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About a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the food system, but the public conversation about food and climate keeps getting stuck at the two ends of the chain — what farmers grow on one side, what consumers buy on the other. The middle of that chain — processing, packaging, distribution, storage — is where most of the practical climate levers actually live, and it is the part you almost never see. Brendan Niemira, Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT), wants us to look there. Brendan spent more than 25 years at the USDA Agricultural Research Service leading a team of 30-plus scientists developing non-thermal treatments — cold plasma, high-intensity light, irradiation — that kill foodborne pathogens on produce, meat, poultry, and shellfish without cooking the food. He stepped into the IFT role on December 1, 2025, and joins Sustainability In Your Ear to walk through IFT’s new white paper, Food Science & Technology Solutions for Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change, which lays out a roadmap covering circular bioeconomy practices, AI-enabled supply chain resilience, reusing food waste, precision fermentation, and cellular agriculture.

Brendan Niemira, Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Institute of Food Technologists, is our guest on Sustainability In Your Ear.

Brendan describes food safety as a three-legged stool — exclusion, containment, and eradication — and notes that in a warming world the first leg is getting harder. Pathogens travel further, persist longer, and show up in places they didn’t used to, with warming oceans already expanding Vibrio bacteria in shellfish that previously didn’t carry them. That reframes food safety as climate adaptation work — and it lands at the moment when federal research capacity is being thinned out. The conversation then opens into the ultra-processed food debate, where IFT is pressing the case that nutritional quality, not processing intensity, should define dietary guidance, because pasteurized milk, shelf-stable beans, and a deep-fried snack cake are all “processed,” and collapsing them into a single category hobbles the very technologies that extend shelf life and cut food waste. Brendan closes on the structural shift coming next: humans domesticated about 50 animal species over 25,000 years of agriculture, but precision fermentation — built on whole genome sequencing and metabolomics — opens up trillions of possible microbial community combinations, each able to turn side streams and waste streams into dairy proteins, vitamins, flocculants for water treatment, and food ingredients. Garbage in, gumdrops out, as he puts it. We’re not there yet, but the trajectory is clear.

To learn more about IFT’s work and download the climate white paper, visit ift.org.

Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe  (0:09)

Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society. I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.

We’re going to talk about food. Food is responsible for roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions each year, and the climate is now responsible for a growing share of what happens to our food. Food systems face dramatic challenges. Droughts are reshaping olive country in the Mediterranean. Warming oceans are increasing the frequency of shellfish pathogen outbreaks. Hurricanes are taking out manufacturing facilities. Sea level rise may flood key ports where food flows, and fluctuating precipitation is driving mycotoxin contamination in crops. And that’s only a partial list.

The food system must feed 8 billion people while the conditions it was designed for are unwinding underneath it. Meanwhile, the public conversation about food and climate gets stuck at the two ends of the chain: agriculture on one side, consumer choice on the other. But our guest today wants us to pay attention to what happens in between—the processing, packaging, distribution, and storage that turn a fall harvest into something you can eat in February. That middle segment is where a quarter century of food science meets the climate problem, and where most of the practical levers actually live.

Brendan Niemira is the Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Institute of Food Technologists, a Chicago-based scientific association that has served as the voice of the global food science community since 1939. Its 200,000-member network spans academia, government, and industry. He stepped into this role on December 1, 2025, after more than 25 years at the USDA Agricultural Research Service, where he led a team of more than 30 scientists, engineers, and students developing tools to kill foodborne pathogens on produce, meat, poultry, and shellfish.

Brendan’s specialty is non-thermal food safety systems that use cold plasma, high-intensity monochromatic light, irradiation, and pulsed light treatments to disinfect food without cooking it. He’s published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, holds patents on the technology, and the 2024 citation rankings place him in the top 0.01% of food scientists worldwide.

Brendan joins IFT at a moment when food science is being pulled in two directions at once. On one side, climate pressure on supply chains, food safety, and resource efficiency is intensifying—the subject of IFT’s new white paper, Food Science & Technology Solutions for Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change, which lays out a roadmap for circular bioeconomy practices, AI-enabled supply chain resilience, food waste valorization, and emerging technologies like cellular agriculture and precision fermentation—that is, growing food in vats.

On the other side, the public and political conversation about food is fixated on ultra-processed food, and the MAHA Commission—the Make America Healthy Again Commission—frames processing itself as the central problem rather than part of the solution. IFT has been one of the loudest scientific voices arguing for definitions grounded in nutritional quality rather than processing intensity. That’s a position that’s both scientifically defensible and complicated by the fact that IFT membership includes much of the food industry.

So we’re going to talk with Brendan about what the climate case for a redesign of the food system is, what IFT’s recent white paper does and doesn’t quantify, and where precision fermentation and cellular agriculture actually stand in 2026. We’ll also look into why food safety remains under-researched within climate science, and how IFT is navigating the MAHA debate. To learn more about IFT’s work, visit ift.org; the white paper we’ll be discussing is available there as well.

The climate fight runs through the food we eat, but most of the action is happening in the part of the supply chain that nobody sees. So let’s find out what Brendan Niemira sees right after this brief commercial break.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Welcome to the show, Brendan. How are you doing today?

Brendan Niemira  (4:46)

I’m doing great, Mitch. How are you?

Mitch Ratcliffe  (4:49)

I’m well. It’s a beautiful morning here in Southern Oregon, and I’m excited about this conversation. You spent 25 years at the USDA. What does the food system look like from this new vantage point at IFT? How’s it different from the perspective at the lab bench?

Brendan Niemira  (4:59)

Well, first let me say that I really enjoyed being a scientist for the USDA. There were a lot of great scientists working at the USDA, and I was absolutely proud to be one of them. Even with the recent losses, there are great scientists, engineers, and subject matter experts in different areas of the federal research continuum. The research done in those labs remains a crucial part of the overall science landscape for the US.

My work as a food microbiologist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service was focused on food safety and advanced food processing technologies—again, to improve food safety and extend shelf life. Now, as the Chief Science and Technology Officer for IFT, I get to engage with all of the technical areas of food science: microbiology, chemistry, sensory science, sustainability, food laws, and regulations. I also get to engage in the larger space around advocacy and science communication. I get to work with colleagues across the whole food system—all the way from primary producers like farmers and ranchers, to processors, product developers, all the way to nutritionists and retailers. So I get a much bigger-picture view.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (5:56)

When you think of it from that perspective—from the industry side—what do you think the key issues we need to consider as a nation are in our food system as it stands today?

Brendan Niemira  (6:08)

Food has to be safe, healthy, and wholesome, but it also has to be available, it has to be sustainable, and it has to be the kind of food that people will want to eat. It doesn’t matter if you produce something that’s super healthy and even super affordable; if it doesn’t meet the cultural needs of what people want to eat, if it doesn’t meet their expectations for how it looks, how it tastes, how it performs in their lifestyle, then it’s going to stay on the shelves, and all that science that you did to produce this product is not going to be any good, because it’s not going to provide any nutritional benefit to people.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (6:43)

IFT draws a sharp line between food processing—what you do to the ingredients—and food formulation, which is the ingredient list itself. Why does that distinction matter, and why has the public conversation lost that distinction?

Brendan Niemira  (6:56)

Well, we draw that distinction because if you take either one of those aspects alone—just the ingredient list, or just the ingredient processing—neither one is going to give you a complete indication of the healthfulness or the nutrient value of the food. If you use either one just as a simple shorthand—you say, well, there’s a certain thing on the list of ingredients, or a certain thing was done to that stuff—you miss the mark. You’re going to have to take both of them into account to look at the total healthfulness of the food.

Part of the issue with the public conversation is that, frankly, it’s a little bit more straightforward to give short, simple messages about which foods are healthy and which foods are not. Look for this ingredient, or look for that processing step, and it’s a thumbs up or a thumbs down. The fact that it’s simple is true, even if those short, simple messages don’t give a complete or, frankly, a fully accurate picture. Food is more complicated than that, and complicated stories are harder to tell.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (7:53)

Our dialogue is, let’s just say, relatively simplistic right now. Are we diverging from the real issues we need to be exploring as a nation when we talk about the MAHA concerns?

Brendan Niemira  (8:05)

Science communication tries to make complex issues of science and nutrition, nutritional availability—even getting to things like cultural tolerance, cultural acceptability, economics, and all that sort of stuff—it tries to make these very complex issues understandable. Not everybody is a nutritionist; not everybody is an economist. People just want to be able to get food that they want to feed their family. They want it to be safe, they want it to be healthy, they want to be able to afford it, they want to be able to provide for their family, and they want to be able to enjoy it.

Food is about more than just nutrition. Food is about culture, food is about satisfaction, food is about joy. Those are things that simple stories can speak to, but the science behind this can be very complicated. So it’s the job of us here at IFT, and the job, really, of all science communicators, to take these complicated issues and present accurate, factual, complicated science information in a way that people can understand, and that they can use to make decisions on.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (9:08)

Having written about technology and sustainability and a variety of things over the years, I find that one of the challenges is that experts resort to their jargon, partly because it’s shorthand—it makes it easier to say something to somebody else—but it relies on an understanding of that jargon. Are we at an inflection point? I hate to put it this way, but is Bobby Kennedy simplifying this conversation in an important way?

Brendan Niemira  (9:36)

This is why science communication is a distinct discipline. You can be a terrific microbiologist or chemist or toxicologist or nutritionist or economist, but if you’re not able to communicate to people outside of your discipline, then you run the risk of miscommunication, where you’re trying to say something but you’re just not communicating accurately. And unfortunately, you also set up a situation where people can take what you say in your good-faith effort to explain it properly, take a word here or a sentence or a phrase, and things get misunderstood or taken out of context. When people draw conclusions from material that is misinterpreted, then base decisions on that, or policies based on that, you can get to a point where the science is over here, the communication is in the middle, it gets a little bit muddled, and then policies arising from that are based on something not directly related to what the science is actually telling you.

That’s why we try to support good science communication and try to give people tools to communicate the science. At IFT we bring a lot of different scientists together in different disciplines, and we try to give them the tools to make sure that people are understanding their science and connecting on it appropriately.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (10:56)

I think that’s a really important point: that we need to create full access to the conversation, so people who want to dig in further can go further and learn more, in order to deepen their understanding of the decisions they face, either as a consumer or as a policymaker. I’ll just give a quick shout-out to ift.org. We have lots and lots of information—some of which is intended for scientists, technicians, food scientists, and food technologists, and is very jargon-heavy—but we have a lot of information that is intended for the general public to consume, and that is intended for decision-makers in industry, academia, and government.

A moment ago, you talked about the food system needing to be sustainable. A recent meta-analysis found that processing, packaging, transport, and retail steps in the food process account for just a modest share of the overall greenhouse gas footprint of our food system—farm production and distribution account for most of the rest. If most of food’s climate damage is upstream, how big a sustainability lever can processing innovation actually be? Can we really lower the overall impact of our food?

