Dartmouth College’s proposed biomass plant is unlikely to be safe or “green.” Biomass burning is toxic, barely regulated and has weak testing requirements, making toxic limits unenforceable.
Potential toxic pitfalls of a biomass heating plant including hazardous air pollutants like hydrochloric acid and dioxins, carcinogens like benzene and formaldehyde, and heavy metals like arsenic, lead and cadmium. The American Lung Association has made a strong statement opposing biomass: “Burning biomass generates dangerous air pollution that immediately harms human health. … These pollutants can cause a sweeping array of health harms, from asthma attacks to cancer to heart attacks, resulting in emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and premature deaths” because of the toxic gases and small particulates that enter into the lungs but can never leave.
These particulates and toxins affect everyone, but especially individuals susceptible to lung disease, the elderly and children. Burning wood releases carbon now that takes decades or even a century for replacement trees to reabsorb. In the meantime, all that atmospheric carbon will accumulate and drive climate change because there are no legal or regulatory guarantees that require managed forests to grow trees to the point at which the carbon that is burned will be re-sequestered. The entire basis for the “carbon neutral” argument for burning biomass is flawed, not carbon neutral, not “green” and unable to achieve the goals of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Dartmouth alumnus William Schlesinger, a biogeochemist and a member of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board, wrote: “The whole renewable forest industry is kind of a hoax in terms of its benefit as climate mitigation.” Biomass plants can legally emit 2½ times more pollution than oil or natural gas plants before triggering federal permitting. Dartmouth’s likely would be classified as a “low emitter,” so it is unlikely the college would be required to measure emissions under current EPA rules.
I implore Dartmouth President Phil Hanlon to put the brakes on this project until it can be properly vetted by independent scientists, climatologists and concerned Hanover residents.
AARON OSOFSKY
Hanover
As I read the many letters to the editor in the Valley News about Dartmouth College’s proposed biomass heating plant, and as I talk with folks about it, it seems that fear of the unknown and “alternative facts” are generating real concern.
At a forum in Bradford, Vt., a couple of years ago, state officials, foresters, loggers and biomass plant operators came together to discuss the challenges faced in the industry with the loss of many viable markets for the “junk wood” that makes up about 70% of what’s cut in sustainable forestry practices. I learned so much and now have a greater appreciation for the players and their commitment to sustainable forests and the northern forest landscape. I realize that having viable outlets for biomass is critical for the marketplace, which provides a significant boost to the regional economy both directly and in “trickle down” to loggers, truckers, equipment repairs and sales, landowners, foresters and all the stores and suppliers that these folks visit.
The fears of emissions, truck traffic, wiping out forests, etc., are all understandable, but learning more about such an operation and its effects might alleviate some of those fears. Perhaps Dartmouth could organize a field trip for skeptics to Middlebury College for a tour of its biomass operation and a discussion with those involved in the decision and its effects now that there are 10 years of history to review.
MARVIN HARRISON
Newbury, Vt.
That violence is no more subject to legislative remedy than is stupidity, that it neither recognizes nor responds to anything other than counter-violence or a credible threat of it, is a fact so unpalatable, so distressing, so repugnant to the infantile, the cowhearted and the superficially civilized sorts that make up the gun control mob that it can never be acknowledged, much less contemplated or discussed. After all, if it doesn’t square with one’s puerile preferences or delicate sensibilities it can’t very well be reality, now, can it?
ANTHONY STIMSON
Lebanon
I wondered why President Donald Trump has yellow hair. It’s to match the streak on his back. You know he’s yellow because he attacks women, like the four congresswomen of color who have spoken out against him. Maybe if these four women were 14 years old they would be invited to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort to attend a private party and have “fun.”
ROBERT POLLARD
Enfield