By Naoki Nitta for Grist.
Broadcast version by Farah Siddiqi for Hawaii News Service reporting for the Grist-Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Like many homesteaders on the island of Molokaʻi, Kailana Place grew up off-grid, on 40 acres of family land designated for Native Hawaiians. Living in repurposed school buses surrounded by fields of red volcanic clay and kiawe trees "was a glamping lifestyle," joked the social worker and mother of three, a way of life powered by kerosene and propane.

Three years ago, those fuels sparked a devastating fire. Neighbors helped Place and her husband, Ikaika, build a new house with rooftop solar and a battery. Even now, the buzz of constant, reliable power has yet to wear off. Beyond ensuring continuous internet access and a freezer for fish and venison - most residents depend upon subsistence fishing, hunting, and farming - their asthmatic son no longer relies on a generator to power his inhaler. "It's unreal," said Ikaika Place. "My wife has never had a house where she could just switch on the lights."

It's been a radical change. When it comes to electricity, residents of Molokaʻi get by with as little as possible. Consumption rates on this rural island are the lowest in the Hawaiian Archipelago, and energy costs are the most expensive in the state, which pays the nation's highest price per watt. For the 7,300 or so residents, that often means forgoing the luxury of reliable power. In fact, the cost and challenges of accessing utilities prompt many to live off the grid altogether.

But locals have begun taking charge of their energy security. Four years ago, many of them came together to develop the Molokaʻi Community Energy Resilience Action Plan. The blueprint, backed by the state's primary utility, maps the island's transition from fossil fuels to renewables, largely through micro- and nanogrids of photovoltaic arrays with batteries. Beyond that, Hoʻāhu Energy Cooperative Molokaʻi is establishing a subscription-based, collectively owned solar system, which eliminates the burden of buying expensive hardware and keeps funds invested locally. Two projects now underway are set to supply one-fifth of the island's electricity. Implementing this plan, touted as a national model for community-driven renewable energy planning, falls to a growing number of locals who have become certified technicians.

These goals align with the state's ambitious mandate to abandon fossil fuels, which provide 85 percent of Molokaʻi's power, by 2045. Rather than let regulators and policymakers shape their future, island residents, known for their resilience, independence, and activism, have taken charge. Hoʻāhu - Hawaiian for "to capture" or "collect" - is "a community effort to achieve energy equity" says Lori Buchanan, a founding board member of the co-op and Native Hawaiian community leader.

Native Hawaiians have a long history of oppression and colonization. American and European industrialists, along with missionary families, established the plantation economy in the early 1800s, displacing Indigenous peoples throughout the archipelago. With the backing of the U.S. government, they overthrew Queen Liliʻuokalani in 1893, depriving an internationally recognized nation of its right to political self-determination.

But even within this context, Molokaʻi has been uniquely exploited. Starting with early invasion by Native Hawaiians from larger islands, the Hawaiian legislature designated its northern reaches as a leper colony in 1865. The island has since been mined for sand to replenish Waikiki Beach and served as an open-field lab for GMO seed testing; 11 years ago, locals stopped a proposed state-backed wind farm intended to send power to Oʻahu via undersea cables, but the experience left the community ever-wary of outside interests.

When it comes to resource decisions, "we've [long] been what was eaten for dinner" rather than having a seat at the table, Buchanan said. For Native Hawaiians, who comprise 65 percent of Molokaʻi's population, in particular, energy sovereignty is central to self-determination. "We are taking control of our own destiny as a grassroots cooperative, as a people, as an island, to care for our own resources."

As one of the world's most remote places, Hawaiʻi relies heavily on imported oil and other fossil fuels, which results in exorbitant electricity rates, even as rising seas and intensifying storms place the archipelago on the front lines of climate change.

Accordingly, the state has fast-tracked its clean energy transition through comprehensive utility reforms, including a 2020 ban on coal and shuttering its last coal-fired plant. Solar panels dot the landscape and sprout from rooftops, bolstered by loans that help finance installations. Renewables account for one-third of the state's energy mix, though that figure is higher in places like Kauaʻi, where nearly 60 percent of the power is green.

On Molokaʻi, about 500 rooftop arrays generate 15 percent of the island's power, with the rest produced by Hawaiian Electric Company's diesel-powered plant. These two sources supply energy to 93 percent of residents; the remainder live off-grid with diesel generators and propane. Despite the appeal of cheap, reliable power, adoption of solar is often hampered by the high cost of buying and installing the equipment, and by the fact it isn't an option for renters or those who live in apartments, condos, and the like.