Brendan Niemira  (12:03)

Well, you’re absolutely right, a lot of the impact is on primary production, and that’s why people are also working on reducing the carbon footprint, water usage, and overall sustainability impact at the primary production stage: farms, ranches, fisheries. If you go talk to groups like the American Society of Agronomy, the Crop Science Society of America, the Soil Science Society of America, the American Meat Science Association—all those folks—they are working hard. They’re doing all of that science to develop and implement ways to improve sustainability in terms of carbon footprint, water-use efficiency, land-use programs, wildlife setbacks, insect refugia, and a host of other approaches.

Now, IFT does food. We do food processing, food science, food technology. So we are in the center part of that continuum, but we are actively working with those other scientific organizations to support the work that falls under those sectors, the overall food system, and to improve what we can do in processing, packaging, transport, retail, and so on.

Mitch, I would say this is one of those cases where we can’t allow ourselves to be tripped up by the false thinking that if we can’t do everything, then we shouldn’t do anything. Our Sustainable Food Systems interest group is an active and vibrant part of all the food science that we support. There’s a lot of communication between what they are doing and what other efforts are underway in other societies and other parts of it.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (13:26)

Absolutely—we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of progress. We have to take important steps.

Brendan Niemira  (13:31)

Here at IFT, we’re doing what we can, and we are supporting the other people that are working in their areas as well.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (13:37)

When I read the white paper that I mentioned in the introduction, there was not a lot of quantified environmental data, but it seems to me that what you’re saying is that that’s an area we really need to dig into now. How do we do that?

Brendan Niemira  (13:50)

It’s by talking to people who are on the ground doing that work. I would not sit back here as somebody who focuses on food production and food science and go talk to a soil scientist and tell them what to do, or what they should be doing, or what I think is most important in their area. When we’re all focused on the same overall goal of improving sustainability and reducing the impact of how we grow, how we harvest, how we process, how we ship, and how we consume our foods, then we need to listen to each other. There are people who have expertise in lots of different areas.

Our food is complicated. People think, well, there’s an apple on the shelf, or there’s some hamburger in the cooler. Food is complicated—it really truly is. And all of the different people that are contributing in all the different ways, all up and down across the food system, the food continuum—we need to draw on their expertise and get together to solve problems that will work across the entire system. If one person working on just one part of it rolls out a solution and says, ‘Yep, I’ve done my thing, and all the rest of you should change to do what I want,’ then that may not be a usable solution, because it breaks other parts of the system. There has to be a holistic approach.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (15:04)

As you say that, I realize how hard it is just to get food from my garden at the beginning of the season onto a plate at the end of the year.

Brendan Niemira  (15:12)

Yeah, and that’s encompassing. There are different people who grow different products, different commodities, different regions. You grow different kinds of tomatoes in different parts of the country, and there are different ways of growing food. Even on a very, very small scale, it gets to be very complicated. You have to have a lot of different kinds of knowledge, a lot of different kinds of infrastructure, a lot of different kinds of expertise and equipment, and so on. Plus, you have to comply with different regulations, different laws controlling different sorts of commodities in different parts of the country at different times of the year. All of this knowledge has to come together and be brought to bear on the problem.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (15:50)

Again, it’s a huge storytelling problem, but we have to look at this as a system rather than a bunch of separate parts that don’t necessarily interact with everything else.

Brendan Niemira  (15:58)

Absolutely, absolutely. It’s all one. That’s why we talk about the food system and the food continuum, because going right from primary production through all the various stages of getting food to you, and then on the back side, taking food waste—say, away from restaurants at their point of sale, point of service, point of consumption—some of those aspects of where the food goes, and what kind of advantages we can gain from paying attention to where those nutrients are ending up.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (16:26)

One of the other—and probably the most shocking—parts of the white paper that I read was how our dietary recommendations are being undercut by climate change. For instance, the Mediterranean diet is recommended; it consists of olives, olive oil, tree nuts. But those come from regions that are warming 20% faster than the rest of the globe. How should we think about US dietary guidelines in terms of how climate stress is going to change the availability of food over the course of the next decades?

Brendan Niemira  (16:58)

I think it starts with a clear-eyed understanding of what it takes to grow, deliver, and consume food. If you’re saying, well, I’m going to lean into one kind of a diet or another—whether it’s the Mediterranean diet or other specialty diets, either recommended by your doctor, by a nutritionist, or recommended by your own cultural or societal predilections—where does that food come from? Is it grown locally? Is it shipped far away? Does it come from other parts of the country? Does it come from other countries?

And then you have to understand: this is what food costs—not just the money, but in terms of the carbon you’re using to produce the food, the water, the land use. Once you have that accurate information and you have an accurate understanding of what goes into producing the food, then you can start to make some other decisions about the health and nutritional benefits of the food that you’re consuming, or one aspect of it, and then you can make other decisions about the other sustainability parts of how you’re getting your food and how you’re eating it.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (18:07)

You mentioned the cuts we’ve seen in federal research recently. As a microbiologist, where do you think federal climate-health research should be focused at this point?

Brendan Niemira  (18:17)

My specific work with food microbiology was in food safety, and so I was always very concerned with understanding the risks for human pathogens on foods. Despite the best efforts of food producers, you still do have instances where you have E. coli, salmonella, or listeria on one commodity or another. The way that you respond to that—there’s a sort of three-legged stool of responding to a food safety problem from a microbiology and food safety standpoint.

You can prevent these harmful organisms from being on your food commodity in the first place—that’s called exclusion. That’s where you do water quality monitoring, you do land-use history analysis, you do exclusion activities to make sure that the bad bacteria or viruses or parasites don’t get on the food in the first place.

Then you have containment, which is a monitoring system. That’s where you do continuous testing of foods being produced at the point of production, point of packaging, when they’re in shipping. Sometimes you pull samples, you hold them back a little bit, you test to make sure there are no pathogens on them, and then if you find any, that’s when you do the recalls and the trace-back analysis. Our Global Food Traceability Center at IFT is working very hard to develop protocols so that if we have a problem, we know where it came from, we can trace that back, we can isolate it, and we can contain it.

Then the third leg of the stool is eradication—that is to say, you apply techniques and technologies that will eradicate potential organisms. In one big way, we heat. If you’ve got ground beef, you can cook that ground beef, and you apply a thermal process that kills any potential E. coli or anything that might be on it. Now, heat is one technique, but you can’t apply that to lettuce. That doesn’t really work, which is why my research—and other people’s research—is working on other kinds of processing technologies that you can apply to more sensitive foods: fresh fruits, vegetables, berries, melons, other sorts of more sensitive products. Different kinds of novel sanitizers in the organic space, non-thermal processing technologies, other sorts of interventions that will kill the organism so they can’t cause any harm. So you’ve got exclusion, containment, and eradication, and all these different efforts working together. Those are the kinds of research that you’re going to do to have a good food safety impact.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (20:56)

Well, because exclusion is getting harder—because of the rising temperatures globally encouraging the growth of more pathogens, or at least the propagation of more pathogens—it sounds like that’s raising the bar for containment and recall.

Brendan Niemira  (21:09)

Yeah. If you find yourself in a situation where one of those things is not an option, or you’re not able to do it as well as you were before, then you lean into the other two. If effective technologies for eradication don’t exist, well, that’s where you need to put some research dollars in to create them.

I’ll give you an example. Years and years ago, we had lots and lots of outbreaks on sprouts. Sprouts were the cause of continuous outbreaks again and again, and research was put into place to find: how can we eliminate E. coli and salmonella on sprouts so they can be as safe, healthy, and wholesome as they can possibly be? But just because we were working on eradication steps does not mean we were ignoring the other two. There were things like seed certification processes to make sure the seed coming into these sprouting facilities is as healthy as it can be. There were containment efforts—let’s do better trace-back analysis, let’s do better testing, so that we know what’s on there, so we can act when we find it.

So it’s not a case of, ‘Well, we’re just going to work on one and ignore the other two.’ You’ve got to have an understanding of what the problem is. You can address all the different aspects of science at once. I would say this is one of the issues that happens when you start to see cuts in science: then you have to start making some hard decisions—well, we’re going to dial back on one and we’re going to keep our remaining resources and put them into one of the others. Maybe you’re leaving yourself in a situation where two years from now or five years from now, you might say to yourself, ‘Darn, I really wish we’d been working on that.’

Mitch Ratcliffe  (22:45)

Do you think that the private sector can step into the gap that has opened? Or are we really at a point where we need to seriously reconsider our federal funding for food science research?

Brendan Niemira  (22:55)

Private funding—corporate funding—has always been a huge part of food science research. Companies fund their own research, and then there’s funding through grants and consortia funding larger works. Industry funds provide grants for academic researchers, and academic research is a huge part of this. Government research is a huge part of this. And in a time when you’re looking at research funding that is cut or under threat, one of the unwanted outcomes is that there’s research that’s not being done.

Some of our advocacy priorities at IFT include seeing that we want food science research—including food microbiology, food safety, food toxicology, whether it’s chemical toxicology, chemical safety issues, or biological safety issues. We want to see that funding. We’d like to see it increase, honestly, but at least we’d like to see it not cut. Because you can’t have good data without good science, and you can’t make good decisions without good data. So, if you want to be able to make good decisions and develop good policies, you need good data, and for that, you need good science.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (24:10)

We certainly have had a foundation of solid data in the United States for the past 50 years. I think we’ve got a great sense of the problems that we need to talk about. Let’s take a quick commercial break, folks. We’re going to come right back and talk more with Brendan.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s get back to the conversation with Brendan Niemira. He is the Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Institute of Food Technologists, a 200,000-member network focused on food production and safety.

Brendan, let’s talk about bugs. The paper discusses a Costa Rican study where they’re taking a variety of food waste to farm edible insects. What’s the realistic potential for adoption of food made of insect protein in the United States, and is there a path even to regulatory approval for that in this day and age?

Brendan Niemira  (25:07)

Okay, here’s the thing. I actually just wrote a book chapter on edible insects and digging into all the ins and outs of this, so I happen to have a lot of this fresh in my mind. There are only a very small number of animals that we can take things that humans can’t eat—like cellulose—and convert. Humans can’t eat grass; humans can’t digest grass or the cellulosic material. Historically, the way that we have made cellulose into something that we can eat is to feed it to an animal and then eat the animal. Right now we do that with cows and other ruminants.

But you can do that with crickets. Crickets have some advantages over cows: they use a lot less space, they have a shorter generation time, so you can be more responsive to market changes, they use less water, they use less energy, and so on. But then at the end of the day, you have this insect protein, and what’s the realistic prospect for that?

I would say that, because of the cultural nature of Western society, Western society does not have a cultural heritage of entomophagy—eating bugs. That’s the Greek word for it. There are other parts of the world that do have a cultural heritage of this, and so they have lower cultural barriers to having insect proteins as part of the diet, either as just edible insects—as a commodity, where you look down and say, hey, here’s a cinnamon-crunch-flavored cricket. These are products that are on the market.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (26:44)

I’ve tried these. They’re not the worst thing in the world, but they’re also not something that most people would pop in their mouth at a movie theater.

Brendan Niemira  (26:50)

Well, certainly not in the US, and not in most Western societies that derive their cultural heritage from Europe. So if you’re not going to have these things that are identifiable as an insect, could you have insect protein powder as part of an insect supplement? I think these things are still in the market. I’ve tried it. I’ve got insect powder, and—you know, put my money where my mouth is—I’ve made brownies and cookies with cricket powder. They taste like brownies and cookies. It was okay.

