dairy industry

7 Reasons California Should Get Tougher on Methane from Dairies

A dairy cow

California lawmakers should rethink the role of dairy digesters in the state’s dairy and livestock mitigation strategy.

Even though California aims to decrease the emissions of methane, dairy operations are rewarded for creating, and capturing, more and more of the planet-warming super pollutant in the form of manure-derived biogas. Today, California lawmakers declined to correct that perverse incentive, but they still have opportunities to rethink the state’s embrace of digesters as its …

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Livestock Operations Are Responsible for Over Half of California’s Methane Emissions—Why Won’t CARB Regulate Them?

Image of an anaerobic digester on a dairy

CARB will have the authority to regulate methane from livestock operations beginning in January but has not initiated rulemaking

  At a recent California Air Resources Board (CARB) meeting, a staff member responded to a question about why CARB’s program for reducing emissions from transportation fuels incentivized the capture of methane from landfills so much less than the capture of methane from dairies: “Landfills have a different CI [carbon intensity] score because they are …

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Revised SLCP Strategy Demonstrates the Impact of SB 1383

Many in the environmental community, myself included, heralded the passage of SB 1383 in the California legislature. This bill is the first state law to target short-lived climate pollutants (SLCPs), and it codified the reduction goals that ARB had adopted as part of its general GHG reduction agenda. This is not a trivial accomplishment – …

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