A new poll, released today by the national advocacy group, Food & Water Action, found that Iowa voters overwhelmingly oppose the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. The poll, commissioned by Food & Water Action, was conducted by Change Research. Its release comes one week after a public hearing on the issue, where over 150 landowners, legislators and advocates rallied at the capitol, demanding the state legislature act this session to ban the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. Poll results highlight that eminent domain is top of mind for registered voters heading into the midterm election.
Voters object to carbon pipelines and the use of eminent domain to build them:
A plurality (44%) are opposed to the three carbon pipelines proposed for Iowa. Only 35% support them, 21% are unsure.
A supermajority (80%) oppose allowing private corporations to use eminent domain to build them. This opposition crosses party lines.
80% of voters who are favorable towards Kim Reynolds oppose the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines.
Voters want their legislators to fight the use of eminent domain to build these pipelines:
73% of voters say they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who supported using eminent domain to build carbon pipelines. This includes 78% of Democrats & leaners, 70% of Independents, and 69% of Republicans & leaners.
70% of voters support Iowa legislators in the General Assembly blocking the use of eminent domain for these pipelines. This includes 72% of Democrats & leaners, 69% of Independents, and 69% of Republicans & leaners.
Food & Water Action Senior Iowa Organizer Emma Schmit issued the following statement:
“Iowans are united against unsound carbon capture scams and the hazardous pipelines that accompany them. We are opposed to carbon pipelines and categorically opposed to the seizing of land necessary to build them.
“Iowans know that the proposed projects aren’t intended to help our state — instead, these schemes are designed to funnel profit into the pockets of huge corporations, taking our land and using our tax dollars to make it happen. We are staunchly opposed to the use of eminent domain in order to fulfill the greedy aspirations of private corporations.
“Voters will not take inaction as an answer. Iowa’s State Senators must address the predominant concerns of constituents by banning eminent domain for carbon pipelines this session — or else feel the consequences at the ballot box.”
Factory farms are a huge pollution menace. These industrial facilities are responsible for an array of serious threats to our air, water and climate. Factory farms are responsible for an enormous amount of methane pollution — a potent greenhouse gas supercharging the climate crisis. Now, industry wants to profit off that pollution. They’re calling the scheme “renewable natural gas,” but we prefer the term “factory farm biogas.
The most recent assessments from the EPA report methane emissions from agriculture have increased about seven percent since 1990. Emissions from factory farm manure have risen an astonishing 71 percent. The main contributor to this spike appears to be the common factory farm practice of mixing animal waste with water.
Lagoon at Pennwood Dairy Farms. CCBY-USDA
After creating this problem, the factory farm and fossil fuel industries are promoting a bogus biogas “solution” — one that we’re all paying for. It involves trapping the methane before it is released into the atmosphere, using expensive and often dangerous digesters. Then they turn it around and market it as “clean energy.” This business is booming with venture capital and government subsidies, and it enjoys mostly glowing coverage in the media. After all, turning waste into energy is a good thing, right?
It’s time to set the record straight.
Methane? More Like Methain’t
If methane emissions are the problem, factory farm biogas is hardly a solution.
The main culprit here is actually the factory farms themselves. Factory farms produce and concentrate huge amounts of waste in one location. So addressing factory farm pollution has to start with addressing factory farms themselves.
But it’s not only the presence of poop — it’s the way factory farms handle it. Many facilities mix manure and water in large waste pits. Industry prefers to use the term, “lagoons,” but that’s quite a stretch. The anaerobic conditions in those pits are what create most of the methane. As the latest EPA data explains, solid manure management techniques practiced on non-industrial farms produce far less methane. The growth of factory farms and with it the growth of stewing waste cesspools have created the industry’s methane problem. Some projects, like one we’re fighting in Delaware, go even farther, creating methane where there was none before. Poultry litter doesn’t emit methane until companies modify it to “capture” the gas for profit.
Factory Farms Drive Climate Change — Biogas Doesn’t Help
The industry’s biogas “solution” addresses only a tiny fraction of methane pollution — created by its own poor practices. Despite pouring millions of public dollars into these projects, digesters do not appear to be having much effect on actually reducing pollution. One news report noted the Obama administration and an industry group aimed to reduce agriculture’s climate pollution problem by promoting digesters. The result? Since then, factory farms have only gotten bigger, and emissions have risen 15 percent.
So a factory farm digester is not even close to a solution. At best, it transforms a small fraction of the pollution created at these facilities into pipeline-grade gas and digestate. We’ll get to that later. But in doing so, the methane refinery creates a different stream of pollution:
The methane that will inevitably leak from pipelines and other dirty energy infrastructure;
The pollution created by trucks that carry the gas to be injected into pipelines;
And the pollution that is created when the gas is finally burned (releasing CO2).
Digesters use public money and incentives to prop up two of the biggest polluters — Big Ag and Big Energy.