As a large-scale process, I think you have to start with the cultural issue and the consumer issue, because if you’re going to make a product that—let’s generalize—very few people want to buy, it’s a very, very niche product. Then you are going to have that process remain a niche process, and so the overall impact on large issues of sustainability, or carbon usage, or moving away from conventional animal sources or plant sources of protein, is going to be kind of limited.

Where you might see much more of a penetration, however, is in taking these insect protein sources and using them as feeds for aquaculture. Right now, fish are not really able to digest soybean meal very well, so you can’t raise fish the same way that you raise cows and chickens. They’re trying to work to breed new kinds of trout, let’s say, that are better able to use soybean meals so you can get some of those economies of scale. But if you can lean into insect protein production, you essentially use the insect farms almost as a kind of bioreactor to turn cellulose—indigestible cellulose—into a digestible form of protein that can then be processed through aquaculture or chicken farms, conventional animal agriculture, that then would go into the human food supply.

I think it is still kind of a long way away, at least in the United States, from a time when insect proteins are going to be a significant or a major part of our daily diet. The FDA rules on insect proteins and edible insects, right now, are that they have to be safe and wholesome. They have to be tested for human pathogens, and so on. These insects have to be in a production facility that is dedicated to that production—they cannot be wild caught. So you can’t just go out into your local meadow and swing a net and start collecting crickets. They have to—

Mitch Ratcliffe  (29:30)

They might be contaminated with pesticides.

Brendan Niemira  (29:33)

Pesticides, who knows—there might be other pathogens on them, there might be fungi on them, there might be potentially heavy metal contamination. So these have to be grown in a dedicated production facility. The FDA is certainly on the ball in terms of having an understanding of the potential risks for some of these things, and they have put rules in place to make sure that if insects are produced as human food, they adhere to safety rules and regulations.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (29:58)

The metaphor of the insect as a bioreactor with legs makes a lot of sense to me. But precision fermentation using bioreactors is another one of the paper’s big bets, and I’ve personally been involved in trying to raise some funding to create dairy proteins using acetate fermentation, which would reduce the need for concentrated animal feeding operations, so dairy’s environmental impact could be drastically reduced. Can you explain how precision fermentation works for our listeners?

Brendan Niemira  (30:30)

Sure, absolutely. Precision fermentation is a really fascinating area of research right now. The work that we’re doing with whole genome sequencing and proteomics and metabolomics has just led to opening a whole new chapter in what we’re doing with fermentation.

What is precision fermentation, versus conventional fermentation? People have been fermenting foods for thousands of years, relying on yeast and bacteria to process raw ingredients and turn them into edible foods—everything from beer to bread to kimchi. Those microorganisms only ate certain things, and from a metabolic standpoint, they only produced certain things. They were useful because they were able to break down cellulose and hemicellulose into digestible sugars for humans. They’re able to take food which was not edible or provided very little nutritive value, into things that do provide nutritive value for us when we consume them.

But because it was gathering wild strains—and even after you get into the Louis Pasteur days of breeding new strains of yeast to make better beer—it was still kind of old-school breeding to get better fermentation cultures. Now, thanks to modern food science, we can really dig into the cellular, molecular microbial ecology. I mentioned whole genome sequencing, microbial community metabolomics, and so on. We can specify what metabolite or nutrient we want to produce, and we can design a multi-species microbial ecology that will produce it, and we can do that based on specific inputs.

Bacteria in the wild almost never live alone. You never have one species of bacteria; you have multiple species of bacteria all working together in conjunction with other kinds of fungi, and so on, to produce lots of different kinds of metabolites. Now we have a much greater understanding of that multi-species microbial economy.

The way I like to think of it is, if you imagine Little House on the Prairie, and you’ve got families—settlers—going out into this wide-open space, and you’ve got 50 families in some state, they establish a town, and that town behaves in a certain way. The behavior of that town will change dramatically if you introduce one person that comes in and opens up a church, and now the behavior of the town changes. The behavior of that town will change dramatically if one person comes into town and opens up a casino. If you have a church and a casino, even though they represent only very minor components of the overall population, they create this incredibly complex interaction—metabolomics, consumption, behavior. You get complex inputs, complex outputs.

Up till the last 10 years, a lot of this stuff has just been so complicated, such a black box. We have a good understanding now—a much clearer understanding. So we can take side-stream products from food processing, we can take waste-stream products from food waste, and we can lean into precision fermentation, design communities of microbes, give them the feedstocks that we want, and we can get valuable nutrients out the other side.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (33:48)

What can we make?

Brendan Niemira  (33:50)

Well, if you want to make lactic acid, you want to make certain kinds of vitamins, you want to make certain kinds of proteins, you want to do conversions of things. There are a lot of things that are useful in the food industry. You can make surfactants, you can make flocculants. Flocculants are stuff that, if you’ve got a bunch of solids suspended in material, you add a flocculant, and it causes everything to clump together and drop out, so you get clean water out the other side.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (34:19)

So, to put a finer point on it, we can make both food materials and materials that help us process a variety of things, including our waste.

Brendan Niemira  (34:29)

Correct. Absolutely. Flocculants are used very extensively in wastewater production, where you’ve got a lot of suspended organic matter, or you’ve got a lot of other suspended material. You add in some flocculants, all that stuff clumps up, and it drops out, and that really simplifies the process of filtration and cleaning the water, so you can get clean water back into the environment.

From a food standpoint—stepping away from the wastewater stuff—let’s say that you’re producing beer, you’re producing wine, you’re producing yogurt, you’re producing some other kind of liquid product. You might add one of these ingredients to cause oil droplets to remain suspended, or to cause sediments to drop out, or to give you better colors, or to give you different kinds of nutrients, or different kinds of vitamin production. All of these things can be the result of precision fermentation, because we have that understanding of what the microbes are doing, what they’re eating, and what they’re producing.

There’s a lot of research that’s going into this right now to work out those molecular details, those metabolomics details, and the position is to scale it up and then put it through its paces. Let’s get that cost engineering analysis. Let’s scale it up; see what’s it going to cost, where the weak points are, where we need to improve. So that you can then feed into developing a business case around it, selling your product, and working on consumer acceptance to get stuff out in the real world.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (35:51)

Going back to simplification: what we’re talking about is that we have been farming as a species now for 25,000 years with macro-level cattle and products. Where we are moving now is micro-scale relationships with nature that allow us to produce our food and other forms of materials and supplies.

Brendan Niemira  (36:14)

Right. So in conventional agriculture, let’s be generous—there are 50 species of animals that we use in animal agriculture, and these animals are used to take things that we can’t eat and turn them into things that we can eat or things that we want to eat. You’ve got cows, you’ve got chickens, you’ve got hogs, you’ve got goats, sheep, and so on. But it’s a relatively short list.

If you’re going from conventional vertebrate animals to insects, there are thousands and thousands of species of insects, only a small handful of which have really been looked at for optimization. Each one is capable of metabolizing different sorts of things, they live in different kinds of communities. And when you then go to the microbial world, you’ve got millions of kinds of organisms that you can use, and if you look at the different kinds of microbial community combinations, the numbers scale incredibly—like trillions of different kinds of combinations of microbial communities that you can create and cultivate and use in these bioreactor kind of environments, each of which eats different things and produces different things.

The goal is always to produce food and nutrients and food processing materials that are safe, healthy, wholesome, available, and sustainable. When you start to lift your eyes up to the skies and see all the possibilities out there, it really becomes—I don’t want to say magical, because I’m a scientist—but it becomes amazing to think about all the things that we could do if we were able to lean into the kind of science that would allow us to take advantage of all these different things.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (38:02)

It is magical in the sense that Arthur C. Clarke meant it: any sufficiently advanced technology appears to be magic until it becomes normalized.

Brendan Niemira  (38:11)

Just imagine that you had some kind of a tank and you put in garbage and you get out gumdrops. Wow, that’s magic. Well, okay, obviously we’re oversimplifying, because there are all the various steps involved in that. But at IFT, what we’re trying to do is bring together all of the different food scientists and food technologists who have the knowledge that will allow us to do some of those things—to increase the food supply, make it safer, make it more wholesome, make it more available, and do it in a way that people can access and that they can have knowledge and confidence in using.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (38:50)

Another topic in the paper was cultivated meats, and this is something that we’ve had folks on the show talking about several times. In 2013, a burger grown in the lab cost about $300,000, and it’s under $40 today. We’re talking about meat that is coming out of a lab, not something processed to appear like meat. Where’s that technology realistically today? Because that number is 10 years old.

Brendan Niemira  (39:16)

It’s getting better. I don’t recall exactly what the latest numbers on that are—whether it’s gone down to $20 or $15 or where it is—but this is one of the big areas of technology that people are looking at. Arthur C. Clarke might have predicted this back in 1955, but actually, I believe it was Winston Churchill who predicted this. I’m trying to remember the quote, but he said something like, someday we’re going to be able to raise chicken legs without having to raise a whole chicken.

Are we there yet? Well, we’re not quite there yet, but there’s been a lot of work that’s been done on this. Cellular agriculture, now, to create meat cells, whether they’re from pork or beef or chicken or fish, to grow these out so that they look, taste, perform, and smell like—I’m not saying like the real thing, because they are the real thing, and this is ultimately what it is, but like conventional, traditional things that everybody is used to.

Part of the work that’s gone into it has been to show that, yeah, you can do this—you can produce these, and they look like a burger, tastes like a burger. But can you do it in a way that’s going to allow you to make that available to people, so that it’s not just a very, very billionaire niche novelty product? That’s part of the challenge, but I think that’s part of the challenge with any kind of food technology innovation.

Mitch, you start in the lab, and you begin with saying, well, is this even possible? And once you’ve demonstrated that it’s possible, then you start to develop that out, and you say, well, how do we lean into some of the engineering stuff to make it realistic, and realism falls in—what people will be willing to buy, from a cultural acceptability standpoint, from their expectation of what food is, how much it’s going to cost, how available it’s going to be, and what are the inputs necessary to create it? That’ll dictate a lot of the overall feel and the overall landscape in which these new products are going to operate.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (41:36)

It’s a data problem to a very great degree, and one of the areas the paper goes into in depth is how AI-driven supply chain modeling and various forms of traceability can perform as climate adaptation tools. Where are those technologies actually deployed today at commercial scale that you might be aware of? And do you have any evidence that they’re actually reducing emissions, reducing the overall impact of our food system on the planet?

Brendan Niemira  (42:00)

A lot of the AI tools—I can tell you what the AI tools are doing now, and probably by the time this show airs, they might have changed.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (42:09)

Obsolescence is an hourly thing today.

Brendan Niemira  (42:12)

AI tools are moving so fast. But AI is one of those areas where, if you want to know how much something costs, or how much water you’re using to produce it, or how much of an impact you’re having—being able to go into the data and ask sophisticated questions of complicated datasets is one of the things that AI is very, very good at. It does it quickly, so you can get to: what are the trends, what are the key points, what are the key pain points, where do we need to lean in and do more research and do better, so that we can get a better outcome on the back side.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (42:48)

So we’re just beginning in that process, along with the leaps that we’re taking in various forms of fermentation and cellular agriculture. Can you paint a picture of where you think the food system should be in 10 years in order for us to start to transition through the climate era?

