LCFC recommends the California Air Resources Board to recognize relevance of climate smart agriculture

In California, the Low Carbon Fuels Coalition sent a letter to the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to recommend the body to recognize farming practices and other methods of climate smart agriculture (CSA) into the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) Rulemaking.

“By quantifying CSA in CA-GREET and in LCFS pathways, CARB would take a leading role in incentivizing carbon smart farming practices in all locations that grow feedstock for LCFS fuel pathways, build knowledge regarding the short and long-term effectiveness of various CSA strategies, and speed fulfillment of California’s aggressive decarbonization goals,” the coalition said.

The Low Carbon Fuels Coalition noted that the ‘Getting to Neutral Report’, recently published by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, analyzed California’s carbon neutrality goal and determined that it is necessary for the State to remove 125 million metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year by 2045 in order to achieve carbon neutrality. The report then determined the lowest cost and most productive pathways to create a negative emissions strategy and identified that the three central pillars of the strategy were to capture and store as much carbon as possible through better management of natural and working lands, convert waste biomass to fuels and store the CO2 and remove CO2 directly from the air using purpose-built machines and store the CO2.

The natural solutions encompassed by the report include farming practices that increase the amount of carbon stored in soils, according to the coalition.