Community-based renewable energy, or CBRE, programs, are changing this dynamic. They offer monthly subscriptions, with no money down, to the power generated by solar arrays, bringing green energy to more people. Such programs "will be an integral part of Hawaiian Electric's overall clean energy planning and efforts," said Rebecca Dayhuff Matsushima, the utility's vice president of renewable procurement.

The state Public Utilities Commission, or PUC, launched a statewide push for these community-based approaches in 2020. When it sought utility-scale proposals from Hawaiian Electric and solar companies, residents of Molokaʻi insisted that they have a voice in the process and an opportunity to shape their green energy future.

"We wanted to create a high-level roadmap reflective of local values and needs," said Leilani Chow of Molokaʻi Clean Energy Hui, the volunteer organization that led the community planning process. ("Hui" is Hawaiian for "group.) Guided by local leaders and technical experts from the PUC and Hawaiian Electric, it spent two years facilitating nearly 3,000 community conversations, conducting hundreds of surveys, and organizing several focus groups.

The resulting Molokaʻi Community Energy Resilience Action Plan outlines a renewable power strategy that prioritizes equity, critical infrastructure, and disaster resilience. The state-approved plan identifies 10 projects, including residential and utility-scale micro- and nanogrids with enough battery capacity for water pumping stations, wastewater treatment plants and the hospital. It also calls for developing a local workforce to build and maintain these systems.

This endeavor helps counter Molokaʻi's stubborn "anti-development" reputation, said Chow, who is Native Hawaiian. Past utility development proposals "were so misaligned with what we need," she said. "This island isn't opposed to progress, but we have extremely high standards of aloha ʻaina - how we care for the land and for each other."

The Hoʻāhu cooperative emerged in 2020 alongside the community energy planning process, driven by a local desire to develop and own the resulting projects. The organization, led by a volunteer board, held nearly 40 public workshops to design the island's first two community microgrids. Those projects, backed by Hawaiian Electric and a Department of Energy grant, include a 250-kilowatt solar array atop a carport at the Kualapuʻu recreation center and a 2.2-megawatt array in Pālāʻau, on seven acres the utility owns alongside its power plant. Each features battery storage and will be integrated into the island's grid; together, they're expected to produce 20 percent of Molokaʻi's power supply - enough for 1,500 households.

Both will be owned by the cooperative, which individuals, businesses, government entities, and nonprofits are free to join. "Essentially, every subscriber will own a piece of the project and hold a stake in its success," said Christopher O'Brien, Hoʻāhu's executive director.

He estimates that subscriptions will shave at least 20 percent off residential electric bills, which currently average $450 a month. (About half of that amount pays a fee to operate and maintain the HECO grid, a surcharge that will remain.) However, the main benefit will be stable rates, O'Brien says, as power generation becomes independent of spiking oil prices.

The co-op is ensuring that the 100 or so off-grid homesteads benefit too. Building upon the prototype system powering the Place's home, it plans to roll out 15 nanogrids in the next year through a $300,000 grant from the federal Energy Storage for Social Equity Initiative, with additional funding expected for 45 more. These standalone solar and battery systems will be collectively owned and maintained through subscriptions that O'Brien said are "significantly less" than the $500 the Place family spent each month on propane and diesel fuel.

To further ensure energy sovereignty, the co-op is cultivating a workforce to build and maintain its solar infrastructure. Hoʻāhu provides free in-person and online courses through the Energy Department and Arizona State University to train installers, technicians, and sales representatives, with an advanced microgrid course that includes a week at the university's Laboratory for Energy And Power Solutions. More than 30 technicians have been certified in the past two years; graduates have come from fields like construction, retail, hospitality, and agriculture, and most have been homesteaders, O'Brien said, including a 73-year-old woman.

Since completing his certification last year, Kaʻohele Ritte-Camara has helped install several systems. He hopes to combine his agricultural background with his new skills to create a youth program that integrates renewables and food production. Clean energy aligns with the sustainable living practices that many homesteaders cherish, helping "keep us more rooted to the land," he says. "It's been transformative. I'm grateful to be part of this movement."

Given Molokaʻi's near-14 percent unemployment rate, clean tech jobs offer promising prospects in a fast-growing sector, especially for a Native population whose average household incomes fall more than 25 percent below the island median. But while workforce development programs can foster economic self-sufficiency, research suggests Native peoples often face limited advancement opportunities.