Brendan Niemira  (43:06)

The food system should be more holistic. That, I think, is one of the things that will make a big difference in terms of our overall ability to respond to issues of sustainability. It encompasses everything that falls under that. Right now there are disparate areas of science and disparate areas of scientific inquiry that are a little bit isolated.

I like to make the joke: if you’ve got an apple on the tree and you’ve got a bacteria on that apple, it’s a plant pathology problem. But as soon as the apple falls from the tree—well, now it’s a food microbiology problem. You need to get the plant pathologist and the food microbiologist talking to each other so they have an understanding of the continuum. I think if we’re going to respond to these large, complicated problems, then we need to have a greater connection between different areas and different scientific disciplines, so that we can adopt and create that holistic approach.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (44:04)

Well, IFT is doing a lot of work to articulate that. You mentioned ift.org earlier. How do people follow your work? What do you recommend they do to keep track and keep at the cutting edge, so they understand these things as they evolve?

Brendan Niemira  (44:19)

Well, you can join IFT. That’s an easy one. If you go to ift.org, there’s membership information right there. We’re a great group of folks, very active and very involved in all kinds of different areas of food science and food technology. We make a big effort to publicize what we’re trying to do, the science that’s done, the research that we connect. When we have all the different areas—people working within the field of food science come to the meeting and they connect with us—academia, industry, and government members of IFT—when we connect them all together, we publish, like the white papers we’re talking about right now. We do press releases, we do commentary on different things, we engage in media responses, all kinds of stuff. Some of this is kind of hot-button issue of the day, and other times we comment on larger scientific issues—big landscape issues that are going to affect us now and tomorrow, and over the next 20 years.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (45:24)

Well, Brendan, thanks. This has been an eye-opening conversation, really interesting.

Brendan Niemira  (45:27)

Well, Mitch, I’ve had a lot of fun with it. I really appreciate your having me on the show.

Mitch Ratcliffe  (45:34)

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Brendan Niemira. He is Chief Science and Technology Officer at the Institute of Food Technologists, the Chicago-based scientific society that has connected food scientists across academia, government, and industry since 1939. You can learn more about IFT’s work and read that new white paper we discussed, Food Science & Technology Solutions for Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change, at ift.org.

Most of the climate fight in food is happening in the middle of the supply chain, where the public has almost no visibility, and the policy debate keeps looking somewhere else. Brendan described a three-legged stool for food safety—exclusion, containment, and eradication—noting that as the planet warms, exclusion gets harder. That’s because pathogens can travel further, persist longer, and show up in places they didn’t used to. That single observation reframes food safety as climate adaptation work. And it lands at exactly the moment when federal research capacity at agencies like the USDA Agricultural Research Service is being thinned out. Roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the food system, and the people best positioned to redesign safety and efficiency at the processing, packaging, and distribution layers of our food system are being asked to do more with less.

The first idea worth elevating from our conversation is the distinction that IFT keeps insisting on between food processing and food formulation. In other words, the question of what we should do to the ingredients, instead of what’s included in the ingredient list, is critical to the sustainability and health outcomes of what we eat. Brendan is right that the thumbs-up, thumbs-down approach we see in federal decisions these days may drive engagement, but it confuses policy.

The MAHA Commission’s framing treats processing intensity as the problem, and that collapses a category that includes both deep-fried snack cakes and shelf-stable beans, both ultra-formulated soda and pasteurized milk, into grossly simplified yes-no, us-versus-them choices. That’s not what we need right now.

The climate consequences matter. Many of the technologies that extend shelf life, cut food waste, and reduce cold-chain energy demand involve processing. If we regulate processing, treating it as a proxy for harm, we hobble some of the most useful tools we have for cutting the system’s environmental footprint and improving its safety. IFT’s response—to define nutritional quality by what the food does in the body, not by how it was made—is scientifically defensible. It is also, as Brendan acknowledged in his own way, complicated by the fact that IFT membership includes the companies whose products would be reclassified under any new rule.

The second idea I want to dig into for a moment is microbial agriculture as a structural shift in what farming means. Farming in 50 years will be as unrecognizable to us as today’s agricultural system would be to a farmer plucked from 1890, when 43% of Americans worked on farms. Humans had domesticated perhaps 50 animal species over 25,000 years of agriculture, and Brendan’s point is that precision fermentation, built on whole genome sequencing and metabolomics, opens up access to trillions of possible microbial community combinations. Precision fermentation can take side streams and waste streams from existing food processing and convert them into all sorts of things—dairy proteins, food ingredients, even in water treatment systems.

That’s a circular bioeconomy story, and one that all of you who’ve been listening for years are aware of. It aligns with the case made by my recent guest, Jasper Steinhausen, that sustainability should be a profitability lever, not just a cost center. We have the opportunity to invent entire new industries here, folks.

The third idea is one that we return to most often, and that’s holism—thinking in systems. The climate problem doesn’t respect the disciplinary boundaries that scientists observe every day. The IFT white paper’s call for AI-enabled supply chain modeling sits right at the center of this argument. That’s not because AI is magic, but because the food system data we rely on is fragmented across many actors who don’t currently talk to each other, and pulling that data into a coherent picture is the kind of work that modern LLMs are actually good at.

The critical issue here is that federal research cuts don’t just slow individual programs—they erode the connective tissue between disciplines, and the connective tissue is where climate adaptation has to happen. Innovation is the product of diverse solutions being combined in new ways, and the most unexpected connections often yield the greatest impact. So we need more cross-disciplinary discussion, not less.

The food system is being asked to feed 8 billion people under conditions that it wasn’t designed for, with less federal science capacity, a public conversation that mistakes processing for poison, and a set of emerging technologies that are scientifically ready but culturally challenging—as our discussion about insect protein showed.

So here’s the headline to remember from my conversation with Brendan Niemira: IFT is making the case that food science is climate science, and we’re going to be watching how that argument lands as the MAHA debate continues, and as the 2026 dietary guidelines evolve. Hopefully they won’t mutate too much.

If this episode gave you something to chew on, please share it with someone in your world to make new connections possible. And would you consider leaving a review of Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or any of the other purveyors of podcast goodness where you can listen to the show? You folks are the amplifiers that help spread more ideas to create less waste. And our archive of more than 550 episodes is there anytime you want to dig deeper.

Thanks, folks, for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.

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Sustainability In Your Ear: GoodPower’s Leah Qusba on Selling Clean Energy as Pocketbook Power

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In 2024, 91% of new large-scale renewable projects around the world made electricity for less money than any fossil-fuel option, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency. Solar power was 41% cheaper than the lowest-cost fossil fuel, and onshore wind was 53% cheaper. The technology that can lower energy bills, keep the grid stable, and create jobs is now the most affordable way to build power almost anywhere. So, here’s the big question our guest faces every day: if clean energy is this good and this affordable, why is it still so tough to get people to support it? Leah Qusba leads GoodPower, a nonprofit focused on strategic communications and research. For almost twenty years, it was known as Action for the Climate Emergency, but it changed its name during Climate Week 2025. Since Leah took over, the group has grown about ten times bigger, built a network of over 8,500 content creators who share facts about renewables, and started running live messaging tests through its Good Data Lab. The new name highlights that renewable power is good power, and the best way to win support is by showing how it affects people’s monthly bills. The decision to rebrand was based on data. Leah’s team learned that words like “climate” and “emergency” can shut down conversations in rural, conservative areas where most new wind and solar projects are built. GoodPower shifted its message to focus on jobs, community investment, and steady power bills.

Leah Qusba, CEO of GoodPower, is our guest on Sustainability In Your Ear.

GoodPower also works to fight anti-renewables disinformation, which Leah says spreads fastest in the first day or two after a grid emergency. When Winter Storm Fern knocked out power in more than 20 states in January, the organization had a few days’ notice and quickly got its creator network ready to “prebunk” the usual claim that renewables caused the blackouts. This strategy, based on the Debunking Handbook, starts with the truth, points out the false claim, and then repeats the truth to make it stick. GoodPower uses the same idea in its AI tools: CleanCast predicts where local fights over new projects might start so communities can get accurate information early, and TrueVoice spots AI-generated comments in public records. Still, Leah says the best messengers are neighbors, since people trust those who share their experiences. For instance, when Boulder City, Nevada’s Republican mayor, Joe Hardy, talks about how solar and storage helped his town’s budget, it connects with other conservative communities in a way ads can’t.

GoodPower’s network of creators shares clean-energy messages through car-repair, food, and gaming videos. Leah calls this the raisin bread theory: the regular content is the bread, and the renewables message is the raisin. For communities already dealing with climate impacts, she highlights groups like Extreme Weather Survivors, which gives wildfire and flood survivors a way to push for policy changes from the ground up.

To learn more, visit goodpower.org and follow Leah Qusba on LinkedIn, where she is active and easy to reach.

Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe   0:10

Hello! Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society. And I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today. Let’s talk about accelerating that shift to renewables in detail.

The technology to lower our energy bills, build a more secure grid, and create millions of jobs already exists. Renewables are now the cheapest and fastest power to deploy almost anywhere on the planet, so here’s the puzzle my guest today wrestles with every single day. If the solutions are this good and this affordable, why is it so hard to build public support for them?

Part of the answer is that we’re trying to make the case for sustainable technologies in an openly hostile environment. Federal climate policy has been rolled back, and there are coordinated disinformation campaigns ready to blame wind and solar within hours of any grid emergency, whether or not the facts support those accusations. And the social platforms where most people get their information will quietly bury anything labeled climate, handing it only to people who already agree that it’s a concern. The audiences you need to reach most never see your message about sustainability.

Leah Qusba has built a career breaking through the noise to reach audiences intent on climate progress. She’s the CEO of GoodPower, an organization you may have known until recently as Action for the Climate Emergency, or ACE. She’s led it for more than 15 years, growing it roughly tenfold into one of the sharpest media and research operations in the climate space, and she runs real experiments on what messaging actually changes behavior, working with thousands of content creators to carry the conversation to people the movement has never reached before. Her own path started along Wisconsin’s Fox River, in a stretch of water she played in as a kid that later became an EPA Superfund site before she finished high school.

We’re going to explore how to sell the benefits of clean energy when the word climate itself becomes a liability, and how you fight disinformation when a lie travels faster than the truth, and why Leah ultimately believes affordability, not alarm, is the door most people will actually walk through when asked about climate. So, what can we do to shift the climate conversation? Let’s find out after this brief commercial break.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Mitch Ratcliffe   2:41

Leah Qusba, welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. How are you doing today?

Leah Qusba   2:45

I’m doing great. How are you?

Mitch Ratcliffe   2:46

Well, I’m well, thanks for taking the time to talk with me. It’s always interesting to speak to somebody who’s been dedicated to climate awareness for so long. You grew up in Wisconsin’s Paper Valley, and a river you played in, the Fox, became an EPA Superfund site while you were in high school. How much of your work derives from the experience of having played in that river, which was polluted and needed a cleanup?

