultural interests, even though you know they get no vote for it in return.

What I do say is that hopefully we can at least find areas of mutual interest, you know, agricultural research, which seem to be an obvious example where, you know, even though in the United States we are going the opposite direction, we’re crushing research. There is both the agricultural industry and the world at large has, you know, can really benefit from more, you know, investment in trying to solve these problems.

Right, on the technology gene editing, can we have drought resistant crops? Can we have higher yielding crops? Can we have gluten-free crops? You know, whatever problems are out there. I think, you know, those are ways that government can help solve them. And at the same time, you know, this, I do think there is this idea that we can at least ask farmers if we’re gonna keep, you know, keep giving you all this money and, you know, protecting you from, you know, the, the vagaries of politics.

Can you at least do a little bit better job you know, you know, reducing your antibiotics, reducing your water pollution, at least adopting these technologies that can reduce your, your agricultural emissions. I think you’ve seen in, you know, Denmark and granted Denmark’s kind of a model nation that people pull out and they’re, they always seem to be doing the right thing. They are really, they are really doing the right thing. I mean, they have this incredible new kind of grand bargain. And let’s be clear, it only happened because they so much, were doing the right thing on energy that suddenly farmers were half their emissions and you know, just of one or 2% of their economy.

So they had to come to the table, but they have, and so now you’ve, you’re, they’re gonna have attacks on agricultural emissions. They’re going to have investment in, you know, these technologies that are gonna help farmers make even more food with less land. But they’re also gonna force farmers to rehydrate some of their drained wetlands, a million acres, like a sixth of their land, to try to turn that back to nature. They’re gonna have a, a nationwide effort to promote plant forward eating. And alternative proteins.

So they’re doing all the things and you know, it may not, may not be a super realistic model for the rest of the world, but it’s a model.

Emma Varvaloucas: This conversation is very optimistic, I would say just overall, right, and we are in the What the, What Could Go Right? podcast. But there, when you, when you read the book in its entirety, I mean. As we started this conversation with, there were like climate bodies missing, like big math, right? Like big blind spots.

Congress not doing what it’s supposed to do. Lots of government’s not doing what they’re supposed to do, environmentalists and, and big ag being fundamentally opposed to one another. People not, you know, coming to the table wanting to find these solutions. There’s even, you know, the one climate scientist who commits suicide in the book because his math is so wrong, which was, that was a moment, but why are you so optimistic? I mean, is this just ’cause you feel like we have to solve this problem? Is it just the tech, or is this your disposition or?

Michael Grunwald: No. And in fact it’s very, I think you, that’s a great, you make a great point, which is like, I hear that all the time. It’s like, you know, these problems are so big and so daunting that they have to be solved. And I’m always like, no, they don’t. We could totally fail. Like we’re really good at that too.

It’s funny, I’ve, I did set out to not write a Debbie Downer book because what’s the point, right? There’s, there’s, there’s plenty of that. It’s really easy to just throw your hands up in the air and just say like, things suck, things, you know, things are getting worse. And that is true on the food and ag part. Like things are in fact getting worse. And, you know, I’m optimistic ’cause I write about dozens of really promising solutions. But kind of when I got to the last, that sort of policy chapter towards the end and I realized like none of these solutions are actually moving the needle yet. We are not making any progress and I’m not pretending that we are.

I like to say that food and Ag is about 25 years behind energy in terms of dealing with this stuff. And when you think of where we were with energy 25 years ago, we were nowhere. I mean, there were no alternatives to fossil fuels. You know, the closest thing there was was ethanol. Right? And, and back then we thought that was gonna help the climate, and it turns out it was, you know, rapidly making the climate worse.

So, and you look at what’s happening today where, you know, in most of the world if you’re building a new power plant, it’s probably a renewable power plant. And you know, you’re starting to talk about peak emissions. And again, like, you know, there’s a lot of work to be done and you know, it really matters whether the energy transition takes, you know, 30 years or 40 years. Millions of lives are hanging in the balance. But you know, the trajectory has really changed and, and we kind of know what to do, right? We kind of, you know, you kind of gotta electrify the global economy and run it on clean electricity, and that’s gonna be hard. And it’s gonna, and the politics are gonna be difficult, but at least you know where we are now versus where we were then is night and day.

Now with food, you know, we still don’t even know, you know, it’s not getting better and we don’t even know what to do. I feel like we didn’t even know what to ask and people like me who had really been covering the climate, didn’t know shit about this stuff. So I guess my book is sort of a, it’s kind of an effort to grapple with this and also sort of, you know, a siren saying like, Hey world, we need to grapple with this. But there really are a lot of, you know, I think about that, you know that guy out in Nepal with this tiny little budget who’s trying to turn rice straw into animal feed. And you know, the world grows like 400 million tons of rice straw every year. Like if you could turn that into good animal feed, that’s a lot of acres you wouldn’t need to grow animal feed.

