At the end of a dirt road along the northeastern edge of Montana’s Crazy Mountains, a simple sign warns visitors they are now entering private property. 

For fifth-generation Montanan Brad Wilson, the notice marks a defeat with implications far beyond the Crazies.

“The fate of our public lands and our rights are in jeopardy right now,” Wilson told Floodlight.

Video: The secret billionaire’s club reshaping America’s public lands

Rare drone footage provides a glimpse into the controversial mountaintop retreat.

FloodlightEvan Simon/Floodlight

Wilson is a former sheriff’s deputy and lifelong hunter. For most of his life, he has lived in the jagged shadows of the Crazy Mountains — their snow-capped peaks and twisting valleys watched him grow from a boy herding sheep on his grandfather’s ranch to a grey-haired hunter tracking elk herds across their remote slopes. 

“The loss of this access means a lot to me and everybody else,” he said beside the gate, looking down and hiding the wet corners of his eyes. 

The road beyond the gate next to Wilson leads into what was, for more than a century, one of two historic public trails into the east side of the Crazies. The U.S. Forest Service relinquished the public’s access to the trail early last year as part of a land swap with the Yellowstone Club — an exclusive mountaintop retreat for the megarich located 100 miles away in Big Sky. 

“It doesn't make any sense to me to give this up,” said Wilson.

For many Montanans, the swap has come to symbolize the growing influence of wealthy private interests spreading across America's public lands and provides a glimpse of what could come under the Trump administration. 

There are more than 600 million acres of federally owned public lands across America — from iconic national parks and monuments to forests, grasslands and seashores. But now, nearly 90 million of those acres are at risk of some kind of development due to what critics describe as an unprecedented shift in policies under the first and second Trump administrations. 

In Arizona, a sacred Indigenous site was handed over earlier this year to a copper-mining company. In Utah, Republican Sen. Mike Lee attached a provision last summer to the federal budget that would have sold up to 3.2 million acres of public land across the West. And just last month, the U.S. Senate voted to overturn a 20-year-old mining ban on federal lands in Minnesota, clearing the way for a foreign-owned copper mine.

Perhaps nowhere in the country is the fight over public lands — and the big-moneyed interests pulling the strings — more on display right now than in Montana’s Crazy Mountains.

“This is a really simple issue,” said Andrew Posewitz, a Montana public lands advocate and the son of a renowned conservationist. “The public had some really good land and some really good access in the Crazy Mountains. Some really rich people decided they liked the Crazy Mountains a lot … And now the public doesn't have that access.”

Every American — not just Montanans — should care, he warned. 

“Because it is very much a harbinger of potentially what could come.”

Perched more than 7,000 feet above sea level, the Yellowstone Club was built atop former public lands acquired through land exchanges with the U.S. Forest Service in the 1990s. It has since converted more than 15,000 acres outside Big Sky into one of the most exclusive communities on the planet. 

The club’s membership has included familiar names: celebrities like Justin Timberlake, Tom Brady and Paris Hilton; tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt; and financial elites like Bill Ackman, Warren Buffett and Robert Herjavec. 

Inside its gates, the Yellowstone Club has an 18-hole golf course, a concert venue, a movie theater, a dedicated fire department, hundreds of luxury homes and nearly 3,000 acres of private ski slopes. Initiation runs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and an undeveloped lot inside the gate has sold for as much as $10 million, according to Forbes. 

CrossHarbor Capital Partners, a Boston-based investment firm, bought the Yellowstone Club out of bankruptcy in 2009. 

In the 17 years since, the firm has expanded its Montana portfolio — developed through a subsidiary called Lone Mountain Land Company — to become one of the largest luxury-resort footprints in the Rocky Mountains.

"They're gobbling up mass swaths of Montana," said Erik Nylund, who served as a staffer for former Democratic Montana Sen. Jon Tester and met often with club representatives. "They will throw money around at anybody and everybody to get what they want."

In 2016, the Yellowstone Club drew criticism after more than 30 million gallons of its sewage overflowed into the headwaters of the Gallatin River, drawing over $300,000 in penalties and financial commitments from the company — and outraging locals.

The Yellowstone Club declined an on-camera interview for this story. In a written statement, a company representative noted that numerous lawsuits against the club over its impacts to local waterways “have been dismissed by federal judges” and the club has spent millions to treat its wastewater “to the highest standards the State of Montana assigns.” CrossHarbor also did not respond to an interview request. 

The club has also become a favorite refuge among high-level Trump administration officials: Energy Secretary Chris Wright owns a home there; Vice President JD Vance reportedly spent Christmas at the club; and Trump himself hosted a campaign fundraiser there in 2024. 

And the man in charge of most of America’s public lands is also a member.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum oversees 500 million acres of federal land in the U.S., and has referred multiple times to these parcels as “assets on America’s balance sheet.”

Since early 2025, Burgum — along with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins — has helped the Trump administration pursue major overhauls of public lands management, including a $1 billion cut to the National Park Service budget, opening the Arctic to potential oil and gas drilling and repealing the 2001 Roadless Rule, the safeguard that has kept new roads and clearcuts out of nearly 60 million acres.

A real estate developer and the former governor of North Dakota, Burgum owns a $22 million condo at the Yellowstone Club, according to Montana property records reviewed by Floodlight.

It’s held through an entity called Lone View, LLC. Burgum disclosed last year that he rented it out in 2024 for income between $100,001 and $1 million. Burgum also holds a separate ownership stake in the club itself that he valued at up to $250,000 and that paid him nearly $22,000 in 2024.

Burgum's latest financial disclosure form shows he did not divest from any of these interests upon taking office. A representative declined to answer if the secretary would abstain from any future decisions involving the club or its affiliates. Meanwhile, Burgum has partnered with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to explore ways for public lands to be sold in order to make room for more affordable housing across the country. 

“He shouldn't be involved in residential development on public lands while he owns that,” said Richard Painter, former chief ethics lawyer to the George W. Bush administration. “Let someone else handle that — he's got a deputy.” 

Burgum’s office did not answer Floodlight’s emailed questions, but responded to our inquiry with this statement: “Secretary Burgum has complied with all federal ethics requirements and remains committed to protecting America’s ability to responsibly use and care for our federal lands for the profit and benefit of future generations.” 

In the past, Burgum has argued his policies aim to lower the national debt and address the nation’s housing crisis. 

“They'll say the words ‘affordable housing’ and there's not going to be anything affordable about it,” said Nylund, arguing that only luxury home builders and private resorts would be interested in developing America’s largely remote and inaccessible public lands. 

“It's all about development,” he said. “And if you've taken a ride to Big Sky or the Yellowstone Club lately, you've seen what development looks like, and it's a bunch of mansions.”

Despite their distance from Big Sky, the fear of luxury resorts replacing wilderness hangs heavy over the Crazy Mountains.  

“The wealth that’s coming here is just changing our way of life,” fifth-generation Montanan Brad Wilson said. 

Wilson, 71, lives a quiet life in Wilsall, a tiny town at the foot of the Crazies. The walls of his small home are adorned with antlers and family photographs dating back to the 1800s. 

"I grew up with a pack on my back hiking those mountains," he said. "Both of my sons grew up in the Crazy Mountains ... And I cannot tell you how special they are to me — because I get choked up sometimes."

The Crazies resemble a mountain fortress — an island of jagged peaks rising more than 7,000 feet above the surrounding high plains, complete with secluded river valleys and alpine lakes. Yet their beauty belies a long history of heated conflict rooted in century-old decisions.  

In the late 1800s, Congress paid the transcontinental railroads for their work by giving them every other square mile of federal land across whole regions of the West, which resulted in a checkerboard pattern of private and public land ownership. 

Anyone could continue to use public roads and trails that crossed through these newly minted private parcels, according to congressional acts and court rulings. Over time, however, those parcels in the Crazies were bought up by some of the richest people in the state, some of whom objected to the public crossing through their land. 

“They began to do things that violated those rules, such as blocking these roads, blocking these trails,” said Posewitz, the Montana lands advocate. 

Wilson first noticed the change around 2016, when he encountered a blocked trail on the west side of the Crazies that his grandparents had used nearly a century ago. He was furious. 

“All of a sudden I'm like, ‘No, you can't do that. That’s ridiculous,’” Wilson recalled. 

Around that time, a U.S. forest ranger began to defend public access in the range by putting up Forest Service signs along contested trails. The big landowners weren’t happy. They reached out to Montana Republican Sen. Steve Daines and Trump’s then-Agriculture Secretary, Sonny Perdue. It wasn’t long before the ranger was reassigned. 

Daines and Perdue did not respond to Floodlight’s repeated requests for comment on the ranger controversy, and Forest Service officials said they wouldn’t talk about it. However, Mary Erickson, the former ranger’s boss, did talk, and she denied any political interference. 

She said the ranger “wasn’t reassigned,” he was “just assigned to something else while the investigation was in place.” She acknowledged the move looked punitive but said it was for the ranger’s own protection as the process played out.

Nylund served as Senator Tester’s natural resources liaison at the time, and said he worked closely with the Forest Service. To him, the ranger controversy exemplified the growing influence of Montana’s elites on the Crazies. 

“The political forces of the country came down on this district ranger and they put him in his place,” Nylund said. 

The ranger was eventually reinstated in 2017 after being cleared of any wrongdoing. Around the same time, Nylund said he was approached by a high-end consultant for an unnamed client seeking to swap land in the Crazies with the U.S. Forest Service. 

The unnamed client? 

“That was the Yellowstone Club,” Nylund said.

Nylund later learned that in order to get the land they needed for an “expert ski run” in Big Sky, the club agreed to help the Forest Service solve access disputes in the Crazies by organizing a land exchange.

“We didn’t have the time and resources to resolve some of that,” said Erickson, the former Forest Service supervisor. But she said she made it clear that “the Yellowstone Club wouldn't call the shots, and I do feel like that was true the whole way.” 

Multiple people involved with early discussions around the land swap said the Yellowstone Club’s involvement in the exchange was kept secret and only revealed years into the process. Once the information did get out, the club’s representatives worked to reassure locals that they had no intention of developing the Crazies.

“Then out of nowhere, it's announced that they are purchasing the Crazy Mountain Ranch,” said Emily Cleveland, a program director at Wild Montana — a conservation group that works to protect public lands and wildlife in the state

Crazy Mountain Ranch is an 18,000-acre former dude ranch located at the foot of the range’s southern end. Cleveland called the club’s move a “bait and switch.” 

“It just really changed our ability to trust them at their word,” she said.

The Yellowstone Club is now converting the ranch into what it describes as “a private membership experience” featuring a luxury spa and a new 18-hole golf course. In response, shell-shocked locals have taken to posting “RANCHES NOT RESORTS” signs along the roads. 

“I about fell over,” Wilson recalled of learning the news. “It just shows the deception and the nontransparency of this whole thing.”

A club representative told Floodlight that, “At the time of those early discussions, there were no plans or intention to own land in the Crazy Mountains … This development came near the end of the exchange discussions and only enhanced the benefits to the public.” 

However, the ranch began illegally drawing water to irrigate its golf course in 2024 and Montana regulators sued them the following year. 

“There’s a very famous saying in Montana that ‘Whiskey’s for drinking and water’s for fighting,’ and when you take water that you’re not entitled to, that's a big deal here,” said Posewitz. 

The club said it underestimated the time it would take to get regulatory approval, and later reached an agreement with the state to stop watering its golf course until proper permits were in place.

A Yellowstone Club representative declined to answer if the group is planning to acquire any more land in the Crazies, instead writing that they expect to be “a good neighbor for many years in the Shields Valley community.” 

Fears surrounding the luxury developer’s potential impact on the Crazies reached a fever pitch after the Forest Service authorized the landswap the club helped orchestrate in January 2025. 

The deal, called the East Crazy Inspiration Divide Land Exchange, moved nearly 4,000 acres of public lands into private ownership. In return, the public got more than 6,000 acres of private lands. On paper, it looked like a bargain: Appraisals obtained by Floodlight put the value of the land the public gained at more than $9.6 million and the land it gave up at more than $8.5 million. However, the swap enraged some locals because most of the low-lying accessible hills the public could enjoy were given up for high-elevation areas.

“All of the sort of prime habitat, that all went into private ownership, and then the tops of the mountains all went into public ownership,” said Posewitz.

The independent appraiser hired by the Forest Service seemed to agree. She described one section of land the public was getting as “very steep and difficult” to reach. Hunting would be impossible on most of the property. A person “would have to be a skilled rock climber” to navigate it, she wrote.

The land swap also solved the checkerboard issue that has plagued the Crazies for decades by consolidating public lands in the center of the range.

“What it's resulting in is a ring of private ownership around a chunk of public land that has very limited access,” said Posewitz.

Critics argue the exchange only benefits large landowners in the Crazies, several of whom run high-end hunting operations that rely on the range’s valuable natural resources.

Yellowstone Club member David Leuschen, for example, has acquired a nearly 8,500-acre ranch along with remote inholdings — including entire mountains — and is among the largest private landowners in the Crazy Mountains. Leuschen did not respond to requests for comment.

“The landowners now have access to the public lands in a really exclusive way,” said Cleveland of Wild Montana. She said the exchange gives these landowners “easy access into that country where the public has to hike 20 miles of backcountry trail to get in there” and “opens the door to a much more realistic development scenario.”

The most contested piece of the deal was the trail network. Two historic public trails had appeared on Forest Service maps for more than a century. The exchange abandoned the public’s claim to both. 

In their place, the Yellowstone Club agreed to pay for a new 22-mile trail on mostly public land, at a substantially higher elevation, as part of a 40-mile backcountry loop. 

“Can you imagine elderly folks and younger folks trying to hike that,” asked Wilson on a visit to the future trailhead. “It's not hiker friendly at all. Definitely not hunter friendly.”

He looked up at the nearly vertical wall of shale rock where the trail is slated to start. 

“It’s ridiculous,” he said.

Erickson, the former supervisor, promises the new trail “will meet all Forest Service trail standards.” She said the exchange will resolve access disputes, create more wild country in the Crazies and strengthen public access in the range.

Proponents of the exchange also say the swap increases access to Crazy Peak, an important cultural and religious site for Crow tribal members. Leuschen, who owns the mountain, has reportedly agreed to allow tribal members to access the peak through a formal agreement.

Critics, however, have questioned why granting such access would be contingent on the land swap. No independent third party has ever seen the agreement and Leuschen has denied its existence. The Forest Service said it is not involved in the agreement’s “management or oversight” because it’s between two private parties, and a spokesperson did not respond when asked to confirm the agreement’s existence. 

“Our concern was that it never materialized into something that was durable,” said Cleveland about the supposed agreement.  

“The Crazies are an incredibly important, sacred place for the Crow Tribe. And to use that as perceived leverage in getting support for this land exchange, you know, just didn‘t feel right to us,” she said.

Tribal officials did not respond to Floodlight’s multiple interview requests, but some have expressed the tribe’s stance on the land swap in lukewarm terms in the past.     

“There’s an assumption that we’re for it or against it. Really what matters is what gives us more access to the landscape,” Aaron Brien, the Crow tribal historic preservation officer, told a local TV station. “I want all Crow land should be back to Crow people.”

Considering the complexity of the swap, it's perhaps no surprise the public saw the deal as highly controversial. Roughly two-thirds of the more than 1,000 public comments submitted to the Forest Service opposed the exchange, according to a Floodlight analysis. Many cited the loss of historic public trails, low-elevation lands and the growing influence of Yellowstone Club. 

“We don't look at that as that's an opposition,” former forest supervisor Erickson said. “We just look at that as, right up until the very end, people are trying to tell you what they hope you can get more of.”

Nylund, the former senate staffer, sees it another way.

“The public spoke, the Forest Service ignored them,” he said. “When one unelected bureaucrat can relinquish public access to hundreds of thousands of acres of public land and we don't get a say in it? That's a crisis.”

The proliferation of high-end private resorts, combined with the Trump administration’s pro-development policies, have only increased alarm among advocates across the country who say America’s public lands are now entering a very different era.

“America has always had this balance of people who seek to exploit her natural resources and those who seek to defend them,” said Posewitz. 

That balance is now shifted, he said, because “those people who are supposed to be defending our interest … are actually actively facilitating the exploitation of these natural resources for the benefit of very, very few.” 

“We’re losing pieces and pieces every day,” said Wilson during a recent drive along the eastern edge of the Crazies. Despite the power imbalance, he draws energy from the words of famed Montana conservationist, Jim Posewitz.

