We know how to decarbonize energy. The food sector should take notes.

The ​“Eating the Earth” column explores the connections between the food we eat and the climate we live in.

These days, I’m sure it’s frustrating and depressing to spend your time thinking about energy and climate issues. Global coal use hit an all-time high last year. So did greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels. Now President Donald Trump and his Republican lackeys are maniacally rolling back America’s clean-energy progress, sledgehammering renewables while subsidizing pollution.

It’s awful, I know.

But just think how frustrated and depressed those of us who spend our time thinking about food and climate issues must be.

On energy, there’s at least progress for Trump to roll back. On food, there’s been virtually none. On energy, the world at least knows what it needs to do — electrify the global economy and run it on clean electricity — even if it’s not doing it quickly or consistently enough. On food, the world isn’t even sure what it needs to know, and the problems are quickly and consistently getting worse.

That’s why I wrote my new food and climate book, ​“We Are Eating the Earth.” The food system is about one-third of the climate problem, but it attracts only 3% of climate finance and maybe 0.3% of climate conversations. It’s also the leading driver of biodiversity losses, water pollution, and water shortages. But I knew nothing about its impact on the planet when I started my research six years ago, and I suspect most people are still as ignorant now as I was then.

The book covers dozens of promising food and climate solutions — including some I wrote about for Canary, like this bad-ass super-tree, this eco-friendly bio-fertilizer, high-yield pastures, and high-tech food. The bad news is that none of them have achieved the kind of scale necessary to make a serious dent in emissions. But 20 years ago, the same was true of energy and climate solutions — and the good news is that nearly all new U.S. power plants are zero-carbon, while electric vehicles look like the future of transportation.

The additional bad news is that we’re losing a soccer field’s worth of forest to agriculture every six seconds; we’re on track to lose another dozen Californias’ worth of forest by 2050; and we don’t have another 20 years or dozen Californias to spare if we want to avoid climate catastrophes. Even if all 8 billion of us stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow, we’ll still blow past the 2050 targets in the Paris climate accord if we don’t fix how we consume and produce food. Our food problems are mostly land problems; we’re eating the earth, and we’ll need to eat much less of it if we don’t want to obliterate our remaining carbon sinks.

In other words, food needs to get where energy is now in a hurry. So what political lessons can the food world learn from two decades of energy progress?

The government has to help

The first lesson of the energy transition is that it has required public investment. The U.S. government’s national labs, scientific grants, and other R&D funding helped spur the development of solar panels, electric-vehicle batteries, and other climate-friendly technologies. Federal subsidies, tax credits, and other aid to manufacturers and consumers then helped deploy and scale those technologies — driving down their costs, reducing the ​“green premium” that makes untested eco-innovations unattractive to investors and consumers, and helping them compete with fossil-fueled incumbents. The Chinese government has been far more aggressive about subsidizing deployment, which is why China is building more renewable power and electric cars than the rest of the world combined.

The Biden administration did start investing in climate-friendly food and agriculture solutions, such as cultivated meat grown from animal cells, feed additives that help cattle burp less methane, and nutrient-management strategies and technologies to cut emissions from fertilizer and manure. China again seems determined to go even bigger.

But the Trump administration is undoing Joe Biden’s green agriculture initiatives, and in any case they were orders of magnitude smaller than the rivers of cash cascading into green energy. That’s a big reason why food and land solutions are off to such a slow start, and why private investment is lagging as well; for example, the cultivated meat industry has attracted $3 billion in its entire history for its efforts to displace beef and pork, while the solar industry attracted $500 billion just last year to take on natural gas and coal.

Obviously, the U.S. government won’t invest in climate solutions as long as Trump and the GOP are running it. And while research into more productive and resilient crops and livestock could help the climate even if it isn’t labeled ​“climate research,” Trump is slashing funding for all research. But countries that haven’t lost their collective minds on climate or research should try to do for food what they’ve done for energy. There are woefully underfunded scientists around the world trying to convert crop residues into high-quality animal feed, reduce fertilizer pollution through a nerds-only process called ​“biological nitrification inhibition,” and even reinvent photosynthesis with artificial intelligence and gene editing. They’ll need government help to figure out which approaches work, then deploy the ones that do.

A corollary to that lesson is that governments should let a thousand flowers bloom, investing in all kinds of potential alternatives to the status quo. In my last book, ​“The New New Deal,” I chronicled how former President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill poured $90 billion into a dizzying array of clean-energy solutions: advanced hydropower; enhanced geothermal; photovoltaic and concentrated solar; energy-efficient windows and bulbs; a slew of battery technologies; biofuels brewed from crops and wood and algae; and the factories to manufacture all that green stuff in the U.S. You can mock it as unfocused spray-and-pray, but the idea was that instead of picking winners and losers, the government would pick the game of clean energy, then let the markets sort out the winners and losers. And it worked.

Oh, there were plenty of losers. The most famous was Solyndra, a solar manufacturer that became Republicanese for ​“green boondoggle” after it defaulted on a half-billion-dollar stimulus loan. The massive stimulus-funded concentrated solar project Ivanpah was a bust, too. So was this battery startup, several biofuels ventures, and a bunch of ​“clean coal” projects. But the green stimulus helped jump-start America’s photovoltaic solar industry and start driving down the price of silicon panels, which is why Solyndra’s and Ivanpah’s more expensive approaches to solar faltered in the marketplace. The stimulus also created a domestic electric-vehicle battery industry, while helping wind power and LED lighting reach critical mass. And even though none of its biofuels or clean-coal projects panned out, learning which technologies don’t work is almost as important as learning which ones do.

