Low-Carbon Fuel Standard regulations: biogas derived from livestock manure (California)

The Animal Legal Defense Fund supports this bill.

Sponsor: State Sen. Ben Allen (D-24)

Introduced: February 16, 2023

Biogas, or factory farm gas, is the meat and dairy industries’ latest attempt to rebrand their harmful greenhouse gas emissions as a form of “green energy.” Essentially, methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas, is produced in large volumes when factory farms raise animals for slaughter or dairy production and store the animals’ waste in large pits where it biodegrades without access to oxygen.

Rather than addressing this harmful practice, industrial animal agriculture operations are instead being rewarded with lucrative subsidies for installing anaerobic “digesters” to capture the methane emitted from their manure pits, which is then piped out, refined, and burned for energy. Factory farms can then receive “credits” for pollution reduction, which they in turn sell to other polluters — such as fossil fuel producers — to offset their greenhouse gas emissions.

Currently, California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) — a program intended to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions — is incentivizing the consolidation of animal agriculture by paying industrial dairy operations to install methane biodigesters to capture methane from manure pits and convert it to factory farm biogas.

This bill would address California’s factory farm biogas problem by:

• preventing dairies from expanding for the purpose of producing more manure and gas to sell additional credits for profit through the current LCFS program;
• requiring regulators to broaden the life-cycle analysis of dairy methane to ensure accurate and transparent calculations of greenhouse gas emissions from farmed animal operations; and
• preventing the California Air Resources Board from allowing credit generation for fuels that have the same greenhouse gas profile as fuels that generate deficits in the program.

Why is this legislation important? California’s factory farm biogas incentives do little to address the dairy industry’s immense greenhouse gas emissions and, in fact, encourage the production of more methane. This legislation would curtail these incentives and help chart a vital new path in the California agricultural industry’s response to our interrelated climate and water challenges, along with disincentivizing the consolidation of animal agriculture to make waste a profit center.

Coalition Support: Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, Food & Water Watch, Center for Food Safety

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