2026-03-14 21:31:22
Federal Judge James Boasberg quashed two grand jury subpoenas on Friday afternoon that are part of the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, finding ample evidence that the subpoenas were intended to harass or coerce Powell into lowering interest rates, with no evidence pointing toward wrongdoing.
“A mountain of evidence suggests that the dominant purpose is to harass Powell to pressure him to lower rates,” wrote Boasberg, a district court judge in Washington, DC, referencing many, many social media posts and statements urging Powell to lower interest rates and then demeaning him when he did not. “Against such extensive and persuasive evidence of improper motive, the Government counters with only a tenuous assertion of a legitimate purpose.” Even when invited to submit more evidence, Boasberg noted, prosecutors declined.
US attorney Jeanine Pirro immediately announced in a press conference that she would appeal the decision. Pirro, a longtime Trump toady, called Boasberg’s opinion a dangerous precedent. She insisted that the reasons for investigating Powell—that the Fed’s renovation project is far over-budget and that there may be discrepancies in testimony Powell gave about it to Congress last year—are legitimate grounds for an investigation. Now, she warned, judges would feel empowered to block DOJ’s grand jury investigations.
But Boasberg’s straight-talk opinion was a long time coming. The obvious result of a Justice Department co-opted by a corrupt president was always going to be a department that judges cannot trust. Boasberg’s decision rubs the shine off the Justice Department, exposing it for what it has become.
“The President spent years essentially asking if no one will rid him of this
troublesome Fed Chair,” Boasberg wrote.
Boasberg, who already has a history with the lies and evasions of the Trump Justice Department, was remarkably frank about why he is not giving prosecutors the benefit of the doubt. He laid out quite clearly that Trump wants to get rid of Powell; that allegations against Powell originated with Bill Pulte, the same official who found bogus evidence for the department to go after several other of Trump’s political targets; and that the DOJ has a history of pursuing these phony prosecutions at Trump’s command.
“The President spent years essentially asking if no one will rid him of this
troublesome Fed Chair,” Boasberg wrote. “He then suggested a specific line of investigation into him, which had been proposed by a political appointee with no role in law enforcement, who hinted that it could be a way to remove Powell. The President’s appointed prosecutor promptly complied.”
Boasberg found that the facts of this particular case pointed to improper motive. But he also looked at the bigger picture of the department’s actions in Trump’s second term. For one, Boasberg was clear-eyed about the connection between Trump’s wishes and DOJ’s deeds. “The U.S. Attorney was appointed by the President and can be fired by him,” he wrote, noting that the US attorney across the Potomac was pushed out for refusing to indict James Comey in what was clearly a political prosecution. “The signal to other U.S. Attorneys was hard to miss.” He further noted Pirro’s absurd investigation into six Democratic members of Congress over a video that Trump didn’t like—which a grand jury unanimously rejected. Boasberg likewise found it noteworthy that Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute Comey, New York Attorney General Leticia James, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.)—and that the department promptly complied.
Justice Department independence was always a norm, not a law. And so Trump’s determination to break down the traditional wall between White House and DOJ and direct investigations and prosecutions was always possible.
This is the context in which Pirro seeks to investigate Powell: with the Justice Department’s prosecutorial reputation in tatters because it has taken up ridiculous case after ridiculous case for the obvious purpose of pursing people Trump doesn’t like. With regard to Powell, as Boasberg pointed out in his opinion, it’s about more than punishing an opponent: It’s about coercing a policy result that Trump doesn’t officially have the power to demand. In this case, the goal is circumventing the Fed’s independence and bulldozing his way to lower interest rates in order to juice the economy in the short term.
Trump insists on treating the Justice Department as his coterie of personal attorneys—he’s even appointed his personal attorneys to top DOJ posts—and Boasberg is treating it as such. This was the predictable outcome of the end of DOJ independence ushered in by both Trump and the Supreme Court.
Justice Department independence was always a norm, not a law. And so Trump’s determination to break down the traditional wall between White House and DOJ and direct investigations and prosecutions was always possible. But the result of an unrestrained and vengeful president taking over the department is that its prosecutors—as well as many of its other officials—lose their credibility.
