 Welcome everyone to our community conversation on industrial aquaculture in Maine. I'm Matt Cannon. I'm the campaign and policy associate director here at the Maine chapter of the Sierra Club. And in addition to a lot of our advocacy work and organizing work in Maine, we started these community conversations at the beginning of COVID by Zoom. So we're a little over a year here and they've been great ways to engage on important issues here in Maine to learn more to talk about them. So we're really lucky to have two folks here who have spent some time thinking about aquaculture in Maine. And we will we were interested to hear what they have to say. And then there'll be plenty of time for questions, as I mentioned. So after they're done, we'll we'll take questions from the chat and then we'll hopefully have a nice discussion here. So I'd like to introduce Jim Merkel and Jonathan Pohlford. Jim, do you want to start? Yeah, sure. Thanks everybody for showing up and for being here with us for this time. And you know, if you're in, I didn't notice there's a lot of people on this call that I haven't met before. So I'm really glad you're here. And around Belfast, this whole topic of industrial aquaculture is really a hot, a hot nerve to a lot of people. And because we've had just tons of hearings, full packed with people. And and so it's been a very divisive issue. And I'm hoping that Sierra Club can play a role in really just helping inform people like why we have our position that we have and also listening to others who may disagree and respectfully having a conversation. And you know, so today we really want to you know, go into a little more depth of what our position is and Sierra Club National does have a policy that we have a marine team plus also food and ag team. And they have had policies in place long standing and more recently than updating them. But you know, one of their biggest issues, why they oppose Nordic is that they, they support systems that are completely enclosed without any connection to the sea, and that are completely recycling water and also polycultures where you have multiple species, not just a monoculture. And everyone knows the work, you know, over the, you know, all the decades, understanding the impacts of monocultures and huge CAFOs, concentrated animal feeding operations. And the aquaculture systems do not look that much different than a huge pig farm or chicken farm, when you look at inputs and outputs and raw impact. And that's to the ecosystem. So it's using the commons, our clean air, clean water, electricity grids, all those things. And it's using it also as a sink to throw pollution out. And, you know, a lot of people have understood for a lot of years that dilution is not the solution. Even if you were to put this pipeline of Nordics way out into the deep ocean, there's still not, Sierra Clause is not buying that. You know, just diluting pollution is not a solution. So, you know, there's some real clear reasons why the thinking has been as it is, especially when we get into shallow waters and estuaries where we are, those are the most fragile ecosystems. In Belfast, you couldn't get close deeper into the estuary system than Nordic's proposal is. So it's in 35 feet of water. And we have all these fish that are recovering. And so it's probably one of the biggest threats. And Maine would like to be a hub of aquaculture. And they're promoting it with proposals in Bucksport, Goolsboro, Frenchman's Bay, Jonesport, Millinocket. And so I'll leave it at that. And, you know, I can expand a little more as we go. But maybe Jonathan will say a few words also, because he's been on the calls with me with the national activists, grassroots campaigners from across the country who've been working on these issues as well. Do you want to go there, Jonathan, and share a few things? Sure. Yeah, welcome, everybody. And I'm excited to have a good conversation about about this issue. Yeah, I think that one of the other things that I think is really important in understanding what make what in certainly in my mind is one of the biggest negative aspects of this proposed project in Belfast, as well as aquaculture in general, this type of aquaculture is the climate impact. And so we relate when I say we really Jim and a couple other people, George Aguera, predictor or particularly did a lot of analysis of this proposal here as a case to look at with all the available information that we could get and did an analysis of carbon impact or climate impact per pound of protein produced is what we kind of boiled it down to. And when you look at the embodied energy of creating it and the operational carbon impact of growing the fish, it is a really unsustainable a very unsustainable way to grow food for human consumption. And I think that for me personally, that is really the the most damning analysis is is this actually part of a human food system versus for human society that can move forward and still have a viable planet with our climate crisis that we're in. And I think the answer is very clearly no. So, and I think even in the net pen ones also suffer from though not as much embodied carbon with building out this massive plant, the largest operational costs for the climate are the feedstock and the fish that meal that is used and that that in itself is reason enough reason enough not to buy from farm raised salmon at this point with the food that they currently use as feedstock. And if we can talk more about that later, you know, any other food sources wishful thinking if you aren't actually producing it on a commercial scale, and there isn't isn't another source that we're aware of. Yeah, I'm back to you. Yeah. And, you know, I got in deeply involved in this issue in 1999 out on the West Coast, a professor who from the University of British Columbia had just bought a fishing boat. And him and I were actually going to kayak the entire coast were really good friends he teach. He was teaching sedimentology at UBC, but he's really into the ocean ecosystem. And we ended up three months on a fishing boat. And we visited some of the whale and ocean campaigners out there by sea and Alexandria Morton, for