On Friday evening, dozens of student activists at Columbia University started another tent encampment on the campus, in an effort to disrupt the university’s upcoming alumni weekend. 

As Israel’s ground invasion of Rafah continues, the protesters say a new tent village—like the one that garnered national headlines before police brutally cleared it away—is necessary to call attention to the role of the United States in Israel’s war on Gaza and what the students see as the university’s complicity in Israeli abuses. Last week, Israel’s airstrikes killed dozens of Palestinians reportedly near camps designated as safe evacuation zones.

“This encampment is in response to the death and destruction that we are seeing in Gaza, specifically in Rafah,” Layla, a protester and Columbia student who did not give their last name for fear of retribution, said. “We feel this is completely unacceptable—and we are calling out Columbia for its complicity in genocide.”

New encampment happening now at Columbia University: pic.twitter.com/Mz4zWyK0vw

— Najib | نجيب (@Jib821) May 31, 2024

In April, protesters at Columbia created a Gaza Solidarity Encampment on Columbia’s lawn outside the library, pitching tents and raising Palestinian flags. The protest coincided with the university’s president, Minouche Shafik, testifying before Congress about antisemitism. The New York Police Department cleared the encampment. National headlines and days of tense standoffs followed. In an escalation, protesters took over Hamilton Hall—the site of past campus occupations—leading to a clash and arrests as police cleared the building.

A drone was just flying low over the encampment. About half the tents of this encampment were cleared. Member of Public Safety could be seen shouting at protestors about their encampment. Here’s a shot of empty tents getting cleared out. pic.twitter.com/N5X5IVg8CH

— Najib | نجيب (@Jib821) June 1, 2024

Students have continued to call for Columbia to divest its endowment from financial investments related to Israel. Protesters at the encampment said they hoped a new protest during this weekend would push alumni to not donate to the university until it divests.

The account of the protester, a Columbia student who wished to remain anonymous out of concern for her security and safety, was corroborated in part by two witnesses. The NYPD did not respond to requests for comment.

The removal of hijabs during arrests has been a years-long problem for New York City law enforcement. On April 5, 2024, the city settled a class-action lawsuit for $17.5 million brought by two women who had been forced to take off their hijabs for a mugshot in 2017. The case, originally filed in 2018, led to changes in policy, when,  in 2020, the New York Police Department altered its rules, saying people could wear a “religious head covering,” as long as it did not cover their faces for photos.

According to the NYPD’s Patrol Guide, in some circumstances, an arresting officer can request that a head covering be “temporarily removed and searched.” But this is to be done in “private” and the religious head covering, the guide says, should be returned. Officers only are permitted the “safekeeping” of a religious head covering if there is a danger of violence or self-harm.

The hijabi protester, and others present, say that when the NYPD arrested an autonomous group that had taken over Hamilton Hall at the university these rules were not consistently followed.

The protester said the problems began even before she got to the station. She wears her hijab loosely, and it began to fall off as she was zip-tied and walked to a police van. She asked an officer to fix it—or to let her take off the zip-ties for a moment to adjust it herself. But the police officer refused, and then, following continual requests, relented but according to the protester adjusted and replaced the head covering inadequately, so that it continued to fall off.

“He would tell me it’s because I’m moving around so much or talking,” she recalls. (She had chanted at officers during the arrests.) But despite “exact instructions,” to place the covering upon her head, she says, “He would put it very, very lightly right behind my ear—so immediately it would fall back, like only on half my head.”

During that time, Aidan Parisi, a protester who was arrested inside the building that was occupied, said they saw the hijabi protester’s scarf falling off. “We were standing in line waiting for them to process us and I noticed her hijab had fallen,” Aidan told Mother Jones on the phone, days after the arrest. “There were numerous times I saw her where her hijab kept falling and they were refusing to fix it.”

Parisi also brought the scarf falling off to the officer’s attention. “The police officer said something along the lines of, ‘What do you mean? I keep fixing it. I keep picking it up for you, don’t lie,” Parisi recalls. “And [the hijabi protester] says: ‘Well why was it still down?’”

More importantly, the hijabi protester said, “A man should not be placing his hands on me—period.”

When she got to the jail, the issues continued. Before taking those who were apprehended to their cells, officers pat them down to search for weapons or other contraband. During this process, the protester was asked to remove her hijab to check her hair and head covering. This is consistent with the NYPD’s Patrol Guide’s policy to temporarily ask those arrested who are wearing religious head coverings to remove the item in private for a search.

After this check, the protester asked for her hijab back. The officer, she says, refused to return it. The protester objected but, eventually, she acquiesced. “Even though it made me very uncomfortable,” she said. “I [felt] like I didn’t really have a lot of fight left in me.” She assumed the cell she was entering was all female. (Rules vary, but wearing the hijab is typically observed in front of men.)

“I didn’t know that this was my right,” she said of keeping on her hijab. “[The idea that] this [hijab] is part of my identity [so I] get to keep this one—I didn’t even process that.”

