Joe Fassler

Thanks to @joefassler.bsky.social and @environment.theguardian.com for covering Sentient’s media analysis — hope it sparks more reporting on emissions from food!

No, the U.S. Doesn’t Need Fossil Fuels to Win ‘an AI Arms Race’ Against China These industry players and allies push a misleading narrative the Trump administration now parrots.

Trump admin officials, industry groups, and tech leaders cite an “AI arms race” with China to justify a massive fossil fuels expansion — calling it an urgent matter of national security.

For @desmog.com, I spoke to experts who explained why that’s not true:

In Texas, AI Gold Rush Helps Spur Demand for Over 100 New Gas Plants State may be “rubber stamping” some air pollution permits, according to new report on the boom.

🚨 NEW 🚨 In Texas, the gold rush to build data centers for AI is spurring demand for over 100 new gas power plants. And it is a "rush": some gas plant air pollution permits were approved by the state in just 24 hours. Get the full story from @joefassler.bsky.social‬ 👇

Didn’t go there for this one, but many of the groups involved also have Atlas Network ties.

Elon Musk’s Government Legacy Was Enacting Project 2025. His Ties Go Back Years. The billionaire rescued the right-wing plan to dismantle the government while at its most toxic moment. Enacting its vision at DOGE, Musk was Trump’s enabler and fall guy.

There were enough covert Elon Musk cameos to warrant a separate piece dedicated just to him — esp. on how DOGE reset the narrative around Project 2025 goals in the election’s final months:

A few months back, I started in on what I thought would be a simple, straightforward piece: mapping out the Trump admin officials connected to Project 2025 groups.

The ties turned out to go so deep, and be so numerous and surprising, that the piece only just ran today.

MAPPED: 70 Percent of Trump’s Cabinet Tied to Project 2025 Groups More than 50 high-level Trump administration officials have links to groups behind the Heritage Foundation-backed plan, a DeSmog analysis found.

Trump tried to deny any knowledge of Project 2025 - the radical plan to dismantle the federal government.

Well it turns out that 70% of his Cabinet have ties to the groups behind the document.

Thanks, Adam!

Elon Musk’s Embrace of Far-Right Energizes Transatlantic Climate Denial In December, a Chicago-based organization called the Heartland Institute, which for decades has attempted to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change, devoted an episode of its daily podca...

Fantastic @desmog.bsky.social post detailing how solidly Musk is now positioned as one of the single greatest threats to climate action we have ever faced

www.desmog.com/2025/02/20/e...

@geoffdembicki.bsky.social @joefassler.bsky.social @adambarnett.bsky.social

Food and Environment Reporting Network | Independent. Investigative. Nonprofit.

How big is the market for "weird meat"? We'll see.

But Vow's journey is sure to be a fascinating and boundary-busting one.

Thanks to @fastcompany.com and @thefern.org for being great partners on this piece.

thefern.org/2024/12/the-...

It starts with the concession that this wildly new approach to making meat won't be very good at simulating the exact meat we eat today.

What *can* it do well?

Create things that are delicious and meat-like and exciting and strange. And — for now — VERY pricey.

I spent months talking to Vow's CEO George Peppou for this story.

His strategy is completely at odds with the standard alt-protein playbook — which strives for low costs and realist mimicry.

Peppou's willingness to embrace the *unreal* has charted a fascinating path forward for this tech.

The strange future of lab-grown meat involves quail, crocodile, and woolly mammoth Australian biotech startup Vow has created the first cell-meat factory and is focusing on 'weird meat' to achieve viable scale.

The team of mad geniuses at Vow Foods envisions a very different future for cultivated meat.

For now, they're not trying to compete with commodity animal ag.

They're scaling expensive, bizarre products in the world's first genuine cell-meat factory — like $100/pound quail foie gras.

6 Fracking Billionaires and Climate Denial Groups Behind Trump’s Cabinet Trump’s nominees are backed by major players in the world of climate obstruction – from Project 2025 and Koch network fixtures to oil-soaked Christian nationalists.

Trump has been filling his cabinet with a long list of conservative partisans eager to stop climate action. Here’s background on 6 fracking billionaires & climate denial groups backing them.

@joefassler.bsky.social reports: www.desmog.com/2024/12/16/6...

6 Fracking Billionaires and Climate Denial Groups Behind Trump’s Cabinet Trump’s nominees are backed by major players in the world of climate obstruction – from Project 2025 and Koch network fixtures to oil-soaked Christian nationalists.

Many of Trump’s cabinet picks aren’t household names, but they’re backed by major players in the world of climate obstruction.

@joefassler.bsky.social goes deep into the fracking billionaires and denier groups eagerly awaiting Trump's second administration.

www.desmog.com/2024/12/16/6...

Thanks Benjamin!

A Madman on the Ground, A Visionary in Flight - Electric Literature An excerpt from THE SKY WAS OURS by Joe Fassler, recommended by Kyle McCarthy

Finally, an excerpt (with a gorgeous introduction from Kyle McCarthy): electricliterature.com/the-sky-was-...

The bittersweet pang of opening a box of finished books It’s supposed to be an author’s happiest moment. For me, it felt more complicated.

On why publishing a book is also a goodbye, and the strange emotions that follow:

joefassler.substack.com/p/the-bitter...

Crash Again, Crash Better: A Brief History of Failed Attempts at Human Flight Years ago, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, I found myself writing about flight. It started as just a few paragraphs, a bit of spontaneous fiction jotted down in a notebook: a man stood …

Research for the book led me to the obscure history of human attempts at birdlike flight, a lost era of daring, incredibly dangerous experiments. I

It's a saga strewn with broken necks — and tantalizing possibilities.

On flight before the Wrights, for Lit Hub: lithub.com/crash-again-...

thanks, Tamar!!

7 Books About Fictional Technologies with World-Altering Consequences  - Electric Literature In these warped versions of reality, tech is expanding the scope of what’s possible, at a cost

As I wrote I spent so much time thinking about other novels and stories that examine technology—brave, new, world-changing inventions—as their central subject.

Electric Lit let me write about some of my favorites: electricliterature.com/7-books-abou...

The Sky Was Ours by Joe Fassler on a cloth surface

I wrote a novel! It lives.

Some related writing, out this week, a thread:

Nicely said Jeff. Yes, that’s the larger point: cultivated meat could be ready now, and we’d still have a lot of the very same problems to solve.

Yes to this! A necessary first step if we want to reduce meat consumption.

What happens beyond 20 or 30 years is uncertain, but the burden of proof is on the companies to show the tech can power a global supply chain. Or even a much smaller scale one. That hasn’t happened yet.

I hope the piece is more nuanced than “cell meat is dead.” The dream of cell meat as a near- to mid-term intervention—which was absolutely the original goal, and a worthy one!—is dead. A lot of the original assumptions were wrong. The promised thing will not occur the way it was promised.

If we start with the premise that CM is a generational project with an uncertain outcome—and my reporting strongly suggests this is the case—we could have a better conversation.

I agree! And nothing wrong with continuing to explore this option. Lots of brilliant folks involved + science often finds a way. But we shouldn’t be under the delusion that this industry can achieve impact any time soon. Once we acknowledge that’s not possible, we can get busy making other plans.

This is the comment I mean.

If telling people to eat fewer Big Macs is pointless, what about telling people to eat, say, more expensive Big Macs that mix mushrooms with genetically modified beef cells?

Nothing wrong with GMO. The point is that I’m not sure one is so much harder than the other.

And it comes with a lot of disadvantages the other options don’t have.

Meanwhile, after 10 years and three billion dollars, no one can produce at any sort of remotely meaningful scale. And we don’t have a ton of time.