So I think there are a lot of, you know, incredibly promising solutions that just, you know, they’re not being invested in, they’re certainly not being deployed. And hopefully if we start to focus on it the way we, I think at least, you know, not, not in a straight line, not in every country and not as much as we should, but we are focusing on these energy problems. I think if we start to think about food in the same kind of systematic way, you know, good stuff could happen.

Zachary Karabell: So would you call yourself a techno optimist? I know that term is laden because it’s been co-opted by a Silicon Valley proto, utopian bro-ey culture. But nonetheless, it’s not the worst concept in the world.

Michael Grunwald: I mean, I think I’d have to say yes. I mean, you know, I, I’m, I’m aware of all the what reasons people freak out about technology, but in general, I think like technologists are gonna be more of a solution to this problem than the anti technologists.

I’m definitely pro math and I think, you know, a lot of these, these sort of throwback solutions where, you know, we, you know, we don’t need to make more food or we don’t need all, you know, we don’t need fake meat, we just need better meat and we need to distribute the food better and we just need to farm nicer. I don’t think a lot of these solutions, you know, that people talk about, I don’t think they’ve done the math. ‘Cause the math is really daunting. And even if we did, you know, replace half our, you know, replace half our beef with fake beef. And even if we did cut our, the world’s food waste in half and got rid of biofuels and you know, kind of did all the things, we would still need to make a lot more food with a lot less land because it’s that daunting a problem.

We’re gonna need 50% more calories by 2050 and we can’t just kind of snap our fingers and say like, Oh well, you solve that food waste problem, but over here we’re gonna go to lower yield farming because we like it better. It’s like, no, I think we’re gonna have to do all the things and, and I think technology is, you know, particularly in this age with, with AI and you know, the, the sequencing of the genome have made a lot of these, you know, technologies that used to take like decades to develop. You can now see like them, you know, the, the experimentation time has been shrunk, you know, a thousand percent.

So, yeah, I think, you know, I’m optimistic about it. It’s like, it doesn’t mean all technology is good, but certainly the, you know, this idea that like, ew, it’s technology. I don’t want that in my food, I don’t want that in my farm. Yeah, get over it.

Zachary Karabell: I wanna, I wanna thank you for your time today, Michael.

I will say there’s one thing which we didn’t get into, which could also be an ameliorating factor that’s totally exogenous, all that we’ve talked about, which is population growth seems to be declining more rapidly than we thought, which means we may not actually need that 50% more calories.

It may be more like 30 by the time all is said and done, just because there are fewer people as it turns out in 2050 than was anticipated, but just because of rapid population contraction.

Michael Grunwald: I do mention that, but especially by 2050 and because, and, and population growth, like fertility rates are really down almost everywhere in the world except for Sub-Saharan Africa, but because in the past, fertility rates were so high that there, right now, and over the next couple decades, there are so many women of child rearing age that even if the, you know, global population estimates come down a little bit, it’s not gonna move the needle that much by 2050.

So by 2100 it can, it can make a much bigger difference.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, I often joke if we can get from here to there while the population adjusts down, we’ll be just fine. The question is just can we go from here to there?

Michael Grunwald: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: I would encourage all of you to go while, while we’re getting from here to there, go read Mike Grunwald’s new book, read his earlier books. Read all of his books. Just read everything you can by Michael Grunwald, Google him, make sure you spell the name correctly. There’s, it’s it’s one of these U and Es conundrums. So just look at our webpage and you’ll get it right.

And you know, you’ve been, you’ve been really, you’ve carved an eclectic important career arc. Looking at these incredibly crucial elements of our society that, particularly for kind of literate urban people, you tend to not pay attention to in the same way that we should. And we must. And we will. And we will because you’ve, you’ve been writing about it. So.

Michael Grunwald: Aw, thank you so much. I appreciate it, and I can’t, I can’t wait to read your corn book.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, I can’t wait to write my corn book.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thanks, Mike.

Michael Grunwald: Thank you Emma, too.

Emma Varvaloucas: Something else that we didn’t get into that I was thinking about asking him is how he gets over like the shoot the messenger syndrome. Like it’s kind of, I feel like people are like, we’re already dealing with climate. Many people feel like we’re not, it’s not going particularly well with climate either. Right?