Leah Qusba   3:10

Yeah, I certainly didn’t know it at the time, growing up in small-town USA in northeastern Wisconsin. I think it has impacted me dramatically and greatly. I kind of look back — it’s over, you know, 25 to 30 years ago at this point. I look back at that time and think, wow, there’s nobody organizing people around that type of environmental disaster. People were angry, they felt powerless. It took over a decade, and then the EPA said, well, we did our best, we can’t really fully clean this up in terms of all the PCBs in the river. So I look back on that time, and I think it did set me on the path that I’m on today.

Mitch Ratcliffe   3:52

We know so much more about the world, and part of the experience of living by a river that turned out to be so polluted is your own recognition. How do you use that approach to storytelling to help other people make the leap to understand where we are with regard to the climate?

Leah Qusba   4:09

Well, I often think about my dad, and what’s interesting about my dad is he’s a staunch conservative — he believes climate change is not man-made — and he recently became a supporter of solar, not because of me, not because of his own daughter’s influence, but actually his HVAC guy has a side business doing rooftop solar, and it was that conversation that convinced my dad. So I think what I take away is: rural speaks to rural, conservative speaks to conservative, neighbor speaks to neighbor.

I think in an internet environment where people trust what’s on the internet less and less, and with the rise of artificial intelligence and related content, I think all we have left is really each other, and so we really leverage that. How do we find stories of communities that already have solar, wind, and batteries, for example, to demystify what these technologies are for a neighboring town, county, or state? It really works.

Mitch Ratcliffe   5:11

In September, you changed the name of the organization from Action for the Climate Emergency to GoodPower. What stopped working about the words climate emergency?

Leah Qusba   5:21

Yeah, I mean, I think as the years went on and we were using this brand, we don’t want to fall into traps where climate, decarbonization, and energy issues are sort of unfairly politicized as left versus right. When we say words like climate in a rural conservative community, that can be a non-starter. When we say things like emergency, do we fall into the trap of being climate alarmists, as we have been dubbed? There’s a different way — there’s a bigger-tent approach where, depending on the audience you’re speaking to, there’s different ways in to showing the economic promise of the energy transition.

Right, what do communities get? Jobs, community investment, long-term leases for farmers and landowners that are, you know, nervous private equity is coming to buy their land for an Amazon logistics warehouse or a data center or something like that. So I think for us, our brand wasn’t working for enough of the American people, especially where, you know, ground zero for the energy transition happens to be rural red America, where a lot of this infrastructure needs to be built and is being built.

So we did it because we wanted a bigger tent that more people could get under and feel a sense of belonging — that, wow, I see something for me in the energy transition. I see something for me in what community benefits I could potentially reap from decarbonized power being built in my town or community. So it was really about creating that bigger tent for more people to get under.

Mitch Ratcliffe   6:51

Well, your dad’s experience is recognizing that there’s economic opportunity in advanced technology. Funny thing, it wakes you up to the opportunity, but it doesn’t address the fact that we’re being told that there’s a crisis all the time, and one of the issues that I seem to run into a lot is that even within the climate community there are very rigid differences of opinion about where to focus our effort and investment. How has the movement torn itself apart to a degree, even as it establishes real credibility because of the fact of the climate changing so rapidly?

Leah Qusba   7:25

I mean, when you just break it down to scientific terms, right? Climate change happens very slowly, and then all at once, I think, is the famous quote, right? How did I go broke? It started slowly, and then all at once. I think for us, what we have learned — we’ve been in business for about 18 years, and I’ve been at GoodPower for about 17 of those years — the number one voting issue, cycle after cycle, and now even young people in 2024, in the last presidential, even young people rated the economy as number one. Usually they’re voting on values issues, you know, racial justice and all sorts of other things. They rated the economy. So the economy isn’t working for most people. Nearly 70% of us in the US live paycheck to paycheck.

So we really, at GoodPower, recognize that people want immediate change. How are my energy bills going to go down? Why are prices at the gas pump going up and down like the stock market? Why aren’t they more predictable? The answer: homegrown power — solar, wind, batteries. It’s not exposed to global commodity risks like oil and gas, right? There’s no far-off war that is going to make the cost of the wind and the sun, which happen to be free — there is no fuel cost — it’s not going to make those go up and down in that way.

So I think it’s about connecting the everyday experiences and things people are constantly worried about. How am I going to keep my job? Am I going to be laid off? Will I be able to afford groceries this week? My energy bill doubled in the last year, and there’s no sight. How do we look at the energy transition as unlocking this generational economic opportunity, right? This potential economic renaissance for the middle class. It’s not just saving money and having more predictability and control and autonomy around one’s bills. It’s also about the wealth regenerating and the economic investment.

I’m from a rural community. These communities are emptying out. Young people are leaving. They need investment. They need new schools, new infrastructure, new roads. Farmers are struggling — hundreds close every year in the US. Well, great: let’s farm 300 acres of solar, along with my 3,000 acres of soybeans and corn. When I have a rough year, the solar still pays the bill. So I think there’s incredible economic potential here, and that hasn’t really been communicated effectively.

Mitch Ratcliffe   9:39

You argue that renewable power is good power, but at the same time, as you just pointed out, our energy bills are going through the roof. Are you arguing for truly distributed energy generation, or are you saying that there is a path to a collectively owned — whatever form that takes — infrastructure that allows us to really meet the electrical demands of the era we’re entering?

Leah Qusba   10:00

I think that’s a false choice. Our position is all of it. We are huge proponents of distributed energy resources, dispatchable power, some of the virtual power plant policies and investments that we’ve seen. We’re huge proponents of utility-scale and community-level renewable projects. We think battery energy storage — when you pair that, right, that’s the invention of the battery — is how we get to more reliable power. So all of it. I think we need all of it.

I think, you know, global energy volatility is really a hidden tax on American families that people are really exhausted having to pay, in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis where everything else is going up — healthcare, housing, groceries. When energy goes up, by the way, everything else goes up too. So I think it’s the predictability, it’s having more control and not being at the whims of these sort of global markets and importing that volatility into people’s lives that already feel chaotic.

Mitch Ratcliffe   10:59

And yet we need to press through the capital investment phase of this with determination, and it seems like the determination is being shaken by, let’s say, people at the White House. How do you tell a story in the face of such rigorous and often completely misleading responses from the other side of the political argument?

Leah Qusba   11:20

Well, I think the American people are pretty smart. Only 40% of Republicans actually approve of their own president’s energy policies right now. That’s from GoodPower’s own national poll we did with the University of Chicago back in mid-March. So there’s extremely low approval. People understand — they feel it. You have to fill your gas tank up, right, probably once, maybe twice a week. If you’re going on vacation, a lot more than that. You have to pay that energy bill and open it up, or go online and pay it every month. So it’s in your face constantly. Nobody’s seeing change, and when you have only 40% of your own party approving your energy policies and your agenda, that’s pretty abysmal.

So I think, from my perspective, when we look at the sort of all-of-government approach to kill renewables, we’re choosing energy winners and losers, and Americans are left kind of holding the bill. It’s simple economics 101 here — supply and demand. If we’re restricting the fastest, most affordable electrons from coming online, which happen to be from solar, storage, and wind right now, we’re going to drive up bills. I mean, my 11-year-old daughter would understand the economics of that.

Mitch Ratcliffe   12:28

AI is going to play a big part in how we ultimately tell the story, and part of the solution in terms of how we optimize everything that we do — simply because we have visibility into how things work in ways we would never have been able to pre-AI. How do you integrate that part of the story, that some of this investment is necessary to develop the intelligence that is going to help us untangle the crisis that we face?

Leah Qusba   12:53

I think the stark reality is that data centers are highly unpopular right now, and land use in general — land use projects across the country are really facing increasing public opposition. I am seeing some really bright lights within the news cycle around land-use development that is being done very responsibly, transparently, in an innovative way. I think about some of the Google data center announcements recently in the MISO region, where they’re looking creatively at how do we get electrons through virtual power plants, how do we invest in infrastructure, how do we invest in community benefits, how do we procure clean electrons to power our digital infrastructure. So I think there are some really good actors out there lifting up those stories where these developments are happening in a very positive way.

I think we can look to the utility-scale renewable energy sector — I mean, this is a lot of GoodPower’s work — but just telling the stories: people have reaped enormous benefits and are very happy with this infrastructure when it’s done in the right way, and it’s transparent, and it’s with stakeholder input. I think there’s a way to do land use that can be really uplifting to communities, but getting their input and involving them as stakeholders, I think, is absolutely essential.

I think the other piece of the story that we forget: big tech, right — technology has been the number one global procurer of decarbonized electrons on planet Earth for the last 15 years. So in other words, the growth of the renewable energy sector has been commensurate with the growth and advancement in the sort of digital revolution and technology. So again, there’s a right way to do it, and if we can uplift stories of where the community is on board with this infrastructure — because they’ve been consulted and they’ve gotten to weigh in, and they’re really getting a good deal out of it — I think the more we can do that, the better off we’ll be.

Mitch Ratcliffe   14:47

On the other hand, AI is also part of the problem, because it is used by algorithms to direct people away from the issue. You’ve said that when you mention climate in a video, it immediately gets relegated to a pile of links to people who already agree. In other words, we’re talking to the converted. How do you articulate that to somebody who is focused on the concerns they have about their community — particularly a rural community, where I live in one as well — when talking about the need for the investment in electrification and AI, which is also potentially part of the problem that we face in terms of being relegated to pools of people who agree and never get the opportunity to evangelize to others?

Leah Qusba   15:28

We don’t say anything to rural communities. We let rural communities talk to each other, so that’s what we enable. We basically find stories that are under-told and under-platformed. For example, here’s a farmer in rural Oklahoma, in western Oklahoma. They’ve had wind on their land for 20 years, put their kids through college. They were able to keep their generational farm that was handed down to them for six generations, and they wouldn’t have been able to keep it without the wind industry, right? So that could be very convincing to another farmer who’s facing closure in a neighboring plains state, or even within the Midwest generally.

So brands, I think, need to say less. I think what we need to do more of is find and mine those stories where the projects were built responsibly, the land-use development was done in a way that enriched the community and, you know, consulted the community. How do we find those stories? We’ve produced hundreds of these now over the last five years, all over the United States, all over Brazil, the UK, right, where we were trying to really build positivity and social permission and social acceptance of this infrastructure. The stories are all out there, and it’s just about platforming and telling them and breaking through when we see this news cycle that has been so anti-renewable from this particular administration. This is the counterbalance. Just go and ask the communities, and they’ll tell you how they feel about this infrastructure.

Mitch Ratcliffe   16:55

Can you give an example of a story that, for lack of a better word, sells the idea of economic prosperity built on renewables?

Leah Qusba   17:03

Yeah, I mean, really authentic, genuine stories. I’m thinking of a story from Mayor Joe Hardy in Boulder City, Nevada. Mayor Hardy is a Republican. He’s a staunch conservative. His story is about how economically secure Boulder City, Nevada, is for the next 25 years. He talks about solar and storage. He takes us out to the fields and shows us what that looks like, and that the community has no economic worries in terms of property tax revenue, and where those revenues are going, and how it’s investing in community infrastructure, schools, etc.