It’s also important for governments to act on what they learn, rather than continuing to invest in the flowers that fail to bloom. The classic example of throwing good money after bad in the energy space is farm-grown fuels; there’s still bipartisan support for giving the farm lobby the biofuels mandates and tax credits it wants even though they increase food and fuel prices, accelerate global hunger, turbocharge deforestation, and destabilize the climate. Biden was a vocal cheerleader for corn ethanol, and Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, while obliterating tax credits for truly clean energy, expanded Biden’s tax credits for biofuels. It is not easy to stop Washington from trying to make this kind of fetch happen.

The Biden administration’s first $3 billion climate-smart agriculture initiative did follow the let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom investment model, and even though I didn’t love its focus on scientifically dubious efforts to sequester carbon in farm soils, it did seed an innovative approach to reducing methane emissions from rice fields that is already producing big climate benefits. Unfortunately, the Trump administration killed the initiative before it could produce much more information about what works and what doesn’t, so even if Washington rediscovers the climate, it will have to start almost from scratch on food and farming solutions.

All is not lost

Like I said, it can get frustrating and depressing.

To meet those 2050 Paris climate targets, the world will need dramatic reductions in farm emissions and meat consumption, which are both soaring, along with dramatic increases in farm yields, which are threatened by climate-driven droughts, floods, and heat waves. The politics are especially dismal. The Biden team focused on providing incentives for green energy as well as green agriculture rather than cracking down on pollution from dirty energy and agriculture, under the theory that carrots are more popular and politically resilient than sticks, but Republicans killed most of those positive incentives anyway, and even many Democrats now believe the climate is a losing issue no matter how it’s framed.

So yes, change will be extremely hard. But energy’s biggest political lesson for food is that change is possible. Two decades ago, wind and solar power were global rounding errors, a documentary called ​“Who Killed the Electric Car?” eulogized an apparently dead technology, and crop-based biofuels looked like the only viable alternative to fossil fuels. It’s amazing how quickly the unfathomable can become almost inevitable. Technologies can get better and cheaper. Politics can be unpredictable. Conventional wisdom can be spectacularly wrong.

One confounding example: all the confident pronouncements about carrots and sticks. Yes, Obama stimulus goodies helped jump-start the energy transition, while taxes and other restrictions on agricultural pollution in Europe inspired farmers to blockade highways with tractors and dump manure on government buildings. (One American pollster told me meat taxes were the least popular government policy idea he’s ever surveyed, ​“up there with veterans benefits for ISIS.”) But the carrots in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act did not turn out to be resilient to Trump’s political vandalism, while cap-and-trade sticks that many pundits assumed would be politically toxic have thrived in California and the European Union.

What does seem to be as true for food as energy is the cliché that there’s no one silver-bullet solution, just the silver buckshot of multiple solutions, although copper buckshot is probably a better metaphor, because the solutions need to get cheap to get to scale. We’ll need all kinds of demand-side solutions — like meatless meats made from plants and fungi and animal cells, as well as anti-food-waste technologies ranging from biotech peels that keep produce from spoiling to garbage bins that dehydrate food scraps into chicken feed. We’ll also need a broad array of supply-side solutions — like crops genetically edited to be drought-tolerant, flood-tolerant, and high-yielding, or ​“see-and-spray” precision tractors that only apply chemicals where they’re needed.

Solar panels were invented in the 1950s, but didn’t become cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels until the 2010s. We don’t have 60 years to get food solutions to scale.

Of course, the development of solar has also been held back by backlash politics; Ronald Reagan removed the panels Jimmy Carter installed on the White House roof, and Trump is trying to crush clean energy while preaching energy dominance. Like I said, progress will be really hard. But it’s also really important. And while perfect probably isn’t on the menu, better is better than worse.

This may be the most important lesson of the energy transition: Climate change is not a pass-fail test. We almost surely won’t meet the Paris goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, but 1.6 would be much better than 1.7. Everything won’t be fine if we meet the goal of cutting emissions 43% by 2030, and it won’t be game over for the climate if we only cut 42%. There’s no such thing as game over for the climate, only degrees of better and worse. The apocalyptic language of failure is weirdly both too pessimistic — ​“business as usual” projections for 2100 have moderated from an insanely horrific 5 degrees to a still-terrible but more manageable 3 degrees — and too optimistic. Paradise, California, already had its climate apocalypse when a wildfire destroyed it, and more apocalypses are coming. Better policies, technologies, and behaviors will mean fewer apocalypses.

That’s not an inspiring bumper-sticker slogan, but politics is about the slow boring of hard boards. The global economy is not decarbonizing quickly enough, but it’s getting a little bit less dependent on fossil fuels every day, and food can follow a similar trajectory that can help us eat less of the earth.

It isn’t happening yet. Agriculture is still expanding. Forests are still falling. But the Chinese proverb that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second-best time is today, is literally true for our land and climate problems. We’re not close to fixing them, or even making them better, but we ought to at least try to slow down the rate at which they’re getting worse — and now is the time to start.