Then she saw another woman enter the same area wearing her hijab. Once more, the protester began to ask the officers to return her hijab: “I was like: give me my hijab back, give me my hijab back.” Allie Wong, a graduate student who served as a “human barricade” in front of Hamilton Hall and was arrested, saw this occur in the jail.

Wong remembers the hijabi protester saying: “This is from my religion and this is my religious and constitutional rights…. And it didn’t matter. They said she had to remove it. She kept protesting and saying it’s her right.” (Despite this occurring in a female section of the jail, male officers were walking in and out, according to both Wong and the protester with whom Mother Jones spoke about the incident.)

After this interaction happened, all three protesters interviewed by Mother Jones recall that the protesters crammed into cells began chanting: “Give her back her hijab.” The protester whose hijab was removed remembers people banging on the walls, too, causing the room to shake. The protester said she did not receive the head covering back until she left the jail several hours later.

She told Mother Jones she could not help but think of a news report she read about women in Gaza who slept with their hijabs on—because they do not know when a bomb will drop and if it happens in their sleep they want to die with dignity.

“I should have put up more of a fight,” she told me. “I wish I knew more of my rights—so I could stand up for myself [but] this has been what has been normalized from the state when protesting.”

Last week, we talked with two managers at WKCR about how the small group of reporters is doing this sensational work.

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Today, we caught up with Sarah Barlyn, director of engineering at WKCR and a senior at Barnard College, for a follow-up.

Barlyn works mostly behind the scenes—“I actually don’t like my voice on radio,” she told us—and has, in her role, been in the field covering the protests. She was there last night when the New York Police Department arrested protesters who had occupied Hamilton Hall.

We chatted about her work, how WKCR has dealt with the high-profile pressure of reporting, and the historical resonances with 1968.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Just to start, it’s been a lot going on: How are you doing?

I mean—yesterday, it was a little bit hard for everybody. Any Columbia student is a little bit shaken by what happened last night. I’m good. But, yes, the correspondents at WKCR have been sacrificing a lot of sleep to cover everything. So there’s a bit of a exhaustion among us. But we’re all very dedicated to our coverage. It’s hard to sleep when we know that we have a job to report on what’s going on.

How was reporting last night—when police arrested those occupying Hamilton Hall—for you?

There were three of our correspondents on the field in the middle of the night. I didn’t get there until 4:50 a.m. (I had gone home to get antibiotics because I’m recovering from a kidney infection.)

So, I entered campus with our correspondent Ted [Schmiedeler]. Then, around 5:00 a.m., they closed campus to only students who live in on-campus housing. So: we decided to stay there. Because we knew that if we left the site, we would not be allowed back on. 

And so we were trying to get some rest in Butler Library, which was one of the only buildings that was open and accessible to us. Then, that building was evacuated. We really had nowhere else to go. And so we just really set up camp outside of Hamilton Hall.

Recovering from a kidney infection…I imagine having to use the restroom might be something that might be important? And you were locked out of the buildings?

I did report on that. Because at one point I went into Hartley, which is a freshman dorm, and I offered to show them my antibiotics. I’m like: I just genuinely am like a member of his community. And I’d really appreciate if I could use your facilities. But my request was denied. 

I think that there were some buildings open—but they were further off, on the northwest side of campus.

So, what did you see last night?

We knew that an NYPD sweep was imminent due to the pretty much unprecedented lockdown of campus.

I was observing the west lawn.

So, I saw a lot of police officers—police officers in helmets and gear such as that—enter in mass from the Carman gate. (That gates that look onto 14th, between Amsterdam and Broadway.) But it was weird. They first went onto that street to disperse students who were watching. Then, the police come north—they start walking through campus and they encircled the west lawn encampment. And they began searching the encampment. I did not witness any arrests on the west lawn from my perspective. But I did see policemen searching the tents with flashlights. I would say over 100 police officers.

Then, myself and another correspondent saw another group of police officers—maybe 50 to 100—and they had entered from another area, I’m not sure where, and were headed to Hamilton Hall with sledge hammers and heavy machinery—because Hamilton Hall was barricaded.

At what point in the night did you start to question your own safety?

I actually—our safety was pretty much in question from even before there was police presence. We were under potentially disciplinary action, because there was, again, a lockdown. We weren’t entirely sure what protection we had as student journalists. But luckily all of us ended up being okay.

What’s something about yesterday that you’ll never forget?

I think the size of everything. It was definitely big—and organized. I mean, it was very strategic. I think there are a lot of things I won’t forget.

I mean, seeing the kind of heavy machinery being brought in. I guess that makes sense, because of the intense barricading of Hamilton Hall. But that’s just something that you don’t—you don’t expect to see that. You know what I mean? Like, that’s just not something that you really ever have the chance to see. Definitely the numbers of police officers, too. Although, I don’t know if that particularly surprised me.

And I’m just curious—what are you studying? You’re a senior writing a thesis. What’s it on?

