By Elizabeth McGowan for Energy News Network.
Broadcast version by Edwin J. Viera for Virginia News Connection reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Virginia’s participation in an East Coast greenhouse gas emissions pact is pivotal to curbing the climate impact of its thriving data center industry.

Globally, northern Virginia has become one of the largest data center hubs over the last decade-plus. Offering generous tax incentives has attracted tech giants eager to construct massive server farms with proximity to crucial digital infrastructure. An estimated 70% of the world’s internet traffic moves through the suburbs of Washington, D.C., daily.

That burgeoning has propelled a surge in electricity use. In 2020, the sector consumed close to 12,000 gigawatt-hours in Dominion Energy’s territory — roughly one-sixth of the investor-owned utility’s total retail sales that same year.

And yet, the state’s carbon emissions from power plants have fallen 12% annually during the last two years.

William Shobe, an environmental policy professor at the University of Virginia, is among those crediting the 11-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. Known as RGGI, the initiative is a voluntary carbon cap-and-invest venture designed to tamp down heat-trapping gases emitted by the utility sector. Virginia’s downward emissions trend will halt without that cap in place, Shobe said.

Even as electricity-hungry data centers multiply across the state, RGGI’s binding carbon cap keeps emissions in check. Basically, the amount of fossil fuels a utility is allowed to burn shrinks each year as the cap is lowered. 

It’s a crucial dynamic to understand, Shobe said, as Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin has vowed to extract Virginia from the market-based climate initiative.

“As a planetary citizen, I’m happy with that [cap],” said Shobe, who directs the Energy Transition Initiative at the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. “If the state relaxes RGGI, then data centers have climate consequences that we need to worry about.”

He’s hopeful that legislators won’t follow Youngkin’s lead on RGGI during the session that opened last Wednesday. Republicans control the House of Delegates while Democrats have a majority in the Senate.

Shobe also argues that continuing to build data centers in Virginia can be a net positive for climate change — assuming data centers will be built somewhere and the state stays committed to the regional greenhouse gas program. That construction trend shows no signs of abating in Virginia for at least the next 10 years.

“As long as we are a member of RGGI, then we should encourage data centers here rather than Ohio, Indiana or someplace else without a cap on carbon dioxide emissions,” Shobe said. 

Shobe played a significant role in designing the mechanisms behind RGGI, which debuted in 2009. In a nutshell, each member state limits emissions from fossil fuel power plants, issues carbon dioxide allowances and sets up participation in auctions for those allowances.

In 2020, Virginia became the first Southern state to join RGGI, after ample back-and-forth bickering. Advocates have hailed the program for its climate benefits and the upward of $450 million the allowance auction has so far yielded for statewide flood resiliency projects, energy efficiency upgrades, and home repairs for low-income residents statewide.

Youngkin has been itching to extract Virginia from RGGI since he took office a year ago. In early December, the state’s Air Pollution Control Board voted 4-1 to accelerate that exit. 

Attorneys with environmental organizations maintain that the Youngkin administration lacks the authority to leave the compact. That decision, RGGI proponents say, is in the hands of the General Assembly. A legislative effort to derail RGGI failed last year.

The air board’s initial vote to leave RGGI will trigger a 60-day comment period this winter. Shobe and his colleagues are prepared to weigh in with insights that the board will review before voting again on the proposal.

Shobe published an electricity use forecast in April 2021 predicting that data centers will be the driving force behind a 38% increase in electricity sales between 2020 and 2035. That equals an average increase in electricity use of around 44,000 gigawatt-hours per year.

“Whether we think this is a good thing or not, data centers are growing very fast,” Shobe said. “Unfortunately, they use a lot of energy. How we provide that energy is what will make a difference.”

Shobe noted that residential electricity sales are close to flatlining due to slower population growth and improved energy efficiency. Likewise, commercial and industrial demand have fallen for several years.

For the most part, large technology companies have pledged to power their facilities with renewable energy. However, it’s unclear whether or how they are following through on those commitments.

Thus far, Virginia’s solar expansion is on pace with a legislative mandate to decarbonize the grid by 2050, Shobe said. But the state can’t afford a solar stumble if it’s going to feed the needs of voracious data centers.

Some in the environmental community doubt that server farms will be able to live up to their vows to harness 100% of their energy from clean sources. Rooftop solar can’t cover those needs because the average solar array on a data center would only offset about 2.2% of its annual electricity consumption, according to calculations by solar developers.

That means operators resort to power purchase agreements, which allow them to go solar even if the utility-scale arrays they invest in are located miles away or in other states and might not be generating when data centers are consuming power.

