Climate and environmental justice groups are demanding that California regulators pump the brakes on the state’s emerging carbon capture program, arguing that the approach risks enriching corporations while leaving farming communities and disadvantaged neighborhoods holding the bag.
On September 25, impacted community members and climate advocates told the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to reject carbon capture, use, and storage (CCUS) projects. CARB is set to finalize California’s first CCUS program by year’s end, establishing the rules for how the state will evaluate and permit these projects.
CCUS technology captures carbon dioxide either directly from the air or from industrial sources, then either uses it or buries it underground. On paper, it sounds like a climate fix. In practice, advocates say, it’s a corporate play that shifts the burden onto rural and farming communities while doing little to address the root causes of the climate crisis.
“These projects concentrate risk in communities that don’t benefit from them,” says Food & Water Watch, which coordinated the push-back. The concern is that California, as a climate leader, is essentially green-lighting an approach that benefits the carbon-polluting industries that created the emissions in the first place, rather than fundamentally transforming how the economy operates.
The agricultural angle
For farming communities, CCUS raises a specific red flag. Some projects target soil carbon sequestration, essentially paying farmers to store carbon in their fields. On the surface, this sounds like a win: a revenue stream and a climate contribution. But environmental advocates worry that corporate control of agricultural carbon creates new forms of land consolidation, transferring stewardship from farmers to extractive capital.
As young and beginning farmers navigate regenerative practices that improve soil health, a commercialized carbon market could upend farm economics and concentrate power among agribusinesses. Farmers would become managers of corporate carbon assets rather than stewards of their own land.
The California pushback also echoes a broader pattern: communities resisting industrial development on agricultural land. Whether it’s data centers, CCUS facilities, or other infrastructure, farming regions are the target for projects that serve distant markets and profit centers, often at the cost of local water, soil, and air quality.
Why environmental justice groups are skeptical
The criticism goes deeper than just land rights. Environmental advocates argue that CCUS is a distraction from the real work of emissions reduction. Investing heavily in carbon capture lets polluters delay cutting emissions at the source, buying time with a technology that still requires major fossil fuel inputs and may never achieve climate net-benefit at scale.
“We need to transform how we produce energy and food,” says the coalition of groups calling on CARB. Instead, CCUS offers a patch that lets industrial agriculture and fossil fuel industries claim climate action while continuing business as usual.
For states like California that have positioned themselves as climate leaders, approving a permissive CCUS framework sends a signal: corporations can continue polluting if they invest in capturing some of it later. For farming communities, that means their land and water become collateral in a climate strategy designed by and for the industries most responsible for emissions.
What CARB decides
The California Air Resources Board now has to decide whether to move forward with a CCUS program at all, or to reject the push and prioritize emissions reduction strategies that don’t rely on unproven capture technology. The decision comes as another form of environmental protection is kicking in across California: stricter oversight of agricultural pesticides.
California has leverage here. The state’s market size and regulatory influence often set national precedent. If CARB greenlights CCUS without meaningful environmental and community safeguards, other states will likely follow. If California says no, or sets a high bar for approval, it signals that genuine climate action means something different than enabling new extractive industries.
For farmers already managing drought, water contamination, and debt, the decision matters enormously. A permissive CCUS regime could reshape land ownership and control in farming regions for decades. Environmental groups are betting that loud pushback now can steer California toward real climate solutions instead of corporate greenwashing.
