When it comes to fighting climate change, speed is of the essence. Rising temperatures will push many processes to tipping points at which catastrophe will be impossible to stop. To avoid this, we need to act fast. And one greenhouse gas will make a huge difference: methane. 

Methane is an especially potent climate pollutant. While carbon dioxide has gotten lots of attention — it is the most dominant greenhouse gas, and it sticks around for millennia — methane is far more powerful in the short term. It has 86 times the warming impact of carbon dioxide in a 20-year timespan, making methane reduction a key part of climate action, right now. 

Globally, methane emissions come largely from two main sources: animal agriculture and fossil fuel production. And the United States is a major contributor. Food & Water Watch’s recent research quantifies the danger: we found that in 2022, factory farms¹In this analysis, factory farms refer to dairy operations with 500+ cows, beef feedlots with 1,000+ head, hog operations with 1,000 head, and broiler operations with 500,000+ sales annually. released up to 3.2 million metric tons of methane, and the fracking industry released an estimated 26.4 million metric tons.

Without reining in these industries and their methane emissions, we will blow past tipping points and dive headfirst into climate catastrophe. The planet urgently needs bold action from policymakers to transform our food and energy systems away from factory farms and fossil fuels.

Beyond Burps: Factory Farms’ Methane Emissions

Despite the gravity of the climate crisis, U.S. methane emissions from animal agriculture are on the rise. Factory farms housing hogs, beef cattle, and dairy cows emitted up to 3.2 million metric tons of methane in 2022 — having the same climate impact as 65.3 million cars.

If you’re familiar with livestock’s climate impact, you may know that much of it comes from cow burps. That’s because those burps release methane through a digestive process called enteric fermentation.

Another source of on-farm methane emissions is all the waste that factory farmed animals produce and the industry’s waste “management” methods. Some factory farms store waste in huge anaerobic lagoons, which produce three times the methane of a farm’s enteric fermentation.

And as animal agriculture has become more corporatized and industrialized, manure emissions have grown. For instance, from 1990 to 2020, methane emissions from manure management in dairy cattle have more than doubled, even though dairy cow populations have remained relatively steady.²FWW analysis of USDA Ag Census; data accessed June 2022 and available at https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov/.

The Fracking Industry Leaks Methane at Every Step in the Supply Chain

The oil and gas industry is another massive contributor to methane pollution — especially fracking. Research attributes 40% of this century’s atmospheric methane increase to new fracking. Food & Water Watch estimates that in 2022, U.S. fracking was responsible for over 26.4 million metric tons of methane emissions.³This includes emissions from wells, processing, and distribution, but excludes combustion. That’s the equivalent of 500 million cars’ annual emissions.

Natural gas is mostly methane, and the gas industry emits and leaks methane at every step in the supply chain, from wells to processing; transportation to distribution.

While the United Nations has pleaded for faster emissions reductions, U.S. oil and gas production has only soared to new heights. Right now, the U.S. is the largest emitter of methane in the oil and gas sector worldwide. At the same time, the U.S. is ramping up sales of liquefied natural gas (LNG) abroad. In just a few short years, by 2023, we became the world’s top exporter. 

As oil and gas execs look greedily to the export market, they’re scheming a major buildout of LNG infrastructure that threatens to lock the United States and the world into decades more fracking. While President Biden has temporarily halted new export terminals, he must stop all LNG and fossil fuel expansion.

To Avoid Climate Catastrophe, We Need to Rein in Factory Farms and Fracking

As with Biden’s LNG pause, our leaders have begun to recognize the urgency of this issue. But they haven’t passed the stringent regulations we need, thanks to the influence of Big Ag and Big Oil and Gas.

Notably, rather than clean up their act, factory farm corporations are pushing anaerobic digesters, which turn their waste into fuel called factory farm biogas. But these are greenwashing scams. Not only do they fail to tackle methane from enteric fermentation — the largest source of on-farm methane — factory farm gas is mostly methane and releases carbon dioxide when burned, just like fossil fuels.

Big Ag’s marketing is paying off. When it comes to the agricultural sector, President Biden’s Methane Reduction Plan fails to compel any meaningful action. Instead, it mostly focuses on incentivizing anaerobic digesters. The lack of policy around agricultural emissions should come as no surprise, considering Big Ag lobbyists spent $2.5 billion from 1998 to 2019 defending the status quo.

Similarly, some of the biggest fossil fuel emitters of methane have sent fleets of lobbyists to fight methane regulations. Such lobbyists are downplaying the industry’s impact, especially the effect of super-emitters that can pump more than a thousand pounds of methane into the air in a single hour. This is having a real effect on policy: Big Oil is currently challenging new methane rules in court, calling efforts to reduce emissions “unfair, unworkable, and uneconomic.” 

Nevertheless, elected officials shouldn’t serve wealthy executives and corporate profits. They serve us, the people. They must pull us away from the cliff of climate chaos and quickly pass policy that tackles methane emissions at the source. That means banning new factory farms and stopping the expansion of old ones, ending federal support for factory farm gas, banning fracking, and stopping the growth of fossil fuel infrastructure.

This is possible — Congress is currently considering bills like the Farm System Reform Act and the End Polluter Welfare Act that will help us transition to more sustainable food and energy systems. But time is running out for the climate. Our leaders must act now.

Want to learn about methane emissions in your state? Check out our fact sheets on California, Iowa, Maryland, New Mexico, Oregon, and Pennsylvania.