example, we had dinner with her and spent some good time with her. And at the time she was fighting aquaculture pens, the net pens, because she was befriending the fishermen and so that she entrusted them. And then they went to the aquaculture industry and said, Look, these here's all our places, we really don't want the pens, these are really our great, our best fishing spaces. And that's where they ended up putting all the pens. And so she lost the trust of these of all the fishermen that she been building relationships with. And if you look her up, and you'll find that it's been a pretty brutal battle over the years. I mean, she's basically been taking salmon off of the supermarket shelf and testing them and finding disease in the fish that are going to market and putting known disease fish into the pens out there. But people think that the pen solves the land base will solve the problem. But the big pipe that goes out into the sea is putting all that stuff that would be out coming out of the pen is just putting it out even though, you know, some operations filter better than others. It's still like 13 times the Belfast city sewer in nitrogen, 13 times the nitrogen and that bay is already closed for shellfish because of algae blooms. So wherever we have a situation, and we have a closures, because of these toxic algae bloom, which are driven by high phosphorus nitrogen, we shouldn't be adding insult to injury. And so they find this 11 year study up in Canada, Port Moten Bay, on lobster harvest, they find 50% or greater decrease in lobster near the pen. But the but the reasons they found was the smell of the salmon basically disrupt the ability of a buried lobster who's on a lobster on hags to actually smell their food, they have to smell to find food. And if your whole world smells like salmon because of a big pipe, or your near pen, you're not going to be able to find your food and you starve. So they're talking 50, this 11 year study, this is not this 11 year scientific peer reviewed study showing decrease in lobster, lobster catch. So there's a lot of unintended consequences. And they find is the lice are attracted to certain pheromones and pheromones from from the smell. So the big pipe that's coming at that would be coming out into the base from these recirculating systems are going to be attract a magnet for life. So any of you who know, if you put a bunch of apples out in your compost bin, you're going to find every creature on earth wants to get there. So this pipe is going to be a magnet for life. Any recovering salmon are going to come around. And they could get any diseases coming out of pipeline. And this will be any monoculture is a basically a breeding ground for some of the most resistant strains of any kind of virus or disease. And, you know, Nordic has several pages of chemicals in their proposal that they would use, they say only in a very bad disaster, but it's all there like 12,000 gallons of bleach is there in their proposal. So they're not hiding the fact that there's been mass die offs and there has been up in Canada, several mass die offs. It's been a big facility 100 million built out in the Midwest. And that went on bankrupt just in 19 vero blue. And so they had it up and running and had massive die off and close the facility. So it's not hypothetical that there could be really deep problems. So I do want people to throw any questions on the chat. I see, can you share your carbon impact analysis? And that's what I'll do now. So yeah, thanks. I'll share my screen now. And hopefully this is going to work fine. And desktop. And while I'm sharing while I'm doing this presentation, you know, if anyone does have questions about it, please do, you know, ask and I'll I can always give it more detail or I don't want to go too slow here. But basically, on the first, the findings, this was done by myself, I'm a recovering engineer, and George Aguiar is a friend from town who is quite technical savvy. And he basically helped me put this that the numbers together for evaluating in depth Nordic Aquifarms as one proposal. And so we have these findings that it would be equivalent to 4.6 to 6.4% of the entire mains 2030 greenhouse gas greenhouse gas target. And so doing something like this would when you know, the Belfast, it would make it possible for Belfast to meet their climate commitments. And you'll see why the carbon footprint is so massive, it's like adding, you know, up to 165,000 cars to the road, adding like five to seven Belfast to our area. You know, and here we have the per capita carbon footprint of any one of us, you or I, on average across the United States 16 metric ton of CO2 equivalents, the little e means you're adding in the other gases such as methane and other gases that are sometimes much more potent of a greenhouse gas to the equation. So you see it, it's adding a massive footprint. And our numbers are a little underestimated. And we had no idea when we were doing this analysis Nordic would not give us data. And we asked multiple times for their electricity. And so we were assuming it was their generator capacity, which is eight two megawatt generators. So we had 16 megawatts. And now in Nordic is telling us it's more like 28 megawatts that they'll burn. And a whole new corridors needed. You know, Mainers don't Mainers don't have much of an appetite for corridors. And this would actually require this plant to have a 28 megawatt line section 80 reopened and all that $60 million with the work would be essentially a subsidy to this corporation. You know, and Belfast as a community assigned two agreements. And these agreements are to be in alignment with the Paris Accord, the Paris Agreement. And so that means, you know, achieving a balance between, you know, humans generated and and and what the actual ecosystem can sequester by the second half of the century. So that's meaning carbon neutral achieve a balance. That means carbon neutral, zero carbon. You know, our governor actually signed even a more aggressive commitments here. And front of the United Nations, Janet Mills, I watched her speech. It was quite beautiful. She says that the state is committing to be carbon neutral by 