 Hi, so I'm Cheryl J. Lipton, I'm a landscape designer and I'm an ecologist. Very glad about this symposium going on now because it is going to bring to light to the masses the terrible injustice of burning biomass. In other words, burning trees for energy or anything is egregious in this time of climate change and climate crisis and biodiversity crisis and water. Trees and forests are there to help us survive and live in a healthy way and to burn them up is doing the exact opposite. People are not being honest about the actual damage that happens when we burn biomass, especially for electricity. It's bad for our health, for human health and health of the forest and all of the other biota that lives there and it's bad for climate. It puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than burning coal does and it's a well known fact that burning anything other than wood is less damaging to both the climate and to the environment. The forestry industry is so strong and the wood products industry is so strong in Vermont and in many places that people think that it is good to keep it local or you know and it's not. It's causing more and more damage. It's just as bad to burn our forests here as it is to cut down the rainforest in the Amazon or other rainforests. As a matter of fact, Vermont and I'm talking about not just McNeil and burning biomass for electricity but Vermont burns the most amount of wood of any state in the entire nation and we put more particulate matter, fine particulate matter which is 2.5 particulate matter into the air than any other state in the country. Per capita, per capita, Jared Omer of the Vermont Department of Health has given a good testimony on that to both the Vermont Climate Council and also to the Senate Natural Resources Committee expressly saying that burning biomass, burning wood is bad for the health of humans and the Department of Health suggests not to do that. The American Pediatric Association suggests not. The American Lung Association asks to stop burning wood and this includes the high efficiency new wood burners. This includes pellet stoves, this includes pellet burners that Vermont is encouraging schools and municipalities to put in for their municipal buildings. These are all very unhealthy and in the winter, when the wood is being burned, the air quality is greatly decreased. I'm Zach Porter, I'm the Executive Director of Standing Trees. Here at Burlington City Hall today to educate city counselors and residents of Burlington about the perils of biomass electricity. Students of Burlington have been fooled for going on for decades now into thinking that biomass electricity is a part of a clean energy future for Vermont, for our planet and we're here to set the record straight because the science is very clear that biomass electricity is actually worse than even coal for electricity generation. It's absolutely taking us in the wrong direction and it's polluting our cities and it's a public health menace. It's also destroying the water quality of our rivers and beloved Lake Champlain and it is threatening the biodiversity of our forests. So biomass has all of these problems and it's time for Burlington to look for truly low carbon energy solutions. In Vermont we're so accustomed to wood heat and thinking of our forest as an energy source and there's a big difference between even wood heat and biomass electricity. Biomass electricity requires heating to incredibly hot temperatures and it's incredibly inefficient to burn green wood as anyone who burns wood in Vermont knows and what we're doing is we're burning green wood in a massive boiler to create electricity and the efficiency of our power plants here are worse than coal-fired power plants for creating electricity. So for every four trees that are burned in the McNeil biomass power plant just one contributes to electricity. The McNeil power plant is a far better producer of carbon than it is of electricity so it's a real dinosaur of a power plant and it's ancient technology that we need to move off of and move towards something that's truly low carbon. We can't keep living in this myth that it's renewable or that it's a sustainable fuel source. What we need is low carbon energy and biomass is anything but. So today we have two global experts Bill Mooma of Tufts and Dr. Juliet Rooney Varga of UMass Lowell who are among the world's leading scientists on climate and on biomass and they're here to help educate city councilors and the public about the perils of McNeil biomass which is Vermont's single largest source of carbon pollution and the city of Burlington has somehow tried to magically greenwash for four decades now claiming that it's carbon neutral and we know that that's just not the case and we can't keep fooling ourselves into thinking that anymore so. To feed this massive wood boiler at McNeil requires an incredible amount of wood and literally tens of thousands of acres a year are required to feed the McNeil biomass power plant. The telephone gap project on the Green Mountain National Forest targets almost 12,000 acres of very mature forest some of the healthiest forests in the state of Vermont and from those forests from state forests like Camels Hump State Forest and many others around the state we are shipping our mature healthy forests here to be burned and at the McNeil