New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy is maintaining the state's clean-energy progress. In his final State of the State Address, Murphy thanked lawmakers for advancing the state's climate and clean-energy goals during his time in office. But he also called on them to codify the state's clean-energy standards into law this year.

Ed Potosnak, executive director of the New Jersey League of Conservation Voters, said this furthers the state's ability to meet its climate goals.

"The laws that exist on the books require New Jersey to get roughly 88% of its energy from clean sources: solar, wind, and nuclear. We're on track to meet those goals. What this call to action and the legislation will need to achieve is the last five years to get the remaining 12%," he explained.

The state has made these strides despite setbacks. In 2023, offshore wind developer Orsted canceled the Ocean Wind project, citing costs. Other offshore wind farms have been met with backlash over perceived impacts on wildlife and complaints of how they could ruin the state's coastline. However, offshore wind is projected to create more than 10,000 jobs by 2030.

The state has seen many severe climate-change impacts grow since 2012's Superstorm Sandy. These have caused an estimated $50 billion to $100 billion in damage between 1980 and 2024.

While moving to clean energy helps the state brace for these storms, Potosnak said fossil fuel companies are fighting to maintain the status quo.

"It doesn't take long for you to remember the TV ads that you've seen where some nice woman walks across the screen and says, 'Natural gas is clean energy,' when in fact natural gas causes pollution, asthma, cancer and heart disease," he continued.

However, the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump is promising to bolster the fossil fuel industry. Along with this, he's proposing to cut many climate-funding initiatives, including the Inflation Reduction Act.

By María Ramos Pacheco for The Dallas Morning News.
Broadcast version by Freda Ross for Texas News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Anamelia Jaramillo has lived in Jubilee Park for almost 20 years and is concerned about the heat getting worse every summer.

She fears her air conditioning system failing because her husband has diabetes and can be vulnerable to extreme heat.

“I wish we didn’t have to have the A/C running all day long, but it is impossible to survive in the summer without it,” said Jaramillo, 54, after attending a Zumba class at Jubilee Park on Nov. 11.

In 2023, more than 20 people died in Dallas and Tarrant counties from heat-related illnesses as Texas saw record heat waves and triple-digit temperatures, according to the counties’ medical examiners. The lack of trees and green spaces, such as community gardens and parks, in an urban area contributes significantly to the “urban heat island effect,” as buildings, roads and other hard surfaces absorb and retain more heat.

Dallas’ District 7, where most of the neighborhoods participating in the South Dallas Greening Initiative are located, was ranked the third-highest priority for tree canopy, according to the Dallas Tree Equity Mapping Report published in 2022 by the Texas Trees Foundation.

Districts 4 and 6 ranked as the first and second highest priority for tree canopy, and the organization has been deploying some of their programs to plant more trees in these areas. Early this year, the Texas Trees Foundation released its plan to tackle the lack of trees in the Southwestern Medical District as part of its initiatives to combat the urban heat island effect.

Texas Trees, through the South Dallas Greening Initiative, also is working in the Jubilee neighborhood to address the area’s lack of trees to combat the extreme heat affecting residents’ health and quality of life. The nonprofit is providing thousands of trees to the almost 50,000 residents of Fair Park, Mill City, Queen City, Wheatley Place and adjacent neighborhoods over five years. Jubilee Park is just below Interstate 30 and north of Fair Park.

Chandler Stephens’ father, Calvin Stephens, has owned two vacant lots in South Dallas since the 1980s. The younger Stephens has been talking with Texas Trees about working together on his vision to create a community garden.

Stephens dreams of having a green space in every corner of South Dallas to improve residents’ quality of life.

“I can see [the initiative] as something that will prolong the community’s livelihood. Not only with addressing the urban heat island issue but just by providing greenery,” Stephens said. “Plants and our health is so linked to the health of the earth and the planet.”

The Dallas Comprehensive Environmental and Climate Action Plan established protocols for adapting to climate change challenges in 2020. It states that Dallas needs approximately 735,000 trees to reach a goal of 37% tree canopy cover and, specifically, mitigate the urban heat island effect.

Since its founding in 1982, Texas Trees has planted an estimated 1.5 million trees across the Dallas-Fort Worth region. In 2023, the Dallas-based nonprofit secured a $15 million grant from the Reduction Act through the U.S. Forest Service’s Urban and Community Forestry program for the South Dallas Greening Initiative.

The project, however, is part of a long-term solution to extreme heat, and many of Jubilee’s residents want to see more.

“I am in favor of the initiative and for them to plant more trees in the area, but we also need help with how to pay the electricity bills,” Jaramillo said.