2045. So that means 45, you know, that means zero 100 percent below 1990 levels by 25 by 2045. And so just a few other, you know, this other like unintended consequences when you to the climate, just if you're going to take a site like Nordic out in the West Coast, they chose an industrial site, Samoa point that had been a pulp mill like Bucksport did that, you know, an industrial nightmare, but they are recovering it in their pipeline. If they do build out in Eureka, California, Nordic's pipeline would be open sea water all the way to Japan, not in an estuary, deep, deep ocean water there. But here they're clearing, they would like to clear 34 acres. Now, if you study what the storage of carbon is actually in the roots, so when you and the trunk, so it's about half above the earth and half below in the soil. So they are planning to remove between 15 and 48 feet of soil to build those tanks. Those tanks when we started doing the running all this data, you know, I'm a recovering engineer, but you put the weight of a tank into your farm, it's kind of a massive. And so Nordic's already had a lawsuit out in Europe, where in Denmark, where their tanks were sinking, and they sued Nordic did, but they lost their suit and suing the contractor. So Nordic lost that and had to pay on not anticipating the weight of the tanks and the soil's ability. So that site, I've walked it tons of times, we go out there all the time, that it's a beautiful forest along the Little River, but it's got 17 wetlands in it. If you wanted to build a house and find a perking site there, you couldn't find one. You know, if you said, let me just buy this and put a house here, you know, nobody would let you put a house. It's all wetland. It's not percable, but it's beautiful and habitat and storing carbon. And so we did the calculations of 42.9 metric tons of carbon per year. That's just what it sequesters. But if you cut it and dig up all those soils, you're releasing instantaneously all that carbon. So the assessment we did on Nordic was I'm quite used to doing these, what we call life cycle assessments, as an engineer, I did many of these. But when you get into ecology or system, you would do a similar thing. So all the embodied carbon on the left here in this diagram are all the things it takes to build a facility or an item, like if you're going to buy a can of Coke or anything, the can has got embodied energy in it, you know, and the liquid inside you drink and it's, you know, gone through you. But this big facility has all this carbon from all the manufacturing to building of the steel, the tanks, the glass, all the pumps, all the filters, all that. So that's added up along with removing tons and tons of soil and replacing with gravel and paving areas and then building huge buildings. And and then operating, you have all the fish feed and the electricity to run all those pumps. And it's massive. The electricity is just massive. And so if you think of two megawatt generators and eight of them, that's like a small power plant that could run the central coast, you know, you could run a huge part of the central mid coast with that. And they in plan to run them, you know, on a daily basis. But as early as 2015, recirculating RAS recirculating systems have been identified as the most carbon intensive of all these different types of aquaculture. So like Sierra Club is not opposed to systems of aquaculture that are small footprint. But this is the most carbon intensive of all the types. And Nordic quotes in their literature, this analysis done, and we've been through this in detail. So they're combined, they're looking at this big red item would be to ship Nordic salmon all the way to Seattle by plane, putting the fish on a nice cozy seat, you know, and flying it across and having you eat it. Of course, it, you know, I'm being exaggerating, but it's a large bit of carbon as if that's our choice. Like in Maine, I can get a lot of seafood that's from Maine or the East Coast. So I don't have to. If you have a study and all you're doing is comparing their project to flying salmon from a Nordic pen. It's not really a good study. And so I don't want to go into labor that. But our analysis was more detailed. That was a good analysis in that it did do embodied carbon. But we did three different life cycle assessment tests. Actually, we use two calculators and then we actually branched out to even a third just to make sure we're getting good data and that we weren't skewed. So we included things such as soil removal, import of aggregate row, building pipelines, loss of forests, building tanks, pumps, motors, filters, backup generators, and also the operational is electricity, diesel, glycerin, fish food. And our results are a little different. So if you look at the first bar, this is a study done in on an operating facility in China. So we said, let's get that study. And it was peer reviewed. And that is, you know, a whole team of researchers did it and came up with the life cycle assessment of a car of a facility in China. And so that's his top bar. The second bar is the bar that we actually calculated using putting in actual data off of the drawings that Nordic has made available to the public. And so you see the light blue, which is the feed production is pretty similar in all these examples. It's a big footprint to grind up all this small food fish from other places like Central America or Africa and ship them here for fish food. Those are, but those are, and they use pig blood and chicken, slaughter house waste and GMO grains and soy and grains. That's what the fish feed is. The blue, the darker blue you see is the embodied. So you see the China study accounted for a little bit more than what Nordic. The third line here is the, I mean the fourth line is the Nordic's assessment that they've been touting for this, this their land base, which would be the fourth line down. Our analysis came out to more than double what they had had predicted. That was in 2016 and it was not built based on any built facility. So the China one is based on a built facility. Our analysis is based on their drawings. And the third is just a different calculator that didn't