The Supreme Court further urged the end of Justice Department independence in its immunity decision, Trump v. United States, in July 2024. In that decision, the court’s Republican-appointed majority found that the president could direct the DOJ to launch sham investigations and prosecutions, even in furtherance of a crime, and that this was within the president’s unassailable constitutional powers. It’s long been understood that the attorney general is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. But in the immunity decision, Chief Justice John Roberts changed that: “The Attorney General…acts as the President’s ‘chief law enforcement officer,’” Roberts wrote.
The blatant use of the Justice Department as a political weapon leads to the obvious conclusion that its actions must be closely scrutinized and possibly rejected.
Roberts’ view is truly an aberration in modern times—and far from what Congress envisioned when it created the Justice Department in 1870. In 2006, for example, the politically motivated firings of at least seven US attorneys exploded into a major scandal of undue political influence by George W. Bush’s White House. In such a world, judges might trust that a criminal investigation was legitimate. Instead, the blatant use of the Justice Department as a political weapon leads to the obvious conclusion that its actions must be closely scrutinized and possibly rejected.
The appeal of this case could pose a serious question for the Supreme Court, should it go that far. The majority has already rolled back the authority of the lower courts since Trump’s return to office, easing some of Trump’s illegal policies past the blockade of the lower courts. If so inclined, the justices could use this as an opportunity to once again make it harder for judges to stand in Trump’s way by adjusting the rules for when a district court judge can quash a grand jury subpoena.
The Supreme Court may not be inclined to do so; as this case demonstrates, it would make it easier for Trump to circumvent Federal Reserve independence that might imperil the economy. This very case seems to demonstrate a worst-case scenario for making it harder to stop improper prosecutions. The justices have signaled at least some dedication to Fed independence, a bedrock of our economic order. At the same time, Roberts is dedicated to empowering the president, even to break the law.
Whether or not this case ultimately reshapes the law, it is a stark declaration of the current state of the Justice Department and the Trump administration: a reputation so sullied by corrupt behavior that it is now imperiling its own corrupt ends.
2026-03-14 19:30:00
“Tell me that is a gorgeous country.” Dave Rogers, an Oregon farmer, points across an expanse of green ryegrass fields. “My goodness, look at that.”
We’re walking along a stretch of land that is under contract for solar development by Hanwha Qcells, a Seoul-based firm known for opening the United States’ largest solar manufacturing facility in 2023. Rogers describes the new project, dubbed Muddy Creek Energy Park, as a “huge amount of construction, three miles of solar panels, a football field with hundreds of batteries” to be built.
Rogers, a wiry man with tanned skin in a plaid shirt, is easily distracted by pointing out the local flora and fauna. He has spent the better part of two years fighting the project, pitting him against his neighbor John Langdon.
Rogers has known Langdon, also a farmer, for Langdon’s entire life. Langdon’s late father was friends with many people now opposing his son’s choice to lease the family land for agrivoltaics, the integration of solar panels into farmland. It’s a practice seen by proponents as vital to expanding cheap renewable power. Several other landowners in the area—who are neither farmers nor locals—have also leased their land as part of the same solar project.
“The only local farmers who signed the [solar] lease,” Rogers says, are “terrible, terrible farmers.”
Neighborly love can go only so far, it seems. Rogers and Langdon have chosen not to name each other in several interviews, though each is aware I am speaking with the other.
When I return to the same spot next week, Langdon talks about his plans to grow crops and graze sheep under the panels. He’s the only landowner leasing to Hanwha Qcells who has committed to agrivoltaics, which he hopes will help keep the family farm viable and profitable; opponents of the project, he thinks, are overstating the blight and the risks.
“My brother and I feel a huge responsibility to not only take care of the farm, but to move it in the future for the next generation,” he says.
Langdon runs a website, Solar Saves Farms, that shares information about agrivoltaics; he frequently speaks with legislators about the promise he sees in the technology for the agricultural community and its farmland. “We have an equal message for left and right,” he tells me. “We are farmer-first.”
One industry proponent calls agrivoltaics the “single greatest opportunity for…land production in a generation.”
