This commentary is by Roger White of Middlebury, a volunteer with 350VT.
I once had a friend who wanted to quit smoking, but not really. So, he made up rules for himself that allowed him to try to quit, but not try too hard: For example, he couldn’t smoke at home, but if he went to the gym he could have a cigarette afterward.
He also decided that smoking when he traveled didn’t count — and because he traveled for work, this was a major concession. Long story short: He was able to follow his rules, but he’s a smoker to this day.
Vermont’s proposed Clean Heat Standard (currently making its way through the Legislature as in the bill H.715) strikes me as similarly counterproductive in its efforts to reduce the environmental impact of our heating sector: Its definition of clean energy, and its rules for how to keep track of it, are hopelessly muddled.
By considering biofuel and renewable natural gas as potential “clean” energy sources for heating, it significantly undermines our efforts to address Vermont’s runaway greenhouse gas emissions and reliance on environmentally destructive energy sources.
Biofuel is liquid or gas fuel made from plant material and agricultural waste. Generating it is land-intensive, displacing the production of food crops and often resulting in food shortages and spikes in prices. Not only that, but the deforestation required for biofuel production prevents an ecosystem from naturally absorbing carbon dioxide in the first place — which exacerbates the greenhouse gas emissions problem it’s intended to solve.
Taking renewable natural gas (methane captured from organic waste and wastewater treatment, livestock operations and factory farms) seriously as a “clean heat” energy requires us to overlook a whole range of problems: the pipeline-related issues around its transportation, the emissions generated from combustion (it burns just like any other natural gas fuel), and the significant environmental impact of the kinds of large-scale industrial agricultural operations that make renewable natural gas production profitable.
Adding insult to injury, renewable natural gas is most likely unable to make a significant dent in Vermont’s energy demands at all. It’s more effective as a public relations strategy for the natural gas industry than as an energy source for heating.
Like biofuel, renewable natural gas is predominantly produced out of state, and the environmental impacts of both are disproportionately severe for members of the vulnerable communities near which production sites are often located.
So when we treat them as “clean” sources of energy, we’re choosing to neglect this fact: They may be clean for us, but they certainly aren’t for the people forced to live and work around them.
If we’re serious about kicking the fossil fuel habit and cleaning up our environmental act, we can’t play word games around our definition of “clean.” I think more progress can be made toward reducing the environmental impact (and costs) of heating by investing in weatherization than by investing in biofuel and renewable natural gas.
It doesn’t make sense to impose an environmental standard that only lets us pretend we’re accomplishing something.