I am actually focused on the student occupations of the five buildings during the 1968 protests at Columbia University, and one of those buildings was Hamilton Hall.

What’s it like seeing the thing that you’ve been studying play out once again?

It’s like looking into a mirror. 

I could tell that the students in Hamilton Hall were inspired by the 1968 protests. Hamilton Hall has been occupied several times after ’68. Still, I could see a lot of the tactics—like the barricading by using the furniture in Hamilton Hall—it’s definitely inspired by ’68.

It’s a deja vu kind of feeling for you?

Yeah, and at one point that night, I find ourselves at the entrance of Hamilton Hall. I got caught up in a bit of an altercation between two students who were not protesters. And they were trying to resist the students who were protesting and barricading the doors. I felt like I was looking at the pictures that I had seen in all of the books that I read.

Have you had a moment just to exhale?

We had a bit of a brief moment at the station last night after we were finally all able to meet with each other. And that was a bit—I guess it was a deep breath. It was a little bit emotional for us. Just because we were all exhausted. And we had been separated from each other the whole day, and we have become very close. So just getting to kind of reunite was definitely a big moment for us.

But, I mean: I feel like we’re running a marathon that hasn’t ended yet. 

This is a village built overnight. On April 17, student activists descended on the lawn outside the library—which had already been locked off to outsiders without a student identification card—and set up green tents and Palestinian flags. It was planned for the same day Columbia President Minouche Shafik appeared before Congress to discuss antisemitism on college campuses. The protesters hoped to call attention to the role of the United States and Columbia University in supporting Israel. Since Hamas’ attack on October 7, in which more than 1,000 Isrealis were killed and 129 hostages were taken, the Israeli government has waged a war that has led to more than 34,000 dead Palestinians and led Gaza to the brink of famine. 

Following her testimony, Shafik called the New York Police Department, which came in wearing riot gear, and students involved in the protests gained new energy. They quickly built a second encampment. Student demands have remained: that Columbia’s endowment divest from companies they say enable the conflict; that Columbia be transparent about its investments going forward; and that amnesty be provided for all students and faculty who have participated in protests. They hope to center the struggles in Gaza, where Israel is on the brink of a potential invasion of Rafah.

Inside the encampment over the past week, I have found life different than most social media posts and news coverage might have you believe.

Students are not only protesting but attempting to create a new world. Within the camp, there is a certain normalcy in the daily communal flow. The few hundred students here—who each night come outside despite memories of the NYPD’s charge—wake up each morning, stretch, and brush their teeth. An IKEA table serves as an ersatz whiteboard, where students can see daily programming. Next is a morning assembly where leaders update everyone on the status of negotiations between protesters and the administration. Occasionally there are guest speakers and lectures.

“If you look at Fox News, we’re all Hamas supporters,” Sherif Ibrahim, a student organizer who said he is studying film, told me. “But I will say, inside the camp—everything happening is beautiful. It’s a show of love and community and solidarity and a seeking of justice.” Ibrahim described events from across the university that have been moved into the camp and food flowing from people across the city. “It’s been so meaningful and so moving,” he said.

When there is tension here, it arises at night. And there are often rumors. A few nights ago, one spread that the National Guard would be called in for a sweep. Quickly, the encampment was broken down to avoid injury. Once it became clear this was a false alarm, tents came back up. Programming continued the next day as if nothing had happened.  

There have been moments, too, of internal tensions. On Thursday evening, comments by one of the student protesters resurfaced. “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” he said in a video. “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” Students I spoke with told me the leader has apologized to the encampment and taken a step back from leadership. “He misspoke, and he disowned his own words, and he apologized,” Ibrahim told me. “And we want to center that.”

Those in the encampment say they are attempting to build the kind of community they would like to see in the world. There is a first aid tent, hot food, cold sandwiches, and snacks served at all hours. There have been Passover celebrations, including matzo ball soup, for the many Jewish students protesting, too. The Jewish students I spoke with who are participating in protests reject the idea that the camp is antisemitic. It is “totally unrecognizable to me as a Jewish person who’s celebrated Seder here,” Sarah, a Columbia student who did not give her last name for fear of punishment, told me.

For Ibrahim the encampment has been “an experiment in building a small society in a way that is humane and communal and community-centered.” He describes the protest as “an experiment” in “making meaning together, and shaping our collective future together as students. It’s an experiment in true actual democracy.”

This Friday evening, they plan to hold another Shabbat. For all the noise outside—the protesters and politicians—it is another night in an attempt at a model community. “It’s been incredible to see other students understand what we’re doing,” Ibrahim said, referring to other encampments across the country. “It’s happened in the span of nine days.”

It has suspended its usual programming and doggedly covered the demonstrations on campus. And, after the administration called in police to break up the protesters, it has become an increasingly essential source of information on the protests for those outside Columbia, as the demonstrations gain prominence across the country.