Rogers feels a similar weight of responsibility to the land. He has spent his life growing native plant seeds on his farm, which he sells to those pursuing wildlife conservation. And he has converted 750 acres of his farmland into a wildlife sanctuary for birds, selling seed blends to attract waterfowl for hunters; he sees conservation and hunting as entwined. Between pointing out birds, Rogers excitedly tells me about his plans to buy more land for conservation.
For Rogers, the agrivoltaics project, like any development, threatens birds. “There’s tens of thousands of waterfowl that use that area,” says Rogers, referring to the planned solar farm site. “If they’re allowed to do this, it’s gone.” (The effects of utility solar on birds are a point of dispute: Research has both found positive and negative effects on avian populations.)
When I drive through Rogers’ and Langdon’s farming community in Linn County, Oregon, I pass numerous signs from Rogers’ group, Friends of Gap Road, against the development.
Its members “discourage this project of taking valuable farmland and putting solar panels on it,” he says. “It’s contradictory to good sense.”
A registered PAC, Friends of Gap Road describes itself as an “informal association of ten local landowners.” It raises money to speak out against the development and donate to local candidates who support farmland conservation and wetland conservation, says Troy Jones, its director. Friends of Gap Road is supporting Angelita Sanchez, a Republican, in the race for Oregon House District 11; in that district’s last race, it supported an independent. But the PAC characterizes itself as single-issue around agricultural land use.
“This is a bipartisan issue,” Jones says. “We say that because we have people from the left fighting” with others from the right, he adds, citing the historically left-leaning 1000 Friends of Oregon, another group weighing in against the project.
Opposition to development is nothing short of a historical legacy for farmers in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The state has myriad restrictions on development, especially around building on “prime” rural farmland—all originating in the valley in which Rogers and Langdon farm.
Oregon’s governor during the late ’60s, Tom McCall, ran against the encroachment of urban development on rural land, with the strong backing of the valley’s farmers. By 1973, the state legislature had passed the Oregon Land Use Act, which strictly regulates the conversion of agricultural land. Jones says his side feels that it is carrying the torch: “There’s still that same love of the beauty of Oregon—forest, beaches, and farmland—that we’re trying to retain here.”
An agrivoltaics project in Ohio was described by an opponent as “spitting in the face” of the county’s voters.
Langdon says the well-coordinated opposition didn’t give him a chance to explain his view. “They all came out and immediately opposed the project,” he says. “All those people have my phone number, most of them I’ve known for years, and no one called me.”
Rogers and Langdon represent a wider fissure around the technology: While the majority of farmers are open to some amount of agrivoltaics, surveys show that at least 30 percent of American farmers are firmly opposed to trying it.
It’s because of the Oregon Land Use Act and subsequent legislation that solar developments of more than a dozen acres require public input, the approval of a seven-person local council, and developers’ demonstration of community benefit, especially advantageous location, and a minimal loss of farmland, alongside many other environmental considerations.
That’s a large part of why the solar project on Langdon’s land hasn’t moved forward in the three years since it was proposed. Why, Langdon asks, do so many other voices get to dictate the choices he makes on his farm?
“It kind of bothered me that everyone has an involvement or an opinion or perception,” he says. “This is not their business. It’s our property.”
The idea of integrating solar farms with agriculture was first conceived in the 1980s by a pair of German researchers as a way to alleviate poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. The plan never panned out, but about a decade ago, scientists in Japan reconsidered the technology as a potential player in the urgent push to decarbonize the world economy. Over the past decade, it has spread rapidly across the globe.
Unlike solar installations on sunnier, less-vegetated deserts or those on developed areas, agrivoltaics in temperate areas like Oregon get an efficiency boost because the vegetation cools the systems. Not all crops are suited for it; some see a yield reduction, and those that demand a lot of sun—like corn, soybeans, and cotton—are a better match for wind turbines. But other plants can actually benefit from the unique microclimate under the solar panels. Oregon State University hydrologist John Selker is researching a solar array in Corvallis, not far from Langdon’s property; he found that soil under agrivoltaics held water more efficiently, describing the panels as “miniature greenhouses.”
As of 2024, the last year for which statistics are available, there were more than 600 agrivoltaics sites in the United States producing 10 gigawatts of energy, enough to power 7.5 million homes—double the capacity of just four years before. But the US, where most agrivoltaics projects are still backed by university research or international firms like Hanwha Qcells, is only a small player compared with agrivoltaics leader China, which generates more than three times as much energy from such projects, or second-place France, which gets 20 percent of its solar power from agrivoltaics.