quite have all the input places to put in all the embodied carbon. So when we were able to put all the embodied carbon in, you can see the dark blue got much bigger. And, you know, it's of course always an underestimate because you can't anticipate all the things that go into any kind of industrial facility. If you just go and look to buy like one system there and you go to go online and try to find all the parts to build one piping system and see how expensive all those parts are. And it's incredibly impactful. So what we're finding now, if you look down the bottom here, you see wild sardines are a tiny footprint. They're 100 times smaller, 108 times smaller than eating caged salmon. And if you want it to get like a haddock burger at a local pub, you're still dealing with a very small footprint. So we have a lot of beautiful seafood choices on the east coast of Maine that are low impact. And there is a bit of a misnomer being propagated that the sea can't supply for this growing human population. Well, it can if we manage it well and use less and use it as a treat, use it less and always totally responsibly harvesting from nature. So our recommendations really would be to demonstrate carbon neutrality. And Norway, this project was three quarters of the entire Norway's industrial sector. For 2020, one project would be three quarters of Norway's industrial sector of electricity of carbon. Now, the whole country has gone to a huge commitment for each sector to become carbon neutral. And you look at their progress been amazing. So this couldn't be built over there. And so and then the applique, Kent, we are saying they should use a brown field, like say the people in Bucksport, and it should be on stable soil, and it should be a completely closed system, then we wouldn't have this opposition. So I'll end there and stop the share. And then I really do invite, you know, Jonathan wants to say anything. And if anyone wants to ask questions, you can type them in the chat. And I'm really open to any question or challenging my data. As an engineer, I love people that challenge my data and find out because if you find mistakes in it, I'm happy because I want to never put probably get a bad piece of information out there. So yeah, Jonathan, any thoughts or does anyone else want to let me look at the questions here? I saw one question that was asked about the money in aquaculture and in our marine in, you know, industries right now in Maine. And I think that's not sure if I'm answering quite the question. But right now, we have a very strong lobster fisheries still. I've heard a different different getting a phone call. I have to be on my phone here. Sorry about that. I'm here. I have heard differing numbers about the value of the lobster fishery in Maine, but somewhere around five billion dollars or something like that, as far as economic activity in the state of Maine each year. I think that the that that is a very strong part of our economy and doing things which jeopardize that doesn't make sense. And so this because of the impacts of Penn stock, as well as this, the potential impact of the land based ones also with the outflow, you know, they seem like we need to be supporting the existing fisheries. The other one also is that the restoring, if we want to restore really the fisheries in the Gulf of Maine and around the world to the health to support wild caught fish, we need to be looking at our river systems and and some of the dam removals we've had that have allowed much stronger herring runs and a wife and things like that. Those kind of practices really strengthen the entire ecosystem so that we have a sustainable fishery. And I haven't because I'm having to work off my phone, I'll have to Yeah, I can check it out. And Jim, I don't know if you can read those two, but I think the other part of that question was you're getting to it. The alternatives, the state has to make money and kind of what are the other sustainable aquaculture farms, kelp mussels, what can you speak to any of those? Right. And you know, what I'm around the world, there's so much aquaculture is happening and I happen to be filming over in India and also in Cuba and people there are doing great small scale like growing tilapia, for example, in polycultures, where they have multiple species eating from one system. And a lot of these smaller systems are they can operate and have people can be profitable without scaling up to this massive, massive plant. I mean, Nordic, from the first presentations they were giving us, they said they can only be profitable at this massive, massive scale. But when you get to that scale, I mean, Steve Byers had asked a question here, you know, about what happens, you know, when we have these big proposals, they take up all the oxygen in the room, for example, if Nordic was allowed, it ends up being allowed to build in in Belfast. If someone else wanted to do anything that's going to pump more pollution, and they just put in nitrogen equal to 13 times their sewer system. They took up all that capacity and more, the capacity doesn't exist even now to for that water to be uptake. So when you don't have the capacity to even uptake what we what we're putting in already and then you add more, you're basically like the water's rising, you know. So, you know, and Nordic has been playing a heavy in our whole state, because we understand that they don't have title and rights. So I know the, you know, they don't have a right to the land yet they're proceeding as if they have it. And they're manipulating the public process all the way through. And it's it becomes tough for citizens, because we have several lawsuits ongoing. And we've had to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to stop them. And to get them to do what's legally required, like you can't just put a pipeline under someone's land who owns it. So, but you know, they are proceeding and they know that as if they can just get the political will at the state level to make this happen. And Maine as a state is putting out, we want to be a hub for this industrial agriculture. It's a return really to the chicken farm days. You know, someone recently did a