The machines used to be cumbersome and prone to failure, but the newer models really work. They feed cows, milk them, clean them, and carefully monitor their health. According to Bloomberg, robots are staged to surge into dairies in coming years.

It’s part of a larger trend of automation across farm country, which could go into overdrive if President Trump continues deporting people living in the United States without papers. Farms have long relied on immigrants working for lower wages than citizens, who enjoy greater protection under labor laws.

We’re also seeing more farmers turn to guest worker programs, which temporarily import foreign workers.

A few years ago, I weighed the pros and cons of mechanized dairies. To put it bluntly, using robots is better than exploiting workers. But even though the jobs these robots take are really crappy, that means that money flowing to poor people will be diverted to robotics companies instead.

Robots could help small and mid-sized family dairies compete by cutting labor costs. On the other hand, automation could further depopulate rural towns.

In sum, robotic dairies mean that farmers will be working less with their hands and more with their heads.

Both President Trump’s speech and the official Democratic response from Representative Joe Kennedy III failed to mention climate change — y’know, the biggest threat facing the human race.

But one event DID put climate change front and center: the Climate State of the Union hosted by environmental activism group 350.org.

Bill McKibben, cofounder of 350.org, and Lennox Yearwood, president of the Hip Hop Caucus, emceed the event. It featured cameos from major players in the environmental, food, and justice movements — including a certain anti-billionaire senator from Vermont.

Author Naomi Klein, indigenous activist Dallas Goldtooth, and food justice advocate Tara Rodriguez Besosa, among others, took the stage to highlight the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico, the movement to build resilience through local food, and the indigenous-led resistance to new fossil fuel projects.

The best part of the night? When Bernie Sanders announced that the climate debate was over. Finally!

A proposed California bill would jail restaurant workers for handing out plastic straws to customers who don’t request them. But don’t worry — it’s a mistake.

Ian Calderon, the Democratic majority leader of the California State Assembly who introduced the bill, says he doesn’t actually want the strict penalties to become law — they were unintentionally left in a draft of the bill. Huh? The Washington Post reports that Calderon has promised to remove the jail sentence (of up to six months!) from the bill before it goes to vote.

Two California cities, Davis and San Luis Obispo, have already passed legislation that prohibits servers from giving out single-use straws unless a customer asks for one. (The bills did not include criminal penalties.) The city of Seattle will ban plastic straws this summer.

The anti-straw campaign — #stopsucking — keeps gaining momentum, which we covered last year. As the EPA gets dismantled and we exist at the whim of climate change-worsened hurricanes and wildfires, people are insisting on action somewhere. It just happens to be with plastic straws.

Bonus: The commonly cited “Americans use 500 million straws each day” figure may come from phone surveys conducted by a 9-year-old in 2011.

To the surprise of nobody, President Trump failed to mention climate change in his State of the Union address last night. His administration has done everything in its power to roll back Obama-era environmental policies and pull federal funding from clean-energy initiatives. But while our leaders in Washington, D.C., remain hellbent on ignoring the biggest existential threat to humanity, Washington state keeps forging ahead.

Here are just a few ways the Evergreen State has been kicking ass and taking names — er, permits — lately:

• In 2017, Millenium Bulk Terminals applied for two permits for its $680 million coal-export terminal project along the Columbia River. In November, a county hearing examiner denied the company the permits to proceed with the project, citing the terminal’s potential impact on the environment and local tribes.
• Earlier this month, Governor Jay Inslee proposed a new carbon tax on commercial and industrial CO2 emissions at a rate of $20 per metric ton, starting in 2019. If adopted, the measure would make Washington the first state in the nation to impose a tax on polluters.
• On Monday, Inslee dealt polluters another blow by rejecting a permit request from Vancouver Energy. The company hoped to build the largest oil-by-rail terminal in the United States. Instead, they have the go-ahead to build the nation’s first non-terminal in nowhere.

The agency planned to “officially shut off” its aid in the U.S. territory and hand over supply distribution to the Puerto Rico Emergency Management Agency, NPR reported earlier this week.

Then FEMA reversed its position on Wednesday and announced that it will continue to distribute aid in Puerto Rico, saying that it had previously “mistakenly” provided information to NPR that indicated it would stop delivering food and water on Jan. 31.

FEMA’s public affairs director had told The Hill on Tuesday that the aid was “no longer needed” because “the commercial supply chain for food and water is re-established and private suppliers are sufficiently available.”

This apparently came as a surprise to the Puerto Rico government. In a statement responding to media reports, a spokesperson said: “We were not informed that supplies would stop arriving, nor did the Government of Puerto Rico agree with this action” — noting that the the transition period should take weeks.

And residents in Puerto Rico aren’t so convinced that the humanitarian crisis is over. Four months after Hurricane Maria, roughly 20 percent of the island is still without power.

“This is the kind of indifference that must be stopped. Enough,” San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz tweeted after FEMA’s initial announcement about cutting off aid. She has been one of the most vocal critics of the federal response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.

This story has been updated.

On Monday, newly minted Governor Phil Murphy signed an executive order to rejoin the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a multi-state carbon trading program that aims to reduce greenhouse gases from the power sector.

New Jersey’s former governor (and bona fide bully) Chris Christie had pulled the state out in 2011, saying the initiative increased the tax burden for utilities and failed to adequately reduce greenhouse gases. Murphy said that Christie’s decision to withdraw had cost the state $279 million in revenue.

The state Department of Environmental Protection and the Board of Public Utilities will begin drawing up a game plan to re-enter the pact.

Nine eastern states already participate in RGGI: Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont. Now, New Jersey is joining the fray, and Virginia may soon follow.

“With this executive order, New Jersey takes the first step toward restoring our place as a leader in the green economy,” Murphy said. Jersey shore knows what it’s doing!