 Okay, I'm going to call to order the Transportation and Energy and Utility Committee of the City Council for our special meeting tonight at 632 In our first item on the agenda is the agenda and I'll entertain a motion on that. I would move that we adopt the agenda second Any discussion on that seeing none all those in favor hi and we have an agenda our agenda tonight is this symposium Thank you. Thank you all for coming Yep Welcome to the special meeting of the Transportation Energy and Utility Committee the agenda and other meeting material included in a Including a program with panelists bios can be found on the city website at Burlington vt.gov slash city council Tuk I'll also note that we have on a couple places We have some hard copies of the program and we have some QR codes at various spots in the room that you can use to Bring that up on your your device Biomass electric electricity generation at McNeil station is a topic that is recently received attention by the Vermont Climate Council And one that has generated significant public interest Some have questioned the renewable status of biomass and called for a plan to phase out or close McNeil Others argue that McNeil is our best option for reducing fossil fuel and is a sustainable alternative I'd like to so we have panelists here tonight, and I'll introduce them all to you now First we have Juliette Rooney Varga She's a professor at Kennedy School of Sciences University of Massachusetts Lowell The director of the climate change initiative there Professor Rooney Varga is an internationally recognized expert in climate change and sustainability we also have Dr. William Moomaw emeritus professor of international environmental policy at the Fletcher School at Tufts University Professor Moomaw has worked at the intersection of science and policy Advocating for international sustainable development He has been a long time contributor to the intergovernmental panel on climate change in authored perspective a paper on pro-forestation Next we have General Manager Darren Springer of Burlington Electric Department where he's been a general manager since 2018 and led a team that's developed Burlington's net zero energy road map Which the smart electric power alliance term the first us net zero 20 30 plan? We also have Ali Kasiba forest ecophysiologist and extension assistant Professor of forestry at the University of Vermont Professor Kasiba serves as a regional educator on forest carbon science and management and is the state lead on Vermont forest carbon inventory Next we have Adam Sherman senior consultant at VEC the Vermont energy investment corporation Mr. Sherman is a nationally recognized expert in renewable heating and cooling and is a biomass expert And lastly we have Harris Rowne a Vermont licensed forester with over 30 years working on public and private lands in the northeast His company long meadow resource management is a full-service forest forestry company covering northern Vermont. So those are that's our panel and the agenda which has been shared it is going to be broken out into Several blocks or a few blocks the first on our agenda. We're going to hear from panelists who we're going to present Responses to questions that the toke has used as prompts for this discussion tonight and There and Maddie has displayed those for us here So all of these questions have been provided to the panelists and they've had a chance to prepare the remarks based on these After these discussions are these presentations and discussions We're going to have a short break and then we're going to go into a series of questions that we've solicited from the public We had a form up for About a week and we solicited questions and the toke has curated some that we'll ask tonight and allow panelists to respond to And lastly, we're going to have a public forum where if you haven't signed up and you want to speak at public forum There's a sign-up seat a sign-up sheet right here at this desk in front of me And lastly if we have any time at the end We'll have an opportunity for two members to ask follow-up questions. So we've a packed agenda tonight We're going to get started and our first Sure like the buses that you might ride or like going to church or some other religious things There are always seats in the front there aren't a lot But those of you who are in the back or where people come in know that there are other seats and you can Go upstairs the balcony and get the front rows and so we should have plenty of seating for folks So stand if you'd like, but there are seats available. So please take them Thank you. The other thing I was remiss in doing is introducing the other members of the Transportation Energy and Utility Committee First I'm Mark Barlow. I'm the chair. We have Hannah King and we have Jean Bergman Okay, so first the first presenter is Darren Springer general manager at Burlington Electric. You can take it away, Darren. Okay. Thank you Mark. Can everybody hear me? Okay? Alright, excellent. I am going to share my screen spare with me just a moment and we'll have some slides that should Pop up here in a second. Okay Alright Let me just move that there we go So just a little about us just to start off Burlington Electric is an over 100 year old municipal public power Electric utility for the city of Burlington and we are a hundred percent renewable as of 2014 first city in the nation to reach that accomplishment and We also run energy efficiency programs for the city of Burlington We're the third largest electric utility in the state of Vermont We are the largest municipal electric utility in the state and McNeil, which is the subject of much of our discussion tonight Is operated by Burlington Electric and is the largest power generator in the