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Joaquin Phoenix has teamed up with the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) to expose animal agriculture’s “deceptive marketing” of factory farm “biogas.”
Factory farms require tens of thousands of gallons of water to flush feces and urine from floors multiple times a day. This is because, in the US alone, farm animals produce around 885 billion tonnes of manure each year.
All of this waste goes to “manure lagoons,” which emit methane and other environmental pollutants.
The animal agriculture industry has described the pollution that emits from these lagoons as “naturally occurring” and “renewable.” But Phoenix describes these claims as “unequivocally false.”
Reduced emissions is an ‘illusion’
To contain these pollutants, factory farms install what they call a “digester” or a “tarp” to the lagoons. The farms then transfer any gas that doesn’t escape to a refinery. The methane is then sold off to the highest bidder to “offset emissions.”
ALDF executive director Stephen Wells told Plant Based News that factory farms are given green energy “credits” for capturing and transferring unregulated methane to a different location for combustion.
He explained: “Factory farms are then selling the “credits” to regulated industries and profiting from the very same pollution they intentionally created when they chose to use the cheapest and most environmentally harmful manure management system possible.”
Wells went on to explain that this creates an “illusion” of reduced emissions by the regulated industry (often the transportation sector) because it purchased faulty “credits” from these farms.
‘Factory farming is not sustainable’
“As if the worst polluting unregulated industry can offset another polluting industry,” Phoenix states in a new video with ALDF.
“And while they sell methane for profit, animal agriculture would like tax-payers to fund this ridiculous infrastructure, incentivizing more factory farms and more sh*t. F*ck that.”
“Factory farming is not naturally occurring, it is not renewable, and it is not sustainable. We need to be going in the other direction.”
Animal agriculture is catastrophic for the environment. It produces at least 14.5 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. That’s more than all the world’s transport combined.
It’s also responsible for up to 91 percent of Amazon deforestation. Plus it’s a leading cause of water pollution and biodiversity loss.
Federal support for factory farm ‘biogas’
ALDF produced the new video in response to increasing state and federal support for the production of biogas.
Grants, tax credits, and other subsidies given to the industry are incentivizing larger farms with thousands of animals.
California, for example, incentivizes factory farm gas production through a Low Carbon Fuel Standard program.
“The industrial animal agriculture industry is already subsidized to the detriment of animals and taxpayers alike,” says Wells. “We need to be eliminating subsidies, not additionally allowing animal agriculture to profit from its own pollution.”
There are currently around 250 methane digesters on factory farms, and Wells says that the potential for growth is “exponential.”