paper that looked at, you know, if you had equivalent number of chicken farms, they'd be spread around 800 square miles of Waldo County. But here it's all in 34 acres, that same amount of effluent. And it's going to be going and the sludge now. So you got the pipeline of 7.7 million gallons a day going out of bay. But what about all the sludge? It's the concentrated. So oh, yeah, we're filtering it. Yeah, well you filter it turns into a sludge. Where does this sludge? It's a pond. They won't tell us really, they don't know where they're going to dump it. They say it's valuable. Well, who wants to put salty sewage on their crops? You know, I don't, you know, I grow all my food. I don't salty. You can't just easily get away and get rid of it. So and in the winter, you have to truck it below the snowline as my understanding because you can't spread this on sacrifice lands. You can find sacrifice lands to dump sludge that you want to get rid of somewhere. Someone will buy it and take it or let you dump it there for a fee. But Nordic hasn't solved that. And some municipalities are saying like Bucksport has been like, well, maybe we'll put it in the sewer. And once you see what it takes for a sewage system to absorb that kind of nutrient load, it'll shut it down. It will not be able to sustain it. And it's going to cost the citizens a whack of money to try to make it do it. So, you know, I have a few other questions here coming in about dissolved nitrogen. And I don't have the numbers off hand, but the other thing beyond dissolved nitrogen is also the phosphorus. So they notice claiming the phosphorus is being filtered. But it usually is reliant on filtering the solids because then the phosphorus attaches to the solids, but certain fish foods that fish eat will does the phosphorus will be dissolved and it won't be filterable. And so it could go as high as four times higher phosphorus based on the diets of what the fish are eating. And that's why the people in Belfast have been insistent on knowing what the fish food is. Let's see. The other questions. How did Nordic farms pass all its permits and get past the Clean Water Act is I don't know if Jonathan or Matt could help with that. That's that's a challenging question. We've been upstream watch has been working pretty hard to try to make sure that the permitting process meets all of the requirements as they are listed. And it's been surprising to see from my perspective a lot of clear requirements in the permitting not having to be met sometimes with apparently Maine has an exclusion from some of the Clean Water Act from years ago, I guess politically because of the supposedly because of the influence of the paper mills back the time and the influence of our legislative delegation in writing a Clean Water Act in Congress that sometimes permits that would not be able to be issued in most other states can be issued because there is an allowance for basically meeting those the environmental requirements after it's already built where and so that my understanding is that that is one of the ways in which some of these permits have been gotten through on a federal level. I'm not a lawyer. I can't speak authoritatively there, but and as far as on the other permitting, I it's been a mystery to me sometimes why some of the requirements don't seem to be fully met and yet we're able to continue on the one that they seem to have stopped has been held up most completely with to this date is a title right in interest having to have actual legal access to the water for their pipes and that is being fought in court. Anybody's been following this Nordic would know this and that is going to be resolved. I think relatively soon is my understanding. So you my reading was you can't actually file a permit, you know, get a permit going if you don't have already established clear title right in interest, but somehow they will step over that and so now that has been resolved in the courts as we speak. Now, I see a question from Crystal Cainey about Protect Main's Fishing Heritage Foundation and it's one point six billion a year. And, you know, I would say that this is probably at the core of of this bigger issue of, you know, do we really want in Maine a legitimate working water front with lots of people at actually able to go out and independently make a living from the sea in a responsible sustainable way and provide long term wild caught fish in a responsible way to. I would hope not the world. I would hope to see. But let's not go back to volumes of fishing that destroy fisheries. But we see whenever we take out dams, even if you we go with our family every year to see the L wives coming up like these tiny streams like the bag of deuce will be a half a million fish. And in Belfast, all our rivers are plugged. Every single river has a dam blocking the L wise from from migrating. And if we were to get them, get some of these dams out, we get a million fish possibly returning. And that's the base of the food chain. Most of these small fish are eating plankton. And then they are the base of the food chain. When you take that out. All bets are off for having all these other fish cod, salmon, you know, sturgeon, all these fish, we need the base of the food chain. So I think the position at this point in history when every time we had a chance to regulate Maine, we didn't. And then all of a sudden the pen, we kept having these ideas like then we'll destroy that fishery, then the next fishery we destroy then the next one and the next one. And then that pens were going to fix that. And then they destroy more than they ever saw. And now they think that putting it on the land is going to solve it and it won't because it has too many unintended consequences. So we're looking to put another nail in the coffin of a dead fishery when, in my opinion, Sierra Club, it's not in my opinion, Sierra Club position is that we need to restore a system and have a fishery that's going to be long standing and healthy and out into the way out in the future. And the only way we could do it is by basically stopping you're doing everything we can to a very climate change, which means not heading places like Nordic and