A letter to the editor highlights the glaring problem with the Energy Futures Group’s Vermont Pathways Analysis Report and its Marginal Abatement Cost Curves Analysis: The analyses provide no transparent methodology to explain the carbon emissions factors of the various pathways that Energy Futures Group analyzes.
Without a transparent methodology, and now that EFG plans to toss numbers it doesn’t agree with and replace them with numbers it does, the Pathways Analysis Report lacks credibility. The report seems more designed to justify predetermined conclusions than to support actual Climate Council decision-making.
Because wood, even dried wood, contains water and is less dense than fossil fuels, it offers a less efficient form of combustion energy than fossil fuels. There is no scientific dispute that, for the same amount of energy released, burning wood creates more CO2 than burning fossil fuels, including natural gas and heating oil.
You can find one peer-reviewed paper comparing CO2 emissions from wood and various fossil fuels here.
I’m not advocating burning fossil fuels; we need to stop burning both fossil fuels and biofuels and quickly transition to solar-, wind-, geothermal-, and perhaps even nuclear-energy production. I’m simply pointing out that replacing the burning of fossil fuels with biofuels does not reduce CO2 emissions; it exacerbates Vermont’s CO2 emissions.
So, how does EFG explain its erroneous conclusions that replacing heating oil with pellet stoves will reduce greenhouse gas emissions? What evidence does EFG rely on to conclude that expanding the use of the McNeil plant — the single largest polluter of CO2 emissions in Vermont, which in 2021 emitted 453,000 tons of CO2 — will reduce emissions?
We don’t know; perhaps by the same erroneous accounting methods used by Burlington Electric Department, and espoused by Trump-appointed EPA director and climate-crisis denier Scott Pruit, who declared wood-burning “carbon neutral.”
Burning wood is not carbon-neutral. Several peer-reviewed meta-analysis of several dozen peer-reviewed studies of greenhouse gas emissions support the conclusion that burning wood is not carbon-neutral.
I hope that when the Energy Futures Group alters the district heat emissions numbers in the EFG Analysis, it will include a clear description of the methodology EFG uses.
Pike Porter
Burlington