Ted Schmiedeler, station manager at WKCR, and Georgia Dillane, program director at WKCR, have been in charge of handling the coverage over a fast-moving few days for the station. “We have a team of 19 people working on this right now,” Schmiedeler told Mother Jones. “And we have at least one person in the field at all times.” Last night, he said, he was that person for the night shift, reporting from 1 a.m. to 5:30 a.m. Dillane often stays in the studio, coordinating coverage among the many reporters.

We spoke with Schmiedeler and Dillane about the change in programming, explaining to your professors you’re skipping class to cover the protests, and how they have thought about the responsibility of covering the Columbia encampment.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What has it been like these past few days?

Georgia Dillane: For lack of a better term, just hectic. We’ve been working around the clock. Essentially, every single person in this team of about 19 or 20 people have been on call since early Wednesday morning, April 17.

So, that means if you’re not actively reporting in the field, or in the station, you’re likely thinking about what’s happening. Or just in bed—maybe dreaming about it.

Ted Schmiedeler: Every person who’s working on this, all of our other obligations have completely fallen by the wayside. And we’re all putting in 14 to 18-hour days to bring this coverage to everyone.

Volunteer and unpaid?

Schmiedeler: Yep, volunteer and unpaid.

How did this reporting start for you all?

Schmiedeler: So we received a tip, and then immediately started preparing coverage. We were stationed in the encampment at 4 a.m., when it began on Wednesday, April 17. And we have had our whole apparatus in place since then.

And you’ve stopped all other programming?

Dillane: As soon as we received the tip, we knew right away that we were going to be covering it as long as it needed. And, at that point, we had no idea that we would even make it to Monday, April 22 (when we’re talking now). But it was very clear to us that we wanted to prioritize this. 

If we feel any sort of lulls in reporting, or moments where we need to really just like need to collect our thoughts, we play music. But we’re treating [coverage of the encampment] as a preemption of regularly scheduled programming.

A good example: Today is Charles Mingus’ birthday—he’s a jazz bassist. And for the past handful of years we’ve been celebrating with 24 hours of just his music. And so, instead of sort of just a regular, somewhat random selection of music today, between broadcasting updates and coverage we’re playing his music.

WKCR continues to broadcast live updates on the developing situation at Columbia as we have been since approximately 5 am on Wednesday, April 17th, shortly after the initial CUAD emcampment began. Stay tuned for live updates via 89.9 FM and https://t.co/VbbKmfeHGg. pic.twitter.com/quUMTfdy1g

— WKCR-FM NY (@WKCRFM) April 20, 2024

How long do you think you can keep this up?

Schmiedeler: We can keep this up as long as the protests keep going.

Dillane: We certainly intend to. We’re making adjustments as we go. But I think everyone on the team knows that we’re going to keep going long as we need to cover it.

For those tuning in from the outside—who might not have been following this—what do you think the students are trying to say who are at the encampment? You’ve talked to a lot of people in the field.

Schmiedeler: I think they have three main demands, is what we’ve reported. They want divestment; amnesty for those who have been arrested and suspended; and then transparency about Columbia’s endowment.

Dillane: Those have been the demands from the beginning. But I think there’s also a second thing happening on campus right now. There’s an increased distrust and frustration with the administration for bringing NYPD onto campus. There’s just a lot of commentary about the NYPD: distrust and frustration about them entering campus for some; and then distrust and frustration about them not doing enough for others.

Can I ask you, because you guys have been covering this so intensely, as well intimately—some of these protesters are fellow students, who are your classmates. What is the outside media getting wrong?

Dillane: I’d say the biggest thing is the student perspective. Certainly, a lot of outlets are interviewing students. But I don’t think to the level that we are. That’s in part our ability to maintain trust. I don’t think we’ve been denied an interview by anyone on campus—and I think that just speaks to our unique position within the university.

Also, I think what some outlets are missing is just the intense discomfort with the atypicalness of what’s going on on campus right now. Like, particularly with swipe access—just like how strange that is on campus.

You’re students, too. What have been the most surprising moments for you both, especially with how the administration is handling this.

Schmiedeler: As a journalist, maybe the most surprising thing to me was when Public Safety asked us to vacate our space. 

That was my next question: What happened with that?

Dillane: I was on air. And when you’re in the studio, you’re sort of in a zone. But what I remember is that I saw someone duck their head in—there are some screens in front of the microphones—and say Public Safety is here and they’re asking us to leave. 

From what I understand after the fact—so, Lerner, the building where WKCR is held, they closed it early that day 9:30 p.m. But there’s a separate entrance, on street level, and that’s where we enter; there’s specific swipe access because we work 24/7 as a radio station. 

So, we reported earlier that Lerner was going to close—but they in no way told us that we had to leave. Because anytime Lerner closes, we never have to leave. 

So, or business manager and a couple other people were calling our advisor, who is our liaison with the university, and trying to get some clarity on that while the Public Safety officer was on the phone with a higher-up. And what ended up being the case was that it was a misunderstanding.

[Editor’s note: Public Safety did not respond to a request for comment.]