also protecting the fishery from disease, from these all the unintended consequences of attracting diseases to these pipelines and things like that. So I just want to say that Sierra Club position is very firm and supporting a working waterfront. Matt, are you seeing any other questions that we? Yeah, there's there's plenty. Thanks for everyone for participating. Keep them coming. We'll get to as many as we can before the hour. There was one for you, Jam, about RAS being a viable technology. Are there running facilities that are working properly and financially solvent? And there was a mention of a recent article by Mr. Heim. Right. Well, you know, I what I've looked into is large, you know, our assistance have been functioning for maybe 30 years and supplying hatchery size fish. And, you know, if you just want to grow the small fish, they grow them pretty well. And the people familiar with those who've worked there didn't seem any problems with diseases. Still would have problems. But as soon as you try to grow fish there for multiple to grow it out to a full size fish, then almost all of them have problems. You know, they have, you know, they have to really fight and manage everything very, very carefully to not have a big outbreak. So there have been multiple mass die offs and really having a trouble understanding why and the technology ends up by the end costing so much. It's a very expensive fish. It's not a fish to feed the world. You know, it's a very, very, very high end expensive product. So to be financially solvent, you know, they can't compete with even net pens, which we shouldn't be doing, but they can't compete even with this with low fish lower on the food chain. So, you know, some of what, you know, the scientists who like from Sierra Club, the marine scientists, you know, they're saying, you know, we should be eating lower down the food chain. And we should also, if we want to farm fish, farm down the food chain, not a higher up the food chain fish. And then and there are systems that are smaller scale that are functioning for lots of years with polycultures all around the world. Polycultures are working. That just means poly means more. You know, you put species together and oftentimes even plants and fish will eat wastes even in certain systems. So it's a quite a cyclical system. So I think, you know, you could have small scale completely enclosed. There are small scale completely enclosed systems that are viable. But in general, the Sierra Club is not supporting monocultures as a as a principle of the problems they introduced to any any human system. If we want to think about, you know, COVID, I mean, you can't blame it on. But those viruses that jump from wild to human are from us basically confining wild creatures in these wet markets of things. And things happen that you can anticipate. So as an engineer, you know, my former training, you always ask, well, what's the unintended consequence of anything you do? And with a big monoculture that's massive, you have a lot of unintended consequences. Can I mention there's one of the chat questions that's there that we did look into some around dissolved nitrogen? And my my understanding is that as we were trying to do carbon analysis, one of the inputs is a large amount of glycerin that is used and the wastewater treatment process. I am not a wastewater treatment engineer. But our understanding was this was a technology to actually reduce the amount of dissolved nitrogen. So even with the best available technology, there the calculations for the amount of dissolved nitrogen that was still going to be released into the bay where as high as our study shows and is kind of based on Nordic's information, trusting that to be accurate. But it is using best available technology with the dissolved nitrogen with this adding glycerin in the wastewater treatment process to really so larger or to tie up and actually turn a lot of the dissolved nitrogen into N2. So in spite of that, still the nitrogen load into the bay is going to be extremely high. That's that was my understanding of how we read the analysis. I'm seeing I'm looking through. Yeah, I can guide a few. There's there's a lot. There were a couple comments on specific amounts of nitrogen per day that I saw ammonia. So feel free to talk to those. But the next. Well, yeah. And, you know, the idea, the problem with the nitrogen and a lot of it has to do with the circulation. Like if Nordic was out, it's a I don't want to push them somewhere else, really. But their plant and Eureka or even if they went out to Owl's head where you have two hundred feet of water. I'm a sailor, so I'm sailing these waters all the time and where their pipe would be. I would say I sail home from most quite frequently in the summer with the tailing wind wind behind me coming into Belfast Harbor. And if you think of the tide coming in and the wind blowing fourteen knots behind you, that water from that area is going to make it all the way up under the bridge. There's just absolutely no way it's not going to make it straight into Belfast Bay because the pipe is really in Belfast Bay. When Nordic runs their model, say, calculate the volume of Penobscot Bay and they say, we're dissolving into this. And you look at their their very crude study they did. Well, the circulation is very complex. Yeah, the studies done on the three levels like the top level of water, the middle and the lower level. They do different things throughout the season based on the salinity and the amount of fresh water coming down from the Penobscot River and also the wind can change the direction of the water out in that bay off of Ellsboro. So the direction is going to flow is contingent on many things throughout the season. Salinity, the winds and temperatures and it's complex. And it's more or less going to go back and forth, back and forth a lot is what's going to happen. So it's it's not going to just flush out to sea. And so that nitrogen could really be a problem. It could go right by the beaches of Bayview and be something very unattractive to swimmers and unhealthy for them. And it is going to come straight into the Belfast Bay. And if you say