Christina Lampert

I feel like most people don’t realize that utility companies don’t actually make most of their profit from selling electricity. They make it by investing in infrastructure. Because they’re regulated monopolies, they go through “rate cases” where the government approves projects and guarantees them a return on those investments, which they then charge their customers then pay back over time. In 2025 alone, investor-owned utilities requested a record $22 billion in rate increases, largely tied to renewable energy, storage, and grid upgrades. The news is that historically, the majority of these projects do get approved. On one hand, it's accelerating the clean energy transition. On the other, it’s driving noticeable increases in customer bills. At the same time, installing solar at home is still expensive and many utilities push back on policies like net metering that would make it more accessible and worthwhile to decentralize from the utility company. It seems like customers are funding the transition either way but not always clearly benefiting from lower energy costs. Does this model feel fair, or does it need to evolve? (1) U.S. Energy Information Administration – Utility revenue models & cost-of-service regulation (2) National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners – Rate case & regulated return framework (3) S&P Global Market Intelligence – 2025 utility rate case filings (~$22B) (4) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory – High approval rates for utility infrastructure / transmission & interconnection trends (5) Brookings Institution & National Renewable Energy Laboratory – Net metering debates & distributed solar economics

Bio-based plastics (i.e. plastics made from renewable sources) are projected to grow roughly 48% by 2028. This is expected to be driven largely by major consumer goods and food service companies embedding them into their packaging commitments. While the intention is to support a circular economy, the reality becomes more complex. Many of these materials are marketed as “compostable,” yet they typically require specific industrial conditions to actually break down. Such conditions are not widely available. While only about 15–30% of the global population has access to composting, just 20–30% of organic waste in those systems is actually captured. Of the compostable plastics that do enter these streams, less than 5% are successfully composted, and many facilities reject them altogether due to contamination concerns or impacts on compost quality. As a result, most compostable plastics still end up in landfills or incinerators, where they behave similarly to conventional plastics. If bio-based plastics depend on systems that rarely “compost” them, are we advancing circularity or reinforcing a linear system under a greener label? Sources ¹ European Bioplastics & Nova-Institute, Bioplastics Market Data (2023–2024) ² World Bank, What a Waste 2.0 (2018) + global composting access estimates ³ U.S. EPA (2023); Zero Waste Europe (2020) ⁴ Eunomia (bioplastics/composting analyses) ⁵ BioCycle industry surveys (various years) ⁶ OECD, Global Plastics Outlook (2022); European Commission (2020)

Subsidies don’t just support farmers. They quietly instruct the food system. They signal what’s safe to scale, what gets grown, processed, and eventually, stocked on shelves. In the US, most subsidies flow to commodity crops like corn, soy, wheat, and dairy. Otherwise known as the exact inputs that dominate ultra-processed food (UPFs) manufacturing. UPFs are also some of the highest-margin products in food, reinforcing the system economically. Large food companies benefit from keeping these inputs cheap, which is why we’ve seen subsidy structures and lobbying supported here historically. Today, 60–70 percent of the American diet comes from UPFs. In Europe, it’s closer to 27 percent on average, with some countries as low as 14 percent (i.e. Italy) and others up to 57 percent. These numbers suggest that this isn’t just consumer choice. It’s policy, incentives, and supply chains. If UPFs are linked to chronic disease, are we underwriting the problem at the subsidy level? And if Europe shows a different path, where’s the opportunity for others to power something similar for nation-wide health? Sources (1) U.S. Department of Agriculture. Farm policy & subsidy structure. (2) Environmental Working Group. Commodity crop subsidy concentration. (3) OpenSecrets. Food industry lobbying & subsidy alignment. (4) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Share of U.S. calories from ultra-processed foods. (5) EuroHealthNet. UPF consumption across Europe.