Kate Merlin's two children could not play outside for nearly half of last summer at camp because ground-level ozone reached levels considered dangerous for their developing lungs.

Merlin is an attorney with WildEarth Guardians and part of a broad-based effort to push Colorado Gov. Jared Polis to do more to rein in oil and gas industry emissions, the biggest contributor to ozone smog. She said Colorado's children do not deserve to live in a state where they cannot breathe the air outside in the summer.

"The problem is that these regulations have been insufficient to actually reduce the amount of ozone pollution in our state to an acceptable level, where it's not endangering the health of our children," Merlin asserted.

The northern Front Range has been violating EPA thresholds for ozone ever since they were created in 2008, and the agency recently announced it would downgrade the state from serious to severe violators.

The Regional Air Quality Council admitted this week its plan for lowering smog levels, expected to be approved on August 5, will not reach at least one EPA compliance requirement.

Oil and Gas drilling, fracking and other operations release over 120 percent more pollutants, which, when combined with sunlight, create ozone than the state's transportation sector.

Rep. Tracey Bernett, D-Boulder, said companies will need to do more if the state is going to bend the curve to get back into compliance with the Clean Air Act.

"Making sure that the industry is doing their part to reduce things that cause ozone on ozone-alert days," Bernett urged. "We've all been asked, drive less, ride-share and all that. We need to make sure that industry is doing this as well."

Clean-air advocates submitted a letter urging the regional air council to take additional steps to reduce smog, including pausing oil and gas production during the hottest summer days, and adopting stricter vehicle emission standards. Merlin believes the long-term solution will be to transition away from energy subject to tremendous price shocks in the global marketplace.

"We need a transition to locally produced, renewable energy sources," Merlin contended. "In part because these are the sources of energy that will not experience these significant price shocks. And that's how we get to true energy independence."

By Ethan Brown for The Sweaty Penguin.
Broadcast version by Shanteya Hudson for Alabama News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

A 2023 Pew Research survey found only 27% of U.S. adults feel individual actions can help "a lot" to reduce the effects of climate change. But according to panelists at a Tuesday webinar from ClimateVoice and WorkforClimate, there's a solution - advocacy in the workplace.

"A lot of people understand that if they can get a hold of their employer's resources, they can have an outsize impact on climate change in a way that you will never be able to do as an individual voter or consumer," said Drew Wilkinson, Founder of Climate Leadership Collective.

Prior to founding his own company, Wilkinson was a paralegal at Microsoft. In 2018, two years into his tenure, he emailed The Ocean Cleanup to propose a collaboration at Microsoft's Global Hackathon to find solutions for ocean plastic pollution. At that point, The Ocean Cleanup had built technology to remove plastics from rivers and deployed it in Indonesia and Malaysia, but could not yet identify whether collected waste was actually plastic, or other debris such as sticks and leaves. Through Wilkinson's Hackathon project, participants developed a machine learning model to perform this task, successfully identifying over 30,000 ocean photos.

That same year, Wilkinson and a coworker launched the first employee sustainability community at Microsoft. The group grew rapidly, reaching 10,000 members and 37 local chapters in 2023, and playing a central role in Microsoft's strategy to become carbon negative, water positive, and zero waste by 2030.

"This is fundamentally about changing the paradigm of who gets to work on sustainability in a company," said Wilkinson. "It's not just for the people who have it in their job titles. It's about democratizing sustainability so that everybody can work on it in whatever way they want to."

In fact, a majority of employers want their subordinates' help with sustainability. In Willis Towers Watson's 2021 HR and Climate Strategy Survey, 84% of North American executives reported that employees play a major role in the successful delivery of their company's climate strategies.

It wasn't just large corporations where panelists made their mark. According to Arielle Terry, now Manager of Lending Solutions at ATMOS Financial, even a brand new employee working remotely can create positive change.

"Climate matters so much to me," said Terry. I'm so passionate about it, and I know my friends are probably like 'stop talking about it all the time.' But I just can't."

Before her current job, Terry worked as an Implementation Expert at Perceptyx, an employee experience transformation company with around 400 employees. A month into her job, Terry was shocked to learn that her 401(k) was invested into fossil fuels, deforestation, and other companies whose values did not align with her own.

"As employees, we should not have to invest in things we don't agree with," said Terry.

Before a company town hall, Terry posted a question about climate friendly 401(k) alternatives in the company Slack channel. To her surprise, her question received the most responses and was the first one asked at the town hall. After recruiting ten colleagues to a climate employee resource group, Terry eventually succeeded in convincing the company to add a climate friendly fund. She now works to improve solar lending practices at ATMOS.