“Make ‘em take it from you,” he said. 

A controversial Montana land swap orchestrated by a secretive club for the megarich has come to symbolize the growing influence of wealthy private interests spreading across America's public lands.

Floodlight's Evan Simon goes in search of the Yellowstone Club, a mountain top retreat for the rich and famous that locals say is "gobbling up vast swaths of Montana." Members of the exclusive club include celebrities, tech titans and top Trump administration officials — including the man in charge of most of the nation's public lands.

A nexus of political and economic power in the state, the club quietly played a key role in a controversial land swap in the remote Crazy Mountains last year that has outraged local hunters and conservationists. Simon heads deep into the Crazies to see the impacts of the swap that critics say only benefitted wealthy landowners in the area who now enjoy nearly exclusive access to the range and its valuable natural resources.

The proliferation of high-end private resorts, combined with the Trump administration’s pro-development policies, have only increased alarm among advocates across the country who say America’s public lands are now entering a very different era.

"People should care about what's happening in the Crazies, because it is very much a harbinger of potentially what could come." — Andrew Posewitz, Montana Public Lands Advocate

Read more in our new investigation:

Trump officials, billionaires and the quiet reshaping of America’s public lands

A controversial land swap orchestrated by the mega rich could be “a harbinger of what’s to come” for public lands under Trump.

FloodlightEvan Simon/Floodlight

This story was published in partnership with Type Investigations with support from the H.D. Lloyd Fund for Investigative Journalism, and in collaboration with Verite News and WWNO/WRKF.  Republished by The Nation, Louisiana Illuminator and The Lens.

A dozen federal judges have presided over some of the most consequential environmental lawsuits in Louisiana’s history despite having investments in or business connections to the petrochemical companies being sued, an investigation by Floodlight, WWNO/WRKF and Type Investigations has found.

Their ties took various forms: holding stock or corporate bonds while presiding over the cases, having previously worked as attorneys for the oil companies, receiving large sums of money from investments in the companies prior to hearing the cases, leasing mineral rights to defendants or having a spouse who was a partner at a law firm defending the oil companies. 

Here’s how we ID’d Louisiana federal judges with connections to oil companies

Read the methodology behind Floodlight’s recent investigation

FloodlightGarrett Hazelwood/Floodlight

But even when they appear to have direct conflicts of interest, almost none of those judges broke the ethical rules governing the judiciary.

“To the extent they're following the rules, they can't really be faulted,” said Charles Geyh, a professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law and an expert in judicial disqualification. “But from a systemic standpoint, do you really want judges to be drawn from a pool of people who have a stake in the industry?”

Examples include: 

• Judge Carl Barbier of the U.S. Eastern District Court of Louisiana held over $100,000 of corporate bonds in five oil companies while presiding over four different cases in which one or more of those companies was a defendant. 
• Judge Nannette Jolivette Brown, of the same court, reported that she or her husband traded tens of thousands of dollars of Exxon and Chevron stock while she presided over a case in which both companies were being sued. 
• Judge Jerry Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in favor of oil companies in one of the cases after receiving over $100,000 in mineral royalties since 2013, when the litigation first arrived in federal court. 

Judges must be impartial in their rulings and avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Yet, in practice, that standard is poorly enforced. The judiciary itself decides in most cases what constitutes a conflict, and its current guidelines state that judges may even receive payments from defendants while a case is ongoing — so long as the judge’s ruling will not impact the amount they get paid.

In Louisiana, where many judges profit from petrochemical investments, the question of whether the courts can be trusted to fairly judge the oil industry has enormous stakes. 

Enormous stakes 

For decades, oil companies working in Louisiana dredged canals through wetlands and dumped billions of gallons of waste in unlined pits that leached salts and toxic heavy metals into the surrounding soil and waters. That pollution killed cattle, crawfish, oysters, crops and wetland plants. It has also seeped into aquifers that provide drinking water to local communities and contributed to a land-loss crisis that threatens to wipe southern Louisiana off the map.

Now, through a series of about 40 related lawsuits, the state and several parishes are seeking tens of billions in damages from hundreds of these companies to pay for the cost of cleaning up the mess. The litigation could rank among the most expensive environmental damage cases in U.S. history if the plaintiffs succeed. 

Last year, a Louisiana jury’s verdict in one of these lawsuits found Chevron liable for $745 million in damages. The oil companies have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to move the cases from state to federal courts, where judges could decide to vacate the jury’s verdict. (Federal courts already dismissed an early case in the series before it ever reached a jury).

If the oil companies prevail with the Supreme Court, which is expected to release a decision this spring, the cases will likely wind up back on the dockets of the federal judges named in this story.

An investigation by Floodlight, WWNO/WRKF and Type Investigations found that 12 of the 46 federal judges who have already made rulings in the coastal damage lawsuits had investments in or business connections to petrochemical companies that were defendants in the cases.

Since 2013, nine of these judges have collected nearly one million dollars in income from their investments in the defendants, according to an analysis of their financial disclosures. That income was gained during the period while the cases have been litigated in federal courts, though not exclusively while the cases were on each of the judges' dockets.

It's difficult to determine if and how financial ties influenced judicial decisions — and many of these judges, like Barbier, actually ruled against the oil companies. But even the appearance of impropriety can undermine trust in the rule of law.

“It's only natural for the public to be increasingly suspicious about whether those judges are a little too friendly with the industry to be impartial arbiters,” said Geyh. 

Even beyond the direct ties to the defendants, judges’ investments in the fossil fuel industry more broadly could raise eyebrows. The outcome of these coastal damage cases could impact the industry at large, with the potential to establish a roadmap for anyone seeking to hold oil companies accountable for environmental destruction.

Where’s the money coming from?

The stakes of these cases are enormous for the oil companies, as well as for their investors — possibly exceeding a hundred billion dollars in liability, said the author and historian John Barry. 

The industry’s damage has accelerated the state’s coastal erosion: Since the 1930s, an area about the size of Delaware has slipped into the sea.  

In response, Louisiana spent decades creating its Coastal Master Plan to repair its wetlands and address the land loss. But enacting it will require tens of billions of dollars over the coming decades. 

Where that money might come from is an open question, and one that these lawsuits seek to resolve. 

 “Without money, there's no master plan,” said Barry. “The stakes are the existence of Louisiana. It’s pretty simple.”

In his former position on the board of a New Orleans flood protection agency, Barry was an architect of a lawsuit that became a model for the dozens of parish lawsuits that followed it. His team argued their case in front of Judge Nannette Jolivette Brown starting in 2013 — but she dismissed it, finding that the flood protection agency had no standing against nearly 100 oil companies and keeping the case from ever reaching a jury. She later presided over two additional coastal damage cases. 

Brown and her husband traded tens of thousands of dollars in Exxon and Chevron stock while those companies were defendants before her. She held the stocks for about 18 months, while the price of both increased significantly. She then sold them before issuing any additional rulings  — likely keeping her within disqualification rules.

At the time, Brown’s husband was one of Entergy’s most senior executives, and the couple held millions of dollars of the company’s stock. Entergy was a defendant in one of the coastal damage cases, though not one over which she presided. 

"I always take great care to ensure that I comply with all judiciary ethics guidance, rules and rule of law," Brown wrote in response to our findings.

The statute has limitations

Federal recusal rules set a high bar for when a judge must step aside — and impose no real penalty when they don't. 

Congress requires judges to recuse themselves whenever their impartiality "might reasonably be questioned," including when they hold any financial interest in a party. But words like "reasonably" and "financial interest" leave wiggle room, and judges themselves decide whether a conflict exists. The only remedy when they get it wrong is an appeal — a thorny process with a high bar for success.

However, experts widely agree that if a judge owns any amount of stock in a company that is a party to the case, they are required to step aside.

One judge appears to have crossed that bright line.

U.S. Fifth Circuit Court Judge Edith Jones held roughly $50,000 of ConocoPhillips stock while voting in 2024 on a case where a ConocoPhillips subsidiary was a defendant.  

That ruling likely violated the federal disqualification statute and Code of Judicial Conduct, according to three judicial experts.

Ways to fix this

Louisiana’s federal judges have so many ties to the oil and gas industry that some cases have led to mass recusals. In one coastal damage case, nine judges recused, including at least five who had investments in the defendants. 

The judiciary also has a poor record of policing its conflicts. The Wall Street Journal found in 2021 that over 130 federal judges nationwide had failed to recuse themselves despite owning stock in companies involved in cases they oversaw. 

Relatively simple judicial reforms, like requiring judges to put their holdings in blind trusts, could eliminate many of the conflicts that cause these situations, according to Geyh.  

“You kind of expect that there are certain sacrifices you need to make in order to preserve public perception of your impartiality, your integrity, and your independence,” Geyh said.

In a small step forward in 2022, the courts updated their conflict-screening procedures and lawmakers passed the Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act, which established stricter disclosure rules and a requirement that judges’ disclosures be made available to the public online.

This investigation relied in part on those documents.

Disappearing communities

As the dispute over who should pay to clean up the coast enters its 13^th year of litigation, the communities living with the destruction are losing ground fast. 

“Most people don't have a clue about how extensive the damage can be to landowners,” said lawyer Warren Perrin, who estimates the oil companies have caused hundreds of acres of his family land to disappear into the water. 

Perrin traces his family roots back to the Acadians, or Cajun people, who settled in Louisiana in the late 1700s. He says the loss of wetlands, increasing flood risk, and pollution caused by oil companies has taken a toll on the close-knit Cajun family and community in Vermillion Parish.

“ As we lose the lands, people move away,” he said. “The intensity of the culture is destabilized as more people move away.”

If the oil companies get their way, it’s not clear where the money to preserve these lands will come from — or how much longer the coastal parishes can hold on. 

Despite the odds, Perrin’s family is working to restore the coast in whatever modest ways they can, dumping boulders and rebuilding the coastline to keep their land from becoming open water.

“I'm a chronic, hopeless optimist that it will work out and we're gonna save our lands,” he said. “It's a struggle. But I believe in the system of justice, in our laws — usually the right thing happens.”

Floodlight is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action.

Over the course of a yearlong investigation, Floodlight, Type Investigations and WWNO/WRKF examined the federal judges involved in a series of environmental damage lawsuits with huge stakes for communities in southern Louisiana. 

Our methodology began with building a detailed timeline to track the group of more than 40 connected cases through more than a decade of appeals that spanned four federal courts and 46 total judges. The timeline documented the shifting names and case numbers of each lawsuit, as well as the judges who made rulings in each case and the dates of their orders. We also built a searchable, comprehensive data set of all the lawyers, law firms, companies and judges involved in each case. 

We then investigated each of the 46 judges by reviewing thousands of pages of the financial disclosure reports they are required to file annually, as well as publicly available mineral lease agreements, land records, senate confirmation testimony and court records to build dossiers that documented the financial holdings and employment histories of each of the judges and their spouses. By comparing those findings to the database of companies and lawyers involved, we identified 12 judges with connections to defendants in the cases. 

Along the way, we spoke to experts in judicial ethics and disqualification, government officials, lawyers and judges involved in the series of cases, as well as landowners whose properties were damaged by oil extraction. Their perspectives helped us capture the full context of the court cases, the judiciary’s rules, and the consequences for people dealing with the damage alleged in the lawsuits. 

People we contacted for this story:

• Charles Geyh, professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law 
• Arthur Hellman, professor emeritus at University of Pittsburgh School of Law
• Russell Wheeler, nonresident senior fellow at The Brookings Institution
• Vernon Valentine Palmer, co-director of Eason Weinmann Center for Comparative Law at Tulane University Law School
• Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court
• Hon. Shira A. Scheindlin, attorney and former judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York
• Warren Perrin, attorney and author
• Mike Veron, attorney and author
• Allan Wolf, author
• John Barry, author, historian, adjunct professor at Tulane University
• Lyle Cayce, clerk of court, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit

Despite overwhelming public opposition, Mississippi regulators on Tuesday approved an operating permit for 41 gas-powered turbines to run at xAI’s Southaven power plant.

The new turbines will help power Grok, xAI’s controversial chatbot. A recent Floodlight visual investigation confirmed the plant was operating more than a dozen of the 27 unpermitted turbines already located at the site. The Environmental Protection Agency has long required that such pollution sources be permitted under the Clean Air Act. However, Mississippi regulators maintained that because the turbines are parked on tractor trailers, they don't require permits for the first year in operation. 

The permit granted to xAI this week is for 41 additional turbines at the site that will operate continuously. The machines could emit more than 6 million tons of greenhouse gases and over 1,300 tons of harmful air pollutants every year, according to xAI’s permit application — making the expanded facility one of the largest fossil fuel power plants in the state.

Southaven residents have described being bombarded by ceaseless noise and pollution from the 114-acre site for months. Hundreds turned out to a February hearing to denounce the project and xAI’s plans to expand the site, and not a single community member spoke in support of the project at the Tuesday hearing. 

Advocacy groups like the NAACP and Southern Environmental Law Center criticized the seven-member permitting board after their unanimous vote to approve the permit.

“Mississippi state regulators appear to be more interested in fast-tracking xAI’s personal power plant than conducting a thorough review of its impacts and having meaningful engagement with the families that will be forced to live with this dirty facility — and its pollution — in their communities,” said Patrick Anderson, a senior attorney with the SELC.

The final permit was approved at a hearing in Jackson — nearly three hours from Southaven — held on an election day. 

Floodlight spoke with several residents after the hearing for their reactions (their quotes have been lightly edited for clarity). 

Shannon Samsa, physician’s assistant, executive director of the Southaven-based Safe and Sound Coalition.

“I’m disappointed, but not surprised. It was pretty obvious this permit was going to be pushed through at any cost. It feels like the decision had already been made before the public hearing last month, no matter what residents said. 

“That being said, I do want to be clear that this is not the fault of my community. We did our part. We spoke up, raised concerns, and tried to warn them. We did not create this situation or approve this project.

“The people who had the power to stop this project chose not to. The consequences of this decision do not belong to me or to any of the residents who tried to warn them. They belong to the officials and agencies who approved this project anyway, and they will have to live with that on their conscience, not us.

“My husband and I are probably going to relocate after I start my career later this year. I don’t know that we’ll move completely out of DeSoto County just yet, but we’ll definitely be trying to put some distance between us and xAI as soon as we possibly can. We were hoping to stay in the same apartment that we’ve been in for nearly 10 years for a few more years, so that we could save up to buy a house and have children, as well as pay my student loans down. But that doesn’t seem like a realistic or safe option for us anymore.”

Jason Haley, Southaven resident

“I expected them to approve it. Our concerns aren’t taken seriously. There’s too much money involved to worry about the current and future impact on people. One of the guys on the board announced his retirement right after approving it.”

Krystal Polk, Southaven resident

“The asking of public concerns and comments were just a formality. The decision was already made. Musk is allowed to play by a different set of rules, and money and power can buy anything at this moment, even at the risk of human health. 

“I am disappointed and disheartened that no one on the board had the courage to stand for what was right. It was not in their backyard and therefore they believe it does not affect them. I pray no one they know becomes a statistical number from the detrimental effects of the power plant.

“But I will not give up fighting for myself and others.”

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, is continuing to fuel its data centers with unpermitted gas turbines, according to a Floodlight visual investigation. Thermal drone footage captured in late January 2026, shows xAI running the unpermitted turbines at its custom built powerplant in Southaven, Miss., nearly two weeks after an Environmental Protection Agency ruling reiterated that doing so requires a state permit in advance. The ad hoc gas plant's sole task is to power the datacenter behind Grok and is part of an increasing reliance among AI companies on fossil fuels.

Read the full investigation in our original story, co-published with The Guardian:

‘A different set of rules’: Thermal drone footage shows Musk’s AI power plant flouting clean air regulations

Images confirm xAI is continuing to defy EPA regulations in Mississippi to power its flagship data centers.

FloodlightEvan Simon/Floodlight

Curious how we pulled off this project? Read our Q&A with reporter Evan Simon:

Inside the reporting: Using a thermal drone to investigate xAI’s power plant

A Q&A with reporter Evan Simon on how this first-of-its-kind investigation came together.

FloodlightEvan Simon/Floodlight

Last month, we published an investigation into Elon Musk’s Mississippi power plant fueling Colossus 2, the massive data center powering xAI’s Grok chatbot. Using thermal drone imagery, our reporting showed more than a dozen gas turbines operating at the site without state permits.