Some are leery of those pacts. But Shobe defends the agreements as “perfectly fine ways” to contain greenhouse gases.

“If a data center has a solar farm built somewhere else to cover emissions, why wouldn’t you want to credit them for that?” he said, adding that his university does just that with two off-campus arrays. “From the point of view of resolving global warming, it doesn’t matter where it is built.

“As long as it’s on the same planet, it has the same effect on emissions.”

Shobe suggested that in the big picture, a third-party monitoring organization — along the lines of a Good Housekeeping seal of approval — should be tasked with holding data centers accountable for clean energy pledges.

“Enforcement is a tricky problem,” he said. “What it boils down to is, are people holding true to their promises?”

Boosting in-state solar capacity is far preferable to importing electricity because that might be sourced from states without a carbon emissions cap, Shobe said. 

“The question is how fast we can add renewable energy,” especially over the next five or six years, he said. “We are going to have to be more aggressive and do it faster if we are going to be a center for data center construction.”

In the meantime, the air board’s vote and the start of Virginia’s new, two-month legislative session has ushered in fresh fears that the state’s progress could be stymied. Shobe said he and other RGGI champions will meet with lawmakers to tout the climate value of sticking with the cap-and-invest program.

Withdrawing from RGGI would halt the flow of auction allowances. Instead, in mid-December, Youngkin proposed replacing that with $200 million in taxpayer dollars dedicated to a Resilient Virginia Revolving Fund.

That shift away from the RGGI model signals a lack of commitment to tackling climate change, Shobe said, because it removes not only environmental certainty but also the incentive for utilities to pivot from high- to low-emitting generation.

In Virginia, he emphasized, the original reason for joining RGGI was about having a cost-effective tool for reducing emissions. Producing revenue was an afterthought. 

“If what the governor is hoping is that we will give up on achieving carbon dioxide reductions, that’s another matter,” Shobe said. “If we’re serious about reducing carbon emissions, we need to be thinking ahead and asking ourselves what our energy portfolio is going to look like.”

Elizabeth McGowan wrote this article for Energy News Network.


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By Seth Millstein for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Prairie News Service reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

Our food systems are in serious need of an overhaul. Over the last 60 years, per-capita meat consumption has roughly doubled, and is now at unsustainable levels. During that same period of time, the number of billionaires in the world has increased dramatically as well. This confluence of trends raises an important question: what, if anything, are the world's billionaires doing to fix our food systems, and help us transition into a more climate-friendly way of eating?

Meat production fuels a number of long term environmental impacts, which is one reason why the precipitous rise in meat consumption over the last few decades is such a big problem. The livestock industry is responsible for between 11 and 20 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions globally, with 80 percent of all agricultural land going to livestock production. Beef production is the top driver of deforestation worldwide, and deforestation is an enormously destructive process that destroys ecosystems, reduces biodiversity, erodes soil and emits massive amounts of greenhouse gasses.

At the same time, the world's population is predicted to swell to 9.7 billion people by the year 2050, which means many more people potentially eating more meat. Researchers warn that the global appetite for meat will eventually exceed our capacity to produce it on this planet.

"I was at a workshop surrounded by pork producers, chicken farmers and dairy farmers, and eight out of 10 of them agreed that they will not be able to meet growing meat [demand] on their own without the other options," says Sheila Voss, vice president of communications at the Good Food Institute, a non-profit that advocates for alternatives to meat. "We only have finite land and water."

Despite what some opponents of food systems reform claim, the goal of getting people to eat less meat is not a conspiracy of billionaires trying to replace traditional meat entirely, or aiming to force people to become vegetarians. Efforts to reform the way we produce and consume meat include investments not only in alternative proteins, but also into technologies that aim to make traditional meat production more environmentally friendly, such as feeds that reduce the methane output from cattle. (Though when these turn out to be more marketing gimmick than verifiable solution, the public should be wary.)

While there's no silver bullet for accomplishing all of these changes, the richest people in the world are certainly in a position to help fund initiatives that move us in the right direction. But have they?

To answer this question, we analyzed the investment profiles of several well-known U.S. billionaires: Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Which of them are actually giving away money to improve food systems - and which ones don't appear to invest in solving this major climate issue at all?

A Breakdown of Billionaire Investments in Food

1. Jeff Bezos

One of the more prolific donors in the field is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos - a little surprising, no doubt, since "Amazon" is hardly synonymous with "sustainable." As a company that sells and ships physical products around the world, Amazon has an enormous carbon footprint, and while it's announced several measures intended to reduce its environmental impact, the efficacy of these measures is still unclear.

