Environmental groups challenge update to California’s low-carbon transportation rules

A coalition of environmental groups challenged California’s leading climate regulator on Wednesday, alleging that a recent update to a leading climate program will create additional pollution in the state’s San Joaquin Valley.

Their lawsuit filed in Fresno county superior court calls on the California Air Resources Board to “adequately disclose, analyze and mitigate the significant environmental impact” caused by amendments to the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS).

Partners in the suit include the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, Food & Water Watch, the Animal Legal Defense Fund and Defensores del Valle Central para el Aire y Agua.

“CARB must acknowledge the environmental and public health harms caused by its prioritization of pollution-heavy practices over sustainable solutions,” said María Arévalo, a spokesperson for environmental justice group Defensores del Valle Central para el Aire y Agua Limpio. “Our concerns have been ignored.”

In November, the Air Board 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 program, first created in 2011, is a $2 billion credit trading system that offers companies financial incentives to produce less-polluting transportation fuels such as biofuels made from crop and animal waste.

The program update faced controversy over its potential to raise gasoline prices, as well as environmental harms from biofuels. Roughly 80% of the program’s billions in annual credits go to the renewable natural gas, biodiesel and renewable diesel industries.

Environmental critics have argued these fuels 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 groups’ petition found that the Air Board violated the California Environmental Quality Act by failing to assess and respond to comments regarding environmental impacts of fuel derived from farm factory manure.

They allege that the agency offers overly generous subsidies for farmers who install expensive industrial manure management systems to capture methane for use as fuel. These systems disproportionately affect Latino communities in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley.

Environmental laws “require CARB to acknowledge the obvious—that providing substantial financial benefits for the production of fuel derived from manure at factory farms incentivizes factory farm expansion,” environmentalists wrote in the complaint.

But the agency “fails to adequately evaluate and mitigate their impacts, including increased local air pollution, impacts to groundwater, and climate change,” they determined.

CARB’s environmental review, the petitioners concluded, “cannot support a meaningful process or informed decisions about the LCFS amendments.”

An Air Board spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.

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