I think of another story in Oklahoma, of a school superintendent who talks about how the community benefit agreement that they signed with this wind developer built a new school, and what that means for children in a community that has not seen a lot of investment over the last few decades. And then we have countless stories of farmers, landowners, neighbors to these projects who talk about the community benefits agreements — what’s in them: long-term leases, new infrastructure, donations of emergency management vehicles, police cars, fire trucks.

And again, when you position the community as a stakeholder and it’s transparent and you consult them, we can strike deals here that really work for the industry and for building decarbonized power, and that really work for people in the communities who feel like, “Wow, I’m being invested in, I’m not being extracted from.” We’re not replicating those systems of extraction; we’re investing in building something together. I think that’s really special.

Mitch Ratcliffe   18:35

Is there a risk in the movement swinging so hard toward pocketbook messaging that it no longer talks about climate, or clean in contrast to the dirty systems — or is that exactly the point?

Leah Qusba   18:45

I also think this is a false question, because we do talk about climate. It’s important to talk about climate. 8% of voters under 35 rated climate as their number one issue in 2024. So a front-door climate message, and increasing the awareness and the pie — you know, the slice of people who are really motivated by a climate message that’s front-door — I think there is a huge audience out there. We speak to that audience.

I think the point is, this is not a one-size-fits-all solution, right? The internet and social media are increasingly fractured. Audiences are tribalized. Knowing what platform you’re on and who you’re speaking to — once you know that information, you should have a very sophisticated segmented strategy. How do we connect audience to messenger and message? If you’re trying to have a silver bullet, sort of, you know, one campaign to rule them all, I think that’s a recipe for failure, and in fact you can have polarizing effects. You can make people feel less inclined to support energy and climate policies that are going to drive forward a decarbonized economy by not having the right messenger, or even a polarizing messenger that could make them more entrenched in that opinion. So I think you can do more harm than good in some cases.

I think having empathy — whether you’re talking to somebody on the left side of the ideological spectrum or the right side of the ideological spectrum, or somewhere in between — really knowing who those people are and what moves them and what they’re about, and really trying to seek to understand them and not label them as something other, or “these are not my people.” I kind of hear a lot of that sometimes. Everybody’s our people. If you’re a person, you’re our people. And I think there’s a way to speak to literally anybody about these issues in a way that’s going to land with them, and that’s really the science of communication.

Mitch Ratcliffe   20:37

To be a people person takes real work, especially when you’re telling stories. There’s a lot to unpack in this strategy. Let’s take a quick commercial break and come back to continue this fascinating discussion. Stay tuned, folks.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Now, let’s continue the conversation with Leah Qusba. She is CEO of GoodPower, which is a strategic communications nonprofit working to highlight the need for and benefits of renewable energy. Leah, how do you see the world of storytelling changing because we have the tools that AI unlocks to target and reach people better? Or are we going to be overwhelmed by misinformation? I’m just — where should we set the bar in our expectations about the future of storytelling?

Leah Qusba   21:25

What a deep and complex and fascinating question. So let me start with the platforms themselves, where people are now using Claude and ChatGPT and other AI platforms almost as Google search platforms, right? So they’re looking for information. So I think one way that we’re using these tools is really, how do we set the terms of what information comes up when people are searching around: is solar good or bad? You know, will this raise my bills, lower my bills? Right, so it’s basically like SEO, but for these AI platforms — it’s called AEO and GEO. So how do you do search optimization and get the facts, not the fiction, to pop up in search results? So we do some of that work, going to the source of when people are searching, what information are they getting.

I think then, you know, we think about AI as a technology when it’s really a set of complementary capabilities, right? We’ve got automation — how do we automate the tedious and repetitive things that humans don’t want to do, so we can focus on higher-level creative work? Predictive — right, how do we forecast where siting and permitting battles are going to be through 2030 around clean energy projects, or where opposition might be forming? So how do we predict the future? And then we’re all familiar with the generative capabilities around doing better analysis and communications and content creation, etc. And the way we look at these capabilities at GoodPower, it’s less about a single piece of technology; it’s about leveraging these capabilities to build custom models. So I can walk you through a few pieces of those technologies that we’ve sort of housed.

One product is called CleanCast, and this is a piece of predictive, AI-enabled technology. It helps us forecast where the renewable energy industry might build their projects, so it pipes in public opinion research from local counties, it pipes in the governmental, environmental, and regulatory constraints that might exist. Are there existing bans and moratoria? How does that state do permitting? Does it do it at the county level through a county commission, or is it a state process through a PUC or PSC? So all sorts of intelligence to help us predict: where are these projects going to be built? What’s the prime location? Can we get there first and inoculate the public to disinformation? Can we make them resilient and less vulnerable to disinformation?

The disinformation we see out there is astounding. There was a disinformation cluster last week trying to scare potato farmers, saying Frito-Lay won’t buy your potatoes if you host solar on your land, because they’ll have glass shards in them — your potatoes will have glass inside from the solar panels. We traced this disinformation to some potato trade industry associations that are funded predominantly by the fertilizer industry, and fertilizer is petrochemicals, right? So if you follow the money — how do we anticipate where disinformation or opposition is going to be? Where is the industry going, and how do we get there first? Generally, people remember what they hear first, right? So before the public understanding hardens around the disinformation, how do we get there first? So that’s an example of one product. I have a few more I could share with you as well.

Mitch Ratcliffe   24:41

Well, you also have a small army in what you call the Creator Collective — 8,500 creators, 350 to 400 million followers in food and fashion and gaming and all the things that creators do. How does the sustainability message travel through a network like that? Maybe the message begins with a car influencer, then you run into it in a fashion commentary as well.

Leah Qusba   25:03

Well, I think, going back to your previous question around the tribalization problem on social media — like, how do we break through when the algorithms just sort us into the, you know, left-of-center green climate bucket? We don’t want to be sorted into that bucket. So creator marketing is a way to get around that. We don’t generally lead with a sustainability message with everyone. We lead with the message we think is going to work with that audience.

So if we’re trying to reach a bunch of car bros or commuters that really could save thousands of dollars annually from switching to an EV — maybe they live in a rural commuter town, they drive to the city for work — we want to hire a bunch of car bros, right, creators that are talking about fixing cars, and they slip EV messaging into their regular content streams that are more entertaining for their audience. We call it the raisin bread theory, where most of the content stays the bread, and you’re sprinkling in the raisins.

You could apply this to any one of these content verticals. If we’re talking about regenerative agriculture and getting toxic chemicals out of our food supply, MAHA moms are a great example — suburban white women in the MAHA movement, right? We want to find a bunch of them, or doctors and nurses who are really universally credible messengers who talk about health content. So depending on the audience and the campaign’s goals, we look into that community and we decide: okay, who do we want to engage for this campaign, and who’s the right credible messenger for the audience?

Mitch Ratcliffe   26:26

So would you describe that as: you coordinate and plan a sequence of messages? Or is this something that continues to happen organically based on your urging?

Leah Qusba   26:35

We do both. We do long-term campaigns that are multi-year, sort of patient-capital investments to changing an entire community’s way that they think about these technologies, where maybe there was a huge gap in understanding. One example would be: over 55% of Americans say they’ve never or rarely even heard about battery energy storage. They don’t know what it is. Great — it’s a fantastic opportunity to provide some baseline education to a huge group of people, where these projects are probably going to be built. We can get there first, before any disinformation gets out around these projects.

Then we have things that are more reactive and tied to the news cycle. So, almost two decades I’ve been in this work, and we keep losing during these rapid-response, sort of high-attention moments. The wildfires in LA are a really great example from last January, and we actually lost that narrative — DEI was blamed, that we were too busy with DEI in California to, you know, do proper forest management. It was ridiculous, but when you looked online and did advanced social listening analysis of the narrative, there were more mentions where the disinformation around DEI took over the conversation, instead of “hey, climate change is making these disasters more costly, more dangerous, and by the way, insurers are leaving the market in California.” Who’s holding the bag for that? It’s not the polluters that caused the problem; it’s the ratepayers, the premium holders that live in that state. So how do we make those connections? So there’s both a rapid-response element where we’re gathering this intelligence from the news cycle and responding, and then there’s more long-term strategies that we’re building as well.

Mitch Ratcliffe   28:14

Talk a little about the rapid response. In January, Winter Storm Fern caused up to $6.7 billion in damage, and there were a lot of disinformation initiatives around that storm almost immediately, and they were blaming wind and solar for the grid not having stayed as resilient as it needed to be, ignoring the fact that it’s an ancient grid. What does an effective, fast counter-messaging effort look like? How do you move the truth at the speed of a lie when lies are propagating so quickly?

Leah Qusba   28:46

We actually did a rapid-response activation with our creator community that last weekend in January — I remember that vividly — and because Winter Storm Fern was a forecasted storm, we actually had a few days of lead time, so it wasn’t a same-day activation. We could plan and really activate our community.

So what we did: we used the best practices — sort of the gold standard for inoculation, or prebunking, is another way you can name it. It’s to prepare the audience for disinformation they might see, so that when they see it, it bounces off of them instead of sinks into them. So we follow the Debunking Handbook, and there’s a way to do it where you’re not reinforcing the disinformation. There’s a huge risk in social science of actually reinforcing the lie if you don’t do it in the right way, in terms of introducing the truth, talking about the disinformation, and ending with the truth. We call it the truth sandwich.

So we did that. We activated a couple dozen creators who got millions of views on their content, basically saying, look, the lights are going to go out because of this storm. It’s affecting over 20 states. It’s happening this weekend. If you see blaming or scapegoating — that, oh, the power went out because of those unreliable renewables — don’t be fooled, that’s not the reason. It’s actually inter-regional transmission in our aging grid, and literally frozen coal and gas supply.

And we can look back — we had people who went through Winter Storm Uri. We had some Texas moms who were in our rapid-response creator community that could talk about their own experience. Oh, the same thing: Governor Abbott actually said disinformation on national television in Texas, saying, “Oh, those frozen wind turbines, that’s why the lights went out.” So we actually had people from Winter Storm Uri, who went through that in ’21, that were part of this collection of creators that were activated and were able to speak to their own experience — that, oh, every time there’s extreme weather and the lights go out, renewables are scapegoated. Don’t be fooled, that’s not what it is, it’s this. And so it was very effective.

Mitch Ratcliffe   30:45

Now, you do a lot of randomized trials of different kinds of messaging, and I’m wondering if there’s an example of something that you didn’t expect to work but really did when you put it in the market — or conversely, something you thought was a surefire win that didn’t work at all.

Leah Qusba   30:59

You know what was surprising? We saw a speech that was televised on the Senate floor with Senator Brian Schatz from Hawaii. He was giving a speech on the Senate floor around how the Trump administration’s policies to block renewable energy were driving up the cost of electricity and utility bills for Americans, and that that will continue to happen. We said, wow, this is great — most people in our testing think Congress isn’t talking about these issues. So we said, why don’t we give this speech to our creators, have them clip it up and add some commentary to it, and we’ll have a bunch of them share it. And then we’ll do a randomized control trial, where the treatment audience saw the content — one of the pieces of creator content — and the control group saw nothing, or a placebo. Let’s see how this works.