Biogas Won’t Clean Up Factory Farms Either
What industry doesn’t tell you is there’s also the matter of the leftover poop after anaerobic digestion – what’s called “digestate.” Refining gas out of it doesn’t make that poop magically disappear. In fact, digestate has been found to contain higher concentrations of pollutants than manure, and is more water-soluble. This means the threat to clean water — a well-documented problem caused by factory farms — will persist even with biogas digesters.
Leftover digestate is generally overapplied to fields, and can either spill directly into waterways or leak into water tables from there. Those who live near factory farms know that the field application of manure has long been a menace for nearby communities. It poses real threats to people’s drinking water and health.
Frackers Love Biogas
There’s another industry as eager to hype bogus biogas as Big Ag — fossil fuel corporations and related utility companies. This might seem a little surprising at first. If factory farm gas were really a form of clean energy, it could replace gas from drilling. Wouldn’t that be bad news for the companies that make money fracking? They know better than to worry. Even the rosiest industry predictions tell us that biogas will only ever displace a small fraction of fracked gas usage.
For fossil fuel interests, this is almost a too-perfect scenario. The fracked gas industry is calling biogas their savior. They can promote biogas as ‘clean’ energy knowing it will be delivered in the same pipes that transport fossil gas. Factory farm gas does not replace fracked gas – it complements it, and further entrenches the dirty status quo.
Factory Farms And Their Waste Are No Climate Fix
Help us stop false solutions like factory farm biogas. It’s not clean energy and it’s not a path out of our climate crisis. We don’t need to rely on fairytales that paint fossil fuels and factory farms as heroes — we have the capability to rely on renewable energy now. Electing leaders with the political will to take necessary strides into a clean energy future is how we get there.
Do the higher prices on your grocery receipts lately mean that the growers producing your food are profiting more? Or that the increases reflect rising costs on their end? That’s not the biggest reason for the spike. Some participants in the path from farm to table are profiting big-time, while others are barely scraping by. Let’s take a look at the winners and those left holding the bag when it comes to rising grocery bills.
The Winners In The Food Profit Game: Big Ag
Over the past two years, the cost to feed a family of four on a thrifty budget has increased by 33.5%. Animal products, produced predominantly on factory farms, are sporting some of the largest price increases. Meanwhile, the largest meat, dairy and poultry corporations are seeing record profits.
Tyson Foods, Perdue and Cargill are all seeing double-digit revenue growth. Today, there are over 25,000 factory farms in the US. These industrial operations produce as much as possible as quickly as possible, all at the lowest cost to the corporation. That fast track to profit is a recipe for disaster for the rest of us.
Those Left Holding The Bag: Smaller Farmers
While Big Ag is raising prices at the grocery store, they’re also squeezing farmers for profit. For instance, more factory farms mean fewer farmers. In the five years from 2012 to 2017, fifteen percent of America’s dairies closed. That’s 10,000 rural businesses shuttering their doors and countless thousands of employees losing their jobs. These same trends are mirrored in the poultry, beef, and pork industries.
Farmers who do remain are struggling to make ends meet. For every dollar Americans spend on food, farmers take home only 14.3 cents. Whether buying seeds, slaughtering livestock or finding buyers, independent farmers struggle to remain afloat in a market Big Ag dominates. Contract growers who operate factory farms under Big Ag’s stranglehold aren’t doing much better. They are trapped in extractive contracts with corporations. Those parent companies own the animals, set the terms and dictate all aspects of raising the animals, from the buildings they are confined in to the feed they eat.
Those Left Holding The Bag: Rural Communities
Big Ag is gutting America’s rural communities all while raising prices at the grocery store for consumers. Factory farms are linked to declining rural economic prosperity, including job loss and population decline. On top of wreaking havoc on local economies, they’re also tremendous environmental hazards, producing 885 billion pounds of manure annually.
Flies, stench and toxic drinking water are the norm for those who are forced to live, work and play near factory farms. Small-town businesses from bookstores to independent grocers are closing shop, as large corporations push them out of the local economy. Rural counties nationwide are experiencing massive population declines. Some of the biggest declines come from counties where factory farms have moved in.
Those Left Holding The Bag: Our Planet
Grocery prices mirror trends in Big Ag’s climate emissions — both are on the rise. Factory farms are responsible for a whopping percentage of the methane emissions warming our climate. New EPA data reveals that factory-farmed animal manure emissions have risen 71 percent since 1990. And the manure is only half the problem. Industrial factory farming relies on the massively carbon-intensive overproduction of feedstock. This is produced with petroleum-derived fertilizers, pesticides, and practices like tilling that displace large amounts of soil carbon.
As factory farms continue to expand unchecked, the industry’s effect on the mounting climate crisis only intensifies.
We Must Stop Factory Farms
For too long, our politicians have put Big Ag and their Wall Street investors above Main Street. While corporate fat cats and their investors rake in the dough, farmers, rural communities and our planet are losing out.
Factory farms affect all of us, and consumers are feeling the impacts of a consolidated, profiteering industry more than ever. We must ban all new factory farms and transform our food system so it works for people and our planet — not Big Ag.
Join us in fighting for the Farm System Reform Actwith a message to Congress.