Bezos himself, however, has spent quite a bit of money to fund climate initiatives, including measures aimed at researching and promoting alternatives to traditional meat. He's done this primarily through the Bezos Earth Fund, a grant program for funding climate scientists and green initiatives around the world.

"Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet," Bezos wrote in an Instagram post announcing the fund. "I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share. This global initiative will fund scientists, activists, NGOs - any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world."

Bezos, one of the richest men on Earth, seeded the fund with $10 billion of his own money at the outset. That money is meant to be distributed gradually by 2030; as of this writing, $2 billion has been doled out to various climate initiatives, according to the fund's website.

The fund has committed to spending $1 billion of its overall endowment on food-related projects, with the goal of "transform[ing] food and agricultural systems to support healthy lives without degrading the planet." A lot of that money has gone to grants aimed at reducing methane output from cattle, while the Bezos' fund is also funding research into cultivated and plant-based meat.

In 2024, the fund announced that it would be spending $60 million of its endowment on research centers aimed at improving the technology behind alternative proteins. This allocation was soon increased to $100 million, and in May, the first Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein went live at North Carolina State University. The fund intends to build more of these centers in order to "establish a network of open-access research and development centers focused on sustainable protein alternatives, expanding consumer choices."

In addition to the Bezos Earth Fund, Amazon itself established the Right Now Climate Fund, a $100 million initiative aimed at reforestation and conservation. As cattle farming is the biggest driver of deforestation worldwide, this fund targets efforts, like agroforestry, that are component of food system change.

"We are not turning everybody into vegetarians," said Andrew Steer, president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund, in June. "But we are trying to improve the choice and the health and the vitality of the agricultural system."

2. Bill Gates

Next on our list is Bill Gates, one of two founders of Microsoft. A vocal proponent of alternative proteins, Gates has called plant-based meat "the future," and said that wealthy countries "should move to 100 percent synthetic beef" in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with cattle.

More importantly, he's put his money where his mouth is, so to speak. Gates has invested in plant-based meat companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, as well as the cultivated meat company Upside Foods, formerly known as Memphis Meats. Upside Foods is one of just two cultivated meat companies that have been given FDA approval to sell its products commercially in the U.S.

Gates has also given money to Neutral Foods, a food company that aims to be carbon neutral by purchasing carbon offsets to compensate for the emissions its products cause. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has also provided grants to a number of organizations working on alternative proteins, including the Good Food Institute.

3. Elon Musk

Musk's record on the environment is mixed. There was a time when he had a reputation as an environmentalist, as the success of his electric car company Tesla was seen as a positive step in reducing transportation-related greenhouse emissions.

Over the last few years, however, Musk's politics have drifted steadily to the right, and that includes his stance on global warming and sustainability. In a recent conversation with Donald Trump, Musk downplayed climate change's urgency, claiming that "it's not like the house is on fire immediately" and that "people can still have a steak and they can still drive gasoline cars, and it's okay." Musk's statements are often contradictory, however. He went on to characterize climate action as "something we need to move towards," albeit "without causing hardship in the short term." Musk has also praised Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who made headlines recently for banning the sale of cultivated meat in his state.

And yet despite all of this, Musk's company SpaceX has collaborated with Aleph Farms, an Israeli company that makes alternative meat, to investigate the viability of growing cultivated meat in space. In 2022, a four-man team flew to the International Space Station on a SpaceX capsule with cultivated beef cells in tow, and studied the viability of growing those cells into edible meat in zero gravity conditions.

It seems contradictory: Musk's company participates in an experiment that promotes meat alternatives (in space, at least), yet he's also vocally downplayed beef's role in driving climate pollution (back on Earth). While only Musk knows what's going on in his head, the fact remains that his company has at least played a small role in research to advance cultivated meat technology.

Outside of that, Musk's company Tesla stopped using animal products in its cars in 2019, replacing the traditional leather seats with vinyl.

4. Mark Zuckerberg

Finally, we took a look at investments made by Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. Zuckerberg has made clear that he has no problem with traditional meat, and he doesn't appear to have invested in the alternative meat or meat reduction strategies in any significant way (a Zuckerberg-backed fund did apparently invest in biotech company Modern Meadow, maker of leather alternatives, in 2019). He has made headlines, however, with two of his meat-related projects.

In 2011, Zuckerberg announced that for the next year he would only be eating meat from animals that he personally killed. He later explained that this meant he'd "basically become a vegetarian," since he was killing relatively few animals. He ended the experiment after a year.