While Wilkinson and Terry notched exciting wins in their respective roles, they did not come without challenge.

"A big thing is just, kind of, being ignored," explained Terry. "We were told 'we're gonna reevaluate benefits in 2023' and just being pushed off a lot."

In initial conversations with human resources, Terry learned Perceptyx did not have sustainability goals going into 2023. But by organizing coworkers and staying persistent, she still made a difference from the ground up.

Wilkinson echoed a similar sentiment.

"What it really takes to drive change for employees is a small but very tenacious and very persistent group who refuse to go away. If you can get more colleagues to join your cause, obviously it's harder to say no to ten than one, or ten thousand than a thousand."

To help individuals start their workplace advocacy, ClimateVoice developed an Employee Action Guide. The guide details four steps for all employees, regardless of title, to inspire progress: get the facts, find your influence, engage your coworkers, and advocate for action.

"No matter where you work, you have inside access. You have the relationships with your coworkers, with your leadership," said Deborah McNamara, Co-Executive Director of ClimateVoice. "Start thinking systemically about who's making the decisions and how you can have these important conversations about creating change."

ClimateVoice encourages employees to not just inspire action within the company, but also push employers to use their company's power to influence government policy.

"Right now we have this very lopsided situation where fossil fuel companies are unfortunately dominating the discourse," explained McNamara. "We want employees and companies to be doing more to advocate for the climate solutions that we need through policy."

ClimateVoice acknowledges that political engagement on climate may be daunting for some executives. That's why their guide includes a list of common objections - such as a preference for focusing on internal sustainability, a fear of wasting lobbying firepower, and a worry for pushing away partners like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce - and ideas for how employees can respond.

"It does require changing systems that are very entrenched," said McNamara. "We believe that employees are an important lever for change."

While corporate sustainability - particularly the concept of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals - has become controversial in recent years, companies who engage in the practice report several benefits beyond helping address climate change. Strong ESG practices increase sales, cut costs, attract investors, build customer loyalty, reduce legal liabilities, and improve recruitment with younger employees.

Panelists shared that their workplace advocacy didn't just help their companies' carbon footprints; it also helped their personal climate anxiety. A 2021 Pew Research poll found 59% of millennial and 69% of Gen-Z social media users said they felt anxious about the future after viewing climate content. While studies show excessive fear and anxiety often leads to lower engagement in the climate cause, Wilkinson's sustainability work at Microsoft allowed him to flip that script.

"For me, the antidote to anxiety is action," shared Wilkinson. "Believe that you can get power and influence. [We] are here to tell you that you surely can."


Ethan Brown wrote this article for The Sweaty Penguin.

By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Farah Siddiqi for Ohio News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

In case you missed it amidst the New Year's revelry, Congress failed again last year to pass a new Farm Bill, the critical piece of ongoing legislation that facilitates American farming and agriculture. Unable to agree on a full five-year Farm Bill, Congress instead passed yet another short-term extension of the previous bill in the waning hours of 2024. Now, Congress has nine months to hash out the next Farm Bill - but how will Republican control over the government impact the negotiations?

With majorities in both chambers of Congress, Republicans may be "feeling more emboldened to take a hard-line stance" on their favored Farm Bill policies," Dan Jasper, senior policy advisor at the climate nonprofit Project Drawdown, tells Sentient. But Jasper also says that regardless of what the next Farm Bill includes, Congress's repeated inability to agree on one is a major concern in and of itself, as it throws into question the government's ability to ensure the smooth functioning of America's farming sector.

"Anybody who's connected to this bill has been left in extreme uncertainty," Jasper says. "In a moment of rising prices, inputs are getting more expensive as well, and it just leaves [farmers and producers] in a moment of like, 'can our government even deliver on the most basic things?'"

In other words, the stakes of a new Farm Bill are very high in a number of ways, some of which are more immediately apparent than others.

Why the Farm Bill Matters

The Farm Bill is an enormous package of legislation that undergirds America's farming sector. It touches on a wide variety of different policies relating to food, including the federal food stamps program (SNAP), crop insurance, farm subsidies, USDA conservation programs, animal health, disaster preparedness and more.

In theory, the Farm Bill is renewed every five years. In practice, lawmakers often miss that deadline, and have to pass short-term extensions while they hammer out a long-term bill that enough of them agree on.

