“Until the state has a solid understanding of how much wood is realistically available without diminishing the long-term health and diversity of our forests, and until there is a protective harvesting standard in place, there should be a moratorium on any new, large-scale facilities in Vermont.”
The only independent, multi-stakeholder study of the carbon impacts of burning trees to generate electricity found that it would take 40 years of forest regrowth just to get to parity in carbon pollution with burning coal for those same four decades. To get to parity with natural gas would take almost a century.
Acting as if the carbon emitted from trees cut and burned here will be sequestered by trees over there makes as much sense as letting a coal plant write off its emissions because it’s not cutting trees over there, either.
The current boom in biomass energy depends entirely on the mutually reinforcing myths of renewability and carbon neutrality. But in practice, biomass energy is far carbon neutral and actually looks a lot more like coal and oil.
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