And our research question was: does this help Democrats, or does it help Republicans? Like, what happens when we have people in Congress talking about this? And it turns out not only was it extremely effective at solidifying the idea that these policies to block renewables from being built are driving up bills — so it was very effective at education and awareness — it was very bad for the Republican party generally. Eleven points we were able to get in the treatment group on disfavor for how Republicans were handling energy policy and utility issues. So we found that to be fascinating. We didn’t think a single exposure of a speech of somebody in Congress talking about these issues would be that effective, or have that outsized of an impact.

Mitch Ratcliffe   32:27

One of the things I noted: you started off focused primarily on youth climate education, but as you pivot toward everyone’s energy bill — which is a very dinner-table kind of 30s-and-40s, you-got-kids, you-got-to-think-about-this-stuff kind of problem — how do you stay relevant to youth who continue to grow up into what they can see plainly is a crisis, but that is increasingly being cast as a pocketbook issue?

Leah Qusba   32:53

I think what’s fascinating, and the unique part of this story, is that I’ve been at GoodPower almost the entire time, so many of the young people I personally worked with in high school are now into their 30s. They’re working for social impact investors, they’re working at the EPA, they’re working for big foundations, some are working for hyperscalers and AI companies, and what’s fascinating is they’re taking those values around these issues into their professional lives.

I think, you know, this idea of kind of growing up and maturing within the movement — and I think post-COVID, when we see how COVID really affected the youth movement in general, and college campus organizing: nobody was in person, and you kind of got to be in person to do organizing, to build those relationships and pass the baton to underclassmen, etc. So I think, for us, seeing some of these young people mature themselves into the professional working world — this generation has now permeated the private sector, the public sector, and they’ve carried this sort of generational youth climate movement, sparked by Sunrise, you know, sparked by our organization, Power Shift Network. They have a whole new view, I think, that they’re bringing into corporate America right now, around their values and around how much they prioritize climate and energy policies that make sense.

I think they’re also living in a world where they can’t attain the same things their parents did financially. They can’t own a home, they can’t afford to buy a car, or even move out of their parents’ house. So I think our messaging around the economy — I think it works for young people that have kind of grown up in this movement and are very angry, like most Americans are, around this cost-of-living crisis.

Mitch Ratcliffe   34:37

The number of jobs represented by the capital that is being held in abeyance because of the misinformation must be incredibly frustrating for younger people. I mean, we can see the explosion of economic opportunity that would happen — it might look more like China, for instance. I was reading your 2030 plan; you’re leaning into AI and product development and breakthrough technology, and I’m wondering what those breakthrough technologies that you think are most important to understanding where we can go might be.

Leah Qusba   35:07

I think geothermal is really fascinating. Of course, anything that is zero carbon, I think, is really interesting to our organization when we think about the climate problem and decarbonizing the global economy. I think it’s a very nascent technology, so there’s some fair criticism there, but I would say uniquely it has this bipartisan support because it uses the same rigging and tools and equipment and skills as the fossil fuel industry, right — oil and gas and fracking workers. So I think there’s incredible bipartisan support as well, and I think as these technologies mature, we’ll be in a front-row seat, kind of looking and seeing how these develop and mature over time.

When we think about artificial intelligence tools, we think about it in a bit of a different way. I think one pervasive issue we’re seeing right now is AI manipulation and fabricated opposition in local siting — so AI-generated comments flooding decision-makers, and they don’t know what’s real and who’s real. So we built a product for that called TrueVoice that separates authentic local input from AI-manufactured opposition. We’re going to give it to community stakeholders, county commissioners, public service commissioners, the developers — everybody deserves to know: okay, what’s the probability that there was AI manipulation on this docket, and now how much do we weigh this? Maybe it’ll create new systems of what we prioritize and how we gather community input. Maybe there’ll be a premium on in-person hearings and showing up, you know, and reinvesting in local organizing.

So I think our use of these tools is really around identifying the cracks that could become fissures that could become huge cliffs for the work that we do in our pathway to accelerating decarbonization — and how do we fit within those, and how do we problem-solve and deliver solutions that don’t just solve our own problems at GoodPower, but sort of solve big, big systemic, sectoral problems.

Mitch Ratcliffe   37:04

As you think about where we are right now, and everything you just said in the context of what we’re looking toward in terms of the world we want to build — what are you most hopeful about right now?

Leah Qusba   37:13

Well, I think the market forces, much to President Trump’s chagrin, are just too strong to stop the industry. You know, we have a deadline coming up on July 4, where the PTC and ITC — right, if you haven’t begun substantial construction, and now this is being litigated, or this 5% test, you know, have you spent 5% of the project budget — you will not be eligible for the PTC and ITC, these important tax credits that make these projects more lucrative and more profitable and more desirable from a financial investment perspective.

But when you look at the impacts of this sort of arbitrary deadline that we’re all racing toward — yes, Rhodium Group says, you know, the industry is going to take a hit, and a lot fewer projects will be built, there’ll be more consolidation — but the industry is too mature, and decarbonized power is too attractive and affordable and clean and just desirable and homegrown and stable and secure. There’s just too many good things, I think, wrapped up in decarbonized power to stop it.

I think the same is true for electric transportation. If we look to the global south — we work in the global south and non-OECD economies — where you see these two-wheelers and people buying electric vehicles in droves, because they don’t want to import this volatility of the global oil market into their households either. We look to food and agriculture, the MAHA movement of regenerative agriculture, the best carbon capture solution nature offers. People don’t want poison in their food, and we’re seeing a movement around that, and we’re seeing people get very exhausted and disgusted with, you know, the administration’s actions with Monsanto recently.

And so I think there is too much momentum for any one person or one administration to stop what’s happening right now. Can we throw roadblocks? Can we create friction? Can we run interference? Of course. We see our role as removing those bottlenecks, and kind of the counterbalance to that. So I think that gives me hope. The question is, how much time will it take? Time is our greatest enemy, and if we can save time, I think that’s the point. That’s where we avoid the worst consequences, and we seize the most opportunity. So how do we save time?

Mitch Ratcliffe   39:22

How does the adaptation story fit into what you’re doing today? Obviously, we’re going to need to prepare for this.

Leah Qusba   39:28

I think there are fantastic organizations out there working more on adaptation, disaster relief, mutual aid — community-based organizations that are doing a lot of that work. I think it’s hugely, hugely important. We’re going to need to figure out how to live and thrive and support people. The stories out of New Orleans, you know — hey, people have to move; this is going to be us; we’re going to lose 60 miles inland, right? So it has to happen. That’s not work that GoodPower is leading.

There’s a group of organizations, and also environmental disaster survivors. Extreme Weather Survivors is a great organization led by a dear friend of mine named Sierra Kos. They’re doing incredible work to really platform disaster survivors and what it’s like to live through wildfires, lose everything, lose your insurance — what does it look like to be on the front lines of these climate consequences, and how do we really tell those stories and use them, I think, as a warning signal, but also as an education tool to move local, state, and federal policies further toward supporting people.

I think the last thing I’ll say is some of the insurance subrogation laws that are being proposed in Rhode Island and New York, California, Hawaii. These are some of the leadership states saying, wait a second, polluters caused this knowingly for four decades — why are my constituents being left holding the bag? Why are they footing the bill when this industry was complicit? There’s actually a huge state policy movement right now called insurance subrogation, where insurance companies can actually go and make the industry pay for this and clean up — have a superfund, basically, where these companies pay into it, and when these disasters happen, they have to help clean it up, and that bill should not go necessarily to the community or the homeowner. And the insurance companies, too, I think, always get the blame and the ire, but as this continues to happen, that market is going to be more and more difficult over time. So I think having a solution where those most responsible and complicit with driving this situation are also going to be helping to pay for it.

Mitch Ratcliffe   41:46

Leah, thanks so much for this incredibly inspiring conversation. How can folks keep track of what GoodPower is up to?

Leah Qusba   41:52

Oh, good. Go to goodpower.org. We’d love to hear from you. You can contact us, you can reach me on LinkedIn, where I’m active as well, and we’d love to be in touch. Thanks for having me.

Mitch Ratcliffe   42:02

Thank you very much for spending time with us today.

Leah Qusba   42:04

Take care.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Mitch Ratcliffe   42:11

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Leah Qusba. She’s CEO of GoodPower, the climate and media research organization known until recently as Action for the Climate Emergency, and you can learn more about Leah and her team’s work at goodpower.org. GoodPower is all one word, no space, no dash — goodpower.org.

Let’s consider what it means when an organization that spent 18 years with the words climate emergency in its name concludes those words themselves have become an obstacle to connecting with an audience. Now, this was a data-driven decision. Only 8% of voters under 35 rated climate as their top issue in 2024, and young people ranked the economy first and most important. And that’s the movement’s critical base. If it’s to transform this economy, affordability is what people — especially young people, who want to buy their first home, want to buy their first EV, or would like to be able to put their kids through school. Those folks are the ones who are going to make the change that we’re talking about, who are going to vote — both with their wallet and at the ballot box — for a new world. GoodPower’s rebrand is a bet that the movement can meet them at the crossroads of economics and sustainability.

Leah accurately described global energy volatility as a hidden tax on American families. Every far-off war and commodity swing shows up in the utility bill and at the pump, while wind and sun carry no fuel costs at all. There’s only the capital investment involved in building the solar and wind systems in the first place; then you get free power. But with oil, those taxes are effectively paid to companies, not governments. And as we heard in last week’s interview with Shareholder Democracy’s Gabriel Grant, shareholders have not yet leveraged their voting power to exert control over the companies whose stocks they own, and those companies are ultimately accountable to those shareholders.

When you see the problem through the lens of the Trump administration’s hypocritical approach to market competition, in which they suppress emerging technology, the renewables argument becomes simple supply-and-demand mathematics. The fastest, cheapest form of energy is being blocked from coming to market, and the result is rising rates rather than economic resilience. This isn’t the proverbial 500-miles-per-gallon carburetor purportedly suppressed by the oil industry in the 1970s. This is a real technology ready to reduce the cost of living while doing immense good for the environment, and people see this. GoodPower’s polling with the University of Chicago found just 40% of Republicans approve of their party’s current energy policy.

There’s a real tension as we continue to reinvent the economy, and Leah’s decision to lean entirely on pocketbook messaging is a clear path to building support for solar, wind, geothermal, and other renewables, which will only become more plentiful, not run dry, over the next century, like fossil fuels ultimately will. Leah’s answer is audience segmentation: one message — a front-door climate message — for the audience that wants one, the people who are already convinced and who want to share that message; and on the other side, economics-based messaging for everyone else. The messenger now matters more than the message, and in an era of influencers, this really comes through bright and clear.

Leah’s father, a conservative who doubts human-caused climate change, went solar because his HVAC contractor made the case — not his daughter, who runs one of the country’s largest climate communication shops, but an HVAC contractor. As Leah said, rural speaks to rural, neighbor speaks to neighbor, and GoodPower has operationalized that instinct at scale. They have a creator collective of more than 8,500 content makers with a combined audience in the hundreds of millions, and they’re slipping what Leah calls raisins of clean energy content into the bread of car videos, food channels, and gaming streams. And they measure it. That’s a discipline that separates persuasion from wishful thinking. What you can measure, you can change. It remains too rare in a movement that too often assumes its urgent warnings will carry the day by themselves.