Schmiedeler: Public Safety has never asked us to vacate our space before. We’ve never been asked to leave. But they did clarify later. It apparently was a misunderstanding. But certainly, you know, a scary instance for us.

I think the most tragic part of the whole situation was that we lost about a good 45 minutes to an hour of field reporting. We don’t want to report on ourselves. We want to report on what’s happening on campus. So, when we have to get dragged back to campus because there’s a Public Safety officer telling us to vacate airspace, the ultimate tragedy is that we miss things out in the field.

How have you felt about the impact of this coverage? Do you feel like you’ve been doing something that’s been big?

Schmiedeler: Absolutley. We’ve had people reach out from a variety of mainstream outlets letting us know that they’re listening to us for live updates. We have heard from students from a wide spectrum of perspectives here on campus, thanking us for our coverage. We’ve had people tune in across New York City—people tune in across the country. What we’re doing, we think it’s really valuable.

What has been the hardest part of this work?

Dillane: We’re also juggling the fact that we are students—and having to communicate that to professors and other people we’re taking time to do this. That was challenging at the beginning. We hadn’t gotten the attention that we have now in the beginning. So, I think that was a little daunting—to make sure that I articulated accurately the weight of what I was doing so that they would understand that my time was needed and valuable here.

Schmiedeler: For me, I would say the most difficult thing has been kind of just fueling my body; getting out of bed. Because field coverage is really physically draining sometimes.

Dillane: I think I speak for a lot of the people here and that we’ve never done something like this to our bodies and to our souls. And so that has been something that has been challenging, just like understanding, like balancing the intense motivation we have to bring this coverage out into the world, but also recognizing that there are limits to what we can handle.

The students are part of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition, which formed after administrators suspended chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace this fall, claiming violations of campus safety and event planning rules.

Organizers of the tent occupation drew inspiration from Vietnam-era protestors who, after Columbia announced plans to build a student gym by grabbing city parkland, occupied administrators’ offices in 1968 and demanded the university cut ties with a defense department think tank.

Today’s divestment coalition is similarly demanding the university’s board cut all funding ties with weapons manufacturers that have been supplying Israel, as well as, according to organizer Isra Hirsi, extend amnesty to pro-Palestinian students who have been punished for past campus actions.

“I never expected to see this many people here,” said Hirsi, a Barnard student who is the daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar, “despite the fact that they know the risks of disciplinary action and arrest.” 

While Columbia’s grounds are usually open to all, it has largely closed the campus gates and barred public access following demonstrations this fall protesting Israel’s war in Gaza that the administration said were unsanctioned. (When I requested access, spokesperson Robert Hornsby denied me, claiming I couldn’t observe under a longstanding policy related to “our end-of-term campus preparations.”)

Pro-Israel demonstrators are also expected to stage a rally near campus regarding Shafik’s testimony, setting up a day of tension and high police presence.

Every day, thousands of tons of trash—rotten food, takeout containers, diapers, old shoes, construction debris, tires, plastic bags, soiled carpet, and lawn clippings—burst into flame and turn to ash and energy at an incinerator in Palm Beach County, Florida. 

“Right there is probably about 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit,” said Ray Schauer, the facility operations director, looking at the incinerator’s combustion chamber during a tour in May. “Most people say, ‘If I could see hell, this is what it would look like.’”

As the trash burns, the municipal incinerator produces enough electricity to power about 45,000 homes and businesses. It also pumps out some of the same kinds of greenhouse gases and other pollutants as power plants that use fossil fuels. But because there’s always more garbage to feed the plant, the electricity it produces can be considered renewable.

That means the incinerator can also sell something more theoretical: renewable energy certificates, or RECs. 

Each REC represents one megawatt-hour of renewable energy—enough electricity to power the average US home for a little over a month. But the energy itself isn’t what’s being bought and sold. Instead, REC purchasers—usually companies—buy the right to take credit for green power they’re not actually using. As a result, they lower their carbon emissions—at least on paper—and can keep using the same old fossil fuel-powered electricity.

In 2021, a New York City-based REC seller named Joe Barclay offered to buy the trash incinerator’s certificates for about 30 cents each.

Companies showcasing their green credentials usually wanted to buy Green-e certified RECs from wind turbines, which generate power without emissions, and could cost up to 20 times as much. But the trash incinerator RECs don’t meet any certification standard, Barclay told Schauer in an email, and hardly anyone wanted to buy them. 

Barclay happened to know some buyers who would accept incinerator RECs, “and they are the only buyers that I’m aware of that can,” he wrote.

It wasn’t much, but it was easy money, so the Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County, which runs the incinerator, took the deal, and Barclay bought the RECs in bulk. Last year, he sold them for four times the original cost to his willing buyer: the United States government.

As the world teeters on the edge of climate calamity, this is how the federal government—the biggest energy consumer in the country—has been meeting its mandate to move away from fossil fuels.