"Our end goal is an island workforce that can operate on all levels of the chain," O'Brien said, from individual technicians to full-service enterprises capable of building, maintaining, and marketing the systems. The cooperative has applied to the Apprenticeship Building America program, a $95 million pool of Labor Department grants to promote apprenticeship programs in energy and other fields, to continue fostering "a garden of different opportunities," he said.

Although the larger projects will initially require off-island contractors with utility-scale experience, Hoʻāhu will prioritize those that hire from within the community, and tighten stipulations as the local labor pipeline becomes more robust.

"Most decisions about our energy infrastructure are made in boardrooms of utilities or big companies, yet community expertise offers a perspective that outside entities don't conceive of," said Ali Andrews, head of Honolulu-based Shake Energy Collaborative, Hoʻāhu's development advisor. "The people who live there simply know their resources - sun and wind patterns, culturally sensitive sites, local labor dynamics - better."

Fueled by grit, aloha 'aina, and a quest for sovereignty, Molokaʻi's path to energy independence stands as an illuminating model of community-driven change, especially for other remote and rural locales. Still, the opportunity to forge it could have only happened there, said Chow.

"The PUC recognized that [traditional] approaches do not work at all on Molokaʻi," she says. "They didn't have much to lose by letting us do it our own way - but everything to gain."


Naoki Nitta wrote this article for Grist.


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By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Shanteya Hudson for Alabama News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Over the last couple of years, the US Department of Agriculture has been funding various agricultural initiatives that it calls “climate-smart.” These are farming practices that, in the USDA’s estimation, provide some kind of benefit to the environment. But where is this climate-smart money actually going, and is it really doing anything to stop or slow climate change?

The impetus behind climate-smart farming policies is rather straightforward. Food production is currently responsible for almost one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions, with the majority of those emissions coming from animal agriculture. Over three-quarters of all freshwater and ocean eutrophication are the result of agricultural production, as is almost all habitat loss on the planet.

It’s clear that our farming practices need to change, and climate-smart policies are the U.S. government’s attempt to bring about this change. At least, that’s what the government says.

What Are Climate-Smart Policies?

While the concept of agricultural practices that are good for the environment is nothing new, only recently did the U.S. government start using the phrase “climate-smart” to refer to such policies. Unfortunately, the term doesn’t have any official or legal definition, and as we’ll see, that’s resulted in a number of dubiously beneficial practices being dubbed “climate-smart.”

Broadly speaking, though, climate-smart policies are those that provide some sort of environmental benefit, or otherwise help slow climate change and global warming. Usually, this means that they either reduce carbon emissions or increase carbon capture by soil, trees and other sequesterers.

Climate-smart policies are funded by the USDA, which is in turn funded by Congress, and the USDA has many different programs through which it distributes climate-smart funds.

However, tracking the funding, progress and implementation of these climate-smart practices is quite difficult, in large part because the USDA has made it that way.

The USDA’s Climate-Smart Initiatives Aren’t Transparent

In 2022, the USDA announced the formation of Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, a billion-dollar pilot program aimed at researching and testing the environmental benefits of various farming and forestry practices. Farmers and other agricultural producers could apply to receive grants from the USDA to spend on potentially climate-smart policies, and over the years, the USDA would measure how beneficial to the environment these practices actually were.

The USDA initially dedicated $1 billion to this program, and has added several billion more since then. But Jason Davidson, Senior Food and Agriculture Campaigner for the nonprofit Friends of the Earth, tells Sentient that the inner workings of this pilot program have been anything but transparent, with almost all of the process taking place behind closed doors.

“The USDA has been very opaque in describing not just the projects themselves, but even what sort of data they plan to collect [to evaluate them],” Davidson says. “All we can really say is that they have planned to give money to these organizations. On what schedule, or whether that’s a lump sum over the years, etc, is unclear.”

The Problematic Investment in Supposedly ‘Climate-Smart Beef’

This lack of transparency makes it difficult to determine why, to take just one example, some of the largest meat companies on the planet, including Tyson, JBS and Perdue, received “climate-smart” funds through the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program.

“Tens of millions of dollars were given to projects where either a primary or secondary applicant was a major international meat company,” Davidson explains. “But the actual specifics of all of these programs are hard to decipher. The only sort of information that USDA released was who applied, how much money they were given and a brief description of the project.”