Silicon Ranch is a rare exception: an American-owned solar firm that’s invested heavily in agrivoltaics. Established in 2011, the company built utility-scale solar across the South and in 2013 started a project next to Will Harris, a regenerative farmer in Georgia. Until then, Silicon Ranch had been managing vegetation under panels by spraying herbicides and mowing. Harris didn’t like the prospect.
“I knew it could be done differently,” Harris says. He invited Reagan Farr, Silicon Ranch’s CEO, to learn more about grazing management. Silicon Ranch turned that project, and others, into agrivoltaics developments, three of which Harris is now contracted to graze. The company maintains an in-house sheep herd to graze the others. The practice, Harris says, has brought a much-needed influx of cash into those rural communities.
Loran Shallenberger, who leads the agrivoltaics program at Silicon Ranch, says he’s come to see it “as probably the single greatest opportunity for sheep production and land production in a generation.”
Still, many farmers are skeptical. Those who adopt agrivoltaics often face community ostracism for its perceived effect on land and property values— lowering or raising them, depending on the complaint—and for risking the health of the land. Stories like Muddy Creek’s are playing out again and again across the country. One agrivoltaics project in Ohio was described by an opponent as “spitting in the face” of the county’s voters. In Kansas, an opponent said a solar project threatened “the character of our communities.”
In a comment to a state oversight body drafted by Portland attorney James L. Buchal, farmers opposed to Muddy Creek alleged that the solar project would harm local wildlife, pose a fire risk, leach toxic metals into the ecosystem, and lower nearby property values, in addition to being “aesthetically displeasing.”
But Buchal isn’t just the lawyer for Friends of Gap Road: He’s a Republican politician known for successfully defending the leader of the far-right group Patriot Prayer, collaborators of the better-known Proud Boys, against charges of riot. Jones said Friends of Gap Road was unaware of Buchal’s other clients and hadn’t hired him for his political affiliations.
“He’s a force to be reckoned with,” Jones says.
The concerns about battery fires, toxic metals, and soil damage aren’t easy to definitively confirm or refute without many more years of testing, even if there isn’t yet much direct evidence to back them. Battery fires, for example, while highly publicized, are exceedingly rare in practice.
In terms of agricultural viability, though, USDA research suggests that land with agrivoltaics projects continues to be used as farmland at high rates, and that only one percent of total domestic farmland would be required to meet the nation’s renewable energy needs. Initial research shows promising effects on soil quality. Long-term outcomes are much more opaque, especially since solar installations remain in place for 20 to 30 years.
“We know very little because there has been almost no published research on it,” says Lee Daniels, a Virginia Tech professor emeritus of soil science who has spent the last 40 years studying the effects of land disturbances like mining on soil and water quality.
There is a similar dearth of research on the long-term potential for toxic metals to leach from panels into soil. Ryan Stewart, another Virginia Tech scholar who works with Daniels, says that’s a concern he hears often from local farmers.
“There have been some studies saying that you basically have to mash up the panels into dust for this to be a concern,” Stewart says, but he cautions that research is still in early phases. Daniels agrees that it’s an “area that needs further work.”
Daniels and Stewart are collaborating on a multiyear study assessing the soil and water quality effects of utility-scale solar projects and how best to mitigate them. It’s already clear, Daniels argues, that proper siting and management can prevent the irreparable harms to the land that some farmers fear.
The best practices Daniels cites—leaving topsoil onsite, reducing cut-and-fill leveling—are what Langdon says he plans for his land.
“The land’s been here long before humans, and it’s going to be here for a long time,” Langdon says. “It may be in different uses or look different, but my brother and I truly look at it like we are stewards of the land.”
Without proper management, Daniels acknowledges that the effects can be devastating. He has seen agrivoltaics projects remove nutrient-rich topsoil to level hilly properties, which can cut the land’s productivity by as much as half.
In a comment about the development plan, representatives from Hanwha Renewables emphasized that the project will entail minimum cut and fill because it’s on a flat site. “Topsoil will be retained and preserved to continue crop production for the duration of the operating period of the project,” they wrote.