You can look at that narrative right now and in some, couple of different ways. And then over here there’s might being like, by the way, there’s also this massive unconsidered issue that is compounding the issues that we have with climate that also must be solved. And it’s kind of like, ah, oh man, re really, like now we gotta deal with this.

So I’m curious how he thought about that in terms of like how to make this palatable for people. Palatable, palatable, palatable?  

Zachary Karabell: Palatable.

Emma Varvaloucas: Palatable, sorry, I’m speaking Greek all day and the mind is, the mind is really out there.

Zachary Karabell: Took me a moment to even figure out what you were saying there.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I, listen, I.

Zachary Karabell: Were you saying platable?

Emma Varvaloucas: I had, I don’t even be, a platable, that would be appropriate for this conversation.

Zachary Karabell: It is definitely true that when people think about climate, they don’t go to the meat industry and they don’t go to the agriculture industry, which are linked. I mean, they’re basically twined. They’re not separate issues. And yes, some, something like this book highlights yet another thing that is going to. Kill us if the things that we know are gonna kill us aren’t gonna kill us. But there’s also an awareness and, and again, part of the point of the conversation was it’s not as if there aren’t a lot of people in a lot of governments and a lot of voices aware of these issues and are ignoring them. So there’s an immense amount of work being done to address these issues and create solutions. They, they just fly underneath the cultural radar, and they probably are not at wide scale adaptation level quite yet.

I’m actually more optimistic than Mike in this, in that I think there are so many solutions that are deployable with not massive capitals. It doesn’t require the same, like redoing the entire energy grid or decarbonizing. It’s, it’s, it’s actually more doable within the current framework than I think people realize, so in that sense, it’s true that the agriculture industry is behind relative to the transition that Michael is talking about. But it is also true that the science and the solutions are, are much further ahead than the 25 year behind the carbon industry is.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, and he mentioned too that if you can get basically countries that aren’t like the US and the Netherlands to where the US and the Netherlands are vis-a-vis very efficient farming and agriculture, that would make a huge difference. You know, if India farmed at the same levels of efficiency as the US, but also this is one issue that people love to ask like, what can I do? What should I do? How do I get involved? And there’s like a very easy answer, which is, eat less beef and lamb. And if you wanna do that, don’t come to Greece ’cause it’s not the right place to do that.

Zachary Karabell: It’s funny, just really anecdotally, I find I am eating much less beef and I think most people around me are eating less beef. I mean, everybody I know will have like the occasional steak, but occasional means every three weeks. It doesn’t mean Sunday. And just beef as a staple in a diet seems to be waning. I’m sure that is not true in multiple parts of the United States. It’s certainly not true in Argentina or Brazil or other parts of the world. So. It’s absolutely true in India. You gotta hand it to India. I mean, one thing about sacred cows is you don’t eat them. So there’s not a lot of.

Emma Varvaloucas: They never started.

Zachary Karabell: They never started in the first place.

There is a lot of lamb consumption in India, so it’s not as if on the ruminant, we got it in the word ruminant twice, it’s very good. Or thrice, ’cause we probably repeated it a few times.

Emma Varvaloucas: Now you said thrice too, which is its own.

Zachary Karabell: Thrice, ruminants and thrice. This is another one of these perfect eye of the beholder issues in that you can look around and find a wealth of solutions. And you can look around and find a plethora of problems and which of those strikes you as more immediate and more alarming or hopeful, has a lot to do with that kind of cup half full, cup half empty view. That is as much personality as it is hard data and evidence. So, you know, yet again, you, you can kind of, there’s a lot that one can see from the terrible to the sublime, particularly in these issues.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, absolutely. So we invite everyone to see the terrible and the sublime in Mike’s book.

Zachary Karabell: As you Uber Eat out for your Shake Shack burger.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, right. I mean, the whole time we were having this conversation, I, we, I remember two or three years ago, my stepbrother who lives in London, came to Greece for a visit. And for some reason he was like, we’re gonna do this big family dinner, in which we all try Beyond Meat for the first time. Like, we’re gonna do Beyond Meat hamburgers.

Like it was a thing that he, like, we had an event for it.

They never ate them again.

Zachary Karabell: Didn’t go. Didn’t go over well.

Emma Varvaloucas: I don’t think, I don’t think the Greeks were, uh.

Zachary Karabell: One and done. One and done.

Thank you all for listening. Tune in next week. Same bad time, same bad channel. Please listen to the Progress Report. Thank you to the Podglomerate for producing. Send us your ideas. Send us your tired, your hungry, at hello@theprogressnetwork.org.

And thank you as always to Emma for co-hosting.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thank you everyone for listening. Thank you, Zach, for hosting and to the Podglomerate for doing all the important stuff with the tech on the back end.