Tell the EPA to stop supporting Big Ag’s dangerous greenwashing!

Communities of color and low-income communities disproportionately bear the burden of toxic factory farms and their pollution.

Now the EPA is supporting this harmful industry by promoting factory farm gas. But this isn’t a real climate solution – it pollutes just like fossil fuels. That’s why we urgently need YOUR help today. Can we count on you to take action and protect the planet from dangerous factory farm pollution?

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Dear EPA Administrator Regan,

Factory farms generate large amounts of toxic waste, which pollute the nearby air and water, threatening rural economies, public health, and environmental quality. Industrial animal agriculture is also a major driver of climate change and the largest source of U.S. methane emissions. These negative impacts disproportionately affect the rural, low-income communities and communities of color who you have pledged to protect.

So, I am disappointed to see the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency support the investment of public dollars in factory farm gas production as a way to reduce methane emissions from livestock operations, rather than directly regulate this industry’s climate, air, and water pollution. Factory farm gas is a dirty, greenwashed form of energy that maintains the highly polluting and unjust systems of industrial animal agriculture and fossil fuel energy and should not be incentivized by the federal government.

For one, factory farm gas is incompatible with the goals of environmental justice and public health. Manure biogas systems are typically only feasible at the largest concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and rely on the most hazardous manure management practices that contribute to air and water pollution. Even worse, manure biogas production generates additional environmental and public health concerns for communities closest to CAFOs and biogas plants, including increased production of ammonia during anaerobic digestion, higher concentrations of nutrients in the leftover material that contribute to water pollution, and new pipelines and trucks to transport manure or biogas through communities. Thus, factory farms are being rewarded for their pollution, through a process that fails to address most of industrial animal agriculture’s extensive harms to rural communities, workers, farmed animals and the environment.

Second, incentivizing manure biogas production will fail to adequately reduce methane emissions from industrial animal agriculture to meet the United States’ climate goals. Research has shown that reductions in methane emissions through anaerobic digestion can be undermined because CAFOs are incentivized to increase manure production, either through herd expansions or consolidation, to capitalize on the incentives rewarding manure biogas production. Additionally, neither the EPA nor any other federal agency monitors methane emissions from CAFOs with digesters, and research using methane sensing technology undermines EPA’s contention that digesters effectively reduce greenhouse gas reductions.

The EPA has failed to protect communities from toxic factory farm pollution by neglecting to enforce our bedrock environmental protection laws when it comes to industrial animal agriculture. It shouldn’t be paying these same polluters to capture methane emissions in a dangerous, ineffective approach to address the climate crisis.

I urge the EPA to stop supporting factory farm gas, including by ending the AgSTAR program and excluding factory farm gas projects from its Climate Pollution Reduction Grant program. Instead, please regulate methane emissions from industrial livestock operations, enforce the Clean Air Act, and monitor and report on emissions and pollutants from CAFOs and anaerobic digesters.

Sincerely,

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