Michael Grunwald

Thanks!

We’ll need to grow 50% more calories by 2050 to feed the world, and we’ll need to do it with less land. People keep telling me, no, we just need to stop wasting food and eating meat, but how’s that going? The math sucks, but the math is the math.

“A masterful job of reporting and storytelling.” It’s nice to be recognized by colleagues so I’m especially pumped about this @sejorg.bsky.social review.

Sri Lanka banned all synthetic fertilizers and pesticides–and the nation nearly self-destructed. I get why people hate chemicals, but they do help food grow, and we’ll need to grow more food in the next 30 years than we’ve grown in the last 12000.

No, FPL will continue to do whatever it can to prevent us from going solar and generating our own power. (I did it anyway, it's awesome.) Of course FPL will also continue building its own solar farms to sell us power, because solar is awesome.

PSC approves contentious $7 billion rate hike for Florida Power & Light customers • Florida Phoenix The Florida Public Service Commission (PSC) approved a four-year settlement with Florida Power & Light (FPL) Thursday for about $6.9 billion, which opponents claim is the largest rate hike in U.S. his...

This should be the biggest story in Florida: DeSantis minions approve the largest electricity rate hike in US history for Florida Plunder & Loot. A $7B transfer from us to Republican donors.

floridaphoenix.com/2025/11/20/p...

Photosynthesis has supported all life on Earth for 3 billion years, but it turns out to be quite inefficient. So scientists are trying to engineer out its inefficiencies with AI and gene editing, using innovation to help hungry people and the climate.

Farm-grown fuels are even worse for the planet than fossil fuels. Because they use too much land. They’re deforestation bombs. And now Trump is trying to expand U.S. biofuels, because the farm lobby is even more powerful than the oil lobby.

Read my book - one of Terviva’s miracles was figuring out how to de-bitter pongamia oil. It’s a funny accident - the CEO compared it to Doc banging his head on the toilet and inadvertently inventing the flux capacitor.

Regenerative agriculture is mostly overhyped as a climate solution. But in Brazil, I saw some regenerative grazing practices produce higher beef yields, which meant more money for the rancher and less eating of the earth.

Yes it's perennial, leguminous, drought-tolerant, salt-tolerant, and everything else we wish crops could be.

Climate summits are so weird. Here's the historic agreement out of the #COP30 talks on agriculture: We'll keep talking!

unfccc.int/sites/defaul...

There’s a miracle tree that grows seeds a lot like soybeans in much worse land, without fertilizer or irrigation, with 4-10X higher yields and much more carbon storage. It’s called pongamia, and it could help save the planet. But there’s a twist.

We Are Eating the Earth From the author of New York Times bestseller The New New Deal, a groundbreaking piece of reportage from the trenches of the next climate war: the f...

Also if you're interested in food and politics and the future of the planet, I wrote a book about that stuff: www.simonandschuster.com/books/We-Are...

My main point is, people hate high food prices! It's a big reason they soured on Biden. It's a big reason they're souring on Trump. I'm talking about Captain Obvious ways to stand for lower prices and better policy. END

I would also love to see a bipartisan effort to crack down on food waste. The average American household spends more than $2000 on food it throws away, an economic and environmental disaster. But that's a bit tangential to my point about food as a political weapon. 9

That's my list of easy ways to fight for cheaper food. We could argue about others, like ending federal support for organic ag or cracking down on Big Ag cartels, but those are a little complicated, substantively and politically. The other stuff really isn't. 8

STOP SLASHING AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH. Food is like housing or any other commodity - if you make more of it, the price drops. And the US always invested in cutting-edge research to help farmers make more food per acre...until now. Restoring Trump's cuts is another no-brainer. 7

STOP DEPORTING MIGRANT FARM WORKERS. The politics of this might be a little trickier, but not even ardent anti-immigrant MAGA types believe Florida tomato pickers are stealing their jobs. And cracking down on farm labor means raising food prices. 6

END THE SUGAR PROGRAM AND SIMILAR BOONDOGGLES. The feds set a minimum price for sugar, and the Big Beautiful Bill raised it 22%. That's crazy! Farm welfare programs like Price Loss Coverage and Agriculture Risk Coverage are also designed to boost prices. Why? (You know why.) 5

The ‘Green’ Aviation Fuel That Would Increase Carbon Emissions The U.S. agriculture lobby has long promoted ethanol for cars. If President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” becomes law, the industry would be given tax credits for producing crop-based fuel for planes, ...

The Trump Administration is pushing to expand the RFS to require billions of gallons of additional soy biodiesel. Trump's Big Beautiful Bill also included billions of dollars in new biofuel subsidies. Way too many Democrats support this nonsense! 4

e360.yale.edu/features/cor...

FIGHT BIOFUELS MANDATES. The whole point of the Renewable Fuel Standard is to increase corn and soy prices to help America's 650 thousand corn and soy producers. That sucks for America's 350 million corn and soy consumers. It also sucks for the climate and the environment. 3

FIGHT TARIFFS. Trade wars are unpopular and inflationary. Even Trump realizes his tariffs on coffee and bananas are jacking up prices and hurting him politically. And non-agricultural tariffs just provoke retaliation against US agricultural exports. This is a no-brainer. 2

People are pissed about food prices. People are pissed about Trump. Affordability politics can be tricky and divisive, but there’s an obvious food affordability agenda that could unite the left and center behind good policy and good politics. A thread! 1

TONIGHT IN ST. PETE! Join me at @tombolobooks.bsky.social for a Q&A with @mikegrunwald.bsky.social about his new book WE ARE EATING THE EARTH. No, the store will NOT be serving snacks. www.eventbrite.com/e/we-are-eat...

It starts with Grant Livingston discussing the folk song he wrote about my book, Land Is Not Free. And you can hear me sing a riff from the awesome 2008 Livebroadkast reggae tune Biofuel Song, which recognized how ethanol would cause hunger and deforestation long before most scientists did.

YouTube video by CoolTuneCrew Cool Tunes for a Hot Planet Episode 28

This is so awesome. On Cool Tunes for a Hot Planet, ethnomusicologist Warren Senders and I discussed Eritrean & Bulgarian harvest songs, US country & folk songs about farms, Brazilian ranchers rapping about their big-ass trucks, the Milk Bucket Boogie and more. www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPnm...

A funny quirk to the story is that shredding wetlands protections was a Quayle initiative, James Baker made him back off because Bush had promised no net loss of wetlands during the campaign and the politics team didn’t want him to break another promise after no new taxes.

The first Bush WH tried to gut wetland protections, but failed because of a major backlash (sparked by the main character of my new book) that included the head of Bush’s EPA. Now Trump’s EPA is trying to gut wetland protections and it’s barely news.

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/c...

ST. PETE! I’ll be talking about food and the planet with inimitable Florida Man Craig Pittman tomorrow evening at Tombolo Books. RSVP for the hijinks here: www.eventbrite.com/e/we-are-eat...