state of Vermont? after Vermont Yankee closed, which was a 620 megawatt nuclear plant in the southern part of the state back almost a decade ago and as Mark mentioned Burlington Electric is working with the city departments of the city of Burlington to implement Our net zero energy roadmap for 2030 which focuses on reducing and eventually eliminating fossil fuel use For the ground transportation and thermal sectors one of the most ambitious local climate goals anywhere in the country So a little more about McNeil McNeil is jointly owned 50% by Burlington Electric Green Mountain Power 31% and Vermont Public Power Supply Authority, which is a group of municipal utilities 19% it was built to replace the Moran coal plant which folks can see or familiar with the Moran frame project Down on the waterfront that used to be the Moran coal plant back in the 1970s Burlington Electric as an effort to move away from fossil fuel began Co-firing with wood at the Moran plant and then there was approval by the voters of Burlington to move forward with the McNeil plant Which was built in the 1980s came online McNeil is a unique renewable energy asset for us and we have contracts for wind solar Hydro and wood so we have every different type of renewable Generation, you know with either within our portfolio that we own and operate or that we contract for they all have different Attributes and aspects to them the thing about McNeil that is important from a reliability standpoint is it can store fuel on site And it can be dispatched when we need energy and that's that's similar to how some fossil fuel plants can run many renewable plants Can't operate that way so when we think about McNeil the fact that it can dispatch When we need energy particularly during the winter when there have been reliability challenges in the region when prices are very high That's a benefit to Burlington Electric ratepayers In terms of the ISO New England grid that we're all connected to I've pulled the 2022 data and I'll mention that each of my slides has resources at the bottom where you can click through the links for You know data and analysis that we're relying on for these slides So these are posted on our website if anyone is interested you can go to the Burlington Electric website We have a McNeil page and you can scroll down and you will see these slides on the top under a new report section 2023 so these are all posted online So the ISO fuel mix in 2022 was about 54 percent a little more than 54 percent fossil fuel primarily natural gas And then we have the remainder being made up of nuclear only 19 percent renewable and that includes large hydropower That's imported into the region. We do not have anywhere close to a 100 percent clean or 100 percent renewable grid in New England Which is an important point that I'll come back to because We have analysis that shows that when McNeil is running the marginal fuel the fuel that would replace it if it was offline is Between 92 and 98 percent of the time natural gas So if McNeil comes offline fossil fuel comes back online I'm gonna go ahead here. This is not the subject of tonight's meeting and I won't linger on it But for folks who have heard anything about concerns related to health. I share this slide This is analysis from Jared Olmer who is the climate and health program manager at the Vermont Department of Health that was presented to the biomass task force of the Vermont Climate Council Over the summer and it says and this was looking at both McNeil and Ryegate the other wood chip energy plant in the state of Vermont That the looking at the impacts if any on health He said the health impacts caused by air pollution from the two biomass power plants are essentially negligible and thus Cannot be elaborated on in any detail This is mainly a result of the two generating facilities operating with relatively efficient combustion technology And with extensive filtration pollution controls and regulations that in combination greatly limit emissions again This is the Vermont Department of Health Again, I won't linger on that. It's not our topic for this evening Also, this is not our topic, but I wanted to at least have one slide related to the jobs and economy for McNeil This analysis is going to be posted this week on our website wasn't quite ready yet But it's analysis from innovative natural resource solutions, which is a third-party Consultant who's done work for us both in 2020 and 2023 as part of our integrated resource plan that we submit to the Public Utility Commission in Vermont Their their analysis shows that McNeil generates on an annual basis over 55 million an economic activity in Vermont That includes these wood purchases that you can see here on the map in nine different Vermont counties in 2022 With the largest being in Rutland County and the second largest being right here in Chittenden County And also jobs 87 jobs supported by the plant both at the facility itself and in the supply chain with total wages of Estimated 5.6 million annually and it notes these jobs are ongoing jobs with a lot of renewable energy There's construction jobs, but then the operations jobs are fairly limited. These are jobs that continue as long as McNeil continues Forestry and I note that on zoom we have our chief forester Betsy Lesnokoski She is away on a vacation But is joining us on zoom and we have our three other professional Vermont licensed foresters in the room here Seth Don and Kevin those those three here and Betsy on zoom are the four-person Vermont professional licensed forester team that works at you need uniquely at McNeil to harvest and You know look at harvesting look at sustainable monitoring for our forest management McNeil data here I want to kind of linger on for a minute because