power plant so there's a direct connection between what's going on in our public forest and what's happening here in Burlington with McNeil of course private forest lands provide a lot of the timber supply also but the presence of a biomass power plant creates incentives for really poor forest management practices because it really encourages loggers and landowners to strip forests of really important standing dead wood and woody debris on the forest floor trees that may not be perfectly straight and tall but are extremely important from a biodiversity perspective from a climate perspective get stripped from our forests and brought to McNeil to be burned because they can't be turned into saw logs so what it does is it creates a market for wood that would otherwise be left in our forest and that's a real problem from a water quality perspective because that wood would trap water as it's falling down you know when they are increasingly extreme rainfall events and warm ups after large snow falls you know that woody debris in the forest prevents our rivers from flooding and instead we're removing all of that and taking it here to be burned so it's a terrible incentive for you know the very worst of our logging practices in forests and again we need to get rid of it for all of these reasons not not even just the climate reason our forests can't keep pace with the amount of emissions that you know we're putting out there from any source of carbon whether that's you know wood burning or fossil fuel burning but our forests do an incredible job today you know Vermont's forests sequester incredible amount of the emissions that we put up into the atmosphere every year but they could do a lot more if we simply let them grow old and there are very few Vermont forests that are allowed to grow old my name is Dan Castrigano I live in Burlington I'm an educator and a community organizer here today to call on the city of Burlington and BED to stop burning trees for electricity we need a phase out plan for McNeil burning trees produces more pollution than coal unit for unit and just call on the city of Burlington to stop greenwashing to say saying things like it's renewable or it's carbon neutral or it's green so we need these trees standing right now because of the climate and ecological emergency we need a phase out plan for McNeil there are a lot of things that they don't talk about or they might not talk about tonight so the impact of biogenic emissions in the first place the impact of carbon being released from the soil when trees are clear cut the impact on water quality or air quality or the extinction crisis these are all these things that just are simply not acknowledged by the city of Burlington or by the electric department and we needed a different plan so we need wind solar geothermal we need to weatherize everything and we need to just use less energy as a species and so pouring more capital into this district heating plan and basically keeping McNeil online for a long time is a terrible idea we need and we need a phase out plan we need an end date we need to stop burning trees for electricity thank you I'm Steve Goodkind I am the retired city engineer and public works director for city of Burlington and I'm here tonight to encourage the city to begin to look real hard at the McNeil plant in its wood burning I call the McNeil plant the McNeil carbon dioxide generating plant because it actually generates a pound of carbon dioxide for every pound of wood that it burns it's it did its job back in the day it helped us fight the air boiling margo but its time is way past and in an age where climate change is important the burning of wood is probably the worst worst fuel we can be using at this point in time so I think it's time for McNeil to begin to look to phase out close down and not to expand its use and continue its use into the future by running a steam pipe up to the hospital whatever it's time to phase it out and not increase its use we can have all the benefits of good forest management without burning it in the McNeil plant and probably do even a better job if we didn't burn it burning is the worst way to use wood and the worst way to burn wood is in a factory type of setting like the McNeil plant which is only 25% efficient so it's really just taking a bad fuel and making the worst use of it and creating literally the most carbon dioxide per pound per kilowatt of energy created of almost any other fuel you could think of you don't need McNeil wood to have a healthy forest products industry in Vermont you just do not and they're trying to sell it that way also but you don't and there's other better uses uses that actually fight climate change that can use use the wood that McNeil is using even the so-called scrap wood that they're using that can be put to a much better use and actually not emit carbon dioxide but be in the battle to prevent emissions by using it for insulation or for wood products much better use time to close it down start closing it down this information was continued that we really need to stop burning anything and I think a lot of not being able to have their living any longer but that's not what we were discussing here and that's a different issue and unfortunately that kind of took a high place in the comment section talk about forestry generation after logging