One of California’s biggest sources of methane pollution — its massive dairy industry — operates almost entirely without regulation. In fact, not only do the state’s largest dairies face no penalties for emitting methane, they can actually profit handsomely from those emissions.
If the staff of the state’s air regulator get their way in an upcoming meeting, the loophole that has created this situation could stick around for decades to come.
Under state law SB 1381, which passed in 2016, California must reduce emissions of methane — a greenhouse gas that is shorter-lived but far more potent than carbon dioxide — 40 percent below 2013 levels by 2030. To meet that goal, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) places emissions limits on several of the state’s main sources of leaking methane, including landfills, wastewater treatment plants, and the oil and gas industry.
But the state’s dairy industry, which emits enormous amounts of methane, has so far been exempt from such regulations — that is, until this year, when SB 1381 permitted CARB to start working on those rules.
Now, in anticipation of an early November meeting, CARB board members have instructed agency staff to develop a formal plan for doing just that.
“We were given a task in SB 1383 to take a deeper look at whether or not it’s necessary to do something different in order to reach our methane targets,” CARB Chair Liane Randolph said at a September CARB meeting.
At the same November meeting, the board will also consider changes to the state’s Low-Carbon Fuel Standard, which mandates that fossil fuel importers, refiners, and wholesalers purchase credits to reduce the carbon intensity of their operations.
Credits are sold by providers of low-carbon fuels or transit options, from biofuel makers to electric vehicle charging operators. The $4 billion-per-year program’s aim is to make polluters help pay for the state’s transition to cleaner forms of transportation.
So, what do dairy farm methane regulations have to do with low-carbon fuels?
Under the LCFS program, dairy farmers can generate credits by using anaerobic digesters to capture the methane that seeps out of their manure lagoons and turn it into renewable natural gas, or RNG. Credits produced in this way are counted as carbon-negative, meaning they’re treated as if they remove carbon from the atmosphere. That makes them very attractive to the fossil fuel firms that need to reduce the on-paper carbon-intensity of their operations.
This is a lucrative situation for the biofuel sector as well as for the state’s politically powerful dairy industry; some researchers have found that certain dairies may make as much revenue from selling LCFS credits as they do from selling milk. Meanwhile, RNG project developers and oil and gas companies are investing billions of dollars in dairy biogas projects earning money through the program.
But this subsidy goldmine would crumble if CARB regulated dairy emissions in the same way it regulates other major sources of methane in the state. Energy analysts, climate scientists, and environmental justice advocates who have long opposed how LCFS treats dairy biogas believe that would be a good thing. They say the rules create a perverse incentive that subsidizes air and water pollution from mega-dairies, undermines the clean-transit goals of the LCFS program, and threatens to infect even larger federal clean fuels incentive programs for decades to come.
That’s why, according to these groups, it’s essential that CARB staff respond to the board members’ directive by putting together a robust plan for regulating methane emissions from dairy farms. However, last week CARB staff instead proposed amendments to the LCFS program that could undermine the long-awaited regulatory push before it even begins.
The proposed change? To exempt any dairy methane digester projects that now exist, or that break ground before 2030, from being subjected to any “law, regulation, or legally binding mandate requiring […] greenhouse gas emission reductions from manure methane emissions.”
Advocates who’ve been fighting to regulate factory farm methane emissions described this move as an attempt to shield the dairy biogas industry from state regulatory oversight.
“This is another example of a rogue staff that has an agenda,” Tyler Lobdell, a staff attorney for nonprofit Food & Water Watch, told Canary Media. “That agenda is to appease the financial interests in big ag and these factory farm gas developers at all costs — including by ignoring direction from their own board.”
CARB spokesperson Dave Clegern disputed this characterization of the impact of the proposed change in LCFS rules. “There is nothing that…
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