The last idea to revisit is a leading indicator, and that is that artificial intelligence has become the new front line of the information fight, on both sides of the aisle.

Mitch Ratcliffe   46:29

People now ask Claude and ChatGPT whether solar will raise their electric bills, so GoodPower practices answer engine optimization to make sure accurate information surfaces in the first AI response. Its CleanCast tool predicts where siting battles over solar installations, wind installations, and so forth will erupt, so that developers can inoculate communities before disinformation arrives — like the recent industry-funded campaign that told potato farmers that solar panels would result in glass shards in their crops. Another tool that GoodPower has come up with, the TrueVoice tool, launching now, separates authentic public comments from AI-manufactured opposition flooding county permitting dockets and congressional mailboxes.

So one of the good things about AI, at least, is that it allows us to cut through a lot of the noise that we’re being flooded with. But look, this is an arms race, and Leah is candid about the tools being young. These are nascent movements and a nascent set of technologies we’re building on. But the prebunking playbook worked with Winter Storm Fern in January, when creators reached millions with the truth about the aging grid before the wind-turbine scapegoating could harden into what would be perceived as truth by many people. There’s a clear strategic method evolving in real time, and we will keep tracking that race for the American mind here on Sustainability In Your Ear.

Hey, look, if today’s conversation was useful to you, could you pass it along? Sharing an episode with a friend or leaving a review on your favorite podcast website is a great way to get the word out there, because folks, you are the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste. And you can tell folks they can find more than 560 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear at Earth911.com/podcast, or you can check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness you prefer.

Thanks for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and of course, let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.

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Earth911 Inspiration: Be a Mountain or Lean on One

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This week’s quote is a Somali proverb: “Be a mountain or lean on one.”

Earth911 inspirations. Post them, share your desire to help people think of the planet first, every day. Click to get a larger image.

"Be a mountain or lean on one." --Somali proverb

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Green Living

8 Best Ethical & Sustainable Flats That Are Effortlessly Chic

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Ballet flats have long been a staple in my wardrobe, but in the past few years have experienced a significant resurgence — and for good reason. The right pair can be practical, versatile, and oh so chic through days at work, with family, or out for the evening. But finding that “just right” set that’s well-crafted and sustainably made can be a whole other story. That’s why this sustainable flats guide exists.

Comfort, style, sustainability, and longevity are a lot to ask in a shoe, but I don’t believe it’s too much. It just takes some extra digging. And thankfully, I’ve done that digging for you. Because I get it! I want a flat that looks beautiful. I want a flat that’s made responsibly in line with my values. I want a shoe I can actually wear for my life. And I want that shoe to be worth the investment — it has to last. That’s why I vetted through dozens of brands to create this curated list of flats.

What Makes a Flat More Sustainable?

Material Sourcing

Footwear is a tricky category when it comes to sustainable fashion because we ask a lot of our shoes. We wear them in rain or sunshine, paved paths and cobblestone, day in and day out for years. And through it all, they have to remain beautiful. Because when they’re unwearable, there’s not much left to do with them: there is no viable footwear recycling today. Anywhere that calls it “shoe recycling” is really repurposing that footwear. But once it can no longer be worn, it’s simply trash.

In other words, our shoes need to be incredibly durable, even though the most durable materials don’t always come with the lightest footprint. In footwear, when we talk about durability, we usually rely on leather or high-performance synthetic materials. Leather can hold up with many years of wear, getting more beautiful with wear, and is easy to repair when needed. Synthetic materials are also durable, particularly for withstanding the elements like snow and rain.

But sourcing these materials conventionally is highly polluting — so how can we source these materials better?

For synthetics, we have recycled options. Today, that’s largely recycling from plastic bottles, which isn’t without it’s controversies, but there is much innovation happening in the industry around true textile-to-textile recycling.

For leather, I look for:

  • Vegetable-tanned (rather than chromium tanned)
  • Locally-sourced leather (more traceability), and/or
  • Leather Working Group certified leather, which covers responsible management of water, energy, and waste; safe chemical management, traceability of the raw material, and occupational safety for workers.

Notably, there is no certification for animal welfare, so these are imperfect systems. But the alternative is footwear made from synthetic plastic materials or vegan leather alternatives that don’t yet meet the same durability standards as leather. Sustainability within today’s constraints requires trade-offs.

That said, there is always secondhand leather — by buying shoes secondhand you can access the quality of leather without adding further demand for the material.

Responsible Manufacturing

When considering responsible production practices, I look for first and foremost: transparency. Seeing what the brand shares about their material sourcing, their process, and who made their shoes where. And then I look at the details of that process: were the shoes made locally or within a geographic region? How are the workers paid and treated — and under which conditions do they work?

And, sometimes a brand employs an out-of-the-box approach to manufacturing entirely. There are a few slow fashion footwear brands challenging the traditional fashion system of ordering in mass quantities before demand is assessed —which inevitably leads to overproduction. These brands use an “on demand” model instead, producing their shoes only after they’ve been ordered. This reduces the risk of overproduction (i.e. producing more than what gets sold) while also encouraging more thoughtful consumption. You can’t impulse buy a pair of Mary Janes that you have to wait 8 weeks for.

Wearable and Beautiful

The most perfectly environmentally sustainable flat in the world is useless if no one wants to wear it. And as I mentioned earlier, footwear cannot be recycled into new footwear at the end of its life, so we want our shoes to last a really long time. That means they need to be design forward and comfortable, too.

My Top Picks for More Sustainable and Ethical Flats

Keeping all of that in mind, these more sustainable flats brands meet this criteria, albeit to various extents. Some err more on comfort while some more on style. Some have admirable levels of transparency and social impact, while other brands have more of a focus on their ecological impact. I’ve included descriptions alongside each brand as well as a summary of conscious qualities so you can find a brand that meets your priorities best. And, of course, a price range so you know what makes sense for your budget as well.

Some that this guide includes affiliate links which means we may earn a commission if you shop through these links. As always, brands featured in shopping guides are brands that meet our strict sustainability criteria that we think you’ll love.

1. ALOHAS

Spanish brand ALOHAS flips the typical fashion production system on its head with its on-demand model.

Instead of overproducing thousands of shoes to later discount them, ALOHAS does the exact opposite. Its newest styles are available for pre-order at a discount of 30%, so the footwear brand can more accurately forecast demand. Then the shoes — like their flats — are primarily made by local artisans in Spain and Portugal. The brand regularly shows the behind the scenes of their production on their social media.

Conscious Qualities: On-Demand Production, Locally Made

Size Range: EU 35-42 (US 5-11)
Price Range: $195-$225

sustainable black ballet flats

2. Rothy’s

If you’re looking for flats for all-day wear at work or running errands, Rothy’s is my recommendation with their cushy insoles. The brand makes their more sustainable flats from recycled plastic bottles, as well as materials like hemp and merino wool, but they still look sleek enough for the office.

While I might not wear Rothy’s flats to a fashion event (I prefer smooth leather for more elevated occasions), they are more than stylish enough to wear to most of my real-life scenarios. My favorite part about Rothy’s, though, is that they are machine washable.

Materials: Recycled & Natural Materials, Owns One Factory (undisclosed percentage of production)

Size Range: US 5-13
Price Range: $99-$165

mustard yellow recycled flats with pointy toes

3. Vivaia

Vivaia has the most adorable sustainable Mary Janes made from recycled plastic bottles. The adjustable straps and arch support make Vivaia’s Mary Janes suitable for all-day comfort, even if your feet are typically prone to slipping out of flats.

This vegan footwear brand also makes square-toe and pointed-toe flats for a more elevated look. And of the several recycled plastic bottle footwear brands on the market today, Vivaia tends to have the most elevated designs in my opinion.

Conscious Qualities: Vegan, Recycled Materials

Size Range: US 5-11
Price: $97 – $116

4. The RealReal

The RealReal is an authenticated luxury resale platform with contemporary, designer, and high-end luxury brands. Depending on your priorities you can find shoes in anywhere from pristine condition (but higher priced)) to “fair” or even “as is” for the largest discount from full price.

You don’t always have as many options aesthetically when shopping more sustainably, so I like to go to The RealReal when I’m looking for specific styles. I was recently looking for Mary Janes with feminine detailing and came across Larroude Flats on The RealReal, where I purchased a pair of neutral scalloped accent flats. (Pictured here!)

Conscious Qualities: Secondhand

Size Range: US 3.5-14
Price Range: $9+

5. ESSĒN

ESSĒN elegant, minimalist footwear is artisan handcrafted from Leather Working Group-certified leather in solar-powered facilities in Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Each shoe also comes with a product passport where you can view the step-by-step journey that product took through the brand’s supply chain from raw material to manufacturing to packaging and distribution.

Beyond transparency and responsible manufacturing, ESSĒN’s slow fashion business model prevents overproduction by operating on a made to order basis. Meaning while sizes and styles are predefined, the shoes are only produced after they’ve been ordered.

Conscious Qualities: LWG Certified, Supply Chain Transparency, On Demand Production

Size Range: EU 35-44 (US 4-13)
Price Range: $295-$450

Chocolate brown leather classic flats

6. Allbirds

Another comfort-first footwear option besides Rothy’s is Allbirds. The brand creates lightweight, super smooth and breathable flats from tree fibers, aptly called “Tree Breezers”. The (washable) shoes are also soft enough to wear without socks.

The Allbirds Tree Breezers are far more comfortable than typical flats, though I find that the Rothy’s are slightly comfier.

Conscious Qualities: Natural materials (FSC-Certified eucalyptus, castor mean oil, sugarcane EVA)

Size Range: US 5-11
Price Range: $105-$125

Gray wool flats

7. Darzah

Fair trade certified by Fair Trade Federation, Darzah’s ethical flats are entirely hand-embroidered and handcrafted in Palestine from locally sourced leather.

The tatreez flats from this nonprofit are embroidered by refugee and low-income women artisans in the West Bank with this traditional Palestinian techniques.

Conscious Qualities: Sustains Heritage Crafts, Fair Trade Certified

Size Range: EU 36-41 (US 6-10)
Price Range: $199 – $209

Tatreez fair trade flats in red and blue

8. Nisolo

If you’re seeking a quality pair of classic leather flats ideal for your capsule wardrobe, Nisolo is a strong pick. Nisolo’s flats are handcrafted by artisans using leather sourced from a Leather Working Group certified tannery.

I’ve been wearing my Nisolo shoes for many years and can attest to their quality and durability.

That said, the brand has recently turned over to new ownership and now has significantly less information about their sustainability and ethics in their supply chain. I will be keeping a close eye on this brand to see if it continues to uphold the values Nisolo has long held.

Conscious Qualities: LWG-Certified, Artisan Handcrafted

Size Range: US 5-11
Price: $138 – $198

Tan square toe Mary Jane made from certified responsible leather

👗 For More Slow Fashion Content:

You May Also Want to Check Out:

The Best Affordable Ethical Fashion Brands

Responsibly Made Vegan Shoe Brands

15 Brands with Ethical Boots to Rock this Fall (and Beyond)

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