“I think we can do solar well,” Daniels says. “I think we can minimize impacts. We need to move away from fossil fuels.”
As I walk the valley with Rogers, I probe him about some of that research. He may not be an expert on the science, he grants, but he doesn’t like the idea of his backyard becoming a “lab.”
Setting agrivoltaics aside, I ask him about transformation and development, full stop.
“Anything that changes the land offends me,” he says, “if it isn’t farming or wetlands.”
Langdon, when we take a similar walk, tells me that a major draw of the solar project is the thought that it will help him with farming and conservation. The current use of the valley is to conventionally farm grass seed, which isn’t a food source or native habitat for migratory birds, so solar provides an alternative.
The influx of cash from the solar lease allowed Langdon to plant 220 acres of more expensive Oregon wild rice, one of the same crops Rogers grows. “It’s been the biggest wildlife attraction that we could have imagined,” he says. He wouldn’t have been able to afford it otherwise.
It all depends, of course, on whether the project goes through. Hanwha Qcells submitted its notice of intent to file an application for project back in 2023, which sparked the public backlash. Four months later, the state of Oregon responded with requirements needed for a formal application such as site studies, community comments, and local ordinances. Hanwha Qcells had a year to respond to the project order with an official application, but requested and got an extension.
Now, for the project to move forward, Hanwha Qcells will need to submit an official application by May. Friends of Gap Road posted about that nearing deadline on its Facebook page on January 27: “We are ready and prepared for this action. Please make sure you are ready to fight like hell!”
The future of agrivoltaics, like all clean energy in the United States, is in a weird spot. Shortly after I first visited the farmers, the USDA announced it would stop funding renewable energy projects on farmland. While Langdon’s array comes from an agreement with a private solar company, many farmers’ access to the technology depends on grants like these. The solar credit many farmers use has become more complicated under President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. And then there’s the increase in overall solar costs thanks to tariffs.
In January, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek ordered state agencies to move faster on renewable energy projects. But Friends of Gap Road remains “cautiously optimistic” that it can stop the project, Jones says.
Although his father’s friends have become staunch opponents, Langdon says his dad would have been supportive. “He would be very disappointed to make the neighbors unhappy, because these are lifelong friends,” Langdon says, “but he’s a guy that’s going to do what he has to do to make a living and to make his farm better for the next generation and generations to come.”
2026-03-14 15:01:00
In 1989, Chuck Stuart called 911 on his car phone to report a shooting.
He said he and his wife were leaving a birthing class at a Boston hospital when a man forced him to drive into the mixed-race Mission Hill neighborhood and shot them both. Stuart’s wife, Carol, was seven months pregnant. She would die that night, hours after her son was delivered by cesarean section, and days later, her son would die, too.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.Stuart said he saw the man who did it: a Black man in a tracksuit.
Within hours, the killing had the city in a panic, and Boston police were tearing through Mission Hill looking for a suspect.
For a whole generation of Black men in Mission Hill who were subjected to frisks and strip searches, this investigation shaped their relationship with police. And it changed the way Boston viewed itself when the story took a dramatic turn and the true killer was revealed.
This week on Reveal, in partnership with the Murder in Boston podcast and associate editor and columnist Adrian Walker of the Boston Globe, we bring you the untold story of the Stuart murder: one that exposed truths about race and crime that few white people in power wanted to confront.
This is an update of a show that originally aired in May 2024.
2026-03-14 03:54:09
Pavel Talankin is a teacher from a small mining town in Central Russia. He spent two and a half years documenting how his school was conscripted into Putin’s war propaganda machine for the Oscar-nominated documentary, Mr. Nobody Against Putin.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, his school changed almost overnight– teachers ordered to deliver government scripts and students marched through military drills. Talankin was required to film it all as the school videographer, and what he witnessed made him want to walk away from his job entirely. Instead, he connected with documentary director David Borenstein, and together they turned his footage into a feature film.
Borenstein said Talankin “wanted to show how quickly totalitarianism can take over a school, a workplace, a government, and how our complicity becomes fuel in that fire.”