Published in partnership with The Guardian and republished by newsrooms in Mississippi and beyond, the story and its striking images have reached more than 1.5 million people so far, underscoring the national stakes of what’s happening in this small city.

Now, Floodlight reporter Evan Simon has released a mini-documentary of the investigation. 

I caught up with Evan to talk more about what it took to report a first-of-its-kind story like this — from getting his drone piloting license to how a bad storm nearly ruined our plans.

— Rosie Gillies, Floodlight director of audience

For readers just coming to this story, what did Floodlight’s investigation find about how xAI is powering its Mississippi data center, and why does it matter?

We used a thermal drone to prove Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company was violating longstanding Environmental Protection Agency rules under the Clean Air Act. The images we captured of xAI’s custom-built gas plant in Southaven, Miss., were the first of their kind, revealing the true scope of a hastily built facility that until then had remained largely hidden from public view. 

Most importantly, though, the thermal images proved that xAI was running more than a dozen unpermitted turbines at the site — a clear violation of federal law, according to a former EPA air enforcement chief I spoke with. 

Why does it matter? Well, as AI data centers proliferate across the country, they are increasingly relying on “behind the meter” gas plants like the one in Southaven for power. Our investigation documented the brazen rulebreaking occurring at one of the nation’s largest data centers and exposed how state and federal regulators have done nothing to stop it. 

At what point did you realize that standard reporting tools wouldn’t be enough for this story and that thermal drone imagery could actually show what was happening on the ground?

I’ve always been drawn to using new reporting tools, especially those that can help visualize environmental threats in compelling and unique ways. I’ve used tracking devices to investigate plastic recycling claims and handheld gas detectors to hunt down leaking, abandoned oil wells. I’d been interested in using thermal cameras ever since I read about how the Southern Environmental Law Center used them to catch xAI running more than 30 unpermitted turbines in Memphis last year. I immediately wondered if there was a way to incorporate that kind of technology in my reporting. SELC had flown a photographer with a handheld thermal camera in an airplane, but I was most interested in using a drone. 

So, I started researching and found that thermal drones were often used to inspect industrial facilities, and once I started hearing about xAI’s gas plant in Southaven, I prepared for a trip to Mississippi.

‘A different set of rules’: Thermal drone footage shows Musk’s AI power plant flouting clean air regulations

Images confirm xAI is continuing to defy EPA regulations in Mississippi to power its flagship data centers.

FloodlightEvan Simon/Floodlight

Video: We caught Elon Musk’s AI company flouting EPA rules using a thermal drone

xAI’s Grok chatbot is powered by unpermitted gas turbines at a Mississippi power plant. Here’s how we know.

FloodlightEvan Simon/Floodlight

Can you walk us through the logistics and constraints of using a thermal drone for reporting, including legal considerations and how you planned the flight?

Lifting the thermal drone into the air that day took months of preparation, and I think that might help explain why Floodlight appears to be the first newsroom to have done something like this. 

The journey actually began months prior, when Floodlight supported my wish to get a Part 107 drone operator’s license. Once I passed my test and had my license, I had to log a lot of flight hours to feel comfortable enough flying the drone on assignments. 

Safety and legality are the most important aspects of any drone flight, and the Mississippi deployment was no different. I consulted Federal Aviation Administration airspace maps and used a flight plan approval process to ensure we would be flying legally at all times. I also had to make sure there was a safe and legal place for me to take off that would provide a good view of the gas plant while also allowing me to keep my eye on the drone at all times. 

I tried flying from a nearby park, but the ceiling of the controlled airspace wouldn’t allow me to get high enough above the treeline. While I could have flown from the side of a public road directly outside the facility, for safety reasons, I wasn’t keen on the likely prospect of being approached by private security while operating the drone. 

Thankfully, Krystal Polk, one of the Southaven residents whom I planned to interview, owned a home directly across the street from the plant, and she was more than happy to let me fly from her backyard. Despite being so close to the facility, fences and treelines prevented her — and most Southaven residents — from ever getting a good look at it. So she was eager to see it for the first time. 

With all the pieces coming together, we booked travel to Mississippi and rented a high-end thermal drone typically used by search and rescue teams as well as utility inspectors. The plan was to have it delivered just ahead of my arrival. Unfortunately, though, Winter Storm Fern knocked out my travel plans and any possibility of flying during the window we had planned. The drone actually sat in a hotel storage room for nearly a week before I was able to get there. Thankfully, the hotel staff kept it safe for us (shoutout to the front desk crew!), and the drone rental company was extremely understanding about the delay in our production. 

By the time I got to Southaven, the storm had passed but the city was practically shut down. The unplowed highways and roads were nearly impassable and most of the city was holed up in their homes waiting for the snow to melt. Thankfully, the skies were clear and all my sources were still available. When I got to Krystal’s, I made my final safety checks, confirmed I had legal permission to fly, and finally took off. 

Once you had the thermal footage, how did you make sure the findings were solid?

As soon as the thermal drone lifted above the treeline, I could see multiple massive stacks emitting very strong heat signatures that looked like giant burning candles. While it seemed fairly obvious that these turbines were operating, I needed to be 100% sure. Also, I wanted to see if we could establish just how many were running at the time. So we shared the images with several leading experts including Bruce Buckheit, former director of the EPA’s Air Enforcement Division, who served decades in the agency under multiple presidential administrations. After several conversations with him and two other experts deeply familiar with this kind of equipment, we felt confident reporting that at least 15 turbines were operating at the time.

It’s also important to understand that the thermal drone was only one of many reporting tools used for this project. In addition to interviews with local residents, we also heavily relied on public records requests. Emails we obtained between xAI consultants and Mississippi regulators confirmed that 27 unpermitted turbines were located at the site and some had been operating since at least November. 

I’m sure all this effort to confirm that the unpermitted turbines were indeed operating (which was fairly obvious to anyone within earshot of the facility) might seem odd to some of the residents I spoke with, but when you’re reporting on the illegal activities of a company owned by the richest man in the world, we had to be rock solid with our findings in every way imaginable.

What are you reporting on next as this story continues to unfold, and what questions are you still trying to answer?

More and more AI datacenters are building their own gas plants and with the lack of public notice or regulatory enforcement I saw in Southaven, I want to know just how many similar plants are out there and skirting environmental regulations in the race for AI dominance. We have another similar investigation in the works that I won’t get into ahead of publication, but I believe there is a real need for this kind of reporting going forward, and I think it’s incredibly important that journalists continue to hold the AI industry accountable for its impact on public health and the climate. This reporting is not just about xAI or one Mississippi city. It is about how quickly AI’s fossil fuel infrastructure is scaling, whether environmental oversight can keep up, and what it means for our changing climate.

This article was produced in partnership between Floodlight and The Guardian. It was republished by Capital B, Grist, Mississippi Free Press, MLK50, Tennessee Lookout

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company is continuing to fuel its data centers with unpermitted gas turbines, according to a Floodlight visual investigation. Thermal drone footage shows xAI is still burning gas at a facility in Southaven, Miss., despite a recent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ruling reiterating that doing so requires a state permit in advance.

State regulators in Mississippi maintain that since the turbines are parked on tractor trailers, they don't require permits. However, the EPA has long required that such pollution sources be permitted under the Clean Air Act.

Any exemption for these machines “could leave these engines subject to no emission standards at all,” the agency wrote in a January final ruling.

However, thermal images captured by Floodlight — and analyzed by multiple experts — show more than a dozen unpermitted turbines still spewing pollutants at the plant nearly two weeks after the EPA's recent ruling. 

“That is a violation of the law,” said Bruce Buckheit, a former EPA air enforcement chief, after reviewing Floodlight’s images and EPA regulations.

xAI, which is seeking permits for dozens more turbines in Southaven, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The EPA, which under Trump has initiated a record low number of enforcement actions, declined to answer questions about the turbines at Musk’s AI facilities and referred to local authorities on permits.

The first and only public hearing on the matter is scheduled for February 17, and the public comment period is still open.

The Trump administration has made AI a priority, but as data centers proliferate across the country, regulators are struggling to keep pace with the industry’s increasing reliance on custom-built power sources and their public health impacts on surrounding communities. And Southaven, where state regulators are at odds with federal guidance, is a prime example. 

The turbines there help power Grok, the company's controversial chat bot, and emit harmful pollutants linked to health problems such as asthma, lung cancer and heart attacks.

"The risk of living next to this type of power plant is well documented,” said Shaolei Ren, a UC Riverside associate professor who specializes in the health impacts of data centers. "From the health perspective, we know that this is not good." 

Southaven residents have voiced concerns for months over the noise and pollution emanating from the 114-acre site that is largely hidden from public view — a site xAI is looking to expand. 

“For them to be releasing so much pollution in such a populated area, not to mention that there are at least ten schools within a two mile radius of the facility, is really concerning,” said longtime resident Shannon Samsa. “It's horrifying to me that we're allowing this in our community.”

From Memphis to Mississippi

The Southaven turbine cluster is part of xAi’s rapidly growing footprint along the Tennessee-Mississippi border. That expansion began in the spring of 2024 in South Memphis, next to historically Black neighborhoods, with the construction of Colossus 1, which the company touted as the world’s largest AI supercomputer.

The Southern Environmental Law Center released thermal images in April revealing that xAi had been operating more than 30 unpermitted gas-powered turbines at that site.

“We were hopeful that the health department would step in,” said Patrick Anderson, a senior attorney at the SELC. “That never happened.” 

County officials in Tennessee maintained the turbines did not require a permit despite longstanding EPA policy that they do. In July, amid local pushback, the county permitted 15 turbines for use at Colossus 1.

On January 15, the EPA reiterated its decades-old policy that such machines need a permit. By then, xAi had already built a second data center in the area, Colossus 2. To power it, the company parked 27 turbines just across the stateline in Southaven, Miss., a diverse suburb of Memphis with higher than average levels of air pollution. 

“When you're talking about these turbines, think of the jet engine,” said Buckheit.  

Despite the EPA’s recent directive, Floodlight’s thermal imagery — analyzed by multiple experts — shows 15 unpermitted turbines in operation at Southaven. Public records obtained by Floodlight show 18 of the 27 turbines have been used since November, at least.

“One might easily have expected, since this has been going on for some months, at least [issue a] stop work order,” said Buckheit, who served during the Republican Gerald Ford and George W. Bush administrations. He also said the EPA could refer the case to the Department of Justice. 

“But apparently that didn't happen.”

Playing by a different set of rules

An EPA spokesperson did not answer Floodlight’s questions relating to its enforcement options, instead saying, “EPA does not approve the operation of gas turbines at facilities, that would be the state or local air permitting authority.” 

Air permits are traditionally handled by state agencies. However, according to its own website, the EPA is responsible for making sure these agencies comply with federal regulations and “generally will take enforcement action” if a state government fails to “take timely and appropriate action.”

xAI “violated the Clean Air Act the first time, and now they're gonna copy and paste and do it again,” said Anderson. “I maybe had some naive hope that the regulators who are most in the day-to-day business of implementing the Clean Air Act in Mississippi would do the right thing.” 

In response to Floodlight’s questions, a spokesperson from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality said the EPA’s recent rule leaves permitting decisions to state authorities. 

“The turbines currently operating at the Southaven facility are classified as portable/mobile units under state law and therefore remain exempt from air permitting requirements during this temporary period,” they said. “Nothing in the EPA’s January 15 rule altered that determination under Mississippi regulations.”

Longtime resident Krystal Polk said she had no idea xAI was coming to Southaven until black fences were set up across the street from her house. The area, she said, was once quiet and serene, with an abundance of wildlife, but is now bombarded by ceaseless noise and pollution. 

“I do feel like xAi is playing by a different set of rules,” she said. 

An asthmatic, Polk said she was forced to empty out the home that’s been in her family for generations and cancel her plans to retire there out of concerns for her health.

“We are a casualty of the whole data center race,” she said. “I feel that my voice doesn't matter.”

The spokesperson for the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality said the agency takes public concern around emissions, noise and overall quality of life seriously, and though the turbines — in their view — do not require permits, all “applicable air quality standards still apply.”

AI’s increasing thirst for fossil fuels 

Despite lofty sustainability goals put forward by industry leaders, data centers across the country are increasingly turning to fossil fuels to power the AI boom by using custom-built power plants like the ones seen in Southaven.

Roughly 75% of this power comes from natural gas, according to a recent report by CleanView, which tracks clean energy and data center projects. 

“Nearly every project we reviewed mentions renewables, hydrogen, or nuclear in its public announcements,” the author wrote, but renewables aren’t scheduled until 2028 or later.

And “nuclear is a decade away,” he said.

Now, xAI is seeking to expand in Southaven, applying in January for a permit to operate 41 turbines at the site. 

The facility could emit more than 6 million tons of greenhouse gases and over 1,300 tons of health-harming air pollutants every year, according to xAI’s permit application. That would make it among the largest fossil fuel power plants in the state. The company also purchased property in Southaven for a third data center that, when completed, will make the Colossus cluster — spanning Memphis to Southaven — one of the largest data center complexes in the world.

“It would be devastating,” said Samsa, the Southaven resident. “No community in their right mind would want something like this in their backyards.”

Samsa, a physician’s assistant, had hoped to raise a family in Southaven, but the presence of xAi’s gas-powered turbines has made her and her husband reconsider. She has helped collect more than 1,000 signatures for a petition demanding Mississippi authorities shut down the plant. 

“I don't want my children to be growing up around such massive amounts of air pollution,” she said. “I don't want them to have to live in a place where their health and their overall well-being is not considered over economics.”

Floodlight is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action.

Republished by Canary Media, Capital & Main, Climate Home News, Louisiana Illuminator, Mother Jones, The Lens, Verite, Worth, WWNO and others. Listen to Ames' interview on WWNO.

From her home in Donaldsonville, La., less than three miles from the world’s largest ammonia plant, Ashley Gaignard says the air itself carries a chemical edge. 

The odor, she said, is sharp and lingering. Years ago, when her son attended an elementary school about a mile from the massive CF Industries ammonia production facility, he would begin wheezing during recess, she recalled. His breathing problems eased only after he transferred to a school several miles farther away.

“I’m not against progress,” Gaignard said. “We are against development that poisons and displaces and disregards human life.”

Now, along Louisiana’s Mississippi River corridor, fertilizer giant CF Industries and other companies are placing multibillion-dollar bets on “blue ammonia” — a product made from fossil fuels but with extra technology to capture planet-warming gases and pipe them underground for storage. 

To date, no commercial-scale blue ammonia plants are operating — but more than 20 have been proposed nationwide, according to Oil and Gas Watch. Four of the largest such plants are slated for Louisiana, in communities already saturated with petrochemical pollution. 

An extensive review by Floodlight found no evidence that existing carbon capture projects anywhere in the world have achieved anything close to the emissions cuts companies like CF Industries are promising. Permit documents, meanwhile, show that the proposed plants combined could be allowed to discharge more than 2,800 tons each year of air pollutants (not greenhouse gases), including more than 400 tons of ammonia. 

Classified as a highly hazardous chemical, ammonia can damage the lungs and hurt the skin, eyes and throat. In the air, it can form fine particles that are linked to increased risks of heart disease and stroke, and can be deadly — particularly for children, older adults and people with heart or lung disease. 

The Louisiana plants would also be allowed to release carcinogens, including benzene and formaldehyde.

The companies proposing those plants — CF Industries, Air Products, Clean Hydrogen Works and St. Charles Clean Fuels — have said their operations will provide an abundant source of clean fertilizer and clean energy to global markets, including countries whose climate and trade policies favor low-carbon fuels. They’ve also said they’ll create nearly 840 permanent jobs and millions in new tax revenue for local communities while prioritizing public health and safety.

“We are designing the facility with advanced emissions controls, robust monitoring systems, and strong operational practices to minimize impacts,” said Chandra Stacie, the director of community relations for St. Charles Clean Fuels. “Our goal is to operate responsibly and be a constructive, long-term partner.”

Environmental advocates, scientists and community members, however, say the new ammonia plants would delay the phase-out of fossil fuels — and bring substantial air pollution and safety risks to places that have long borne the health costs of America’s industrial economy. 

Why Louisiana became ground zero 

While the historic streets of Donaldsonville recently served as the backdrop to the 2025 blockbuster Sinners, the town’s real-life drama is far less cinematic.

Donaldsonville lies at the center of Cancer Alley, a chemical corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans known for its elevated health risks and dense concentration of petrochemical plants and refineries.