The last time Congress passed a full, five-year Farm Bill was in 2018. That bill expired in 2023, but Democrats and Republicans couldn't agree on a new one before it did, and so they passed a temporary extension of the 2018 bill in November 2023, and another in the last month of last year.

These Farm Bill extensions last for a year...sort of. Lawmakers and the media have both referred to them as a "one-year extension," but it's actually more complicated than that, because some provisions of the Farm Bill expire earlier than others, and some don't really expire at all. But more on that later. For now, Republicans control both chambers of Congress and the White House, and that will have an impact on the negotiations.

What Happens Next With the Farm Bill?

The optimal scenario would be for lawmakers to pass a new Farm Bill in 2025 that lasts for the next five years. This would be good for lawmakers, as it means they wouldn't have to negotiate another Farm Bill until 2030, and for farmers, as it would provide them with a sense of consistency over the next five years.

This is a point Jasper returned to several times; the amount of sheer uncertainty farmers face when the Farm Bill is stuck in purgatory like this. Farmers rely on a host of government services to run their businesses, from crop insurance and conservation programs to price supports and research grants, and if they aren't sure how or when these programs will continue, it becomes more difficult for them to plan for the future.

"It just leaves them in a moment of like, 'Can our government even deliver on the most basic things?'" Jasper tells Sentient. Even with an extension, he says, "it's still going to lead farmers in limbo, and it's really going to further erode trust in our government. Which is already a problem, but when it comes to farmers, and basic food security, that's a huge problem."

How Will the Last Election Impact the Next Farm Bill?

Republicans captured both the White House and the Senate in the 2024 election, giving them full control of the government in 2025.

Though the exact impact on Farm Bill negotiations is unclear, the next session will see Congressional Republicans with greater freedom to include their own favored policies, and fewer checks on their ability to do so.

This doesn't necessarily mean they'll have carte blanche to do whatever they want, however. Republicans have a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives, so they can only afford to lose a few of their own members' votes before having to rely on Democrats to pass legislation.

This dynamic, which was true during the last session of Congress as well, means that Democratic Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the previous House minority leader, has an unusual amount of power in the chamber - so much so that he's been referred to as "the shadow Speaker" and "the most powerful person in Congress."

Moreover, Republicans don't agree on everything. For instance, there's significant disagreement in the GOP regarding Proposition 12, the California law that forbids the sale of certain animal products that were produced using extreme confinement. While many Republicans want to repeal Proposition 12 through the Farm Bill, there are a handful of Republican holdouts in the House who, if they held firm, could single-handedly torpedo any attempt to scrap the law.

Similarly, any Farm Bill will also need the approval of President-elect Donald Trump, who largely hasn't indicated which Farm Bill policies he supports or opposes.

Jasper also believes the next Farm Bill could - and should - contain some small modifications.

"It would probably need some updates to provide adequate support at this point," Jasper tells Sentient. "Given that they've had so much time here, they're basically on borrowed time. [USDA programs] need updates."

For instance, a lot of the USDA's programs are too popular, meaning that more farmers want to enroll in them than funding will allow for. Jasper cites conservation management programs, which have been chronically underfunded since at least 2010, and include the new climate-smart initiatives funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, as an example.

"The demand is growing increasingly, and the supply just isn't there," Jasper says. "There's a lot of interest in those programs, and so my guess is that some of those updates would need at least a nominal increase to keep up with inflation, and that kind of stuff."

Failing to Pass a Farm Bill Would Bring Chaos

One of the stranger aspects of the Farm Bill is that, in addition to funding policies that people do want, it also suspends the implementation of policies that people don't want.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Congress passed several farm-related policies to address economic uncertainty in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II. These policies, which are often referred to as "permanent law," were meant to stabilize farmers' income when commodity prices dropped below a certain level. Because they were based on pre-1920s information, they're now hopelessly obsolete.

Rather than repeal these laws entirely, however, Congress simply suspends them every five years in the Farm Bill. If Congress were to let the Farm Bill expire without passing a new version or an extension, these policies would suddenly kick in - and wreak economic havoc on the agriculture sector if enacted today, according to USDA analyses.

Congress defused this threat in the short-term when it passed a second extension of the 2018 bill in December 2024. But the threat will return in September, when this most recent extension is set to expire.

On the flipside, there are a couple of major policies in the Farm Bill that won't expire even if the Farm Bill does. SNAP funding, crop insurance and a handful of disaster programs will remain in place regardless of what happens with the Farm Bill.