nitrogen isn't a problem, some people say, well, possibly dissolved nitrogen isn't a problem. Well, we do have a current shellfish closures over much of Maine's coast. Much of it is. If you look at the maps, you'd be surprised how many areas are closed to toxic algae bloom. And it is someone else so common. And it is also the ammonia. So there's a lot of compounds that come out with fish growing that are below the pens when you have the pens. And also when you have the pipe, it's the same thing as a pen. It's just the pipe is just it concentrated instead of it dispersing into the ecosystem. It's coming out in one big three foot pipe. All right, those are. Thank you for those. There's one. I think it's a quick answer, Jonathan, maybe, you know, influenced Sierra Club has on legislation. I know there's one piece of legislation to add climate impact to the public utility utilities commission. There's also another bill to add climate impacts to department decision making. So those are the two I'm aware of that we're following and working on, Jonathan, or others, do you know? Yeah, those are the ones I'm aware of, too, in this legislative session that would have direct impact. One of the things to know is that with the work that was done on creating a climate impact assessment that George and Jim worked so hard on and we tried to submit that that was to the Department of Environmental Protection and the Bureau of Environmental Protection in the licensing permitting process. And it was stricken from the record and considered not part of the environmental review of Nordic is what is its climate impact? And so they never had to publicly defend or even state what their climate impact truly would be and have a nor could we submit ours and say, this is our analysis. This is what it's based on. I would love to have seen construction drawings and actual detail of all instead of having to interpret the relatively simplified drawings which we had the basis on and the analysis that was done with the Chinese study as well. So we were working with the best available information we had. But, you know, if there is legislation that required the DEP to have to use climate impact as part of the basis of any permitting, we would have actually been able to make Nordic disclose or at least we could have sued them to make Nordic disclose the climate impact instead of them just say, oh, this is how low it is and have no real hard data to base up those claims. And I think the silence which they never actually challenged any of the details of the carbon analysis we did, I think speaks volumes if somebody actually had good data that would have given better outcomes than the one that George and Jim was able to create. I think they would have been happy to do so. But I think we actually did significantly underestimate the climate impact and therefore the carbon impact per pound of fish grown, but we were wanted to be conservative, not and very defendable in our in our calculations. So that would that legislation would have great value. It's possible that that legislation won't pass. It's also possible that it'll be only used to regulate the DP and not the DP, excuse me, Public Utilities Commission instead of actually DP and all their agencies. So if you would like to make sure that every agency in Maine when they are making considerations of how they spend their money and what projects they approve has to include an analysis of the climate impact, then that legislation is something to support. And that's a pretty I think a pretty exciting change to the main regulatory environment if that was to pass. And I don't remember the bill number. I would guess, Matt, you're pretty on top of that. Do you remember the bill number for that? I just put one of them in the chat that's been printed about all agency rulemaking and there's the other one for the Public Utilities Commission that has not been printed yet. Yeah. And I would like to invite James Hascom to say a few words. I know he's I saw him in the chat wanting to speak to the issue a little bit. So James, if you want to unmute yourself, I'd love to hear what your thoughts are. OK, can you hear me? Yeah. OK, good. So my name is Jim Hanscom. I'm a law officer and fisherman, scholar, pursuant for all of it, top drawer, everything from Bar Harbor. I'm also the zone B vice chair on that council. I also am the vice president of the lobster 207 Lobstering Union here. So we are getting ready to deal with this in Frenchman's Bay. I just sat in on a town council meeting two weeks ago with the three guys and their attorney that is proposing this stuff. And there they are proposing a massive facility up here. And so for me, I know that 207 lobster 207, the MLA, you know, Maine Lobstering Union, they're heavily invested right now in, you know, opposing what's going on in your bay in Penobscot Bay. I feel like our Bar Harbor Town Council is not understanding what's going on at all. And you guys seem to have a good grasp, you know, of what's happening. Of course, I'm a lobster and so I got problems with salmon pens, windmills and whales, things that we might agree might disagree on, but we can agree on some stuff. My main question was, and I'm just not very good at typing stuff, was the earlier in the meeting, the data that you you are posting up on your page, Jim, the just the carbon footprint stuff and all that. Is there a way for me to could you get that to me? Can you email that to me? I would love to have that. I have a very close friend Valerie Peacock is her name. She is a town council member for the town of Bar Harbor and she her thought process is like one hundred and fifty percent in line with all of you folks here for certain. And I'd love to be able to get that information to her and then go on to the Bar Harbor Town Council. We're obviously in a unique situation because the site, the proposed site is actually in the town of Gulesboro, but it's really truthfully in our wonderful, beautiful, pristine Frenchman's Bay that none of us want to look at it. But this group is coming at the town of Gulesboro, which is a little more challenged, you know what I mean? Economically, promising jobs. They're