Now this stretch of Louisiana is also ground zero for a new buildout: four proposed blue ammonia plants, with several more planned for Texas.

So, why the Gulf Coast?

South Louisiana has abundant natural gas for ammonia production and ports that connect to international shipping routes. 

The state offers an existing pipeline network, a seasoned chemical-industry workforce and political leaders who have consistently favored industrial development. The companies proposing ammonia plants can also tap generous state and federal incentives, including more than $2 billion in federal tax credits for carbon capture projects.

The Inflation Reduction Act, former President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, allows companies to collect up to $85 for each ton of carbon captured and permanently stored. 

And the state of Louisiana is offering developers millions more in grants and tax breaks designed to spur economic development. 

Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University who has studied carbon capture systems for years, said there’s little to be gained — and much to lose — from making ammonia this way.

“These plants increase air pollution, they increase global warming … they increase not only energy costs, but total social costs, and so there’s zero benefit — except to the people who are taking the subsidies to implement these projects,” he said.

The scale of subsidies for the proposed Louisiana ammonia plants is “off-the-charts outrageous” — and amounts to a bad deal for taxpayers, said Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a nonprofit that tracks and analyzes economic development projects. The plants are unlikely to deliver anything close to $2 billion a year in public benefits, he said. 

“It can only be accurately called a massive transfer of wealth from U.S. taxpayers to corporate shareholders,” he said.

Ambitious pitches, tougher reality

Ammonia has long been a workhorse of the global economy, quietly underpinning modern agriculture. It’s the key ingredient in nitrogen fertilizer, and demand is expected to grow as global food production strains to keep pace with population growth. 

Now, producers say it could play a far larger role — not just as fertilizer, but as a climate-friendly fuel for ships and power plants. 

When it’s burned as a fuel, ammonia doesn’t emit carbon dioxide (though it can produce nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas roughly 270 times more potent than carbon dioxide).

It can also be burned with other fuels in power plants or potentially used to store hydrogen for shipping and later conversion for use in fuel cells. 

But the process commonly used to make ammonia carries a heavy climate cost.

Most production relies on hydrogen derived from natural gas, a process that releases carbon dioxide. Enormous amounts of energy — typically from fossil fuels — are then used to force hydrogen and nitrogen to combine under extreme heat and pressure.

Nitrogen fertilizer plants in the U.S. released more than 46 million tons of heat-trapping gases in 2021 — roughly the emissions of nine million cars running for a year — according to a report by the Environmental Integrity Project. Globally, almost 2% of carbon dioxide emissions come from making ammonia — or as much as the energy system emissions of South Africa, according to the International Energy Agency. 

That’s where carbon capture comes in. The companies planning blue ammonia plants say they will isolate most of the carbon dioxide released, piping it deep underground for permanent storage.

• Texas-based Clean Hydrogen Works says its Ascension Clean Energy project, slated for Donaldsonville, will produce up to 7.2 million tons of ammonia annually and will capture “up to 98 percent” of the carbon dioxide produced.
• Nearby, CF Industries and the Pennsylvania-based Air Products plan to build two plants they say will have capture rates of 95% or more. 
• About an hour to the east, the St. Charles Clean Fuels project would capture more than 99% of carbon dioxide generated, its developer says.

Those claims are unlikely to hold up, said Cornell University professor Robert Howarth, an expert on greenhouse gas emissions and ammonia pollution. 

“Is the industry correct in saying that they can produce a really, really low emissions fuel using natural gas as their original feedstock?” he asked. “The answer is no. It's just never been done, and I don't think it can be done.”

The majority of existing carbon capture facilities trap less than 60% of carbon dioxide, according to a 2023 review by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “No existing project has consistently captured more than 80% of carbon,” the institute found.

Blue hydrogen — a prerequisite for blue ammonia — “is neither clean nor low-carbon,” and pursuing it would divert time and money from more effective climate solutions, the institute concluded. 

In an email to Floodlight, Air Products spokesperson Christina Stephens said the company is “very confident in our proprietary technology that allows us to capture 95 percent of the CO2 emissions.” She did not elaborate.

Stacie, the St. Charles Clean Fuels representative, said its facility’s design will be “conducive to high capture rates.”

Experts also note that carbon capture itself is typically powered by natural gas, adding emissions and undercutting its climate benefits.

Compounding the problem are emissions of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Methane is frequently emitted during drilling, processing and transport of natural gas. More escapes in the process used to extract hydrogen for ammonia production.

Total methane emissions from the fertilizer industry could be more than 140 times higher than official estimates, one 2019 study found.

Stephens, the Air Products spokesperson, said the company believes previous research related to methane leakage has flaws that led to inaccurate conclusions.

Stacie, meanwhile, said St. Charles Clean Fuels will monitor and verify methane emissions through “operations control and third-party verification consistent with emerging best practices.”

The local cost of a global fuel

Even if blue ammonia plants deliver the climate benefits their backers promise — benefits that experts dispute — their local impacts could still be substantial.

In 2024, the CF Industries Donaldsonville plant — near Gaignard’s house — released more toxic air pollutants than all but one other industrial site nationally, according to EPA data. The 7.1 million pounds of ammonia the plant released that year would more than fill the New Orleans Superdome, according to Kimberly Terrell, a research scientist for the Environmental Integrity Project.

Emissions from the planned blue ammonia plants could worsen respiratory health, Terrell said, with impacts extending far beyond the plant sites. 

“I would be concerned about increasing asthma rates long term,” she said.

“We are living in a cauldron of toxic chemicals down here in Louisiana.” —Jane Patton, a campaign manager for the Center for International Environmental Law.

Ascension Parish, where three of the proposed blue ammonia plants would be built, hosts more than two dozen industrial facilities and already has the second highest amount of air emissions in the country, according to EPA data.

So the prospect of new ammonia plants in Ascension Parish worries Twila Collins. 

She has lived her entire 55-year life in Modeste, a historic, predominantly Black community along the Mississippi River. If CF Industries gets its way, a massive ammonia plant would rise roughly a mile from her home. 

Her message for the company is blunt: “Leave us alone and find somewhere else to go where there's nobody living, so you won't disrupt a community.”

Industrial pollution already drifts into her neighborhood, bringing smells “like a landfill,” she said, and a new ammonia plant would add another layer of pollution — and another set of health risks.

In a 2024 report, CF Industries said its employees “regularly maintain, replace, and update equipment” to reduce emissions. 

But under its draft permit for the Blue Point plant, the company would be allowed to release more than 1,100 tons of air pollutants each year — equivalent to the weight of more than 27 fully loaded tractor trailers. That includes more than 140 tons of ammonia and more than 580 tons of carbon monoxide.

Collins said she can name more than 30 people in Modeste who suffer from cancer or respiratory problems. The issue is deeply personal. She herself has struggled with cancer. And in 2002, her 9-year-old son died of an asthma attack. He had struggled with asthma all his life, but Collins still wonders whether the industrial pollution surrounding Modeste helped trigger the attack that killed him.

She also worries about what could go wrong if something fails — an accident, a leak or worse — because ammonia production and carbon dioxide transport involve well-documented industrial risks.

CF Industries’ Donaldsonville plant has a history of deadly accidents: a 2000 explosion and fire killed three workers and injured at least eight others, and a 2013 blast killed one worker and injured eight more. 

This past November, an explosion at another CF Industries plant in Yazoo City, Miss., led to an ammonia leak and prompted the evacuation of nearby residents.

Residents push back

While supporters emphasize the economic boost and high-paying jobs the projects could bring, many local residents have turned out at public hearings to oppose them.

So many people packed a hearing room on the St. Charles project in 2024 that it had to be canceled and rescheduled in a larger venue.

Some of the public fears have centered on the carbon dioxide pipelines that would be needed to make the projects work.

Air Products, for instance, has proposed piping millions of tons of carbon dioxide 38 miles to be stored a mile underneath Lake Maurepas. The project would be “the world’s largest permanent carbon dioxide sequestration endeavor to date,” according to the Louisiana Department of Economic Development. 

At a November public hearing on the project, Air Products vice president Andrew Connolly said the company has an “unsurpassed safety record.” 

“All pipelines will be monitored 24-7 and we will meet or exceed all pipeline regulations,” he said. 

More than 300 people turned out for that public hearing, according to Dustin Renaud, a spokesperson for the environmental law group Earthjustice. Among the more than 50 people who spoke, all but three opposed the project.

Opponents have warned of what could happen if a carbon dioxide pipeline ruptures, as happened in 2020 in Satartia, Miss. That disaster sent 45 people to the hospital and left some residents unconscious in their homes and cars. Starved of oxygen, cars stalled or couldn’t start, making evacuation difficult.

The Air Products pipeline would run within half a mile of Sorrento Primary School, an elementary school in Ascension Parish with more than 600 students. An expert hired by Earthjustice concluded that a pipeline rupture could endanger the schoolchildren, along with residents of a nearby subdivision.

Stephens, the Air Products spokesperson, said the company will run the pipeline deeper than is required by code in the school’s vicinity. The pipeline will also have more shutoff valves than required, she said.

“We have a long safe history of operating the largest hydrogen pipeline network in the world right here in Louisiana,” she wrote.

Stacie, the St. Charles Clean Fuels representative, said the company will incorporate “detection systems, automated shutdowns, mechanical integrity programs and emergency response planning” — consistent with federal rules and “lessons learned from prior incidents.”

Still, some residents worry. 

“We don't have a good evacuation route,” said St. James Parish resident Gail LeBoeuf, who co-founded the environmental justice group Inclusive Louisiana. “If something would happen, we would just be stuck like Chuck.”

Promises of jobs, safety and economic growth

The companies behind the blue ammonia projects have said they will bring jobs and millions of dollars into the state economy — a message that has found a receptive audience in the state capital and some city halls.

CF Industries did not respond to Floodlight’s questions about its proposed plant, while Clean Hydrogen Works declined to answer questions.

Amid public opposition, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry in October announced a moratorium on new carbon capture projects. The order halted the state’s review of new permits for projects that would inject carbon dioxide underground, while allowing existing applications to continue — including the blue ammonia projects already underway.

In touting the CF Industries proposal last April, Landry noted that the company has been operating in the state for more than 50 years. “We don't get to grow food in this country without the hard work of CF Industries and its employees,” he said.

The oil and gas industry — which has strong ties to the ammonia and fertilizer industries — has for years been Landry's largest industrial sector donor. It has contributed more than $1.1 million to his campaigns, according to data from FollowTheMoney.org.

Donaldsonville Mayor Leroy Sullivan has also spoken out in favor of the proposals by CF Industries and Clean Hydrogen Works. 

“The benefits outweigh the things they're saying,” he told WBRZ last year. 

“These plants are safer, they’re better for the economy than some of the other industries that may be in the area.”

Sullivan previously worked at CF Industries for 26 years.  In 2000, he was badly injured in an explosion at the Donaldsonville plant and spent more than a month recovering in a burn unit. 

“It almost killed me,” he said at a public hearing last year on the Ascension Clean Energy proposal.

Neither Sullivan nor Landry responded to Floodlight’s requests for interviews.

For her part, Gaignard feels let down.

“What hurts the most is we’re watching the leaders that we elected … support these companies instead of supporting the community,” she said. 

A lower-carbon alternative 

There are cleaner ways to make ammonia.

Instead of extracting hydrogen from natural gas and then trying to capture the CO₂, producers can use renewable electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. That “green hydrogen” can then be combined with nitrogen to make what’s known as “green ammonia.”

At least one large-scale green ammonia plant is already operating. In Chifeng, China, a facility powered by wind turbines and solar panels began industrial-scale production in 2025. By 2028, the plant is expected to produce 1.5 million tons of green ammonia annually.

In the U.S., developers have proposed green ammonia plants in Texas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Washington. 

“Instead of making this big labyrinth of pipes and equipment and sending CO2 everywhere and using more energy, you can simply produce that hydrogen with electricity from solar and wind,” said Jacobson, the Stanford professor. 

In the debate over blue ammonia, the stakes are high.

For ammonia producers, the projects promise billions in federal tax credits and a foothold in emerging energy markets. They also offer oil and gas companies a way to delay the phase-out of fossil fuels, critics say.

“It's a great way to lock in oil and gas infrastructure. … Something that we should be getting away from, as opposed to locking in for years and years to come,” said Alexandra Shaykevich, a research manager at the Environmental Integrity Project who tracks oil and gas projects. 

For residents along Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, the stakes are more immediate. They’re being asked to live with new plants, new pipelines and new risks in places that have already absorbed decades of pollution. 

But Gaignard plans to keep fighting for her community.

“I don't look at this as red and blue and the left and the right,” she said. “We need to start looking at humanity.”

Floodlight is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action.

This story is a partnership between Floodlight and Sentient, with visual reporting by Floodlight's Evan Simon. Sign up for Floodlight’s newsletter here.

On ground that was once the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, trucks unload food scraps and yard waste, filling the air with the sharp tang of decaying garbage. Machines hum as they separate plastics and other contaminants from fruit and vegetable peels, leftovers and leaves, while speakers play fake bird sounds to keep scavengers away. Still, seagulls perch atop the slowly transforming compost, now resting in concrete bunkers. Nearby, heaps of dark, rich finished compost sit ready for gardens and parks. This is where organic waste from the country’s largest city gets a second life. 

Opened in 1991 to process yard trimmings, the Staten Island Composting Facility has become a pillar of the city’s composting efforts. It recently underwent an expansion, boosting its capacity by nearly 2,000% to accommodate a growing volume of food scraps and yard waste collected from neighborhoods across the city.

In October 2024, New York City took a major step in tackling its trash problem by making curbside composting mandatory. Residents are asked to separate peels, leftovers and leaves and place them in a lidded brown bin on their recycling day, when sanitation workers collect them. 

There should be a steady supply of organic waste. About a third of the city’s total waste stream is compostable, and composting offers many benefits. The initiative aims to keep food scraps and yard waste out of landfills, cut planet-warming emissions and even help curb the city’s rat problem. (The sanitation department says that composting bins actually help reduce rodent activity when the lids are consistently kept closed.) 

When organic materials decompose in landfills, they release methane — a greenhouse gas about 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Composting would also save on the estimated $215 million per year that the city spends exporting solid waste to landfills and incinerators. 

The city’s Department of Sanitation has hailed the expansion as a success. For instance, between Nov. 16 and 22, it collected more than six million pounds of material, surpassing records set earlier this spring. But researchers and advocates are not convinced the program is working as well as it could. An examination of the data reveals that inconsistent enforcement and inadequate education and outreach have contributed to lower participation than would be needed for the program’s long-term sustainability.

Tackling the city’s participation problem

Since enforcement began in April 2025, the city says it has collected an average of about five million pounds of compostable materials per week. But in April, May and June, New Yorkers still sent 91% of their compostable materials to landfills or incinerators, according to an analysis done by Samantha MacBride, a professor at Baruch College in Manhattan who researches urban waste.

The city’s curbside composting program still captures only a small share of food scraps and yard waste. The capture rate for organic waste — which indicates how much of the city’s organic waste is actually collected — was just 10% by spring of this year. This was far behind Seattle’s 60% capture rate.

“When you have empty trucks, you have wasted money, wasted wages. You have wasted emissions,” MacBride, who used to work as the sanitation department’s director of research and operations, tells Sentient. The Department of Sanitation counters that the capture rate “can be imprecise,” as the volume of compostable materials varies by neighborhood and season, according to an email from Vincent Gragnani, the agency’s press secretary. 

For the program to become viable, MacBride argues, the city needs to reach at least 30% capture rate within five years. By comparison, the city’s curbside recycling reached 40% in just a year, she says. Organics tend to be trickier than recyclables. Unlike bottles or papers, organic waste like food scraps can smell, attract pests and get messy, making people reluctant to separate them properly, MacBride explains. 

Suburban neighborhoods like Staten Island and eastern Queens do better when it comes to capture rates because there are more homes with yards to generate waste like leaves and grass clippings — materials that are generally less gross than food waste. But dense areas like Manhattan, southern Bronx and much of Brooklyn lag behind since most residents live in apartments with little yard waste. Most of their organics come from food scraps, which can be more unpleasant to handle and collect, especially in small apartments. 

Even when apartment residents do their part, building staff must ensure the scraps and other waste are set up for delivery. Building superintendents must put the bins out on collection day and clean them thoroughly — on top of their regular duties without extra pay — which can further limit participation, says MacBride. 

