Late last week Governor Newsom’s California Air Resources Board (CARB) approved a series of hotly contested, controversial amendments to one of the state’s oldest climate programs, the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) – considered to be the model for New Mexico’s new Clean Transportation Fuel Standard. 

The LCFS is the nation’s largest and most lucrative pollution trading scheme for factory farm biogas. Designed to reduce climate warming emissions from California’s transportation sector, the program’s perverse incentives are instead encouraging factory farms to pollute across the country and distracting from clean, zero-emission transportation solutions. 

New Mexico is home to a factory farm industry with large operations. The average in-state mega-dairy today confines 3,685 cows, nearly two-thirds more than a decade ago. Meanwhile, New Mexico is bleeding family-scale dairy farms (those with under 500 head) with 44 percent fewer today than just five years ago. 

Alexa Moore, New Mexico Organizer for Food & Water Watch released the following statement: 

“California’s controversial incentivization of biogas is a warning sign for New Mexico. Our legislators have a chance to do what California has not and build better climate programs that cannot be hijacked by major polluters. New Mexico’s legislature must act to close the biogas loophole in the Clean Transportation Fuel Standard, before it incentivizes the buildout of dirty biogas infrastructure, bigger herd sizes and more pollution.” 

Background

HB41, passed in the 2024 session, creates New Mexico’s Clean Transportation Fuel Standard. The bill was modeled on California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (“LCFS”), and as written, it risks replicating one of that program’s most problematic policies – “avoided methane crediting” – that has perverted California’s LCFS program into a lucrative new revenue stream for the largest and most polluting factory farms.

Indeed, the LCFS is the nation’s largest and most lucrative pollution trading scheme for factory farm biogas. Designed to slash climate warming emissions from California’s transportation sector, the program’s perverse incentives are instead encouraging factory farms in California and across the country to pollute. A Food & Water Watch analysis found that 15 California mega-dairies receiving lucrative green energy credits through the LCFS program emit levels of methane visible by satellite and imaging aircraft.

Due to shoddy accounting that ignores both the up- and downstream emissions of factory farm gas production, California’s LCFS awards factory farm gas a falsely negative carbon intensity, allowing factory farms to earn credits by “capturing” intentionally produced greenhouse gas emissions and selling those credits to other major polluters. This incentivizes the buildout of gas infrastructure and the factory farming model, both huge sources of climate, air and water pollution disproportionately impacting low-income communities and communities of color. 

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