Friends of the Earth Reacts to EPA Climate Pollution Reduction Grant Rollouts

WASHINGTON – The Environmental Protection Agency announced $4.3 billion in grant funding for community-driven climate projects, yet it includes money to support the development of dirty factory farm gas – also known as biogas. Most of the funding was awarded to initiatives that will combat climate change, improve air quality and advance environmental justice. However, EPA awarded funds to support factory farm gas-related projects in Illinois, Minnesota and Nebraska that will entrench factory farms and their harms into communities and the climate.

Anaerobic digesters are portrayed as a way to substantially reduce methane emissions from the animal agriculture sector, the largest source of U.S. emissions of this potent greenhouse gas. However, manure biogas systems are typically feasible only at the largest concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), or factory farms, which are major drivers of climate change and other forms of pollution, disproportionately affecting low-income communities and communities of color. Digesters not only fail to resolve the negative environmental and public health impacts of CAFOs, but they exacerbate pollution and safety risks to those same communities living near industrial livestock operations and biogas plants.

This use of public dollars to develop factory farm gas infrastructure undermines EPA’s commitment to environmental justice by perpetuating the inherently unsustainable and unjust systems of industrial animal agriculture and fossil fuel energy.

Molly Armus, Animal Agriculture Program Manager for Friends of the Earth, said this:

EPA had a historic opportunity to meaningfully reduce agricultural methane emissions and invest in environmental justice for rural communities, but instead it embraced greenwashed factory farm gas and left communities in the Midwest to pay the price. The EPA has repeatedly failed to protect communities from factory farm pollution by neglecting to enforce our bedrock environmental protection laws when it comes to industrial animal agriculture. It shouldn’t be providing funds for these same polluters to maintain the status quo in a dangerous, ineffective approach to address the climate crisis.

Amigos de la Tierra publicó recientemente un informe, Biogás o ¿Pamplinas?: La falsa promesa del biogás de estiércol como solución para el metano, that documents ways in which manure biogas production undermines environmental justice and exacerbates industry consolidation – for methane reduction benefits that are overstated by the U.S. government, inadequately tracked, and insufficient to meet global methane targets.

Contact: Shaye Skiff, Friends of the Earth, [email protected]