It’s a message Talankin originally hoped to share with fellow Russians. But he now believes the film speaks to a far wider audience than he could ever have anticipated when he began filming.
He points to a joke circulating in Eastern Europe: the Belarusians say they and the Russians are watching the same TV series- only Russia is a few episodes behind.
“I am sorry to tell you,” he says, “that America has begun watching this series, too.”
2026-03-14 01:47:40
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Up until the end of February, a steady flow of ships bound for destinations across the world would pass daily through the Strait of Hormuz. A narrow channel running between Oman and Iran, the waterway serves as the only natural maritime link between the Persian Gulf and the global economy. That all changed on March 2, when, after days of military strikes led by the S and Israel, Iran effectively closed the strait for the first time in history and warned that any ships passing through would be fired upon. Ever since, vessels moving through the channel have been attacked and set ablaze, and hundreds of tankers remain stranded. At least 1,800 people have been killed in the war, including Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top government officials.
The Persian Gulf is a linchpin of the planet’s oil and gas production; normally, roughly one-fifth of global oil and gas flows through the strait. Now, as it remains embattled, oil and gas prices have surged, and many experts warn an energy crisis is imminent. Restaurants across India are scaling back operations and warning of closures amid fuel shortages from the maritime blockade, while cooking gas prices are spiking in Sri Lanka.
“The fact that obviously nothing is leaving means that there’s going to be a large hole in the market for fertilizer.”
Another world crisis sparked by the war in Iran may also be in the offing. That’s because the region’s oil and gas production has made it one of the world’s leading exporters of nitrogen fertilizers, which are indispensable to the global food system. To produce the chemicals used to grow much of the planet’s crops, natural gas is broken down to extract hydrogen, which is combined with nitrogen to make ammonia, and then mixed with carbon dioxide to make urea. All told, nearly a third of the global trade for nitrogen fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz, while almost half of the world’s sulfur, essential in producing phosphate fertilizers, also travels through the corridor.
The waterway is a lifeline for food, too. Palm oil exports coming from Southeast Asia face potential major disruptions. Grain shipments headed to Gulf countries reliant on rice and wheat imports have been stalled.
“A worrying amount of food, or inputs into modern agriculture, are going through this very small channel,” said Ginni Braich, a data scientist who studies food insecurity at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Better Planet Laboratory. She estimates that the strait is in the top 20th percentile of all the worlds’ transportation corridors just based on the sheer volume of food that passes through it.
The sudden and cascading effects of trade halting through the waterway, according to Braich, “really underscores how interconnected everything is, and how fragile…just any small amount of disruption can have huge aftershocks that reverberate all around the world.”
The timing, Braich said, could not be worse, as spring planting in the northern hemisphere—crop farmers’ biggest season—is approaching. “So, basically, vessels that were leaving the Middle East today would be arriving in mid-April,” she said. “Now, the fact that obviously nothing is leaving means that there’s going to be a large hole in the market for fertilizer.”
“There are many stops along the way from closing the Strait of Hormuz to a child in Malawi being fed.”
If the war persists, experts warn that the drop in supply and the increase of cargo insurance premiums and freight rates could raise prices for everyone along the supply chain. Unlike with oil, there is no meaningful strategic reserve for nitrogen-based fertilizer, so there’s no equivalent stockpile to help buffer the shocks.
While the US does produce some of its own fertilizer, domestic producers cannot rapidly replace millions of tons of fertilizer supplies. Other countries more reliant on fertilizer imports from the Middle East, such as India, will be hit hard by the cessation of traffic on the strait. China, Indonesia, Morocco, and several sub-Saharan African nations are also expected to be affected by the global gridlock of sulfur exports flowing from the Gulf.
Moreover, Braich warned, any prolonged increase in shipping and inventory costs “is going to be felt by the consumer.”
For some, the impact is already here. Prices for key fertilizer products are up because of the war and are expected to squeeze growers’ profit margins—which could lead farmers to ration fertilizer use, reducing yields, or even to shift from planting input-intensive crops. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told reporters in Atlanta, Georgia, on Tuesday that the Trump administration was “looking at every possible option” to address “skyrocketing” fertilizer costs for US farmers “based on actions on the other side of the world.”