Take the “Climate-Smart Grasslands” grant. The goal of this initiative, according to the USDA, is to “market climate-smart beef with the ultimate goal of launching a cooperative to sell climate-smart beef products.” A partnership of 28 different entities, including JBS USA and Tyson, received $30 million to implement this project.

But what exactly is “climate-smart beef?” Sure, different methods of cattle farming vary in their environmental impacts, but none of those methods are beneficial to the climate. Beef production emits over twice the greenhouse gasses as any other protein on a per-gram basis, according to Our World In Data, and is the leading driver of deforestation worldwide.

Nevertheless, the USDA soon authorized Tyson to market their Brazen Beef subbrand as “climate-friendly,” and to claim on the packaging that it achieves a “10 percent greenhouse gas reduction.” Even if Brazen Beef’s production techniques really do produce 10 percent fewer greenhouse gasses than traditional beef production, though, they’re still emitting more than twice the greenhouse gasses than any other protein source.

But it’s not even clear that this 10 percent reduction is actually happening, as Tyson and the USDA have offered vanishingly few details as to how they’re achieving this supposed reduction. (Tyson is also being sued for these claims.) The USDA doesn’t directly monitor their implementation of these practices, and EWG says that when it asked the USDA for substantiation of this claim, the documents it received were heavily redacted in order to protect Tyson’s “trade secrets.”

This kind of opacity is indicative of the USDA’s general approach when pressed for details on its climate-smart policies, Davidson tells Sentient. Other environmental organizations, such as the Center for Biological Diversity, have also expressed frustration at the USDA’s lack of transparency regarding climate-smart policies, as have some members of Congress.

“Friends of the Earth and other organizations have submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to USDA over the last two years to try and get more information about these projects, and we have been largely unsuccessful, receiving heavily redacted documents in return,” Davidson says. “It is extremely unclear how the USDA evaluates these programs.”

The Inflation Reduction Act Funded Climate-Smart Projects — Or Did It?

 When the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act was announced, information on it included $19.5 billion in funding for climate-smart policies. While it’s true that it contains $19.5 billion in funding for the USDA, the phrase “climate-smart” doesn’t actually appear anywhere in the law’s text.

In truth, the the IRA allocated this money to a selection of USDA conservation programs, and mandated that these programs use the money only on practices that “directly improve soil carbon, reduce nitrogen losses, or reduce, capture, avoid, or sequester carbon dioxide, methane, or nitrous oxide emissions, associated with agricultural production.”

Since then, the USDA has curated and maintained a list of programs that it considers to be “climate-smart,” which it updates annually. This list determines which specific practices are eligible to receive climate-smart funds provided by the IRA. In October 2023, the USDA added 14 new practices to its list of “climate-smart” policies.

A February investigation by the Environmental Working Group, however, found that one of the USDA’s newly designated “climate-smart” programs — waste storage facilities for animal farms — actually increases greenhouse emissions, according to the USDA’s own analysis from 2024. Note: though the 2024 data is no longer available on the USDA website, this author did review data provided by EWG.

The Farm Bill Could Scale Back Climate-Smart Funding

Every five years, Congress has to renew the Farm Bill, an enormous package of legislation that undergirds American farming and agriculture. The last version of the bill has expired, and as usual, Republican and Democratic lawmakers are bickering over what the next bill should include. One of these arguments concerns the IRA’s funding for climate-smart policies.

In May, Republicans released a Farm Bill proposal that retained the $19.5 billion in funding that the IRA approved, but removed the requirement that this money go to initiatives that “directly improve soil carbon, reduce nitrogen losses, or reduce, capture, avoid, or sequester carbon dioxide, methane, or nitrous oxide emissions, associated with agricultural production.”

If this version of the Farm Bill passes, which looks increasingly probable given Republicans will control both the House and Senate, the $19.5 billion in “climate-smart” funding provided by the IRA would become $19.5 billion in general funding for the USDA’s conservation projects, regardless of their impact on the climate.

A 2022 analysis by EWG found that the overwhelming majority of funds from the USDA’s conservation programs don’t go to climate-smart projects, and the group estimates that if these “guardrails” from the IRA are removed, only one-fifth of the USDA’s conservation budget will go to programs that reduce greenhouse emissions.

It’s not a sure thing that this provision will be included in the final Farm Bill, which isn’t expected to pass until next year. Nevertheless, the fact that these guardrails are on the chopping block shows just how precarious funding for climate-smart projects is, regardless of their efficacy.