To be clear, that doesn't mean they'll be functioning at full capacity. The American economy has changed dramatically since 2018, and the current funding levels for these programs doesn't reflect that. A new Farm Bill would be required to increase their funding, but not to simply keep them running.

The Bottom Line

In Jasper's eyes, the stakes of the Farm Bill extend beyond one specific program or initiative. For better or worse, the production of food in America is inextricably intertwined with federal policy, and when the continued functioning of those policies is destabilized, so are our food systems themselves. It's not a big leap from that to food insecurity, and Jasper says that high levels of food insecurity should worry everyone.

"Typically, if people are already malnourished and food security worsens, conflict doesn't erupt, because it's hard to fight on an empty belly," Jasper says. "But when people are in the middle, and food security starts to drop, that's when you get conflict."

Jasper's observation echoes that of political theorist Eric Hoffer, who noted that people living in extreme poverty rarely join violent revolutions, as they're too preoccupied with finding their next meal. It's when people are in a transitional period between security and insecurity that they become susceptible to extremism, which is already on the rise in the U.S.

"It relates to the political divisions that we're seeing," Jasper says. "It relates to some of the violence that we're now seeing erupt. This is important, and it's important in a big way that people do not understand."


Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.


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By Dawn Attride for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Freda Ross for Texas News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

President-elect Donald Trump has picked long-term ally Brooke Rollins to lead the Department of Agriculture. Her nomination is somewhat of a surprise; Kelly Loeffler, former U.S. senator, was rumored to be Trump's initial pick for the role. Rollins is also a surprising pick because she hasn't worked directly in agricultural policy.

Rollins acted as domestic policy director in the White House during Trump's first term, and has since gone on to preside over the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a Trump-aligned think tank. She grew up on a farm in Glen Rose, Texas, which is known for its farming and ranching activities. Apart from her undergraduate degree in agricultural leadership and development from Texas A&M University, she doesn't appear to have much experience in agricultural policy.

Rollins took to X after the announcement, saying it will be the honor of her life to fight for America's farmers and agricultural communities. "This is big stuff for a small-town ag girl from Glen Rose, TX - truly the American Dream at its greatest. WHO'S READY TO MAKE AGRICULTURE GREAT AGAIN?" she wrote.

Reactions to the Nomination

If confirmed, Rollins will direct the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and its 100,000 employees, running on an annual budget of upwards of $437 billion. The USDA oversees food security, agricultural production, promotes rural development and provides financial aid to farmers and low-income families. The USDA was founded to carry out research on agriculture, and at its core, is a research-centered organization.

"Outside of a misdirected interest in Chinese ownership of U.S. farmland, Brooke Rollins appears to have no agricultural policy track record to comment on. Rollins' AFPI, described as the second Trump administration in waiting, has so little interest in farm policy that there are no agriculture experts listed on its website," Karen Perry Stillerman, deputy director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement.

Stillerman added that this appears to be another example of Trump "doling out cabinet appointments for loyalty rather than expertise." Two of Trump's other picks also came from AFPI -- Linda McMahon, for Education Secretary, and Scott Turner as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Industry groups appear to be optimistic about her nomination, however. The American Farm Bureau Federation said they're encouraged by her statement that she'd "fight for America's farmers and our nation's agricultural communities."

What Can We Expect From Rollins?

Importantly, Rollins has the upcoming new iteration of the Farm Bill ahead of her, which has significant sway over America's food systems. With Republicans having a majority in the House and Senate, the updated Farm Bill could repeal Proposition 12, a high-impact animal welfare law that banned certain kinds of extreme confinement of animals, and the sale of such products in California.

The Farm Bill is also crucial for food emissions and conservation. While Rollins hasn't said much publicly regarding climate change, the think tank she leads has published articles promoting fracking and criticizing the Paris Agreement.

Rollins' new role will likely overlap significantly with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s mission to "Make America Healthy Again," by eliminating certain pesticides and food additives, as well as reforming dietary guidelines.

But Kennedy's opposition to GMOs and pesticides poses "a significant threat" to American agriculture being a global leader when it comes to reducing its carbon footprint while maintaining high yields, Emily Bass, an associate director of federal policy at the Breakthrough Institute, tells Sentient. (Contrary to popular belief, for example, organic foods are usually less climate-friendly.)

"Should she be confirmed as the next U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, we hope Brooke Rollins will be a force to defend against RFK Jr.'s vision, and instead lead a USDA that recognizes the value of technology-forward advances," Bass says.


Dawn Attride wrote this article for Sentient.


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