Under the green veneer of the government’s renewable energy claims lie controversial, polluting power generators that expose the flaws and folly of the government’s reliance on RECs to pad its environmental stats.

Despite years of mounting evidence that RECs don’t help fight climate change, federal agencies have kept buying their way into compliance without changing the way they get the vast majority of their electricity.

As the Florida incinerator RECs demonstrate, it looks on paper like a win-win. Federal agencies can say they’ve gotten greener, and renewable energy producers get a bit of extra money for energy they were already producing. But with no change to the amount of greenhouse gases warming the Earth, the only loser in the transaction is the climate.

The federal government has enough buying power that it could lead the way to a broader, national transition to clean energy. 

Instead, it has been leaning on RECs to meet modest environmental goals since a 2005 law signed by President George W. Bush required federal agencies to use 3 percent renewable energy. That figure rose to 7.5 percent in 2013 and hasn’t changed since. Any renewable electricity produced on federal land counts twice, as an incentive. But the law doesn’t mandate that agencies actually use renewable energy directly. So the government has relied for more than a decade on cheaper “unbundled” RECs that are sold separately from the electricity. 

The Department of Energy said that in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available, the federal government outperformed the law, with 10 percent renewable electricity. But that number has little to do with how government buildings were actually powered. 

Take out RECs, and that number goes down to 6 percent. And without the double-counting bonus, the total shrinks even more. The actual renewable electricity the government bought or generated that year amounted to just 3 percent.

In fact, RECs accounted for more than half of all the renewable energy the government claimed from 2010 to 2021, federal data shows. The government wouldn’t have met its mandate without RECs in any single year. 

While most were from wind power, more than a quarter of RECs purchased came from biomass—energy produced by burning natural materials like wood and mulch, which can pollute the air in nearby communities. Another two percent came from trash incinerators. Fewer than one percent were from solar energy. 

By filing dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests with federal agencies, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting obtained many of the certificates the government uses to make its renewable energy claims, with details about the facilities where the RECs were produced.

In recent years, numerous federal agencies bought RECs from wood-burning biomass plants in rural Georgia communities, where residents complained of toxic pollution. They also bought RECs from a mill run by International Paper in Campti, Louisiana, that burns its own industrial byproduct to power the mill—in effect, subsidizing one of the world’s largest paper companies for something it was doing anyway.

But it was in 2022 that agencies invested more heavily in incinerator RECs, which are less reputable than even controversial biomass RECs and are considered too dirty by the Environmental Protection Agency to be “green power.” The EPA spurns them in a program to encourage green initiatives at private companies because of the environmental impacts of burning non-natural materials like plastics.  

Reveal requested detailed information from every federal agency that bought at least 10,000 RECs in 2021, including how much the RECs cost and where they came from. We received price details for a quarter of the government’s REC purchases, showing an average cost of just under $2 per REC. At that price, it would cost about $22 to cover the annual power use from the average US home. 

President Joe Biden has ordered a dramatic change to how the government buys power, mandating 100 percent clean electricity by 2030 and making it harder for agencies to meet the target without meaningfully changing their practices. But as a far-off goal without congressional approval, it could fall apart if Biden is not reelected next year.

Crucially, the government would have to break its longstanding, frequent habit of choosing the cheapest way to look good on paper. That hasn’t happened yet. In fall 2022, nine months after Biden laid out his carbon-pollution-free plan, the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce and Energy, as well as NASA, the Air Force and the National Institutes of Health, spent at least $372,000 on hundreds of thousands of incinerator RECs.

The NIH spent almost $100,000 on RECs to call its North Carolina environmental health laboratory a “net-zero energy” campus, to show its “long-standing commitment to promote the health of the community and the planet.” More than two-thirds came from the paper mill and incinerator. 

A spokesperson said the agency complies with government mandates and does not choose what kind of REC to purchase, though records show it had a variety of choices. 

Tradable renewable energy certificates were first invented in the 1990s to put a price tag on greenness. Compared to fossil fuels, it was more expensive and less profitable for energy companies to build new wind and solar projects then. Selling certificates would bring in an extra revenue stream.

Plus, for other companies that wanted to go green, buying certificates was a much easier, more accessible way to get renewable energy. Corporate buyers could cut their carbon footprints without changing how they got electricity. So, in theory, the REC market would fund energy producers, signal demand for green power and incentivize the creation of more renewable energy. 

The Environmental Protection Agency boosted the REC market by giving it the government’s stamp of approval and lavishing positive publicity and awards on companies that bought lots of RECs. The EPA even bought enough RECs in 2006 to call itself “the first federal agency to be powered 100 percent green.” 

“At EPA, we don’t just talk the talk, we walk the walk,” said then-Administrator Stephen Johnson.

The idea behind RECs, though, was deflated years ago. The sales of cheap, unbundled RECs weren’t enough to stimulate investment in new renewable energy. News stories and academics blasted the concept as ineffective, creating a misleading sense of progress in cutting emissions and potentially distracting from more effective measures to fight climate change.

