Santa Fe – Today, the Environmental Improvement Board held the first of a series of hearings on New Mexico’s new Clean Transportation Fuel Program, which is currently going through rulemaking. 

Food & Water Watch New Mexico Senior Organizer Alexa Reynaud, who attended the hearing and provided public comment, made the following statement: 

“New Mexicans deserve a future that is free from factory farm pollution. We have already seen how California’s version of this program has enriched factory farms and incentivized them to grow larger and pollute more. We don’t want that for New Mexico. We call on The NMED and EIB to ensure that the final Clean Transportation Fuel Program does not entrench these polluting facilities in our communities, and to remove avoided methane crediting from the program.”

Background: 

The Clean Transportation Fuel Program, based on California’s highly controversial Low Carbon Fuel Standard, would create a statewide “carbon intensity” standard for transportation fuels and a marketplace to buy, trade and sell “credits”. 

In the draft rule, factory farms could receive lavish incentives to produce and sell factory farm biogas – creating a perverse incentive for these facilities to grow larger and pollute more to gain more credits. 

New Mexico’s factory farms are already producing massive quantities of waste. New Mexico’s mega-dairies each confined an average of 3,685 cows in 2022 — 20 percent more than just five years earlier. The state’s mega-dairies also produce 11.5 billion pounds of manure annually — four times as much as the state’s human population.