Michael Grunwald

Ok, I’ll just say the main message of the museum was that Chileans who had way more reason to be fatalistic than we do, and way more to lose from resistance than we do, eventually won.

I’m at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago today. I wonder if we’re going to have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission when all this is over.

My daughter, too. Very solid piece.

HEAL Report Questions Precision Agriculture The HEAL Food Alliance asks whether precision agriculture can truly deliver on sustainability promises.

Your helpful innovation is a pernicious distraction from my One True Solution. (Which is inevitably regenerative agriculture.)

foodtank.com/news/2026/02...

Wow: USDA just shoveled more $ to sugar farmers to offset “market disruptions.” The entire U.S. sugar program is a market disruption! It’s a price floor that makes consumers pay more for candy. And Trump already increased it last year!

I feel like factory-farmed pork should not be blamed on our people

Opinion | The Climate Solution That’s Horrible for the Climate (Published 2023)

www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/o...

And sure, there are subtleties on the ground - land titles, law enforcement, discount rates, etc. But to argue that land sparing is a myth is to suggest that tripling crop and livestock yields over the last 60 years had no impact on deforestation. It’s lalalalalaing the counterfactual.

I missed this, very interesting. The brutal math is really a baseline: hitting the supply-side targets doesn’t necessarily prevent all land clearing, but missing the targets necessarily drives land clearing. Demand will find a way, like a river flowing around rocks.

Well my views on biofuels are pretty well known!

I don’t. Neither do Robert or Nicholas. But police unions in particular use their political muscle to shield their members from accountability and ensure them insane overtime windfalls. Teachers unions also tend to make themselves unfirable at the expense of students and taxpayers.

I'm pretty sure Robert bitches about suburban unions too!

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...

Yes, but the world ate 400M tons of meat last year, and it's on track to eat 70% more by 2050. It's a hard problem!

www.simonandschuster.com/books/We-Are...

Opinion | Blue Cities and States Are in Trouble. Democrats Need to Change How They Run Them.

Real talk in the NYT from the great @robertgo.bsky.com and @nbagley.bsky.com: If blue states and cities want to prove that government can work, they can’t keep giving all their money to government unions. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/o...

Sorry, but more sustainable farming isn’t more natural farming. It’s farming that doesn’t overrun so much of the earth. That means higher-yield farming that makes more food per acre, so it doesn’t need so many acres to make food.

Yes, let’s!

But hope is not a strategy. A real strategy for attacking the eating the earth problem needs to take beef production seriously. We can’t just wish it didn’t exist.

A gripping story by a great reporter

New farm policy insanity: USDA is sending more $ to sugar farmers impacted by "unfair market disruptions." Of course they don't mean the federal price floor that already guarantees sugar farmers above-market prices. No, they just mean the same high costs we all face.

www.usda.gov/about-usda/n...

Yes, I get it. But it actually wouldn’t be insanely hard to triple grazing productivity in much of the world, which would make beef 2/3 less destructive. And I quoted a pollster in my book calling meat taxes the least popular policy he ever polled, “like veterans benefits for ISIS.”

Absolutely. But so far they don’t want it, so you can’t ignore the supply side.

Saving this to show my wife.

Brazilian Amazon on Track for Record Low Deforestation

They’re doing really well!

e360.yale.edu/digest/amazo...

Like I said, I haven't gone deep enough on the substance to trust my opinion

But I've known @mikegrunwald.bsky.social a long time and, well, he's usually right

Also you should buy his book www.simonandschuster.com/books/We-Are...

If 99% of the population was eating cyanide you would want to think about some cyanide harm reduction strategies, rather than just hoping the 99% sees the wisdom of the 1%

Beef is definitely an eco-disaster - a big theme of my book - but this kind of bad analogy leads to bad strategies. Beef isn't arsenic; an average American eats 3 burgers a week! So eating less beef matters, but so does making less destructive beef.

www.simonandschuster.com/books/We-Are...

It’s the bizarro-world version of framing a guilty man; the Trump Administration is giving glyphosate a pardon even though it didn’t do anything wrong.

I hear you, but that just makes my point. Because EVERYONE who eats slaughtered animals knows that they’re eating slaughtered animals. It’s not an education problem!

Quick primer:

MAHA and TrumpWorld both hate vaccines. Vaccines are awesome.

MAHA hates junk food, TrumpWorld claims to hate it but won’t do much about it. Junk food is unhealthy.

MAHA hates chemicals. TrumpWorld loves them. Some (like mercury) are lethal, others (like glyphosate) are fine.

Yes but the number of people who know that the animals they eat are often treated badly before they’re slaughtered is probably not much less than the number of people who eat animals.

It’s complicated, but this part isn’t: Grass-fed beef (from cattle that spend their entire lives on pastures) is worse for the planet and the climate than conventional grain-finished beef (from cattle that spend their last few months in feedlots).