Best Left Standing: The Role of Trees in Attaining Burlington’s CO2 Reduction Goals
By Deniz Dutton
May 6, 2021
As I drive down the steep hill across Riverside Avenue and follow the bend on the Intervale Road in the Old North End of Burlington, I am met with the shocking sight of a massive cloud that seemed to have descended upon the earth. I am confused, as there is not a cloud in the sky on this sunny, early spring day. Getting closer, I notice that the cloud is coming from the smokestacks of the McNeil Generating Station, a wood-burning power plant that supplies most of the Queen City’s electricity.Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
The industrial structure contrasts sharply with the surrounding small farms and nature trails that comprise the Intervale Co-op. Signs mounted on the fence around the facility assure visitors that the cloud is nothing more than water vapor and that the level of particulate matter emitted from the power plant is far below federal legal limits. But what is also coming out of that smokestack— and which can’t be seen by the naked eye— is carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that is drastically changing our climate and our planet.
Since its inception, the McNeil plant has spewed between 385,000 and 543,000 tons of CO2 per year into the sky, approximately the amount produced by 118,000 cars in a year. Still, the plant is the single largest contributor to Burlington’s renewable energy portfolio, followed by hydroelectric power. The city became the first in the United States to have its electricity supplied by 100% renewable energy in 2014, although it has now set its sights on carbon neutrality by 2030.
The wood biomass that fuels McNeil has been instrumental in achieving this goal, as has the designation of biomass energy as “carbon-neutral” by the EPA in 2018. The gross oversimplification of the carbon cycle on which this label is based allows the biomass industry to reap subsidies and take tax cuts designed to support the development of renewable energy alternatives— subsidies that are often the only thing making biomass economically feasible.
Consequently, bureaucrats pat themselves on the back for finding an easy “solution” to climate change that does not cost much or require any actual changes to our cultural habits or energy systems.
“It’s easy to convert a coal plant to burn wood,” says Rachel Smolker, co-director of Biofuelwatch, an NGO based in both the UK and the US. “It doesn’t have a lot of the problems with intermittency that happens with wind and solar so it gained a lot of traction very quickly and has now come to feature as one of the main sources of renewable energy.”
Ironically, burning wood for power is less efficient than burning coal. Overall, for each kilowatt-hour of electricity produced, burning wood is likely to add two to three times as much carbon to the air as using fossil fuels. Yet, biomass is still considered carbon-neutral – what is the catch?
As it turns out, the catch is locality. Vermont has no coal mines or oil wells, but it does have acres and acres of forestland.
“When you start factoring in that full lifecycle, of where the coal comes from and the equity issues around it, wood tends to be the better choice [compared to coal],” says UVM professor of forestry Anthony D’Amato.
The combined mining, trucking, and burning of coal have a larger net carbon footprint than the combustion of locally harvested wood. That’s why a wood-fired power plant fits into Burlington’s net-zero energy goals; though not completely sustainable, the plant brings Burlington closer to self-sufficiency and reduces its reliance on imported fossil fuels. “[Biomass is] not carbon neutral, but it’s carbon better,” D’Amato said, borrowing the words of Mike Snyder, commissioner of the Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation.
For Smolker, on the other hand, the bottom line is simple: any biomass is bad biomass. “The McNeil plant operates at 23% efficiency, which means basically that three out of every four trees go to waste. The smoke goes out and the carbon dioxide goes out, but the actual energy content is essentially wasted because it’s so inefficient,” she laments.
For the last 35 years, there has been talk of increasing the plant’s efficiency by using the heat by-product from McNeil to heat the homes and businesses in Burlington, a process coined as “district heat,” which could potentially offset a fifth of the city’s carbon emissions. This would put all of that waste heat to use, but it would not necessarily reduce the amount of fuel needed to run the plant; the idea is that the more buildings sign on to receive district heat, the fewer smoking chimneys there will be, increasing the city’s efficiency overall. On March 2nd, Burlington citizens voted to make district heat more politically feasible; essentially, the city now has the authority to levy carbon taxes on businesses that continue to use fossil fuels for heating. While this does provide an incentive for more buildings to switch to electric heating systems, the source of that electricity is still the McNeil plant, and it would mean committing to biomass energy for years to come.
Excited to finally see with my own eyes the power plant that has sparked so much controversy, I park my car on the side of the muddy, unpaved road and take a stroll along the fence that surrounds the facility. Every couple of minutes, unmarked pickup trucks carrying woody debris drive into the compound and deposit their load onto a football field-sized pile of wood waste, most of which appears to be pieces of wooden crates. Bright orange and grey informational signs posted on the border fence facing the Intervale Road sport titles like “How the process works” and “why biomass is sustainable” – a bold statement considering the research on carbon dynamics in forests does not support such a conclusion.
To their credit, the McNeil plant employs four full-time professional foresters to ensure that their fuel is sourced with as little detriment to forests as possible. Betsy Lesnikoski, the chief forester who has worked at the plant since its establishment in 1984, informs me that the regulatory processes determining where and how McNeil can source wood are extremely rigorous. The Department of Fish and Wildlife must approve a plan for inflicting minimal damage on the ecosystem when harvesting wood.