making big promises about the old Stinson scanning factory than prospects Harbor and promising to acquire that facility if these lease agreements are granted. And then they're saying they're going to, you know, promote a couple hundred jobs, you know, and everybody's buying it. You know, I personally am not buying it. So pretty much that's all I really want to say is that there is a group of us that are here in another bay, you know, that are staring down what you're staring and any information that I could, you know, get from you guys just to maybe pass on to our town councils and people involved. That's a really nice display of information, what you had said. And I think that information that you posted, I have a town council that would respond to that. They would see the whole green footprint, so to speak, you know, it would I feel would would weigh heavily with them. Can I can I speak to that? Just a touch. Oh, when you look at that analysis, you'll see that the embodied carbon of building a land-based one is pretty severe, but the largest carbon footprint is actually the operational carbon and the largest operational carbon is the feed. And that is the same, whether it's penstock or land-based. And, you know, I think from from a water quality and ocean health standpoint, penstock is worse from a climate impact land-based is worse. Neither is sustainable, neither is good. So it's an interesting and they both have negative impacts on climate. And they both have negative impacts. These are semi open systems to the bay as well with both water temperature and, you know, the discharge and the nitrogen and phosphorus and viruses coming out of the discharge as well, the semi open systems. So I don't I can't. That's why I think Sierra Club is pretty clear that, you know, the analysis so far is there is no current commercial proposals in the coast of Maine that I've seen that would come anywhere near meeting the environmental standards necessary to support from an environmental perspective, support any of these developments. The other one also is to take in on a kind of a global scale, not just the climate impact, but when you are these fish feeds that these penstock and closed and semi closed systems are using are primarily based on fish that are being caught off of West Africa and off of Peru, some of the last really strong viable fisheries. And my understanding is they're being hammered by these this this industry. And, you know, the last thing we need to do is strip out some of the last viable fisheries, you know, on this planet. And we need to instead be focusing on ways in which we have sustainable fisheries. We support that in all the ways necessary on a global scale. Like, you know, that's you know, you're under water, you know, it's like it doesn't end. It's it was all one ocean, really. And we need to take care of all of it in order to make all of it work well. So and we just got about two or three minutes left. And so, James, I definitely put maybe put your email in the chat and I'll get to you that stuff. And I want to say if you need me to come over there at any time to meet with people, I am happy to. And, you know, Sierra Club is going to take a position against the French and Spanish nation being quite sure. So, I mean, we're looking at it right now. We have a committee and we've been talking about it. But the more we talk to you guys, the better, because you're on the ground. And just I know people want to know what to do. And right now there's the thing because Nordic seems like they're flying through. But what they need to hear from his people, I think Janet Mills Office and the Economic Development Office of Maine needs to hear and the newspapers, you know, when they've been printed, whenever you can send a letter to the newspapers of any of our papers, that's helpful. And I know there's some legislation right now to regulate agriculture is a little better coming up. So pay attention to that. But I would say right to Mills and and Jonathan, anything else that you can think of that people can do right now to support? No, stay involved, stay, you know, stay informed. There's lots of ways which we as citizens can have a much larger influence and voice in the outcomes of things, both in Augusta and nationally, but also particularly our local town. So local elections matter who and so does having your voice heard respectfully, putting your understanding of the issues out there and making sure that, you know, you stay engaged. We can make sure that we shape the future in a way that's sustainable if we all participate. So thank you for all of your you wouldn't be on this call if you weren't interested and engaged. So thank you for the work you already are doing. And I just want to give a shout out like I'm reading through the chat and I'm seeing Ellie and Kate and a lot of other people have put a lot of great comments in the in the chat. So I think Matt's going to save that chat. And if any of you can want to save the chat just on your bottom right corner, the very bottom, you have a little three dots and you can save the chat. And so you can see what others were contributing to this conversation. There's been a lot of people in our community working tirelessly for like three years trying to stop this multiple lawsuits, five, six organizations founded just to stop this main turning into this industrial hub of industrial of agriculture. And we really feel certain that this is a time to restore our fishery, as Jonathan said. And so I want to thank everyone for coming on the call. I mean, it was great to meet all of you, too. Yeah, thank you all. And I'm not sure if you can save the chat, but we'll follow up with some of the materials and some of the comments. And it seems like we need a part two because there were a lot of great questions and so we couldn't get to all of them. But clearly, there's some momentum here. And stay tuned. We'll keep you updated and we may reach out to many of you for organizing support. So thank you again. Stay tuned for our Earth Day events coming up in a couple of weeks. You can get there on our websites, seraclub.org slash main. And thank you all again. Really appreciate.