A weekly reckoning with our overheating planet—and the fight to save it |
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Donald Trump visits a grocery store in Kittanning, Pennsylvania, on the campaign trail in September, 2024. Win McNamee/Getty Images |
Last week, new data dropped showing that inflation has hit a seven-month high, driven in no small part by rising food, gas, and housing costs. Egg prices alone jumped 15.2 percent from December. But coffee and other items have also grown more expensive. As numerous pieces were quick to point out, this is not a great look for President Donald Trump, who campaigned on the promise of lowering costs for consumers on "day one," and who has also promised lower interest rates, which the Fed is unlikely to deliver unless inflation is under control. Trump reacted to the inflation news by blaming his predecessor. "BIDEN INFLATION UP!" he posted on Truth Social. At least one survey already suggests consumers aren’t buying this line: The University of Michigan’s February survey of consumers found they expect inflation to increase, particularly in light of the tariffs Trump has slapped on top trading partners. Nor are economists overly impressed by Elon Musk’s proposal to tackle the problem: dramatically slashing government spending. Even if Musk could cut spending as much as he suggests (doubtful, reports The Economist, which finds much evidence of chaos but not much movement in actual numbers) experts say the result would crash the economy. But the whom-to-blame discourse threatens to obscure a broader truth about food prices in particular right now: These price increases aren’t random. While inflation overall is a complicated topic, to put it mildly, many of these individual price increases have clear causes and were accurately predicted not just months, but years in advance. And Team Trump, even without their sudden enthusiasm for tariffs, would be poorly suited to tackle these particular price hikes. That’s because the dominant conservative model for fighting high cost of living—removing regulations and cutting government spending—isn’t very well suited to the crises driving some of these increases. |
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As Jan Dutkiewicz wrote at The New Republic last month, egg price increases are being driven partly by the H5N1 avian flu outbreak—which is being exacerbated by longstanding underregulation of animal agriculture. "Virtually all of the 100-or-so billion eggs produced annually in the United States come from factory farms," and "cramming so many virtually genetically identical birds of the same breed into such tight quarters makes factory farms hotbeds of disease," Jan wrote. "For decades, public health experts have feared that the next big pandemic would originate in poultry.… Reducing the risk of zoonotic outbreaks in the food system, mostly by reducing land clearing for crops and moving away from the factory farming of animals, is a lesson we should have learned from previous avian flu outbreaks and from the 2009 swine flu outbreak. And it should have been driven home by the scope and scale of the human and economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic." Paradoxically, he continued, the historical cheapness of eggs has fed a national egg-eating habit that now gives egg prices disproportionate sway over our overall experience of inflation: |
[I]f consumers eat a lot of eggs, the price of eggs will be weighted heavily in calculating the [Consumer Price Index]. As the Brookings Institute put it, in an article written before the current outbreak of H5N1, "Americans spend more on chicken than tofu, so changes in the price of chicken have a greater impact on the CPI." In the face of a supply shock like H5N1, egg prices rise much faster than those of other goods, which not only drives up CPI but makes the difference in prices very obviously visible to shoppers, even though most of them don’t connect the price hikes to a disease ravaging farms thousands of miles away from their supermarket. |
Cheap eggs might just be a bad long-term goal to aim for, Jan argued. And whether or not you agree with that conclusion, cheap eggs seem like a difficult outcome for the Trump team to deliver merely by slashing spending and regulations. They could, of course, simply stop doing anything about the avian flu: no more testing, and thus no more culling of diseased chicken flocks or federal compensation for those culls. This "let the world burn" strategy is not impossible to imagine of Trump—but it’s hard to see how this would accomplish the putative goal, given that sick birds typically stop laying eggs. The Trump administration’s economic approach also seems suboptimally calibrated for dealing with the kind of price volatility we’re starting to see with coffee. In January, Arabica coffee futures spiked to record levels amid tariff fears, The Wall Street Journal reported—but that wasn’t the only reason for the volatility. Severe drought in Brazil and wild swings in precipitation in Vietnam—the world’s two top coffee-producing countries—had already lowered yields. This is consistent with what researchers have long predicted might happen as climate change accelerates. In fact, last March, researchers with the European Central Bank calculated that "weather and climate shocks" alone may drive food price increases of 1.5–1.8 percentage points a year within a decade, and increases of 2.2–4.3 percentage points a year by 2060. Coffee has long been identified, along with chocolate, as a crop particularly sensitive to these weather changes. In fact, chocolate prices are also way up for weather reasons, leading to multiple stories last week (and a data-heavy report from Climate Central) explaining the context to Valentine’s Day shoppers. Deregulation and cutting all funds geared at addressing climate change isn’t going to help this problem. "Drill, baby, drill," the slogan Trump adopted for his inauguration, has long been the Republican rallying cry for economic growth and low cost of living. But Democrats have tried this approach, too, and it’s not even very effective at lowering gas prices—much less the prices of things that get harder to produce the more fossil fuels you burn. There are, of course, efforts to diversify coffee strains and make the global coffee market more resilient to climate shocks. One of the bodies funding those efforts was the U.S. Agency for International Development, which the Trump administration is now dismantling. |
—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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On March 25, TNR contributors Kim Kelly and Brian Goldstone introduce us to Goldstone’s new book, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. By telling the unforgettable stories of five Atlanta families, this landmark work of journalism exposes a new and troubling trend—the dramatic rise of the "working homeless" in cities across America. |
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That’s how much money—intended for states, municipalities, and nonprofits—remained frozen in EPA coffers as of the end of last week, despite court orders for the Trump administration to resume disbursements, according to Inside Climate News. |
Last spring, Liza Featherstone wrote at TNR about Vermont’s new law, following the federal "Superfund" model for chemical cleanups, that aims to make fossil fuel companies pay into a fund that can then be used to offset the costs of climate disasters. This model of climate policy, The Guardian’s Dharna Noor reports, is now spreading rapidly, although courtroom challenges from the fossil fuel industry are spreading almost as quickly: |
"I think Trump’s election has turbocharged the ‘make polluters pay’ movement," said [Jamie] Henn, who has been a leader in the campaign for a decade.… The state of Vermont in May passed a first-of-its-kind law holding fossil fuel firms financially responsible for climate damages and New York passed a similar measure in December.… Similar bills are being considered in Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts and now Rhode Island, where a measure was introduced last week. A policy will also soon be introduced in California, where recent deadly wildfires have revived the call for the proposal after one was weighed last year. Minnesota and Oregon lawmakers are also considering introducing climate superfund acts. And since inauguration day, activists and officials in a dozen other states have expressed interest in doing the same, said Henn. "I think people are really latching on to this message and this approach right now," Henn said. "It finally gives people a way to respond to climate disasters, and it’s something that we can do without the federal government." |
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Can Trump and his top advisers really just act with total impunity? Or is there, just maybe, a price to be paid for starving poor people and un-indicting a corrupt mayor? |
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