“Once we have their approval, only then can the harvest begin,” she said.
However, while the impact on habitat and wildlife is taken seriously, this same amount of attention is not paid to the impact on the climate that burning tree biomass may have. Over time, climate change will have as much of an effect on wildlife in Vermont as habitat destruction.
Lesnikoski emphasizes that no trees are cut down in Vermont for the explicit purpose of fuel.
“What we get is the forest residues, which are the tops or the unusable parts of the tree, or small trees that don’t qualify for any of those other products,” she said. The other products that she is referring to are mainly paper and firewood, which require “high-quality” lumber.
Smolker is skeptical of the narrative purported by plants like McNeil. “It’s a myth that the industry has given us that it’s just leftover materials,” she tells me. “They’ll go in and say this tree won’t make very good timber but we can cut it anyway because we can put it in the biomass plant. It creates a market that wasn’t there before.”
Yet this new market can provide an incentive to keep forests in Vermont around, which is another way in which the biomass industry in Vermont justifies its existence.
“When we talk about working landscapes in Vermont, there’s a long history and legacy of logging happening,” D’Amato says in reference to popular initiatives like the Value Use program, which gives landowners preferential tax treatment to manage their forests for the production of wood products. The biomass plant provides a market for low-quality wood, which can sometimes make the difference between a profitable woodlot and a woodlot that a landowner thinks would be better made into something else. Both D’Amato and Lesnikoski emphasize that this practice is important for keeping the vast amount of privately-owned Vermont forestland from being sold off and developed.
Largely, the way in which the forestry industry interprets the carbon cycle has allowed for the proliferation of biomass. The accepted knowledge is that younger trees sequester more carbon as they grow, so the value has been placed on new growth over storage. D’Amato acknowledges that there can be some manipulation of the narrative around forests and carbon, depending on what the agenda calls for.
“If you’re all about cutting trees you can say, ‘young trees are best for carbon sequestration.’ People kind of select what part of the carbon cycle they want to talk about,” he says.
However, as new scientific findings continually emerge about the carbon dynamics of forests, this idea is being amended.
“The interesting thing is in a very young forest, the trees are growing fast but there’s also a lot of carbon being lost to the atmosphere from respiration. Early on they don’t function as well as a carbon sink but over time the capacity for this gets stronger and stronger, before reaching a relatively stable state” D’Amato says. “Old forests [being] better for storing carbon is an indisputable scientific fact.”
After a forest is cut, sequestration rates remain low for several decades, because while saplings grow quickly, they are smaller and subsequently do not store nearly as much total carbon as older, larger trees. It can take between 30 to 70 years for a tree to reach peak sequestration rates— years we can’t afford to wait. As each molecule of CO2 enters the atmosphere, it affects our current climate and triggers ecological feedback loops that will continue regardless of whether carbon is eventually sequestered.
As they stand, Vermont’s trees sequester half the state’s own emissions. Without forests, the city of Burlington would be hard-pressed to achieve its carbon neutrality goals. It is paradoxical that trees are being cut down at increasing rates to reach this goal, increasing the carbon debt from both ends.
Though the science confirms the forest lover’s intuition that trees are best left standing, reducing emissions in the short term may mean using trees for power in a forest-rich state while looking for more sustainable alternatives. If an alternative energy source produces emissions out of state at some point in its life cycle, these must be taken into account; each option should be assessed critically and holistically.
“It’s a good intermediary,” D’Amato says of biomass energy, “but then again, when we think about these bridges it’s not just about trying to transition away from carbon-intensive energies. It’s also about thinking about where we are exporting our impact to in order to meet some of these [CO2 reduction] goals.”
Booting biomass is not the answer if it means, among other things, importing our wood from elsewhere because the incentive to keep forests around is gone. While biomass energy alone may not have an overly detrimental effect on Vermont’s forests, its use still sustains a culture of extractivism that we must transition away from. More work needs to be done to attribute value to forests in different ways than just their physical biomass. Carbon markets are on the rise and could provide an avenue for monetizing the numerous ecosystem services that Vermont’s forests provide without cutting down trees.
Ultimately, it comes down to finding the balance between energy needs and the need to mitigate climate change— without succumbing to our desire for quick, easy solutions. Labels like “local” and “renewable” will not get us out of the climate crisis; rather, thoroughly assessing the impacts of our options, doing our carbon accounting correctly, and putting our money where our words are will. McNeil may only be a local plant but it is contributing to a global problem, and keeping it in commission for decades to come is not consistent with the values that our elected officials claim to have. While the city does seek to make progress in its carbon emission reductions, anything less than complete carbon neutrality will not be enough to stop us from crossing planetary thresholds from which we cannot return.
Before I leave McNeil, I close my eyes and try to tune out the ceaseless hum of the power plant, for a moment imagining in its place another vegetable garden like the ones on the Intervale land behind me, or perhaps some gently swaying birch and pine trees, yielding slowly to maple, beech, and oak. No matter what confronts us in the present, we must never stop dreaming about a better future.