Major corporations like Google and Walmart decided against purchasing them. “RECs were cheap, and I think the adage ‘you get what you pay for’ applied,” Bill Weihl, the former green energy czar at Google, said in an email. 

And yet despite the burgeoning noise of critics, the EPA remained a strong proponent of RECs, and federal agencies kept gobbling them up. 

Meanwhile, scientists have been warning that the world is running out of time to avoid the worst ravages of climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions need to be cut nearly in half by 2030 in order to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Every fraction of a degree above that brings increasingly severe suffering: worsening heatwaves, fires, floods, storms, drought, and hunger.

In Florida, the Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County brought its new $672 million incinerator online in 2015, over the objections of some residents, who worried about toxic pollution, and local environmentalists, who argued against burning trash at all. 

The waste agency called it the cleanest, greenest, most advanced waste-to-energy facility in the world, with state-of-the-art pollution control technology that keeps emissions below EPA limits. Agency officials pointed to research that argues incinerators are better for the climate than landfills and had a study prepared that predicted no significant health effects to the local community. 

Andrew Byrd lives nearby in Riviera Beach, a historically Black city in Palm Beach County. He said he remembers sand dunes there when he was in elementary school. Now, there’s an industrial park, a power plant and, a short drive away, the incinerator. He worries about the fumes from burning garbage.

“It’s affecting the health of everyone,” Byrd said. “I could tell you a thousand ways you could have generated the same amount of power (other) than burning trash.”

He thinks the government buying RECs from the incinerator isn’t helping the environment. “The notion of selling RECs is a false economy,” Byrd said.

The Palm Beach incinerator emits hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide a year, and the synthetic materials in the trash alone release carbon at a similar rate to the national electric grid. Its rate of releasing other harmful gases—nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide—is even worse than an average gas-fueled power plant, though the waste agency argues this isn’t a fair comparison. 

The incinerator was the latest, but not the only controversial plant where the federal government bought renewable energy certificates. In 2021, a half-dozen agencies purchased RECs from a pair of biomass plants owned by Georgia Renewable Power in neighboring rural counties in northeastern Georgia. The plants produced energy by burning wood chips, construction debris and, for a while, old railroad ties laced with the toxic chemical creosote.

After the plants started up in 2019, neighbors complained of stinging eyes, burning lungs, and the noxious smell of chemical fumes. Officials in Franklin County called it a public health emergency.

Georgia Renewable Power denied causing any harm. “We’re not emitting anything into the atmosphere that harms anyone,” president and chief operating officer Steve Dailey told a local TV station in 2020.

But state environmental regulators fined the company in 2020 for air pollution violations in Madison and Franklin counties and a toxic runoff into Indian Creek that potentially killed thousands of fish by one state estimate. 

Federal agencies, including many that bought incinerator certificates, spent more than $700,000 on more than 400,000 of these RECs in 2021. They were generated in 2020, the same year local residents mounted a campaign that eventually won a state ban on burning railroad ties treated with creosote, which has been linked to cancer. 

RECs from burning creosote-contaminated wood couldn’t be certified. Sonny Murphy, CEO of Sterling Planet, the company that sold the RECs, said the plants made assurances that the certificates were not tainted by creosote, but by then, they were too old to be certified. Luckily, the government didn’t mind. 

“Most everybody would require certified,” Murphy said, “but the government does not.”

Another popular source of government-purchased RECs is called “black liquor,” a toxic byproduct of papermaking that mills have burned for decades to power their own operations. In 2020, federal agencies bought nearly 258,000 paper mill RECs—15 percent of all RECs for that year. 

The agencies received certificates noting that for each black liquor REC, the facility produced about 4 pounds of smog-producing nitrogen oxide gas—a higher rate than an average coal plant. An International Paper spokesperson said in an email that the number on its certificates is an upper limit and its actual emissions are lower. 

As scientists raise alarms that drastic action is necessary to avoid widespread climate disaster, Congress hasn’t raised the Bush-era requirement that federal agencies use 7.5 percent renewable energy.

Over the years, though, the government’s overall energy use has declined and direct renewable energy use has increased, including from solar arrays on military bases. Governmentwide, from 2010 to 2021, direct renewable use increased from 1 percent to 3 percent of the government’s electricity demands.

Biden campaigned on a vow to eventually eliminate carbon emissions from the country’s power grid. But one of his most powerful proposals to do so—rewarding utilities if they phased out fossil fuels and penalizing them if they didn’t—died in Congress. 

Democrats eventually pushed through the Inflation Reduction Act, which uses billions of dollars in tax incentives to stimulate green energy and is expected to dramatically cut emissions over time. But it won’t be enough by itself to meet Biden’s pledge under the Paris Agreement to cut US emissions in half by 2030. 

Biden bypassed Congress when it came to the government’s own emissions with his 2021 executive order that federal agencies must use 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2030.