About 4 billion people on the planet eat food grown with synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. Roughly half of the global population, in other words, is alive because of these chemicals converted into nutrients for plants, said Lorenzo Rosa, who researches sustainable energy, water, and food systems at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University.
Of course, the fact that natural gas is the key to mass-producing synthetic fertilizers carries its own terrible climate implications. Together, manufacturing and applying synthetic fertilizers to fields and farms accounts for over 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions—just about equal to the CO2 emissions from global aviation. There are low-emissions alternatives to this process, Rosa argued: Nitrogen could be recycled from waste, and natural gas plants could be powered by local or renewable energy sources and built closer to the farms that require fertilizer.
The US “will ensure the FREE FLOW of ENERGY to the WORLD,” Trump wrote on social media. He made no mention of fertilizer, or food.
Normally, the fossil fuel-based, centralized—and, thus, fragile—supply chain for fertilizer and food is far cheaper than its alternative. But major shocks like the U.S.-Israel war against Iran expose the dangerous vulnerability of that system, as efficient and financially sound as it may be. “At some point, a country will have to decide: ‘Do I want the cheap fertilizer, importing it from the Strait of Hormuz or another country? Or do I prefer to pay a green premium and have my own domestic production and energy and food security?’” said Rosa.
USDA Secretary Rollins acknowledged this vulnerability in Tuesday’s press conference. “We are getting almost all of our urea, almost all of our phosphate, almost all of our nitrogen from other countries around the world, and that has to stop,” she said.
The catch, however, is that decentralizing this supply chain could inadvertently create a green divide—splitting the world between the nations and farmers who can afford domestically produced fertilizer and those who can’t. Many countries confronting widespread famine in Africa, for instance, already pay the highest fertilizer prices in the world and are unable to withstand further inflation.
“There are many stops along the way from closing the Strait of Hormuz to a child in Malawi being fed,” said Cary Fowler, president of the nonprofit Food Security Leadership Council and former US Special Envoy for Global Food Security in the Biden administration. “The clear thing is that those two things are connected.”
The same countries that stand to face the most harmful food security effects because of the conflict in Iran are also the ones struggling to feed their citizens following the collapse of global food aid after President Donald Trump dissolved the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, last year. Emergencies like these are where the international community’s response becomes increasingly important, Fowler said.
In addition to the dissolution of USAID, which halted international research efforts and initiatives to improve farming practices in lower-income nations, the World Food Programme has in recent months sounded the alarm over historically low donations from the US and other major Western donors.
“If we don’t invest in that sustainable productivity growth, then we put ourselves in a situation where we’re going to need a lot more humanitarian aid, particularly when there’s flare-ups like we’re experiencing now,” said Fowler. “And that gives us another choice—whether to provide that humanitarian aid or not. And that’s a choice of whether we want to, at least in the short-term, solve the problem. Or do we want to watch children starve to death on TV?”
It’s not clear how long the strait will remain closed, although Trump has swung between stating the war with Iran could stretch on through April, if not longer, and declaring it nearly done. Last week, the president announced that the US might begin to escort oil tankers through the embattled channel. “No matter what, the United States will ensure the FREE FLOW of ENERGY to the WORLD,” Trump wrote on social media, before later declaring “death, fire, and fury” if Iran continues its shipping blockade. On Sunday, he told Fox News that ships holding there should “show some guts” and push through.
The president made no mention of fertilizer—or food.
Rahul Bali of WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station and a Grist partner, contributed reporting.
2026-03-13 23:36:18
On Thursday, college football coach turned Senate dunce Tommy Tuberville took to X to quote-retweet a post from the account @EndWokeness. The original tweet were side-by-side photos of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and a plane hitting the second tower on 9/11. “Less than 25 years apart,” the account wrote.
Tuberville’s contribution? “The enemy is inside the gates,” he wrote.
That story was picked up quickly the likes of the Washington Post, Fox News and Politico, which even wondered aloud on X if Tuberville was suggesting that Muslims were the enemy.
Actually, no. On Friday, Tuberville clarified his intentions. “To be clear, I didn’t ‘suggest’ Islamists are the enemy,” he wrote. “I said it plainly.”
Got it, Coach.
And he’s still going:
Really clears things up.
