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This week, the public had a chance to weigh in on a California regulatory scheme that aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Critics charge that the program stalls real climate action and entrenches highly concentrated, industrial-scale meat production.

The story starts in 2006 when California passed the Global Warming Solutions Act. 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 these days, they might buy gas refined from hog manure in Missouri or a dairy farm in Wisconsin.

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 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 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. 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 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 and lower life expectancies. Producing biogas also introduces the risk of catastrophic waste spills and even explosions. In major livestock production hot spots, such as North Carolina and the San Joaquin Valley, 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 farm biogas from its low-carbon fuel crediting program or at least adjust its carbon-intensity rating 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 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. “These companies are really good at finding public money to pay for their daily costs.”