There was another major setback on April 19 — less than three weeks after enforcement began — when the city paused fines for small residential buildings that failed to follow composting rules. The reversal came following complaints from New Yorkers who found the system confusing and were unsure of which bins to use. The pause in enforcement will remain in place through the end of the year, though the sanitation department said it will continue to issue warnings and will fine large residential buildings that have already received four notices.

Putting fines on hold has created even more confusion, City Council member Shahana Hanif, who introduced the composting bill, tells Sentient. “This stop-and-start timeline and mixed messaging from our administration isn’t how New Yorkers will be able to adopt new behaviors and build muscle memory like the way we’ve done with recycling,” she says.

That brief period of enforcement — during which nearly 4,000 tickets were issued — did make a difference. It led to a “significant and sustained improvement” in the organics capture rate, according to MacBride’s analysis. Still, she cautions that relying on penalties is not a sustainable strategy. “What is indeed needed is trust and continuity” between the city government and residents, she says. Building that trust may take time. Since New York City first piloted curbside composting in 2012, the program has expanded, been scaled back and relaunched in different forms under different administrations, she notes. 

These challenges highlight the importance of consistent and well-funded community outreach to help New Yorkers embrace a system that requires them to change how they deal with waste. 

Researcher: More hands-on help needed

For the city’s composting outreach to become truly effective, the government should go beyond simply distributing flyers or mailing notices, MacBride argues. She says a more hands-on approach is needed: city personnel should visit buildings in person to meet superintendents and staff and maintain ongoing relations so people can ask questions and get help over time.

“That’s very labor intensive and involves having a lot of boots on the ground,” MacBride says, noting that the city must increase its outreach budget to make that possible. The sanitation department did not provide a specific outreach budget to Sentient, saying that the same team responsible for education also handles other duties. 

So far, Department of Sanitation teams have knocked on 740,000 doors, participated in more than 1,000 outreach events, and sent multiple pamphlets to every New Yorker, alongside press conferences and community discussions, Gragnani said.

More outreach is needed, MacBride says, and such efforts should include immigrant households and Black and brown neighborhoods near landfills or other sources of environmental pollution — communities that face greater barriers to participation, Hanif adds. 

The city government should also expand the presence of community composters — small-scale, neighborhood-based organizations that turn organics into compost locally, MacBride says. In November 2023, the administration of Mayor Eric Adams cut funding for community composting programs amounting to $7.1 million, but the City Council later restored over $6 million. 

Even though community compost programs do not process huge volumes, they are highly effective at education and engagement, showing residents the tangible benefits of turning food scraps into compost, MacBride says. “This is an excellent method to show what composting is to get over some of the disgust and fear around it.”

Neighborhood programs like these complement the city’s larger-scale operations, which handle the bulk of organic waste.

From trash to black gold

On Staten Island, the upgrade of the facility sped up decomposition of organics, allowing the site to turn food scraps and yard waste into finished compost in just three to four months — down from six to eight months.

Before the expansion, the facility could handle about three million pounds of food waste a year. Now, it can process up to 62.4 million pounds annually, along with 147 million pounds of yard waste. City officials estimate the improvements could prevent roughly two million tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year by diverting more organic waste from landfills. 

But even with its expanded role, the Staten Island facility currently processes only about a third of the city’s compostable material — mostly from Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx, local media outlet The City reported. Other organic waste goes to the Newtown Creek Wastewater Resource Recovery Facility in Brooklyn to be turned into biogas, while the rest is sent to facilities outside the city.

In 2024, Council member Sandy Nurse introduced a bill that would require the city to maintain at least 180,000 tons of annual composting capacity in each borough. The legislation has been stalled, however, since the summer of 2024. A report released in October by the office of Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso found that Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens have more than enough space to meet that capacity target, but Manhattan does not. Staten Island was not included in the site analysis because the borough already has substantial capacity and scope for expansion at the city-run composting facility. 

The sanitation department opposes the proposal, arguing it would require building hundreds of small composting facilities. Still, the agency does plan to establish eight new composting sites and upgrade its 17 existing facilities, according to a draft solid waste management plan, which will guide the city’s sanitation policy for the next decade. A city ordinance also mandates composting facilities at five parks in each borough by 2028, though implementation will depend on available funding. 

At the Staten Island compost facility, processed materials are screened by machines and divided into three piles: fines, mid-grade and overs. The fines are the good stuff — finished compost product ready to be bagged and distributed to residents and city agencies like the parks department and sold to landscapers. The mid-grade material — still mostly organic — is sent back through the composting process to achieve a finer texture. The overs — which have larger bits of contaminants like plastic mixed in with organics — are sent to the landfill. 

The contamination rate for compost was low, around 4%, back when curbside composting was still in its early stages. Now that the program is citywide, the sanitation department is seeing much higher contamination in material collected from schools — about 25%, Gragnani said. MacBride attributes the high contamination in school organics to both a lack of education and institutional challenges: students often are not taught proper composting practices, and schools lack coordinated support among principals, custodians and cafeteria staff to ensure proper sorting and participation.

As the city’s composting program grows, the sanitation department has no plans to further expand the Staten Island facility’s footprint, says Jennifer McDonnell, the agency’s deputy commissioner for solid waste management. The facility could bolster its current practices here and there. For instance, it could process some landscaping waste into mulch — material spread over soil to retain moisture and suppress weeds — instead of compost. That, McDonnell says, helps free up more capacity for food scraps and other materials that require full composting.

The expansion of largest facility in the city is impressive — expanding food waste capacity by about 2,000% — but it alone cannot solve New York City’s trash problem. Without cooperation from city officials, building staff and residents, much of the city’s organic waste will continue to rot where it shouldn’t.

Co-published by The Guardian

For decades, corn has reigned over American agriculture. It sprawls across 90 million acres — about the size of Montana — and goes into everything from livestock feed and processed foods to the ethanol blended into most of the nation’s gasoline. 

But a growing body of research reveals that America’s obsession with corn has a steep price: The fertilizer used to grow it is warming the planet and contaminating water.

Corn is essential to the rural economy and to the world’s food supply, and researchers say the problem isn’t the corn itself. It’s how we grow it. 

Corn farmers rely on heavy fertilizer use to sustain today’s high yields. And when that nitrogen breaks down in the soil, it releases nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Producing nitrogen fertilizer also emits large amounts of carbon dioxide, adding to its climate footprint.

Agriculture accounts for more than 10% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and corn uses more than two-thirds of all nitrogen fertilizer nationwide — making it the leading driver of agricultural nitrous oxide emissions, studies show.

The corn and ethanol industries insist that rapid growth in ethanol — which now consumes more than 40% of the U.S. corn crop —  is a net environmental benefit, and they strongly dispute research suggesting otherwise.

Since 2000, U.S. corn production has surged almost 50%, further adding to the crop’s climate impact.

Yet the environmental costs of corn rarely make headlines or factor into political debates. Much of the dynamic traces back to federal policy — and to the powerful corn and ethanol lobby that helped shape it. 

The Renewable Fuel Standard, passed in the mid 2000s, required that gasoline be blended with ethanol, a biofuel that in the United States comes almost entirely from corn. That mandate drove up demand and prices for corn, spurring farmers to plant more of it. 

Many plant corn year after year on the same land. The practice, called “continuous corn,” demands massive amounts of nitrogen fertilizer and drives especially high nitrous oxide emissions. 

At the same time, federal subsidies make it more lucrative to grow corn than to diversify. Taxpayers have covered more than $50 billion in corn insurance premiums over the past 30 years, according to federal data compiled by the Environmental Working Group.

Researchers say proven conservation steps — such as planting rows of trees, shrubs and grasses in corn fields — could sharply reduce these emissions. But the Trump administration has eliminated many of the incentives that helped farmers try such practices. 

Experts say it all raises a larger question: If America’s most widely planted crop is worsening climate change, shouldn’t we begin growing it a different way?

How corn took over America

Corn has been a staple of U.S. agriculture for centuries, first domesticated by Native Americans and later used by European immigrants as a versatile crop for food and animal feed. Its production really took off in the 2000s after federal mandates and incentives helped turn much of America’s corn crop into ethanol.

Corn’s dominance — and the emissions that come with it — didn’t happen by accident. It was built through a high-dollar lobbying campaign that continues today.

In the late 1990s, America’s corn farmers were in trouble. Prices had cratered amid a global grain glut and the Asian financial crisis. A 1999 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis said crop prices had hit “rock bottom.”

In 2001 and 2002, the federal government gave corn farmers and ethanol producers a boost — first through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bioenergy Program, which paid ethanol producers to increase their use of farm commodities for fuel. Then the 2002 Farm Bill created programs that continue to support ethanol and other renewable energy.

Corn growers soon after mounted an all-out campaign in Washington. Their goal: persuade Congress to require gasoline to be blended with ethanol. State and national grower groups lobbied relentlessly, pitching ethanol as a way to cut greenhouse gasses, reduce oil dependence and revive rural economies.

“We got down to a couple of votes in Congress, and the corn growers were united like never before,” recalled Jon Doggett, then the industry’s chief lobbyist, in an article published by the National Corn Growers Association. “I started receiving calls from Capitol Hill saying, ‘Would you have your growers stop calling us? We are with you.’ I had not seen anything like it before and haven’t seen anything like it since.”

Their persistence paid off. In 2005, Congress created the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which requires that a certain amount of ethanol be blended into U.S. gasoline each year. Two years later, lawmakers expanded it further. The policy transformed the market: The amount of corn used for ethanol domestically has more than tripled in the past 20 years.

When demand for corn spiked as a result of the RFS, it pushed up prices worldwide, said Tim Searchinger, a researcher at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. The result, Searchinger said, is that more land around the world got cleared to grow corn. That, in turn, resulted in more emissions. 

That lobbying brought clout. “King Corn” became a political force, courted by presidential hopefuls and protected by both parties. Since 2010, national corn and ethanol trade groups have spent more than $55 million on lobbying and millions more on political donations, according to campaign finance records analyzed by Floodlight. 

In 2024 alone, those trade groups spent twice as much on lobbying as the National Rifle Association. Major industry players — Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill and ethanol giant POET among them — have poured even more into Washington, ensuring the sector’s voice remains one of the loudest in U.S. agriculture.

Now those same groups are pushing for the next big prize: expanding higher-ethanol gasoline blends and positioning ethanol-based jet fuel as aviation’s “low-carbon” future.

Research undercuts ethanol’s clean-fuel claims

Corn and ethanol trade groups didn’t make their officials available for interviews.

But on their websites and in their literature, they have promoted corn ethanol as a climate-friendly fuel. 

The Renewable Fuels Association cites government and university research that finds burning ethanol reduces greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 40-50% compared with gasoline. The ethanol industry says the climate critics have it wrong — and that most of the corn used for fuel comes from better yields and smarter farming, not from plowing up new land. The amount of fertilizer required to produce a bushel of corn has dropped sharply in recent decades, they say.

“Ethanol reduces carbon emissions, removing the carbon equivalent of 12 million cars from the road each year,” according to the Renewable Fuels Association.

Growth Energy, a major ethanol trade group, said in a written statement to Floodlight that U.S. farmers and biofuel producers are “constantly finding new ways to make their operations more efficient and more environmentally beneficial,” using things like cover crops to reduce their carbon footprint.

"Biofuel producers are making investments today that will make their products net-zero or even net negative in the next two decades," the statement said.

But some research tells a different story.

A recent Environmental Working Group report finds that the way corn is grown in much of the Midwest — with the same fields planted in corn year after year — carries a heavy climate cost.

Research in 2022 by agricultural land use expert Tyler Lark and colleagues links the Renewable Fuel Standard to expanded corn cultivation, heavier fertilizer use, worsening water pollution and increased emissions. Scientists typically convert greenhouse gasses like nitrous oxide and methane into their carbon-dioxide equivalents — or carbon intensity — so their warming impacts can be compared on the same scale.

“The carbon intensity of corn ethanol produced under the RFS is no less than gasoline and likely at least 24% higher,” the authors concluded.

Lark’s research has been disputed by scientists at Argonne National Laboratory, Purdue University and the University of Illinois, who published a formal rebuttal arguing the study relied on “questionable assumptions” and faulty modeling — a charge Lark’s team has rejected.

A 2017 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the RFS was unlikely to meet its greenhouse gas goals because the U.S. relies predominantly on corn ethanol and produces relatively little of the cleaner, advanced biofuels made from waste. 

The problem isn’t just emissions, researchers say. Corn ethanol requires millions of acres that could instead be used for food crops or more efficient energy sources. One recent study found that solar panels can generate as much energy as corn ethanol on roughly 3% of the land. 

“It’s just a terrible use of land,” Searchinger, the Princeton researcher, said of ethanol. “And you can't solve climate change if you’re going to make such terrible use of land.”

Most of the country’s top crop isn’t feeding people. More than 40% of U.S. corn goes to ethanol. A similar amount is used to feed livestock, and just 12% ends up as food or in other uses.

As corn production rises, so have emissions 

Globally, corn production doubled from 2000 to 2021. 

That growth has been fueled by fertilizer, which emits nitrous oxide that can linger in the atmosphere for more than a century. That eats away at the ozone layer, which blocks most of the sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation.

Global emissions have soared alongside corn production. Between 1980 and 2020, nitrous oxide emissions from human activity climbed 40%, the Global Carbon project found. 

In the United States, nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture in 2022 were equal to roughly 262 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to the EPA’s inventory of greenhouse gas emissions. That’s equivalent to putting almost 56 million passenger cars on the road.

The biggest increases are coming straight from the Corn Belt.

Ethanol’s climate footprint isn’t the only concern. The nitrogen used to grow corn and other crops is also a key source of drinking water pollution.

According to a new report by the Alliance for the Great Lakes and Clean Wisconsin, more than 90% of nitrate contamination in Wisconsin’s groundwater is linked to agricultural sources — mostly synthetic fertilizer and manure. 

The same analysis estimates that in 2022, farmers applied more than 16 million pounds of nitrogen beyond what crops needed, sending runoff into wells, streams and other water systems.

For families like Tyler Frye’s, that hits close to home. In 2022, Frye and his wife moved into a new home in the rural village of Casco, Wisconsin, about 20 miles east of Green Bay. A free test soon afterward found their well water had nitrate levels more than twice the EPA’s safe limit. “We were pretty shocked,” he said. 

Frye installed a reverse-osmosis system in the basement and still buys bottled water for his wife, who is breastfeeding their daughter, born in July.

One likely culprit, he suspects, are the cornfields less than 200 yards from his home. 

“Crops like corn require a lot of nitrogen,” he said. “A lot of that stuff, I assume, is getting into the well water and surface water.”

When he watches manure or fertilizer being spread on nearby fields, he said, one question nags him: “Where does that go?”

What cleaner corn could look like

Reducing corn’s climate footprint is possible — but the farmers trying to do it are swimming against the policy tide.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, backed by President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans, strips out the provisions of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act that had rewarded farmers for climate-friendly practices.

And in April, Trump’s USDA canceled the $3 billion Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative, a grant program designed to promote farming and forestry practices to improve soil and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The agency said that the program’s administrative costs meant too little money was reaching farmers, while Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins dismissed it as part of the “green new scam.” 

University of Iowa professor Silvia Secchi said the rollback of the Climate-Smart program has already given farmers “cold feet” about adopting conservation practices. “The impact of this has been devastating,” said Secchi, a natural resources economist who teaches at the university’s School of Earth, Environment and Sustainability.

Research shows what’s possible if farmers had support. In its recent report, the Environmental Working Group found that four proven conservation practices — including planting trees, shrubs and hedgerows in corn fields — could make a measurable difference. 

Implementing those practices on just 4% of continuous corn acres across Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin would cut total greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of taking more than 850,000 gasoline cars off the road, EWG found.

Despite setbacks at the federal level, some farmers are already showing what a more climate-friendly Corn Belt could look like.

In northern Iowa, Wendy Johnson farms 1,200 acres of corn and soybeans with her father. On 130 of those acres, she’s trying something different: She’s planting fruit and nut trees, organic grains, shrubs and other plants that need little or no nitrogen fertilizer. 

“The more perennials we can have on the ground, the better it is for the climate,” she said. 

Across the rest of the farm, they enrich the soil by rotating crops and planting cover crops. They’ve also converted less productive parts of the fields into “prairie strips” — bands of prairie grass that store carbon and require no fertilizer. 