this is an important point And this is coming from again innovative natural resource solutions report that's posted on our website It shows that McNeil procures the vast majority of its fuel 88% as What is called in woods chips and I'm quoting here from or paraphrasing from the report that? Constitutes tops and limbs left over from operations such as lumber and paper making so eighty eight percent Are left over in woods chips another eight percent of fuel is mill residue from sawmills Around three plus percent comes from our wastewood yard that we operate at McNeil where residents can bring clean untreated wastewood and Then point three percent point three percent less than half a percent is Coming from a round wood that is purchased and kept on site in order to be used If we cannot get into the woods during seasons like mud seasons so that we have some fuel supply So that's the relative mix you can see the kind of pie graph there But this is all kind of written out and I'll come back to these points in a little bit I was going to and let's see if this works This is just a one-minute or so video clip from a film series TV series called empowered energy heroes that we're using with permission from the Filmmaker the narrator here is Dan Riker who is a former assistant secretary of energy under President Clinton a former advisor to President Obama and the former head of climate initiatives at Google and this is related to McNeil But also just to carbon accounting relative to biomass generally so I'm going to press play Let's see if we can get this to work Okay, I might need to unmute myself No Okay Technical difficulties this video is on our website as well the main point and the I'll let it play just for a moment Because it shows an illustration that may still be helpful It's showing essentially as Dan Riker narrates that the co2 that is being used above ground in the above-ground Carbon cycle is being absorbed by trees as they grow when they fall or when they are cut or used for energy Then that same co2 is going back into the atmosphere So it's co2 that's been above ground that's coming into a tree that's going back up into the atmosphere in a cycle as pointed out here in this circle Contrast that with co2 from fossil fuels, which we are extracting which have been geologically stored for millions of years Have not been part of the above-ground carbon cycle and are being net additions to the carbon cycle that we have That's the basic point of the video Dan Riker who has a much more Expertise it does a great job of narrating it So feel free to watch on our website apologies that the sound there didn't quite work, but we'll keep moving The next several slides are direct quotes from various different international national and state Environmental and climate organizations about the complex topic that we're here to talk about tonight Which is how to account for carbon from bio related fuels biomass How do we look at that the IPCC quotes here in? 2007 and 2019 both speak to sustainable forage management and biomass being part of efforts to lower Greenhouse gas emissions to generate the largest sustained Mitigation benefit, so that's the intergovernmental panel on climate change 2007 and 2019 Here a couple different quotes us energy information administration Burning fossil fuels or biomass releases carbon dioxide. We all know that However, the plants that are the source of biomass for energy capture Almost the same amount of co2 through photosynthesis while growing as is released when biomass is burned Which can make biomass a carbon neutral energy source according to current international convention IPCC guidelines carbon released through biomass combustion is excluded from reported energy related emissions I'll come back to that point The White House under the Obama administration counsel on environmental quality These are guidelines that I'm quoting for the federal government to report its own emissions and it points out in this quote That we're seeking to avoid double counting And that's an important point. We cannot count carbon when it is in the land use sector And in the energy sector if it is the same carbon We have to account for it in one place or another place and the point that these quotes are all making is we don't account for Carbon from biomass in the energy sector emissions We account for them in what is called the land use or land use change forestry sector emissions Essentially the flux that's happening within our land use So if we are losing forests and we are losing carbon in the forests Then that's where this gets accounted for and likewise if we're gaining carbon in the forests Then that's showing some sort of a benefit in terms of adding carbon storage. We don't count the stack emissions It's not that we ignore the stack emissions, but we don't account for them in emissions inventories So this is IPCC White House CEQ US energy information administration Here is the Obama administration EPA with another quote on a kind of similar, you know similar line CO2 emissions from the consumption of fossil fuels will inevitably increase the amount of carbon in the atmosphere on Policy relevant timescales, but such an outcome is not inevitable with the consumption of biologically based feedstocks Biologically based feedstocks consumed at stationary sources and McNeil is a stationary source During a year may be partially or completely balanced by the amount of feedstock that grows during that year and Then lastly the Vermont agency of natural resources, which has an emissions inventory that was just published for 2020 and a Methodology document that shows how they come to their conclusions And so this is this is quoting the methodologies document from April of 2023 so fairly recently And