SACRAMENTO, CA – The lead climate regulator of California has been challenged in multiple lawsuits over recent adjustments “to a leading climate program (that) will create additional pollution in the state’s San Joaquin Valley,” according to a story in the Sacramento Bee.
The allegations filed against the California Air Resources Board (CARB) state that CARB “did not assess or alleviate environmental harms the new transportation pollution rules under the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), related to biofuels made with crop and animal waste, will cause,” noted the Bee.
There are, added the Bee, currently two main lawsuits brought by environmental groups, including the Animal Legal Defense Fund, the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability on behalf of Food & Water Watch, and Defensores del Valle Central para el Aire y Agua (DVCAA).
Spokesperson María Arévalo from DVCAA stated, “CARB must acknowledge the environmental and public health harms caused by its prioritization of pollution-heavy practices over sustainable solutions,” wrote the Sacramento Bee.
The second lawsuit, also according to The Sacramento Bee, was filed by Earth Justice on behalf of Communities for a Better Environment.
CARB in November “voted to strengthen the LCFS, which aims to subsidize low-carbon fuels and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector, by requiring that cars, trucks, trains and airplanes be powered by increasingly clean fuels,” the Bee reported.
The program was created in 2011, and focused on incentives to reduce the usage of fuels that increased pollution rates, so that “roughly 80 percent of the program’s billions in annual credits go to the renewable natural gas, biodiesel and renewable diesel industries.”
The Sacramento Bee stated the program still faces controversy from the risk of increasing gasoline prices and the negative effects on the environment from biofuels.
Although biofuel producers, oil companies, and electric vehicle manufacturers support this program and its update, there are also numerous critics who state the fuels incentivized by this program “perpetuate harmful waste practices in some of the most polluted regions of California, can lead to food shortages abroad and contribute to global deforestation,” the Sacramento Bee explained.
The Sacramento Bee adds that on top of the environmental harm the agency’s update brings, according to the lawsuits, “over-generous subsidies for farmers who install expensive industrial manure management systems…disproportionately (affect) Latino communities in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley.”
The concern of many environmentalists with the subsidies is the incentive they provide to factory farm expansion, according to the story in the Bee.
The Earth Justice complaint states the biofuels produced with crop waste “cause a host of adverse impacts to vulnerable communities when they are grown, when they are refined, and when they are combusted in vehicles,” alleging CARB did not adequately address nor alleviate the potential impacts of this biofuel type, reported the Bee.
The Sacramento Bee quoted Senior Attorney Nina Robertson from Earth Justice, who stated the LCFS program “reward(s) polluters and foul(s) our air. The changes lock in billions of biofuels refined in the East Bay and Los Angeles and burned throughout the state, and CARB failed to inform the public about these impacts.”