Under the now-cancelled Climate-Smart grant program, they were supposed to receive technical assistance and about $20,000 a year to expand those practices. The grant program was terminated before they got any of the money.

“It’s hard to take risks on your own,” Johnson said. “That’s where federal support really helps. Because agriculture is a high-risk occupation.”

The economics still favor business as usual. Johnson knows that many Midwestern corn growers feel pressure to maximize yields, keeping them hooked on corn — and nitrogen fertilizer. 

“I think a lot of farmers around here are very allergic to trees,” she joked. 

In southeast Iowa, sixth-generation farmer Levi Lyle, who mixes organic and conventional methods across 290 acres, uses a three-year rotation, extensive cover crops and a technique called roller-crimping — flattening rye each spring to create a mulch that suppresses weeds, feeds the soil and reduces fertilizer needs. 

“The roller crimping of cover crops is a huge, huge opportunity to sequester more carbon, improve soil health, save money on chemicals and still get a similar yield,” he said.

But farmers get few government incentives to take such climate-friendly steps, Lyle said. “There is a lack of seriousness about supporting farmers to implement these new practices,” he said. 

And without federal programs to offset the risk, the innovations that Lyle and Johnson are trying remain exceptions — not the norm.

Many farmers still see prairie strips or patches of trees as a waste, said Luke Gran, whose company helps Iowa farmers establish perennials.

“My eyes do not lie,” Gran said. “I have not seen extensive change to cover cropping or tillage across the broad acreage of this state that I love.”

The next corn boom?

Despite mounting research about corn’s climate costs, industry groups are pushing for policies to  boost ethanol demand. 

One big priority: Pushing a bill to require that new cars are able to run on gas with more ethanol than what’s commonly sold today.

Corn and biofuel trade groups have also been pressing Democrats and Republicans in Congress for legislation to pave the way for ethanol-based jet fuel. While use of such “sustainable” aviation fuel is still in its early stages domestically, corn and biofuel associations have made developing a market for it a top policy priority. 

Secchi, the Iowa professor, says it’s easy to see why ethanol producers are trying to expand their market: The growth in electric vehicles threatens long-term gasoline sales.

Researchers warn that producing enough ethanol-based jet fuel could trigger major land-use shifts. A 2024 World Resources Institute analysis found that meeting the federal goal of 35 billion gallons of ethanol jet fuel would require about 114 million acres of corn — roughly 20% more corn acreage than the U.S. already plants for all purposes. That surge in demand, the authors concluded, would push up food prices and worsen hunger.

Secchi calls that scenario a climate and land-use “disaster.” Large-scale use of ethanol-based aviation fuel, she said, would mean clearing even more land and pouring on even more nitrogen fertilizer, driving up greenhouse gas emissions. 

“The result,” she said, “would be essentially to enshrine this dysfunctional system that we created.”

Floodlight is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action.

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An investor lawsuit accusing Florida Power & Light’s parent company, NextEra, and several current and former executives of securities fraud can move forward, a panel of federal appeals judges ruled last week in a remarkable resurrection of the case. The suit, which has two Florida pension funds as the lead plaintiffs, argues that the company made misleading statements as Florida newspapers several years ago uncovered evidence of a wide range of misdeeds, including involvement in efforts to warp Florida elections through the use of “ghost” candidates, use of dirty tricks to acquire Jacksonville’s city-owned electric utility, surveillance of a journalist and attempts to control media coverage.

Last year, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed that class-action lawsuit against NextEra, finding that the lead investors had failed to demonstrate that any of the company’s statements during a maelstrom of news coverage about those controversies was sufficiently misleading.

A panel of 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges sharply disagreed.

“The complaint has it all: corporate malfeasance, bribery, off-the-books recordkeeping, surveilling journalists, creating ‘ghost’ candidates, corrupting independent media outlets, and a failed acquisition that spiraled into two federal indictments,” Judge Gerald Bard Tjoflat wrote in a 38-page decision, joined by Judges Elizabeth Branch and Embry Kidd.

“When reporters began to uncover traces of the alleged conspiracy, NextEra and FPL executives were quick to put the claims to rest … But after some time, leadership began to backpedal.”

A key episode in the lawsuit is NextEra’s January 25, 2023, announcement that Eric Silagy, FPL’s CEO, was retiring — an abrupt development that utility analysts found unexpected — as well as “unscheduled disclosures about potential legal and reputational risk” that stemmed from some of the allegations that had run in Florida newspapers, which FPL leaders had previously denied.

“That very day, NextEra’s stock plunged 8.7 percent, wiping out more than $14 billion in market capitalization,” Tjoflat wrote.

Until last week, it appeared FPL had moved past that series of potentially damaging revelations with few other consequences and retained its status as one of Florida’s most powerful companies, even as bit players from Jacksonville to Miami were convicted of crimes (law enforcement officials have never accused NextEra or its employees of wrongdoing).

After Cannon dismissed the lawsuit last year, a right-wing Florida news site derided media coverage of FPL and crowed that Cannon’s decision amounted to a “crystal-clear outcome again validating the continued claims of innocence made by FPL and its leaders.”

And earlier this month, the Florida Public Service Commission approved FPL’s requested $7 billion, four-year rate hike, which consumer advocates have characterized as the largest such increase in electric bills in United States history.

The commissioners, appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, approved that rate hike despite widespread public concerns about affordability and withering criticism from the chief judge on the Florida Supreme Court, who last year sharply rebuked the PSC as a “black box” that had hardly bothered to justify its decision to sign off on the previous FPL rate increase in 2021.

Now, the federal appeals court decision could re-open the company’s old wounds from a series of controversies across Florida. At the center of nearly all of them were operatives of Matrix LLC, an Alabama-based consulting firm that FPL had once employed.

Matrix’s founder, Joe Perkins, and its former CEO, Jeff Pitts, had a falling out, based in part over the company’s work on FPL’s behalf, which Perkins denied ever knowing about. During that feud, internal company records began making their way into the hands of reporters at the Orlando Sentinel, The Florida Times-Union, the Miami Herald and Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom, that connected FPL to a series of seemingly discrete controversies across Florida.

In a 2020 state Senate race in South Florida, for example, those internal records showed that former Matrix operatives propped up a sham candidate who shared a last name with the incumbent, state Sen. José Javier Rodríguez, whom FPL despised, at least in part because of his opposition at the time to one of the company’s top legislative priorities. “I want you to make his life a living hell … seriously,” Silagy, FPL’s former CEO, emailed two underlings about Rodríguez in 2019. (Silagy later said he regretted his choice of words).

Rodríguez narrowly lost reelection.

In Jacksonville, the internal records showed that Matrix operatives worked discreetly on an effort to lure an FPL critic off the City Council with a six-figure job offer at a sham nonprofit and that they surveilled a columnist at The Florida Times-Union who wrote critically about FPL’s efforts to buy the city’s publicly owned electric, water and sewer utility (that columnist is the author of this story).

A watchdog organization also filed an FEC complaint over FPL’s alleged funneling of money through various not-for-profit organizations (the FEC eventually deadlocked along partisan lines, with Republicans in unison against moving the investigation forward, ultimately killing the inquiry).

The records connected FPL to these efforts and others, but the company vigorously denied any role in them, both in statements and during the course of an interview of Silagy at the Times-Union’s office in downtown Jacksonville.

But, the appeals court wrote, after “the dust settled, NextEra leadership appeared to change course.”

On the same day NextEra announced Silagy’s departure, it filed an unscheduled risk disclosure. “While earlier SEC filings also touched on potential risks, the new disclosure was more comprehensive and warned investors of ‘material fines’ and a potential ‘material adverse impact on the reputation’ of NextEra and FPL,” the court wrote.

While not an “admission of wrongdoing,” the court wrote, it was a “notably different tune than (former NextEra CEO Jim Robo’s) earlier statement that there was ‘no basis to any of [the] allegations.’”

To ultimately prevail, the investors suing FPL “still must show material fraud,” the court wrote.

The lead plaintiffs in the case are the City of Hollywood Police Officers Retirement System and the Pembroke Pines Firefighters & Police Officers Pension Fund.

Disclosure: The Tributary’s executive editor, Nate Monroe, was the journalist whom FPL and Matrix are alleged to have surveilled. He is also the author of several past columns in The Florida Times-Union that are at issue in this lawsuit and which FPL has criticized in the past.

Nate Monroe can be reached at nate.monroe@jaxtrib.org.

This article first appeared on The Tributary and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This story is a partnership between Floodlight and Sentient, with visual reporting by Floodlight's Evan Simon. Sign up for Floodlight’s newsletter here.

City Harvest is more than 40 years old, but it’s never been more needed than it was over the last month. 

The work of City Harvest, New York City’s largest food rescue organization, took on new urgency when the recent government shutdown cut off funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which serves roughly 42 million Americans. 

City Harvest’s work tackles two issues of vital importance right now: food insecurity and climate change, both aggravated by policy decisions made by the Trump administration. 

Though the shutdown ended Nov. 12 after a record 43 days, SNAP is still subject to more unprecedented cuts thanks to the so-called “mega-bill” signed into law in July. Some of those permanent cuts are already in force, which means the need for nutritious food in New York City will only continue to grow, Jenna Harris, associate director of City Harvest’s donor relations and supply chain team, tells Sentient. 

It may sound paradoxical but despite rising food insecurity, food waste continues to be a massive problem both nationwide and globally. Only about 12% of the 14.5 million tons of recoverable food in the United States is donated to organizations like City Harvest. 

In addition to supplying fresh food to people who need it, food rescue has another, lesser-known benefit: it helps to mitigate the climate crisis by reducing the emissions from food waste. Globally, food waste is responsible for 8-10% of all greenhouse gas emissions — about five times as much as the aviation industry.

Food rescue under pressure

On a Tuesday afternoon in July, Jaeok Kim, an associate director for research at the Vera Institute of Justice, wasn’t behind her desk working on criminal justice reform. Instead, she, along with 200 other volunteers, spent the latter half of the day collecting trays of leftover gourmet pastries and tubs of yogurt from the massive Javits Center near Hudson Yards. She scanned surplus food abandoned by vendors at the Specialty Food Association’s summer show. By the end of the day, Kim and her fellow volunteers had saved 84,000 pounds of food.

City Harvest was founded in 1982 when its first executive director, Helen verDuin Palit, learned over a dinner of potato skins that the restaurant was throwing out the insides of the potatoes. The very next day, she organized a donation of 30 gallons of cooked potatoes to a nearby soup kitchen.

Today, City Harvest operates with a fleet of 23 refrigerated trucks, rescues food from around 1,600 donors, and delivers to 400 partner agencies across the city. In 2024, City Harvest rescued nearly 79 million pounds of produce, dairy and packaged goods that would have otherwise gone to waste. This year, the organization expects to divert 86 million pounds of food from landfills — preventing the equivalent of 25 million kilograms of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. 

Fresh produce makes up 74% of rescued food, providing healthier options than the nonperishable items typically distributed by food banks. One August morning in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, a line snaked around the block outside City Harvest’s warehouse. Parents and grandparents — many from the neighborhood’s Hispanic and Chinese communities — waited their turn, grocery carts and reusable bags in hand, to collect celery, onions and potatoes at the mobile market. After picking up their produce, several of the residents participated in a cooking demonstration to learn new ways to prepare the food they had just received. 

New York City is home to 1.8 million people who rely on SNAP benefits. The demand that surged during COVID never let up, says Harris. “People who never used to rely on emergency food now have to rely on it because they’re just not making enough money to support themselves day to day,” she adds. 

The organization’s outdoor farmers’ market-style distributions were already seeing “record-high visits,” with City Harvest expecting to distribute more than a million additional pounds of food this November compared with last year, Molly Horak, the group’s senior communications manager, told Sentient in an email. 

During the shutdown, City Harvest stepped in to support workers directly hit by the shutdown, distributing 20,000 pounds of produce and pantry staples near LaGuardia and JFK airports, where federal contractors and employees were furloughed or working without pay, as well as to active-duty service members and veterans in Brooklyn and Staten Island.

City Harvest is known for rescuing surplus produce, but the shutdown pushed the nonprofit to broaden its approach. It purchased shelf-stable items such as rice, pasta and peanut butter, which community members would ordinarily use SNAP benefits to buy. 

“As SNAP recipients navigate delays and disruptions to their payments, they may not be able to use their SNAP benefits to buy those staples, and we want to ensure we are distributing the foods that are most helpful during this time,” Horak said. 

Although the shutdown has ended, further SNAP cuts loom. The Trump budget bill referred to as the One Big Beautiful Bill imposed stricter work requirements and reduced SNAP funding by $186 billion over 10 years, or about 20% — the largest cut in the program’s history — which will result in millions losing their benefits. “For every meal that organizations like City Harvest provide, SNAP provides nine,” City Harvest’s chief executive officer Jilly Stephens said in a statement. 

Making food donations work

In the United States, most of the country’s surplus food ends up in landfills, where it decomposes and produces methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over 20 years. 

When food is thrown away, everything that went into making it — from farming to processing to transportation and cooking — is wasted as well. Greenhouse gas emissions are released, but when food is wasted, no one ends up fed. 

Donating excess food is one of the best solutions because it not only prevents food waste emissions, but it also nourishes people. Yet despite the potential, only 12% of food in the United States that could be donated actually reaches people, according to food waste nonprofit ReFED.

Stronger federal and state policies could help unlock the full potential of food rescue and donation, reducing both hunger and climate pollution. The Zero Food Waste Coalition (of which ReFED is a member) recommends that state laws about organic waste incentivize donations by requiring food businesses to participate in diversion and rescue programs.

In an analysis published in January, researchers from University of California Davis and ReFED found that state policies tend to emphasize food waste recycling methods (such as composting) and anaerobic digestion more than rescue strategies such as donating to food banks or repurposing food for animal feed, even though the latter are more effective at drawing down emissions. 

California is an exception: businesses are required to donate surplus food to recovery organizations instead of throwing it out. The law has contributed to the increase in overall donations and helped some food banks receive more nutritious items like fresh produce, but is not without logistical challenges, a survey by the California Association of Food Banks found. 

New York State also mandates donation before composting, but this law does not apply to New York City. New York City’s organics law skips over food donation, directing food waste straight to compost or biogas — a major missed opportunity that leaders at City Harvest hope policy advocacy can change.

More robust policies on food rescue could address both problems, fighting hunger and reducing climate pollution. The vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions from food waste happen when the food is produced, so every piece of edible food saved from the landfill reduces those emissions. 

Cutting down on food waste is one of the most practical ways to mitigate global warming: Project Drawdown calls it an “emergency brake” solution. Last year, 55 member organizations of the Global Food Banking Network diverted 512 million kilograms of edible food away from landfills, preventing an estimated 1.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions. That’s roughly the annual emissions of about 400,000 gasoline-powered cars. 

Barriers to donating surplus food include fears of liability, limited awareness about what can legally be donated and confusion over date labels, says Steven Deheeger, associate director of advocacy at City Harvest. “Even when we rescue perfectly good food and we pass that on to the 400 partners that we work with, they sometimes won’t accept the food because they’re unsure whether they can serve it to their communities,” Deheeger tells Sentient. 

Roughly 6% of all food waste in the U.S. stems from misconceptions about date labels. Adopting a standardized two-label system — “Best if Used By” to signal peak quality, and “Use By” for highly perishable or potentially unsafe products — could prevent large volumes of edible food from being thrown away, he adds. 

In 2023, former President Joe Biden signed the Food Donation Improvement Act, updating a 1996 law that established civil and criminal liability protections for food donors who gave food in good faith to nonprofits. The new law expands those protections to include direct donors — such as schools, restaurants, caterers, grocery stores and farmers — who provide safe, edible food directly to individuals or groups, not just nonprofits. It also extends protections to nonprofits and other organizations that offer donated food at a low cost to help cover expenses like storage, transportation and staffing.

While the law was a welcome step, clear guidance on food safety and donations remains limited to meat and poultry, says Emily Broad Leib, director of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic. The FDA needs to issue more complete guidance, Broad Leib says. States can publish their own guidance, but having federal language that states could adopt would allow states to move more quickly. 

Saving food from landfills is a strong win for both climate and hunger, but not enough to address food insecurity. Millions of people in the United States still struggle to afford meals. To truly ensure access to nutritious food for all, there must be fairer wages, more job opportunities and stronger food and nutrition programs like SNAP, Pamela Koch, faculty director of the Laurie M. Tisch Center for Food, Education and Policy at Columbia University’s Teachers College, argues in an email to Sentient. 

