Farming Methane

To further its climate goals, California is providing dairy and hog farms huge subsidies to turn animal waste into a form of energy called biogas or biomethane that farms can not only get carbon credit for, but that they can also sell as a supposedly “low carbon” liquid fuel for vehicles.

Proponents of biomethane call it a win-win that helps reduce farm emissions, produces an ostensibly “renewable” natural gas, and also gives farms carbon credits that other polluting industries can buy to offset their emissions. But researchers and environmentalists who have dug deeper have a different take. They say these financial incentives to produce biomethane are not only prolonging the state’s dependence on natural gas but are also be promoting the expansion of industrial agriculture, and brings with it all the problems associated with packing cows and pigs into Concentrated Animal Feedlots (or CAFOS).

To understand this emerging issue at the nexus of California’s climate policy, agriculture, and environmental justice, Earth Island Journal editor Maureen Nandini Mitra talks with two researchers who have been following the rise of the biomethane industry — Jeremy Martin, Director of Fuels Policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Clean Transportation Program, and Sarah D’Onofrio, a sociologist and educator who recently completed a critical analysis of biodigesters as a “climate solution” for emissions from the meat and dairy industries.