Agencies will still be able to use RECs, but under new restrictions. The order doesn’t include trash incinerators or biomass plants in its definition of carbon-pollution-free electricity. Half of the clean energy is supposed to be produced at the same time of day the federal government uses it—a strategy to push the grid to run cleanly at all hours. And the RECs have to come from the same region as the government agencies using electricity.

“This new requirement has accelerated the need for purchasing additional RECs,” said a spokesperson for the Department of Agriculture, adding that it will buy wind and solar RECs now.

There are some signs of progress. The Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, which purchased the cheapest RECs available in past years, is planning to install a solar array at one of its sites and expects to hit the 100 percent clean energy mark early, without RECs, according to a spokesperson.

But previous sustainability mandates have failed from lack of funding, ineffective enforcement or leadership changes. Former President Barack Obama had ordered 30 percent renewable energy by 2025, but former President Donald Trump killed it and many other climate regulations when he came into office.

Andrew Mayock, Biden’s chief federal sustainability officer, is in charge of implementing the plan. In an interview, Mayock acknowledged that changes to the government’s renewable energy approach were necessary.

“We’ve made a number of pivots from a policy perspective from what was done under previous administrations, so that the federal government gets to a place of legitimately running on clean energy not solely from an accounting perspective,” he said. “The world was in a different place at that time as to the urgency and the need to get to carbon-free electricity.”  

As for his progress, Mayock’s office pointed to a few agreements with utilities, to work on providing the required clean energy eventually.

“The shift to 100% carbon pollution-free electricity is already underway, and will continue to advance incrementally over the coming years through 2030,” his office said in a statement.

But a year and a half since the order was issued, the Biden administration hasn’t yet required agencies to set annual targets. Mayock’s office said it is working closely with agencies to help them develop plans.

Rep. Julia Brownley (D-Calif.) is pushing a bill that would codify a requirement for federal agencies to use 100 percent renewable energy, but not until 2050—20 years after Biden’s target. The 7.5 percent target in existing law is antiquated, and legislation is needed so that future presidents “do not backslide on this critical issue,” Brownley said in a statement. 

Her bill, which has failed to advance in previous years, directs the government to use renewable energy produced on-site as much as possible. But it still allows agencies to rely on buying even more of the same kinds of cheap RECs.

“The government has a responsibility to the taxpayer to use federal funds wisely, but we also have responsibilities to future generations to fully and immediately address the climate impacts of our energy usage,” Brownley said.

Government agencies acknowledged often opting for whatever is cheapest.

The Defense Logistics Agency, which facilitates buying RECs for many federal agencies, picks contractors based on “Lowest Price Technically Acceptable,” according to a spokesperson. Federal agencies then chose that contractor’s cheapest option in 90 percent of the purchases coordinated by the logistics agency last year.

The Indian Health Service told Reveal that it purchases the cheapest RECs—including Georgia biomass and Louisiana paper mill RECs—to minimize the cost. Still, an agency spokesperson said: “The purchase of RECs incentivizes private industry to strive to create renewable/clean forms of electricity which is beneficial for the Earth’s environment.”

Some agencies—such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—do prefer slightly costlier, certified RECs from solar energy or, more commonly, wind farms. Those certificates can come with laudatory titles like “Certificate of Environmental Leadership” or “Carbon Champion.” But compared to tax incentives and the revenue that energy companies get from selling the actual electricity, those RECs are also generally too cheap to have an impact, said Michael Gillenwater, executive director of the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute, who has published multiple studies critical of RECs. 

In that sense, Gillenwater said, it doesn’t matter whether the REC comes from a wind farm or a trash incinerator. “It’s hard to have less effect than no effect,” he said.

Murphy, who runs Sterling Planet, the company that sold the Georgia biomass RECs to the government, said a more sophisticated way to support renewable energy is to invest early in a specific project to help it get off the ground. Buying whatever RECs are available on the open market, like the government does, is “easier to critique,” he said.

Alden Hathaway, a consultant and former executive for Sterling Planet, maintains that all RECs are beneficial, but in terms of creating new renewable energy, he said they “never made a huge difference.” 

“We’ve always been talking about the value of the REC as something like the icing on the cake,” he said. 

Buying the Florida incinerator RECs didn’t end up mattering much for the environment or the plant that produced them. 

The Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County had been going about its business, turning garbage into energy for years without bothering with RECs. It only started selling them last year after being approached by REC sellers.

So far, the waste agency is bringing in about $175,000 per year in extra revenue from the certificates. That amounts to less than 1 percent of the operating budget for the incinerator, said Schauer, the director of facility contract operations. 

The money federal agencies spent on the incinerator RECs isn’t going to bankroll any new renewable energy. Most of it went to a middleman, the REC seller. What’s left helps make the trash bills a tiny bit cheaper for county residents. 

By Schauer’s calculation, that $175,000 in revenue could save each homeowner about 18 cents on a nearly $180 annual trash bill. “It’s better than nothing,” he said.

Data reporter Melissa Lewis contributed to this story