While food rescue groups can help, writes Koch, they cannot fix the inequities that create hunger in the first place.

This article was produced in partnership between Floodlight and New York Focus. It was co-published by The Guardian and republished by TruthOut,

Baba Ndanani has lived in one of New York City's most flood-prone neighborhoods for more than 20 years, and he knows the risks all too well. His two-story home in the coastal community of Edgemere sits directly beside Jamaica Bay. During high tides, he often watches with concern as the bay creeps into his backyard and climbs the steps to his back porch.

In 2012, during Superstorm Sandy, over 5 feet of water rushed into Ndanani’s house. He had to swim across the street to higher ground, riding out the rest of the storm in a disabled car surrounded by water.  

“I was praying,” Ndanani told Floodlight. “I just wanted to get out, and that was it.”

After the storm, he returned to his decimated home and spent two weeks sleeping atop an overturned refrigerator. 

“There was nothing else for me to sleep on. I had nowhere else to go.” Ndanani said. “It was horrible.”

Despite his harrowing experience and a city-run voluntary buyout program designed to relocate residents of Edgemere, he says he has no intention of leaving his coastal home. 

“Even with everything that happened, I love the scenery, I love the environment,” he said. 

Instead, Ndanani is among the many Edgemere residents still holding out hope the city will deliver on its decade-old promise to protect the neighborhood from flooding. 

“In the other neighborhood(s) they've done that, so why is Edgemere different?” Ndanani asked, referring to the city’s efforts to raise shorelines around Lower Manhattan. “Because we don't have Wall Street here?” 

The lack of flood protections in Edgemere, combined with a largely ineffective attempt to relocate residents in the working class minority neighborhood, reflects a wider trend among coastal resiliency efforts currently underway across America’s cities. In Charleston and Miami and Norfolk, city officials are planning billion-dollar seawalls to protect their wealthy core, but not the vulnerable communities beyond it. 

“Neighborhoods like Edgemere will become more and more frequent,” Veronica Olivotto told Floodlight. Olivotto is a New School researcher who spent months studying flood risk mitigation efforts in the community. 

She says Edgemere illustrates how managed retreat from an increasingly uninhabitable coastal America “will have to confront the fact that some people cannot move either because they don’t have the financial means or because they feel that this is the place they have always lived.”  

Olivotto stressed: “We need to think way more about the land that’s left behind, and the people that are left behind after retreat than we are right now.” 

‘We are forgotten here’ 

With more than 500 miles of waterfront, few American cities are more vulnerable to sea level rise than New York City. About 1.3 million New Yorkers live within or directly adjacent to a floodplain, and a recent report estimates more than 80,000 homes could be lost to flooding in the next 15 years. By 2050, city officials estimate that at least 800,000 residents will be living in a high risk floodplain. By 2080, nearly a third of the city’s landmass could face significant flooding.  

New Yorkers got a terrifying glimpse of what’s to come in 2012, when Superstorm Sandy flooded 17% of the city’s landmass, killing 43 people and causing more than $19 billion in damage. 

Officials have been scrambling to make New York more resilient to rising waters ever since. The city has begun raising shorelines and installing massive floodgates around Lower Manhattan as part of the so-called Big U, a 10-mile-long U-shaped system that also includes mitigation features aimed to protect the island’s southern tip from future floods. 

The estimated $2.7 billion project is among the most ambitious coastal protection efforts in the nation. But for many of New York’s working class coastal residents, is just another city service they aren’t seeing in their neighborhood. 

“Everybody deserves the same amount of protection,” Edgemere resident Jackie Rogers told Floodlight. “If they can invest in other communities, raising up the shorelines, putting berms in the communities that’s along the Lower East Side, as well as the Hudson River, why can't they do the same thing to Edgemere?”

Unlike Lower Manhattan, Edgemere was among the hardest hit communities during Superstorm Sandy. A low-lying neighborhood located along a narrow stretch of the Rockaway peninsula, Edgemere is flanked by the Atlantic Ocean on one side and Jamaica Bay on the other. When Sandy struck, water rushed in from both sides, filling the streets with nearly 6 feet of water. 

“We were actually in the ocean at the height of Hurricane Sandy,” Edgemere resident Sonja Webber-Bey told Floodlight. “The ocean and the bay were one in the same. So whatever was in your house was the ocean and the bay.” 

Yet more than a decade after city officials pledged to fortify Edgemere, critics say little has been done to protect the community from flooding. 

“Edgemere, especially the portion towards the bay, is still highly vulnerable,” Olivotto said. “If a superstorm were to happen next month, the same exact issues would occur in Edgemere as they occurred in Superstorm Sandy.”

In 2015, the city began working on the Resilient Edgemere Community Planning Initiative. The goal was to reduce flood risks in Edgemere while also bringing in affordable housing. But a decade later, the plan’s major resiliency project has yet to break ground. 

While the city upgraded drainage systems, elevated more than 100 homes and rebuilt the boardwalk to help fortify Edgemere’s oceanside, a crucial protection feature to raise the shoreline along the bayside was dropped. 

“It’s 13 years since Superstorm Sandy, and yet still no flood mitigation on the bayside,” Rogers said. “We are forgotten here.” The city’s original plan earmarked $14 million for raising the bayside shoreline. 

“That money was taken away from Edgemere without Edgemere community members knowing about it and reallocated to another community. We want that money back. We want it reinvested back in our community. We want our shoreline to be raised,” Rogers said. 

Official: Residents ‘are right to be concerned’ 

“I understand the frustration of Edgemere residents and I think that what we're talking about with this plan is really challenging compromises,” Michael Sandler, associate commissioner at the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development, told Floodlight. 

“The plan will be a success,” said Sandler, whose agency is responsible for the effort. “I don't consider the plan to be complete. And I think the plan has taken much longer to implement than we would have preferred.”

Key setbacks, he said, such as “continuity of staffing at the agency” as well as the loss of funding during the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the delays. Still, Sandler recognizes that Edgemere remains far too vulnerable. 

“We're coming up on the peak of hurricane season right now, and there isn't a coastal protection feature, and I think that residents in the neighborhood are right to be concerned about what the future looks like,” Sandler said in a September interview. He added, “I think that we have invested a lot in the community. We have a lot in the works right now that is coming in terms of community improvements.” 

The city now relies on a federal Army Corps of Engineers project to protect Edgemere’s bayside. However, the project has remained in the design phase for years, and with the Trump administration’s posture towards climate change, few in Edgemere expect the project to move forward anytime soon.

“It's not happening,” Edgemere resident Rogers said of the Army Corps project. “Nobody is looking to do anything along this bay to address the constant flooding of Jamaica Bay.” 

Sandler says there is federal funding for the project, and it is moving forward, but he acknowledges residents’ frustration. 

“These are really big, complicated projects, and the city does not have the full resources for all of the coastal protection projects that are necessary to protect the city from climate change,” Sandler said. “And we have a partner in the federal government who is overall pulling back from this work and from their financial commitment to resiliency. And so it is a really big challenge for New York City.” 

Caught between the housing and climate crises

Despite the lack of flood protections in Edgemere, the city has approved construction of new affordable housing towers in the area. One building is completed, and several other towers are slated for construction. All are in or adjacent to floodplains; sea level rise projections show they could be partially underwater by 2100. 

“The fact that Edgemere may be considered as the last bastion of affordable housing in New York City, considering all the flood-prone issues that it has, I think is ridiculous,” Olivotto said.

Officials stress the city’s need for affordable housing and that apartment towers in Edgemere will be less flood-prone than one- and two- story homes. But Olivotto notes Edgemere has only one main road and one subway line for evacuation in the event of a flood.  

“If the subway is down and your car is submerged in water, people will not be able to evacuate,” she said. “ So your property may be safe because you are in a tower, but you might not be able to have access to services that you need, food, health care, etc. So I think the idea of bringing new homes to Edgemere needs to be rethought.” 

Bringing more affordable housing to Edgemere continues a nearly century-old tradition of trying to concentrate low-income residents in public housing along the city’s perimeter. 

It began in the 1930s under the infamous city planner, Robert Moses, and has resulted in thousands of working class New Yorkers living in vulnerable floodplains across the city. Under Moses, New York City bought swaths of land in Edgemere and bulldozed homes to make way for public housing towers. Some got built, but many of the city lots remain empty, despite multiple urban renewal projects in the ensuing years. 

“All of the services that were promised as part of the urban renewal were also not delivered,” Olivotto said. “So many people moved in the area and were able to access some of this housing, but none of the schools or health care services that a community needs.”

Rogers moved to Edgemere in 2007 through a city-run affordable housing initiative under the administration of then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “There were promises of supermarkets, promises of retail stores, shops. Nothing. Nothing came,” she said. 

Rogers also says she wasn’t fully informed about the flood risks in the area before moving there. “Nobody ever said that in a couple of years this community would be underwater,” she said.

“Seeing these lots vacant is very depressing to me,” Rogers added. She has watched as people from outside the community dump garbage on the lots, which she says are poorly maintained by the city, with overgrown grasses forcing pedestrians off the sidewalk and into the street. 

“Just to have a sidewalk, just to have the basic things that most communities should have is a fight,” Rogers said. “Why does everything have to be a fight in this community? All we want is to live a decent quality of life.” 

The lack of services, coupled with the city’s attempt to relocate some residents along the bayside through a voluntary buyout program, has sparked concerns that officials are trying to push out Edgemere’s long-time residents. 

“They're developing the whole neighborhood, but I don't think they're building for the people that already live here,” said Webber-Bey, who has lived in Edgemere for nearly 50 years. “I think people feel they just want our land and then they're going to build something that's three or four times as expensive and build a whole new community on the coast.” 

NYC’s first try at coastal retreat struggles to take root 

Another goal of the 2015 Resilient Edgemere Community Planning Initiative was to relocate some of the community’s most vulnerable residents through a voluntary buyout program. 

“We were really pulling back and trying for the first time in New York City some form of managed retreat from the shoreline,” Sandler said. 

The city established a Hazard Mitigation Zone in Edgemere along Jamaica Bay where it limited development and offered to buy people’s homes in exchange for moving elsewhere. Ultimately, only seven of the approximately 50 eligible homeowners participated in the buyout program. 

“We saw a mixed uptake. We had homeowners who were not interested in leaving. And I think you see (that) in most buyout communities around the country,” Sandler said. 

“They’ve been neglected in the past and they see retreat as a new sign that the city just doesn't want to invest in this neighborhood,” Olivotto said. She added it's important the city takes steps “to try to regain trust of the citizens of Edgemere.”

Despite Edgemere’s vulnerability to flooding and the lack of coastal protections, few of the residents interviewed for this report expressed any interest in leaving.  

“It is still one of the hidden gems in New York City, even with all the vacant lots, with all the mosquitoes. It's quiet. You can hear yourself think at night,” Rogers said. 

Research shows she is far from alone. Less than 10% of Americans who experience a natural disaster decide to relocate, according to one study. For most, it's simply too difficult to leave the economic, social and cultural networks they’ve built their lives around. 

Those who move generally do so only after the economic outlook has deteriorated so much — due to rising insurance costs or the loss of jobs — that they feel they have no other choice. 

Residents fleeing climate-fueled disasters tend to be younger, higher income households who can afford to rebuild elsewhere. When these wealthier residents leave, research shows their departure can lower the community’s tax base, leaving the older, lower income households behind with fewer resources to recover and guard against future flooding. 

“We live from day to day not knowing what a high tide or hurricane’s going to do to this community. It is very scary,” Rogers said. “But by the grace of God, I ain’t going no place.” 

Rogers is president of a community garden, which regularly hosts community events and encourages residents to literally lay down roots. 

“People have suffered a lot of trauma here,” Rogers said, citing years of storm damage and neglect from city officials. “So being in a space that is nature centered, we get centered.” 

Rogers has fortified the garden by installing raised metal beds, but she dreams of a day when her community finally gets the protection it’s been promised.  

“I don't believe it's going to be underwater, even though the scientists say it is,” Rogers said. “And I'm hoping good people with good minds and good hearts look at this community and recognize the potential of what this community can really be.”

Floodlight is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action. Sign up for their newsletter here. New York Focus is an independent nonprofit newsroom investigating power in the Empire State. Sign up for their newsletter here.

This article was produced in partnership between Columbia Journalism Investigations and Documented. It was co-published by The Guardian and republished by Floodlight.

Gricelda experienced her deciding moment in 2018, when she chose to leave the country where she was born after years of not being able to stop the stormwater from seeping into her mud-wall home in the western highlands near the city of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. Drought only added to her difficulties. 

Hossain, two continents away, knew that the changing climate was weighing on his life in the late summer of 2022, when he couldn’t afford to pay the hospital bill to bring his wife and newborn daughter home. His savings were gutted after enduring a decade of frequent flooding that destroyed harvests in the southeastern city of Feni, Bangladesh.

For Mohamed, his reckoning occurred more recently in 2023, after yet another cycle of withering dryness and torrential rain in Diourbel, Senegal, sparked tensions between him and his extended family. 

These were the disasters, some sudden, some slow moving, that finally pushed each climate-strafed person over the edge, forcing each to consider what they would come to see as the best remedy for disaster: crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and seeking out a new life in New York City.

Global temperatures have risen steadily, bringing extreme heat, water and food scarcity, and a surge in climate-driven disasters. Since the late 19th century, the planet’s average surface temperature has moved upwards about 2 °F, fueling more frequent and severe storms, floods and droughts that lead to greater deaths and displacements. This human-caused warming is making the middle of the globe, in particular, less habitable than at any time in human history, research shows. 

“Eventually, if constraints are not addressed, no further adaptation measures are implemented, and climate hazards intensify, the area could become uninhabitable,” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, warned in a recent report, referring to coastal communities in the tropical and subtropical regions.

In countries like Guatemala, Bangladesh and Senegal, migrants are fleeing places where storms, floods or droughts have piled on, again and again, since 2010. These extreme weather events have strained fragile economies, pushing people to a breaking point. Few migrants blame the warming planet for their plight. But its impact manifests in their collapsed houses and failed crops. Already, climate-related disruption has become a quiet, yet consistent driver of migration to the U.S.

By 2050, climate change could force as many as 143 million people in the global south from their homes, with hotspots in Latin America, South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Governments, aid organizations and researchers have warned about the climate migration crisis, but it isn’t a far-off threat. It’s happening around the world, and it has reached New York City.

A year-long investigation by Columbia Journalism Investigations (CJI) and Documented found a pattern that spans the globe: Tens of thousands of migrants who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in 2024 have come from localities repeatedly hit by hurricanes, floods and droughts, according to an analysis of federal data on southwest border apprehensions and international data on major natural disasters. 

To understand how climate change may have influenced migrants’ journeys, CJI and Documented analyzed more than nine million records of people apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) from 2010 to 2024 that included information on the cities, towns and municipalities where they were born. The CBP data was obtained through public-records requests by researchers at The University of Virginia and CJI.

In 2024 alone, CJI and Documented identified more than 520 distinct birth places in Guatemala, close to 350 in Senegal and around 100 in Bangladesh. An analysis of the data shows that around 55 countries that saw higher than average migration rates also were devastated by three or more climate catastrophes from 2019 to 2024, according to the international disaster database known as EM-DAT, which tracks major events reported by UN specialized agencies and other official sources. 

The data has gaps. It cannot say why a person left, and it doesn't account for gradual, long-term shifts in weather patterns like excessive heat, diminishing rainfall and sea level rise that may be less dramatic than major disasters but nonetheless have profound impacts. But CJI and Documented used the data as a guide to find migrants affected by climate catastrophes who fled their home countries.

The list includes cities and towns like Quetzaltenango, Feni and Diourbel — places that recent migrants left to build new communities in New York. CJI and Documented interviewed scores of migrants — in cafes, food pantries and other gathering places throughout the city — who say they moved here to escape the worsening effects of hurricanes, floods and droughts back home. Most are among the more than 237,000 migrants and asylum seekers that have arrived in New York City since April 2022, putting pressure on the local shelter system and prompting the use of hotels and large tents as emergency housing.

After arriving, the migrants spread across the five boroughs, often ending up in enclaves established by immigrants from their home countries. Guatemalans, now one of the city’s largest Central American migrant groups, left the country’s western and northern highlands, where repeated storms and prolonged droughts have destroyed livelihoods.

