Sacramento – At a workshop that took place in Sacramento and virtually yesterday, climate and environmental justice advocates shared their concerns about the California Air Resources Board (CARB) not addressing the highly problematic incentives for factory farm biogas in California’s flagship climate program, the Low Carbon Fuel Standard. 

California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard has gained widespread national criticism recently due to how it has incentivized a national buildout of factory farm biogas. In their public comments to CARB, advocates called CARB staff out for not addressing the topic of factory farm biogas in the LCFS at yesterday’s workshop, despite the fact that thousands of people and over 160 groups wrote in to CARB over the last few months to express their concern. Advocates noted that the residents of the Central Valley who are living near the dirty factory farming infrastructure that seems to be constantly expanding around them weren’t in attendance at the workshop in person due to CARB staff’s years-long practice of ignoring their concerns while elevating the voices of dairy industry proponents at similar “workshops.” 

Chirag Bhakta, California Director of Food & Water Watch said, “Despite Governor Newsom’s stated priority of transitioning California off combustion fuels, the current structure of the Low Carbon Fuel Standard provides vastly more incentive to produce and burn factory farm gas than to solar, wind or electric vehicle projects. The individuals, families and communities who live near factory farms are sick of being ignored by CARB, all while their air is getting more polluted and their health is being put even more at risk.

“CARB staff made a major mistake yesterday in ignoring their own environmental justice representative’s presentation and the broad coalition that has long called for an end to lavish incentives for dirty factory farm gas. Staff’s presentation and consideration of tweaks to the ongoing rulemaking did not discuss the many problems with factory farm biogas in the LCFS, how to realign the program with California’s environmental justice commitments, or how they can adopt the suggestions of the advocates from across the state. The fossil fuel industry has come to love how the LCFS treats these factory farm gas fuels because it allows business as usual and continues fossil fuel operations so long as Chevron and other Big Oil corporations just invest in offsets from factory farms around the country.”

Leslie Martinez, Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability community engagement specialist said,  “Factory farm gas is not the climate future we need. It locks California into a dangerous status quo that will continue to undermine our climate goals and incentivize unsustainable, polluting megadairies in the San Joaquin Valley. CARB staff has shown that it is not capable of supporting the long-term sustainability of Californians and ensuring that communities aren’t sacrificed in the process of meeting our climate goals. We urge the board to rein in staff who continue to support polluting projects at the expense of communities already experiencing severe environmental and public health impacts.”

Background: 

California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (“LCFS”) is the nation’s largest and most lucrative pollution trading scheme for factory farm biogas. Originally intended to address the transportation sector’s climate pollution, Big Ag and Big Oil have hijacked the program. Today, the program is the leading driver of factory farm biogas buildout nationwide, rewarding and entrenching some of the worst factory farming practices by showering these dirty operations with lavish subsidies that pay them to get bigger and pollute more.

The LCFS relies on shoddy accounting to assign factory farm biogas a lower “carbon intensity” than even solar and wind energy. Under the current LCFS rules, polluters like Chevron looking to offset their dirty operations can just pay industrial factory farms to extract methane gas from on-farm waste which is then sold as “biogas” into California’s credit trading system. This source of greenhouse gas emissions provides an effective smokescreen for Chevron’s pollution, while doing nothing to clean up climate-warming emissions or factory farm pollution.

Late last year Governor Newsom’s CARB released draft rulemaking on the Low Carbon Fuel Standard. However, the new rulemaking rejected the suggestions of environmental justice and climate advocates,  dairy and refinery community leaders, and a proposed scenario from Stanford researchers that would address these concerns while ensuring the state still meets its climate goals for the transportation sector. All have called on CARB to reform the Low Carbon Fuel Standard program.

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