In any community, including South Dallas, trees may not be at the top of each resident’s list of the needs they see for their community, said Elissa Izmailyan, chief strategy and operations officer with Texas Trees.

“We are showing up with a commitment to help and the ability to offer trees and urban forestry education but realize that we’re entering a landscape where there are a lot of other needs and priorities,” Izmailyan said.

“So first, we need to be sensitive to that broad range of priorities and capacities. Second, we need to think about how our offering intersects with other needs in a way that’s additive.”

The project will have several components beyond planting trees in the community, Izmailyan said.

The first phase has been to reach out to the community and work with nonprofits and organizations in South Dallas to establish a trusting relationship and understand the community’s needs and wants.

That’s where partnerships with local organizations come into play, as well as involvement with community leaders.

The Jubilee Park and Community Center is a nonprofit that works to restore equity and resources for the 3,000 residents of the Jubilee neighborhood. The community center has been around for almost 30 years and offers education, health, food access and after-school programs.

Emily Plauche, Texas Trees’ community greening manager, said the initiative includes an educational component that teaches residents about trees, their benefits, how to care for them, green jobs and other measures that can be taken to combat extreme heat.

“So there’s always going to be other needs or things that arise, too, and we can’t necessarily, with our money, purchase that. But we can help advocate and get the city involved and bring other people to the table who have some of these potential solutions,” Plauche said. “We are deeply committed to the well-being of the community.”

Texas Trees will work with some of the area’s schools to boost green spaces and tree planting on the campuses. The organization already runs a program across the city focusing on schools needing more canopy.

Marissa Castro Mikoy, president and chief executive officer at Jubilee Park, said that over the years Texas Trees has helped plant over 150 trees on their campus, and they can see the benefits to the community, from providing shade to beautifying the park.

Benefits of trees

In April, Dallas shared findings from a study that identified at least 10 neighborhoods as urban heat island spots. Some of these spots have less green space, and the temperature is 10 degrees hotter than in other parts of the city.

Trees can help reduce the urban heat island effect and improve people’s and the environment’s health in several ways.

They provide shade and block incoming solar radiation, lowering temperatures by several degrees. They also release water vapor, which can help cool temperatures. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, trees sequester carbon from the atmosphere in their wood and roots, absorb gases and provide a place for harmful air particles to land.

At the same time, according to the U.S. Forest Service, trees provide mental health benefits such as stress reduction, improved mood and a sense of well-being due to increased exposure to nature.

Cities across the country and the world have documented the long-term effects of planting trees strategically in urban areas.

In Chicago, according to studies, neighborhoods with higher tree canopy cover have experienced temperature reductions of up to 4.6 F to 6.8 F compared to areas with little or no tree canopy.

Similarly, in Medellin, Colombia, temperatures fell by 3.6 F in the first three years of their program installing green corridors, and officials expect a further decrease of 7.2 F to 9 F over the next few decades, even taking into account climate change, the Secretary of Environment of Medellin reported.

Limitations

Trees are one solution that can help residents in South Dallas combat extreme heat, but Castro Mikoy said the initiative needs to be combined with solutions to the area’s other problems.

Displacement, making ends meet and food insecurity are some issues facing South Dallas residents that make heat waves even more damaging for them.

Silvia Herrera, 48, a Jubilee resident, avoids turning on lights and household appliances during the day in the summer to keep her home cooler and reduce her electricity bills. She said her bill is around $500 in the peak summer months.

“You have to make decisions such as when you turn on the A/C and what things to avoid to spend less energy so the bill [electricity] is not too high because then I can’t pay for it,” Herrera said.

Planting trees and having the ecosystem to purchase, transport and maintain them can also be expensive. The South Dallas Greening Initiative was able to come to life because of the grant Texas Trees secured. Not all cities or organizations can afford this type of solution, which is a limitation to replicating this program everywhere.

Community First

Through the five-year plan, Brittani Hite, strategic director of Ethos Equity Consulting, which is working with Texas Trees on the initiative, said there should be no surprises for the residents.

The project is for the community and by the community, said Hite.

“We understand that the solutions are already within the community,” Hite said. “South Dallas residents know what they want. They know what they need, but because of environmental and ultimately systemic racism, unfortunately, we lack green spaces, trees and other basic necessities in our city’s Black and brown neighborhoods.”

From Hite’s perspective, the conversations among the Jubilee moms after Zumba classes to Stephen’s dream of having community gardens that work with the wants and needs of the South Dallas community, will have an impact on finding the right solution.


María Ramos Pacheco wrote this article for The Dallas Morning News.


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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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