The Bottom Line

From a bird’s-eye perspective, it’s undoubtedly a good thing that the federal government has, at least in theory, recognized the importance of making America’s farming practices more sustainable.

But the extent to which these efforts have actually benefited the environment is entirely unclear. Some of the ostensibly “climate-smart” initiatives are anything but, and the USDA’s lack of transparency makes it difficult to measure the effectiveness of those that are.

Bringing about a more environmentally friendly farming system is a laudable goal, but the American government’s efforts to do so have been disappointing and lackluster at best.


Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.


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A Pennsylvania group warned progress on environmental protections could be at risk under a second term for President-elect Donald Trump.

The state's Climate Action Plan aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 26% by 2025 and 80% by 2050.

Tom Schuster, director of the Pennsylvania chapter of the Sierra Club, said it is important for Pennsylvania to continue to curb fossil fuel pollution to prevent severe climate effects. He highlighted the state's growing shift to cheaper renewable energy, noting Trump might not stop it but it could slow down.

"Donald Trump, as president, has pledged to encourage more drilling for and burning of fossil fuels and some rollback policies that are aimed at transitioning to clean energy faster," Schuster pointed out. "That is definitely bad news for the effort to protect our communities."

Schuster added the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure law has provided major funding for climate initiatives. He argued Pennsylvania has effectively utilized these resources for both emissions reduction and climate adaptation efforts.

Schuster emphasized the urgency of utilizing the current available funding, as the longevity of some programs is uncertain with the new Congress and administration. He stressed the need for Pennsylvania to implement state-level policies such as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which is currently before the state's Supreme Court.

"If the court rules in favor the Department of Environmental Protection and the environmental groups such as the Sierra Club that are supporting it, we need to quickly implement that program to help reduce climate disrupting pollution from the electricity sector and create an investment fund for new clean energy investment," Schuster outlined.

Schuster pointed out Gov. Josh Shapiro's proposals aim to boost renewable energy requirements for utilities, spurring solar and wind development. The state's RISE PA plan, tied to the Inflation Reduction Act, focuses on cutting industrial climate pollution -- the largest source in Pennsylvania -- while preserving jobs and industry.

By Allison Frost for Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Broadcast version by Isobel Charlé for Oregon News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

When Matt Swihart started Double Mountain Brewery in Hood River, Oregon, in 2007, his vision was to sell beer in the most ecologically sustainable way possible: in reusable bottles, which would be returned, cleaned and refilled to be sold again.

The numbers, he says, help make his case.

“A single-use beer bottle, as well as a single-use aluminum can, involves a certain amount of carbon through its life cycle … a reusable beer bottle, like the one we use in Oregon, is about 69 times less than a single-use recycled beer bottle.”

That number is based on the glass bottle being reused about 20-25 times, but even reusing it a single time, he claims, cuts the carbon nearly in half, because of how much carbon is used in the original manufacturing.

Reusable beverage containers are also not a particularly novel idea.

“In the ‘70s, it was the norm, ubiquitously, throughout the United States and still is across the world, where reusable beer bottles and soda bottles are used throughout many countries.”

Market forces shifted beverage manufacturers away from refillables and into unique containers that could be more effectively branded for consumers, and the infrastructure fell away.

Swihart began small and is now engaged in building a regional infrastructure that any beer brewer in Oregon can choose to access, with the help of the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative, which partnered with the company in 2018 to make standard refillable glass beer bottles.

One Oregon company that was inspired by Swihart’s efforts is Revino, which is based in Newberg and launched just last year. It’s working with a number of vintners to put their wine into Revino’s returnable, refillable bottles.

Willamette Valley Vineyards recently announced a rollout of over 1,500 cases of a Pinot Noir it makes in Revino’s bottles. Customers will get a 10-cent wine credit for every bottle they return to the winery.

Revino co-founder Adam Rack says only about a third of glass bottles are even recycled, so getting reusable bottles into the process is key. He also thinks Oregon’s landmark Bottle Bill should be updated to include wine bottles.

“California has already added wine bottles, Maine as well,” he said. “We used to be the leaders in the Bottle Bill, but now we’re kind of falling behind. So it’s about time to modernize.”

Both Rack and Swihart say they believe reducing and reusing will play an increasingly important role in helping lower carbon emissions and transform a single-use mindset into one of true sustainability. That’s something they think everyone can drink to.