In the Bronx, migrants from Senegal gather to pray in neighborhood mosques, where they form strong bonds with others who have experienced similar climate impacts at home. Most are from their country’s western region, where rising temperatures and decreasing rainfall have made farming one of the region’s staple crops — peanuts — nearly impossible. From Asia, Bangladeshi migrants, primarily clustered around the desi grocery stores and restaurants of Brooklyn’s Kensington neighborhood, have hailed from coastal areas where monsoon rains cause the Brahmaputra, Ganges and Meghna Rivers to flood.

There is rarely a single, simple cause behind an individual’s decision to migrate, but understanding how natural disasters exacerbated by climate change can push people to leave their home countries is “absolutely important,” said Felipe Navarro, associate director of policy and advocacy for the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California’s College of the Law. 

"It's not simply that a hurricane happened,” Navarro said. “It's that the hurricane caused devastation, and how the state responded.”

Many who flocked to the U.S. southwest border in recent years have come hoping to seek asylum in this country. But there is no clear category for protection of those fleeing climate disasters, leaving them in immigration limbo. 

Now, as President Donald Trump rolls out increased immigration arrests, detentions and deportations, migrants displaced by hurricanes, floods and droughts are at risk of being sent back to places hollowed out by climate change. 

Here are their stories. 

Quetzaltenango, Guatemala

Gricelda remembers the stormwater seeping through cracks in the walls of her family’s home, leaking through the kitchen ceiling. The house — like some located on the outskirts of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala’s second-largest city — was built from packed mud. Its earthen walls opened up into holes, unable to withstand the rain during Tropical Storm Agatha in May 2010, the first of what would become seven total cyclones, floods and hurricanes over the ensuing years.

“There was a lot of flooding,” said Gricelda, sitting in an empty café in East Harlem and discussing the incident in Spanish. “The rain was very, very heavy.” (Some interviewees requested only to be identified by their first names because of their immigration status.)

Throughout her childhood, Gricelda’s life revolved around her family’s harvest: corn, beans, potatoes, apples. In her village, there were clear signs the growing cycle was changing: the beginning of the rainy season was constantly shifting, and when it did come, the rain fell hard — like Agatha, which inundated fields and obliterated crops. These shocks, paired with recurring droughts that left cropland parched, diminished family harvests.

If the rain arrives too late, a family’s harvest may not grow as it normally would, said Gricelda, whose relatives still live in her native village. “Maybe it won’t yield 100 percent, it will yield 50 percent,” she said. “And because the season is over, it's already a loss for the year.”

What Gricelda witnessed on the ground mirrors what climate researchers have tracked across Central America, especially in Guatemala. Climate disasters have played a major role in driving people north to the U.S.-Mexico border. According to a study by Sarah Bermeo, who helps direct Duke University’s program on climate, resilience and mobility, climate change is intensifying droughts and storms — a dangerous mix for families who depend on the land. 

While some families might have the resources to leave their countries and migrate elsewhere, others stay and can become “trapped,” Bermeo said. Her research found a significant spike in families migrating from rural areas in Central America to the U.S. when drought hit the region in 2018. A more recent study tied intense drought during growing seasons in rural Mexico to higher rates of undocumented migration, and it  found that the severe conditions discouraged people from returning home.

As a young adult in Guatemala, Gricelda noticed the drought was getting worse. Some days the only way to get water was by truck. Other days Gricelda had to trek down to the river to collect her own. “There wasn’t much rain anymore, and when storms hit, they left the river dirty,” she said. “It became harder just to have clean water.”

Hurricanes and heavy rains punctuated the drought and swept through the village, destroying homes and disrupting the harvests. Gricelda remembers rain repeatedly soaking through the walls in her in-laws' mud house. As the dry spells stretched longer and the rains poured down harder, sustaining the family’s livelihood became difficult.

Around 2013, after multiple flooding incidents, Gricelda’s husband decided to leave for New York City, where he worked in restaurants cooking and cleaning. She stayed behind with her two children, watching as her in-laws’ house grew weaker with each storm. By May 2018, torrential rains had inundated swathes of Guatemala, including Quetzaltenango. Subsequent floods damaged roads and interrupted essential services for 5,500 people. 

With no clear future in her country, Gricelda finally made a choice: she took out a loan, using her father’s land as collateral. With the help of a smuggler, she led her children on a three-week trek to the U.S.-Mexico border. Arriving in Texas, federal agents asked for her children’s birth certificates and escorted the family to an immigration shelter. Her husband eventually bought them bus tickets to New York. 

Two years later, in November 2020, Hurricanes Eta and Iota touched down on Guatemala, battering houses and swamping farmland already strained by years of storms. In the country’s western highlands, communities like Quetzaltenango have seen rising numbers of families leave for the U.S. in recent years — not always after a single climate catastrophe, but rather after years of accumulated stress. While migration from Guatemala has decreased overall, the share of migrants coming from this region has grown slightly between 2019 and 2024, the analysis by CJI and Documented shows.

Seven years have passed since Gricelda arrived in New York City. She now raises her four children in a two-bedroom apartment in East Harlem and works for Red de Pueblos Transnacionales, a local organization that launched the city’s first collective of Indigenous-language interpreters, “the Colectivo Colibrí,” or hummingbird, which offers translation services to Central American immigrants. Gricelda informs other Latin migrants how to find resources in the city.

She tried to apply for asylum once, she said, but her lawyer defrauded her of more than $10,000. She has yet to trust the system enough to try again. 

Today, she has nothing but a red card given to her by her employer, which details instructions on how to respond if she encounters U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

“I don’t want to go back,” Gricelda said. 

Feni, Bangladesh 

Hossain’s wife, Shumaiya, had just given birth to a baby girl in September 2022. The couple hoped it would be a new beginning — they lost a child four years earlier. But when Hossain picked up his wife and newborn daughter from the hospital in Feni, Bangladesh, he got a $470 bill for the C-section. He couldn’t afford it.

Floods had battered the couple’s house and surrounding rice fields five times over a decade, and not being able to harvest crops had drained their income. They had to scrape together money from relatives and a friend in order for Hossain to bring his new baby home. 

Like others in this mostly rural southeastern region where three rivers meet, Hossain made money growing rice on his land and selling it at a local market. But every flood waterlogged his fields for months at a time. For several years, he only managed to farm about a third of his land — less than the size of a soccer field. He struggled to pay for his family’s food and health care.

Many of Feni’s 1.6 million residents work on or own farms.Others are fishermen or make crafts from jute and ceramics. Over the past 10 years, floods have killed nearly 300 people in Feni and nearby regions, the EM-DAT disaster data shows. Rising sea levels caused by climate change have worsened flooding in the last two decades, said Sanzida Murshed, a geographer and disaster scientist at the University of Dhaka, in Bangladesh’s capital. 

This has reduced food production in coastal areas like Feni, Murshed said. Because floodwaters have nowhere to drain, the soil has become increasingly saline, making it harder to grow rice. 

More Bangladeshis from these same areas have migrated to the U.S. southern border than from the country overall, CJI and Documented’s analysis shows. Noakhali — located around 30 miles from Feni — tops the list of origin cities for Bangladeshi migrants, accounting for more than 30% of recorded Bangladeshi cases with documented locations in the border apprehensions dataset.

As is usually the case for people hit by natural disasters, the first move for many families in Feni was to the country’s capital, where the cost of living is much higher. Chowdhury stayed behind and, wanting change in his homeland, got involved in opposition politics. As a result, he said, he received threats from local ruling party members. Meanwhile, the floods continued to destroy his crops. The combination of factors pushed him to leave, he said. 

“I was always really tense. I wasn’t able to function,” said Hossain, who heard about others getting asylum in this country. A friend recommended that he go to Brooklyn because of its large Bangladeshi community.

Hossain sold his land and borrowed roughly $33,000 from relatives and friends to raise $41,000 to pay for travel and smuggling fees to the U.S. In February 2023, he left Bangladesh, traveling through 11 countries by air and road for nine months. He handed himself over to border officials in Arizona, who held him in a cell with 15 people for three days. After his release, he flew to New York City, where an estimated 100,000 Bangladeshi people live.

By then, migrants from around the world had flocked to the border in the hopes of getting released, often to pursue claims for relief in immigration court.

From 2019 to 2024, border crossings from Bangladesh increased by 150%, with Feni — located in the disaster-prone Chattogram region (formerly known as Chittagong) — ranking among the top 10 Bangladeshi cities with the highest number of people who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border, CJI and Documented’s analysis shows. 

According to a recent survey conducted by a New York City community organization, Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), climate disasters have pushed 135 recently arrived Bangladeshi and other migrants from their countries.

In April 2024, a Manhattan law firm filed a political asylum case for Hossain based on his support for Bangladesh’s political opposition party, documents show. The impact of the worsening floods on his income and his livelihood is not recognized as a reason for claiming asylum.

Seven months later, while waiting for his claim to be heard in the backlogged immigration court system, Hossain got a work permit. He landed a job as a kitchen helper in a local restaurant, then a food delivery worker biking around Brooklyn. Now he works full time in a Bengali sweet shop and café in Kensington, Brooklyn's Little Bangladesh. He lives nearby in a basement apartment with two roommates, and works six days a week — seven during religious festivals. 

Last year, one of the worst floods in over three decades hit his hometown of Feni, where his wife and daughter still lived. This one submerged the family’s house under three feet of water, deluging it with sewage, snakes and frogs. Flooding damaged nearly every item in his home — three beds, a sofa, chairs. His wife and daughter had to move to a relative’s house roughly 100 miles away in Dhaka. 

Hossain hoped to get asylum and apply for his wife and daughter to join him. If he knew about the challenges of making that happen today, he said, he wouldn’t have come to the U.S. Now that he’s lost what he had in Feni, he estimates it would cost up to $45,000 to build a new house there.  

Threats of deportation have shaken Brooklyn’s Bangladeshi community. When ICE agents detained two Bangladeshis from Noakhali who were working in Buffalo, New York, word spread to Kensington. Not long ago, the neighborhood’s Noakhali Deshi Bazar bustled with families buying groceries. Men packed themselves into eateries like Raj Mahal Restaurant + Sweets. Today, its streets have gone quiet. 

Hossain's belief that he could find safety here has dissipated. “I live in terror,” he said. He keeps a copy of his asylum application and notices of court hearings in a plastic folder in a bedroom drawer. His lawyer is on speed dial in case ICE agents come to the door.

“If I was forced to go back, I do not know how I would feed my family,” Hossain said. “Now I have lost my home in the floods. I have nothing to go back to.”

Diourbel, Senegal

Mohamed sat cross-legged on the carpet before a Friday afternoon prayer at a mosque in the South Bronx, remembering his crops with fondness. He grew maize, watermelon and peanuts on a family farm in Diourbel, Senegal, and worked as a seasonal laborer on another farm about 40 miles away in Kaolack. 

Some 40 West African immigrants, many who arrived in New York in recent years from Senegal, sat next to him. A show of hands indicated about a third of them were farmers who had experienced floods and droughts. Many fell victim to the same cycle of climate events that would impact Gricelda and her family 5,000 miles away in Guatemala.

“When it rained, everyone was caught off guard because for a very long time we didn’t have any rainfall, there was drought,” said Mohamed, 45, who inherited land from his grandfather in 2005.

For more than a decade, Diourbel, Kaolack and neighboring places had faced recurring cycles of flooding and drought. Yet migration from Senegal’s western and central regions to the U.S. surged after more than a half dozen major floods had occurred in 2020, CJI and Documented’s analysis shows. Between 2019 and 2024 — following years of accumulating climate events — more than 1,800 Senegalese migrants from these regions crossed the U.S.-Mexico border — a sharp rise from virtually none.

When flooding hit Mohamed’s hometown of Diourbel, water pooled on the land, sitting there for months, turning green and mosquito-ridden. His family couldn’t spend time outside. Mohamed had to build a brick path so his wife and children could enter their home. 

He decided to switch from the area’s traditional crop of peanuts to maize. Without in-depth knowledge of the changing climate, Mohamed thought that, since maize grows between 5- and 12-feet tall, it might survive the harsher conditions. But each of the stalks eventually withered and died. “The land was basically useless,” he said. 

Eventually, the torrential rain and prolonged dryness deepened tensions among his relatives, who were living in separate houses on the family compound. Mohamed’s brother, who earned more money as a teacher, constructed a new house with a six-foot foundation made of sand, gravel and cement. When it flooded, the water wouldn’t enter his home. Yet Mohamed would have to scramble to dump buckets full of water out of his house and use towels to mop up. 

His six children, ranging from two to 13, got bullied about their dilapidated house. Taunts and jeers followed the family at school, work and home, leaving them feeling alienated. 

Dina Esposito, who ran a global resilience and food security program for the U.S. government from September 2022 to January 2025, said pressure caused by climate change can exacerbate conflict. “Inter family or inter community conflict comes about when climate stresses create economic strain,” she said.

When Mohamed watched scenes of New York’s Times Square on television in his Diourbel home, he admired the flashing lights and supersized digital screens.

Videos on TikTok and Instagram, often made by smugglers posing as travel agents, promoted what seemed like comfortable journeys. Speaking Wolof, the predominant language of the Senegal region, they told viewers it was easy to get work permits and jobs in the U.S.

Mohamed saw the reels about how migrants had entered the U.S. by traveling through Nicaragua. A friend introduced him to a smuggler who was advertising to help people get visas and airline tickets, and connect them with other smugglers along the way. “I was told that once I get to the U.S., ‘Everyone is equal before the law. Nobody can deport you,’ ” Mohamed said.

By October 2023, he had sold a horse, some cows and a cart for about $4,500 and borrowed money from relatives to pay more than $10,000 to travel to this country. He turned himself in to border patrol agents in Arizona, who detained him overnight before releasing him.  

In New York City, he found a different world than the flashy videos he’d seen. 

He stayed at a migrant shelter near Times Square, where he tried to navigate the U.S. asylum system. But he didn’t know his encounters with droughts and floods would mean little for his asylum claim, he said, and mentioned the climate disasters that had diminished his livelihood in his application.

Commuting between the immigration office and the shelter, Mohamed rarely took in glittering scenes. Instead, he saw homeless people begging for help behind signs saying they had lost hope. “The more time I spent here, the more I realized the reality is different,” he said.

Within a month, Mohamed said, the shelter evicted him after another migrant had complained that he entered the female bathroom. He had mistakenly entered the bathroom because he couldn’t read the sign, he said. A shelter spokesperson declined to comment. 

Mohamed resorted to sleeping on the 2 train, where he met other Senegalese people. Many had headed for New York City with contact numbers for imams who lead mosques here, much like their grandfathers did in Senegal. They suggested he seek help at the Bronx mosque. There, he made friends with other struggling farmers from Diourbel and Kaolack. 

“We would talk about how our family members are anticipating the rainfall and the flooding that comes with it,” said Mohamed, who found solace sitting on a prayer mat reading verses from the Quran. It reminded him of his father, a religious teacher.

One new friend, Omar, a delivery driver, brought food to the mosque to share with him. Another, Ndiaga, waited with him outside a nearby Home Depot, anticipating passersby offering odd jobs.

In the months since about a half dozen local WhatsApp groups have emerged, connecting thousands of migrants from West Africa who have settled here. The chats have functioned as support groups of sorts. Members circulate information about jobs and rooms for rent. Some have offered their brethren more. The Bronx mosque’s leader, Imam Cheikh Tidiane Ndao, hails from Kaolack, where his grandfather was a well-known religious figure. He said he’s conducted 40 marriage ceremonies for migrants who met through his mosque’s burgeoning community. 

Recently, the community has focused on the Trump administration’s deportation threats. In voice notes on one WhatsApp group, which the imam shared with CJI and Documented, a migrant who had left immigration court warned that officials were giving migrants just two weeks to present all their documentation, before deciding whether they could stay in the country.  

News of the threats has yet to make its way back to Senegal. Imam Ndao said he continues to receive more than 10 phone calls a month from farmers there, asking for help. Often, they tell him they can only afford to eat one meal a day. They’re allured by the promise of making more money in a week in the U.S. than they can in months in Senegal.

“They still want to come to America,” the imam said.

Malick Gai and Subhanjana Das contributed reporting and translation services for this story. Fabien Cottier, a political scientist at Columbia University and the University of Geneva, contributed to the data analysis.

Jazzmin Jiwa and Carla Mandiola reported this story as fellows for Columbia Journalism Investigations, an investigative reporting unit at the Columbia Journalism School.