A Bill to Eliminate Avoided Methane Credit for Animal Agriculture Facilities (California)

The Animal Legal Defense Fund supports this bill.

Update: A.B. 2870 passed its first policy committee but will not proceed in 2024. The coalition will continue to work to educate legislators on the issue and resume parallel efforts on the regulatory side with the California Air Resources Board (CARB).

​Sponsors:​ Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi (D-66)
​Introduction Date:​ February 16, 2024

Biogas — also known as factory farm gas — is the latest misleading attempt from the meat and dairy industries to rebrand their harmful greenhouse gas emissions as “green energy.”

The factory farming business model is one of scale. In the name of profit, industrial farms confine hundreds, thousands, and in some cases over 100,000 animals within a small physical footprint — typically in windowless, warehouse-like buildings. These animals collectively produce enormous amounts of waste. Factory dairy and pig farms, in particular, often pump the waste from confined animals into enormous outdoor pits the industry calls “lagoons” — some as big as football fields. In these pits of liquefied manure, the waste biodegrades without access to oxygen, causing the pits to emit large amounts of the highly potent greenhouse gas methane.

Rather than addressing this environmentally destructive practice, factory farming operations are instead being rewarded with lucrative subsidies for installing anaerobic “digesters” to capture the methane emitted from their manure pits. The methane is then piped out, refined, and burned for energy — and factory farms can even receive lucrative “avoided methane credits” for pollution reduction, even though their harmful waste-management practices are the cause of the emissions in the first place. They can then sell these credits to other polluters — such as fossil fuel producers — to offset their greenhouse gas emissions. In effect, factory farms are enabled to “greenwash” their images while profiting from their own pollution at the same time.

California lawmakers are currently considering a bill, A.B. 2870, that would direct the CARB to eliminate avoided methane credits for animal agriculture facilities that apply to profit from factory farm biogas through the state’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) initiative. Eliminating these credits would provide a more accurate accounting of the environmental impact of factory farm biogas, while mitigating the perverse incentive that the LCFS is currently providing for factory farms to become further entrenched and obtain even more animals to produce more methane to be captured.

Why is this legislation important?

California’s dairy industry is the largest in the country, producing enormous amounts of methane that harms the planet in addition to causing suffering to cows and calves. California’s factory farm biogas incentives do little to address the dairy industry’s immense greenhouse gas emissions and, in fact, perversely encourage the production of even more methane. A.B. 2870 would help to mitigate this dangerous incentive and more accurately account for the factory farming industry’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Coalition Support: 350 Bay Area; 350 Sacramento; 350 Humboldt; Asian Pacific Environmental Network; California Environmental Justice Alliance; California Environmental Voters; Central California Asthma Collaborative; Central Valley Air Quality Coalition; Central Valley Defenders of Clean Air and Water; Center for Biological Diversity; Center for Food Safety; Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment; Climate Action California; Communities for a Better Environment; Earthjustice; Food & Water Watch; Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability; Sierra Club California

To learn more about active legislation in California, please visit aldf.org/california.