but that still is not even the issue because we're not discussing biodiversity right now we're discussing climate and carbon and greenhouse gases and I think that that's really important I think we'll need to have another couple of at least one more symposium and I think that there ought to be longer time and questions with other informed individuals my name is Scott Zenz I live in Fetford and Straford Vermont over in Orange County and I have training as a silviculture professional done timber supply analyses for the state of Washington for the whole state long-term estimates of timber supply and I have a PhD in forest ecology as well my big concerns about Burlington Electrics expansion into district heating is that it is going to make permanent in our community turn a structural pattern that we shouldn't participate in the very worst use of a top of a tree or the limbs of a tree are to burn them in McNeil because when we do that we give up the carbon sequestration and we lose the nutrients in the soil when this pattern has been implemented in other areas in North America forest productivity goes down and it's that forest productivity that will lead us to have the strongest carbon sequestration possible what counts the most are the greenhouse gas emissions that come from burning things it is not just fossil fuels but also biofuels and you know we cannot afford our children cannot afford to use wood in this very expensive way for such low benefit anything that we do to help landowners keep their properties in forest would be a good thing but we should not be using this mechanism this terrible mechanism that produces such greenhouse gas emissions those the real slash that comes from the residues that are left over from harvesting need to stay where they are and the high quality forest products that come from our forests we treasure and will keep and in that way the carbon that gets stored in those trees gets kept out of the atmosphere we need forestry in the state of Vermont but we cannot afford to be burning it thank you policy initiative to pay landowners to leave residuals to our society greenhouse gas emissions is so high I have to say it again the very worst use of the piece of woods to burn it in yeah it is so inefficient and it is very likely more efficient to burn steam there it is way too hot to travel over long distance waste heat in the ground from such a long large pipeline reduces the efficiency of McNeil down almost a single ditch that is that is worse by order every other way to the VCC so recommend that it be phased out McNeil and riding phased out but also I am a Burlington resident and a information it puts forth on their website and it really ratepayers expense they have a very effective essentially propaganda arm that provides misinformation around biomass burning at McNeil and a lot is said about electricity from McNeil being 100% renewable and it's one of you know it's one of those terms it sounds great and we don't know what that means renewable it really depends upon who is using the word and how they're defining it and in the case of McNeil it does not acknowledge carbon emissions and if you care about climate you need to be concerned about carbon emissions we don't really care about renewability we don't care about where the carbon is coming from so McNeil for example and their net zero energy plan is wanting to reduce and eventually eliminate fossil fuel use great but it's only half the story we really need to be concerned not about strictly fossil fuel use we need to be concerned about carbon emissions and when you have something like wood that emits one and a half times the amount of CO2 as coal burning and you are simultaneously removing the very things the trees that are sequestering the carbon that are supporting biodiversity and clean water you know it just I really tonight when I was speaking I really was angry and I had it with the greenwashing and I was upset by the false equivalency that we've all grown so accustomed to around discussions of climate change where you have the scientists and you have the deniers and they're given equal equal consideration in equal time before the camera and I think we saw that tonight even though I really appreciate the fact that Duke is doing this I truly truly in my heart appreciate it what I don't appreciate is that false equivalency so you have the absurdity of two world renowned scientists juxtaposed against biomass promoters and so that was as a mom who is just concerned about ecological collapse I get angry sometimes and that's so that's why it wasn't my finest moment speaking but it had to be said and I'm certainly glad to have the venue and I hope it leads to more conversations because we are about to sink 42 million dollars into district heat they call it's not a district it's a steam pipe running from McNeil to UVM Medical Center that will increase the amount of wood that's burned at McNeil and thus increase carbon emissions so that's that's what we need to be focusing on is that problem that will that will ensure that McNeil plant that needs to be mothballed is standing for many decades to come so that that's something that needs to be shut down right away we need to get the truth out about that project and I guess that's all I have to say right now because we've got to go home to our sweet 10-year-old boy