More recently, Zuckerberg revealed that he's been raising cattle on his ranch in Hawaii, with the goal of creating "some of the highest quality beef in the world." He said that the cows are wagyu and angus breeds, and that he's feeding them macadamia meal and beer that they produce on the ranch. Zuckerberg was widely criticized for this, in part because it's unclear whether macadamia meal and beer is a suitable diet for cows.

The Bottom Line

The billionaires we've looked at here are all over the map in terms of their stances on meat. Both Bezos and Gates support efforts to address how much meat the world consumes, while Zuckerberg mostly has other ideas. As for Musk, only he can know what's going on in his head.

"[Bezos and Gates] are leaning into food systems transformation, and that's fairly new," Voss says. "Our food system needs massive help, given the realities and challenges, as well as growing meat demand, and in both of these cases, the Bezos Earth fund and Gates both are supporting multiple interventions. They're not just putting their eggs in one basket."

But money talks, and what matters much more than what these people say about meat is how they've spent their money. Billionaires and the ultra-wealthy have the resources to significantly improve food systems around the world. A few have made the financial commitment, and hopefully, more of their peers will soon follow suit.


Seth Millstein wrote this article for Sentient.


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The Environmental Protection Agency began an in-depth review of the health risks of vinyl chloride last year, part of a process required to limit or ban the chemical.

Jess Conard - Appalachia director for the advocacy group Beyond Plastics - said communities in places like East Palestine, Ohio, and in West Virginia along the Ohio River, experienced widespread harm after train derailments and leaks of the chemical.

She said she believes the heightened public awareness of the dangers of vinyl chloride prompted federal action.

"We have safe alternatives for all the consumer products on the market, and I think that the EPA is starting to recognize this," said Conard. "So I do commend the EPA for starting the process, which is the first legal step that could lead to a complete and total ban."

The EPA is accepting public comments on the ban until October 23. Vinyl chloride is used to create PVC pipes, vinyl siding, windows, flooring, packaging, and many common household products.

Research has shown exposure comes with an increased risk of liver, brain, and lung cancers - along with lymphoma and leukemia.

For decades the Charleston area, home to many industries that produced vinyl chloride and other industrial chemicals, was known as the Chemical Valley.

Conard said rather than an outright ban, the EPA is more likely to phase out the chemical, and phase in more sustainable alternatives for companies and consumers.

"We know that pipes, for example, are a big problem right now," said Conard, "because of evidence that indicates that there is leaching of these plastic chemicals into the water that the pipes are carrying."

A 2024 report by Toxic-Free Future estimates more than three million Americans live within one mile of trains carrying vinyl chloride, and that 36 million pounds of the chemical may be traveling along rail lines at any given time in the U.S.




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Savannah's leaders are pointing out the ways federal dollars are being used to boost the area's resilience against climate change.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, many residents are just now getting their power back after a week in the dark. Mayor Van Johnson said the storm has been a wakeup call for the urgent need to tackle climate change, and Savannah's resilience plan is designed to do just that.

"In 2020, the city council unanimously adopted a 100% Savannah Initiative," he said, "which means transitioning partially to clean energy in the 2030s and totally by 2050."

Johnson said 75% of the city's buildings are at risk of flooding, and 26% face wildfire threats. Despite these challenges, he noted that efforts to build climate resilience have boosted the local economy, with jobs popping up in solar energy, construction and renewable technology.

Savannah is part of a statewide initiative that recently received $156 million from the Solar for All program, part of the Inflation Reduction Act. This funding, spread across Georgia, aims to expand solar energy over the next five years.

Nicole Lee, CEO of Be Smart Home Solutions, said its efforts have already helped local families lower energy costs.

"The Thomases were our very first clients to get solar with the Georgia Bright Program," she said. "They have seen savings of more than 50% on their power bills. Just this summer, they've seen a bill of $18 from solar plus storage."

She said the solar system proved invaluable during Hurricane Helene, allowing them to power critical medical devices and even serve as a resiliency hub for their neighbors.

Chatham County Commissioner Aaron Whitley emphasized the importance of preparedness in the face of future storms, pointing to new projects aimed at enhancing community resilience.

"Chatham County is working on community resiliency hubs that will provide power during the outages like the ones we experienced last week," he said.

Officials have said these efforts are also crucial to protect vulnerable communities from the health impacts of climate change. Other projects in the works include what's known as beach "re-nourishment," a drainage basin study, and forging more partnerships with other organizations to bolster the region's preparedness.


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