Did someone forward you this newsletter?
Get your own copy by subscribing here [[link removed]], and to share this story click here. [[link removed]]
Is Food & Power landing in your spam? Try adding
[email protected] to your contacts.
Photo courtesy of iStock
How California’s Low-Carbon Fuel Standard Entrenches Industrial Animal Farms and Local Pollution
This week, the public had a chance to weigh in [[link removed]]on a California regulatory scheme that aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Critics charge that the program stalls real climate action [[link removed]] and entrenches [[link removed]] highly concentrated, industrial-scale meat production.
The story starts in 2006 when California passed the Global Warming Solutions Act [[link removed]]. Under the law, large fossil fuel companies like Chevron and Shell that bring gasoline and other fuels into California are mandated to lower or offset their resulting greenhouse gas emissions. They can do so by including cleaner fuels, like hydrogen, into the mix of products they sell. Or they can buy credits from producers of cleaner fuel. That might include a solar or wind electricity project, or, as has become increasingly common [[link removed]] these days, they might buy gas refined from hog manure in Missouri or a dairy farm in Wisconsin [[link removed]].
In theory, policymakers thought this system would make polluters invest in cleaner fuel and cut emissions over time. In practice, critics argue that the agency that runs this program, the California Air Resources Board, overestimates the reduction in greenhouse gases that result from capturing manure gas, supercharging investments in concentrated industrial animal agriculture in the process.
The California Air Resources Board deems fuel derived from farm animal waste as cleaner than any energy from any other source, including wind and solar. Indeed, it gives farm-generated biogas a negative carbon intensity rating, implying that it takes more greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere than it puts in. How is that possible? Creative accounting.
Large confined animal farms store manure in liquified lagoons that produce a lot of methane. Government regulation could forbid these operations from releasing this methane into the atmosphere, but thanks to agribusiness lobbying, it doesn’t. This gives the CARB the opening to count any methane these operations convert into biogas as a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Even though burning biogas contributes to global warming and is indeed far more damaging to the environment than wind or solar power, the CARB uses this logic to rate farm-based biogas as somehow not only the cleanest of all energy sources but as a fuel whose use leads to fewer greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
This generous accounting overvalues biogas credits, critics charge, and that in turn leads to all sorts of negative, unintended consequences. For example, if a trucking company wants to claim it’s complying with California’s low-carbon fuel standards, it can simply add a few trucks [[link removed]] powered by the methane produced by industrial-scale animal operations, which —according to CARB’s rating system — are supposedly cleaner than vehicles running on electricity produced by sun or wind.
It gets worse. In practice, CARB’s crediting program runs in a way that allows two or three polluters [[link removed]] to claim they have paid for the same ton of methane reduction, which of course overstates how much methane has been eliminated, all while companies continue to emit climate-warming gas.
“[CARB] created this bizarre offset mechanism in a program that wasn’t supposed to be an offset program, and therefore CARB refuses to assign the safeguards that, for example, California’s cap and trade program has” to prevent things like double counting, explains Tyler Lobdell, an attorney for Food & Water Watch.
On the farm side of things, millions of new subsidies to produce biogas turn large livestock farms’ principal environmental liability into a lucrative source of revenue. Ironically, smaller livestock farms can more easily graze animals on pasture where their manure breaks down with oxygen and releases very little methane [[link removed]]. But as public supports stack up on the side of biogas projects, large farms that generate manure lagoons can access this new revenue stream while smaller, more sustainable farms get left behind. So far, farm biogas projects have received more than $1.26 billion [[link removed]] from California’s low-carbon fuel program.
“I don’t think rank-and-file Californians know that the low-carbon fuel standard is fueling more farm consolidation and concentration by making a commodity of the waste,” says Tim Gibbons, communications director for the Missouri Rural Crisis Center.
Building costly infrastructure around manure lagoons also creates a major financial incentive to fix them in place, along with their air and water pollution. “[Private biogas investors] want a guarantee that this manure lagoon will exist with a certain quantity of manure indefinitely, they may even have contracts,” says Kelsey Eberly, a lawyer for the legal advocacy firm FarmSTAND. “It’s devastating for the community.”
Communities that live near large animal farms have higher levels of asthma [[link removed]] and lower life expectancies [[link removed]]. Producing biogas also introduces the risk of catastrophic waste spills and even explosions [[link removed]]. In major livestock production hot spots, such as North Carolina [[link removed]] and the San Joaquin Valley [[link removed]], communities of color disproportionately bear the brunt of this pollution.
California has an opportunity to change these incentives as CARB considers amending its low-carbon fuel standards. A public comment period closed this week, and the agency will host a public hearing to discuss changes in April. Dozens of rural and environmental organizations urged CARB to altogether remove [[link removed]] farm biogas from its low-carbon fuel crediting program or at least adjust its carbon-intensity rating [[link removed]] to reflect its full climate impact.
California’s subsidies are just one part of a large network of government grants and tax breaks for manure methane. A report published Wednesday [[link removed]] by Friends of the Earth outlines all the opportunities for large farms to double dip between state and federal subsidies for biogas projects and urges policymakers to pull back supports.
To address the serious issue of livestock methane emissions, the report suggests that policymakers regulate and monitor farm methane and direct more public support to holistic manure management practices, such as pasture-based livestock systems.
Ultimately, sustainable farm advocates say that polluting farms, not the public, should have to pay for their environmental cleanup. “If you have that many animals in one place and that much manure and you need to build all this infrastructure to safely handle it then it should be part of your business plan,” argues Patty Lovera, an advocate for the Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment [[link removed]]. “These companies are really good at finding public money to pay for their daily costs.”
Find and share this story originally published on [[link removed]] Food & Power [[link removed]] . [[link removed]]
Republican Leaders in the House Attempt to Block Packers and Stockyards Rules
This week, House Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee Chair, Andy Harris, is pushing to include a rider to the 2024 agriculture policy spending bill that would thwart recent efforts to make livestock markets fairer and transparent. Representative Harris’s appropriations rider would prevent the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) from finalizing and enforcing new rules introduced to prevent discrimination [[link removed]] against contract livestock growers and combat deceptive terms [[link removed]] in poultry growing contracts. The rider would also take away funding for the USDA to issue more Packers and Stockyards Act rules that the agency is currently working on. Senators Jon Tester and Chuck Grassley sent a letter [[link removed]] on Wednesday urging other lawmakers to oppose this rider.
What We're Reading
A new book, Barons by Austin Frerick, follows the history of seven food industry titans to tell a bigger story about the corruption that helped them rise to power. In covering the players and policies that drove consolidation in the hog, dairy, grain, grocery, and berry industries, Frerick hopes readers can learn from the past and use history as “a road map for how to deal with unchecked concentrated power” today.
You can preorder Barons here [[link removed]].
About the Open Markets Institute
Our team of reporters, lawyers, and economists works to revive competition policy to build stronger democracies, more just and equitable societies, more innovative and sustainable economies, and a more secure and peaceful world.
Follow F&P on Twitter [[link removed]] | Subscribe [[link removed]] to this Newsletter | F&P Website [[link removed]] | Contact Us [[link removed]]
Tweet [link removed] Share [[link removed]] Forward [link removed]
Written by Claire Kelloway
Edited by Anita Jain and Phil Longman
Open Markets Institute
655 15th St NW Suite 800
Washington D.C., xxxxxx
Unsubscribe [link removed]
