(Just The News)—Multiple environmental groups are suing the California Air Resources Board (CARB) for neglecting to address the potential negative impacts of the recently approved amendments to the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS).
The aim of the LCFS is to reduce carbon emissions from transportation fuels in California, but there have been protests over the past few months about the potential environmental and fiscal impacts of the amendments.
“The amendments channel global, national and local private sector investment towards increasing cleaner fuel and transportation options for consumers, accelerating the deployment of zero-emission infrastructure, and keeping the state on track to meet legislatively mandated air quality and climate targets,” reads a statement from Dave Clergan, CARB public information officer.
However, the petitioners of the lawsuit – Defensores Del Valley Central Para El Aire Y Agua Limpio, Food & Water Watch and the Animal Legal Defense Fund – are alleging that CARB has skirted its responsibilities under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) to disclose, analyze and mitigate significant environmental impacts caused by the LCFS. Most notable to the petitioners is the financial incentive for farmers to collect “biogas.”
Biogas is produced from manure which creates the gas most dangerous to polluting the ozone layer and causing health issues for those who live nearby – methane. This incentive from CARB would go to operators of large dairy farms with industrial scale manure management systems, encouraging them to expand their operations and install anaerobic digesters to collect the methane and convert it into fuel.
“Factory farms are large-scale industrial operations that generally confine thousands—if not tens of thousands—of cows, hogs, or other animals,” reads the lawsuit. “This extreme concentration results in many severe human health and environmental impacts. Factory farms emit large quantities of methane and nitrous oxide, greenhouse gases far more potent than carbon dioxide, as well as multiple forms of air and odor pollution, and cause severe water contamination.”
These farms most often utilize industrial-scale manure management systems which flushes the waste into large manure pits and then that waste is applied to fields and biogas is captured. However there is so much manure that nitrate will leach into the groundwater, contaminating water resources and ecosystems. The effects of this can be found most obviously in San Joaquin Valley where the majority of the state’s dairy farms are located.
“CARB must acknowledge the environmental and public health harms caused by its prioritization of pollution-heavy practices over sustainable solutions,” said Defensores del Valle Central para el Aire y Agua Limpio representative María Arévalo. “In the Central Valley, we live near 90% of cows in California and some of the largest dairy operations in the entire world. We raise time and time again that the conditions and impacts in our communities are getting worse as dairies are getting bigger and dairy digesters are installed. Despite our ongoing advocacy from the local to the federal level, but more than anywhere at CARB, our concerns have been ignored.”
These among other environmental complaints came up during the public comment period, but CARB responded by saying that considering a potential increase in livestock operations is too “speculative” to address as a negative impact and that they cannot propose mitigation measures efforts if that does happen because they do not have “direct authority” over those operations.
“Several comments also raised concerns that avoided methane crediting for biomethane captured from livestock manure may lead to additional greenhouse gas emissions and prevent the state from meeting its climate goals,” reads CARB’s master response. “However, capturing methane from California’s methane sources (including, landfills, dairies, and wastewater) is critical for achieving the state’s 2030 methane reduction and 2045 greenhouse gas reduction targets.”
CARB has taken the stance that the amendments would not encourage the expanding production of methane, but incentivize the construction of the infrastructure required to collect biogas.
“The Proposed Amendments aim to capture biogas from dairy and swine facilities, food processing, and other organic waste management facilities that is otherwise released to the environment,” reads the response. “Capturing biogas reduces the climate impacts of fugitive methane emissions. This recovered methane from biogas can then provide energy for electricity, heating, or transportation fuel.”
The petitioners ask that CARB delay moving forward with the proposed amendments until a prevention and mitigation plan can be put into action. CARB refused to comment on pending litigation.
“Increasing data supports what CARB refuses to acknowledge — perverse incentives in the LCFS for fuel derived from manure at factory farms exacerbates severe environmental impacts, causing cascading harm to communities in California and beyond,” said Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability co-director, Phoebe Seaton. “State law requires CARB to analyze, evaluate, and mitigate these impacts, which it has failed to do despite numerous warnings from environmental justice and environmental groups through the LCFS rulemaking process and numerous calls from communities to correct course.”
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
