Tensions are rising in California’s agricultural heartland over state subsidies for manure-based biogas that are meant to help reduce planet-warming emissions but that environmental groups and locals argue are enabling widespread pollution.
The California Air Resources Board (CARB) next month will vote on whether to lock in the subsidies, which the Golden State has for years been offering to industrial dairies for installing technology that deploys bacteria to break down animal waste and then repurposes it as “renewable natural gas.” California officials argue these anaerobic digesters are environmentally beneficial because they capture methane, a gas produced by dairy cows that is about 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
But environmental groups and some residents of California’s Central Valley contend the technology also generates dangerous byproducts and encourages the propagation of polluting factory farms in vulnerable communities.
The digesters emit byproducts like ammonia, nitrous oxide, residual methane, hydrogen sulfide and other odorous gases, according to a new report from nonprofit Friends of the Earth, which slammed the process as no more than “greenwashing.”