it talks about when considering accounting practices for biogenic CO2 Carbon emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels are coming from a geologic source Which is on a significantly longer time scale than carbon in the much faster cycle Which moves between pools on the orders of months to centuries Which means combusting fossil fuels adds more carbon that was in long-term storage and effectively out of circulation into the atmosphere and into the more immediate carbon cycle Carbon dioxide emitted from combustion or decomposition of biogenic materials Which are part of the faster carbon cycle are assumed to be sequestered by the regrowth of the biogenic material that produced them and are Captured in the flux from land use change so again, we're not accounting for these emissions twice We're accounting for them in land use change not at the stack. That's the point here and that that's the point that's made below so Lastly our own report that just was released that's again on our website talking about carbon accounting I'm not gonna linger on this, but it's basically making the point that whether you look at Biomass you can look at it in different ways some people look at it as a debt and dividend You know and that's not necessarily the right or wrong way But that's one methodology that some people use and the point that's being made here in this quote is given that Remember 88% of our chips coming from those in-wood chips that are looking at you know using tops and limbs 8% from sawmill residues etc Given that a significant amount of our chips are what are called here whole tree chips Which are using the tops and branches that those would even be a carbon-favored fuel under the debt and dividend approach If somebody adopts that approach so we've talked just a lot about carbon accounting for biomass and Adam Sherman from VEC and VEC did a report for us that looked at McNeil in 2022. That's on our website as well And I have some quotes here one of which that I just want to share at the landscape level Vermont's forests grow more new wood each year than is harvested by a two-to-one ratio Based on a 2019 study conducted for the state of Vermont's Department of Forest Parks and Recreation Analysis that examined FIA data on forest inventory growth mortality and wood harvesting levels Vermont and northern New York forests have been adding forest inventory and stored carbon consistently for decades So that's the VEC analysis Also here is the quote that I referenced earlier that when McNeil is not running the marginal fuel is natural gas 92 to 98 percent of the time So that's included here as well. And then there's some data on the methodologies that were used for the VEC study Couple other points just beyond the pure carbon accounting and this is again from the VEC study But this is important McNeil played a really important role in purchasing a wood from Operations that are not going out for the purpose of getting wood chips for energy these are operations for paper for you know a lumber for different things and we can provide an economic value to the Property owner to keep that land as working land Keep that land continuing to grow trees and sequester and store carbon as opposed to facing for example development pressures So that's part of the quote here and the quotes here about the wood products market is if McNeil wasn't purchasing The wood chips it's not a given that those properties stay as working lands it's not a given that they Continue to sequester carbon and store carbon in the way that they are and we know that when our foresters are working with Property owners developing forest management plans. They're doing so in a way that helps us continue to have those lands as working lands We've been to properties In a 30 year span where we went and we've had sustainable management We've been able to come back and there's a harvest again So we've seen this cycle because this is a 40 year old plant play out on a decades and decades long time scale So going to really some of the questions that I think the two has had for us Again, this is the analysis from innovative natural resource solutions 2023 This is looking at data and I know this was one of the questions is can we have annualized data over a period of years that compares the Carbon at the stack and the carbon being stored in the trees essentially where McNeil harvests Can we compare those two things? So this is data These are the private timber lands in Vermont, New York where McNeil harvests and it's demonstrating between 2007 and 2020 That there was a net gain of carbon stored in trees in those lands And when you convert the carbon to co2, which is the greenhouse gas that we're all concerned about you get 24.3 million tons of additional forest co2 between 2007 and 2020 And that's what this graph shows here So this slide here is taking that value and annualizing it in green as you can see and shows our stack emissions Again, we're not ignoring our stack emissions. They're right here But it's showing those stack emissions against the forest carbon additions in the areas where we harvest And I want to make clear as the quote does as well from the report McNeil doesn't make a claim against all of those forest carbon Editions those are not that's not the point of this This is a comparative piece using the methodologies that were discussed earlier saying we're looking at land use flux and land use change If we are harvesting and losing significant amounts of forest carbon in the areas where we harvest Then that's a challenge from a climate standpoint in my view if on the other hand We are able to operate a plant like McNeil in these types of areas and still have a significant net gain in terms of forest carbon Then that speaks to a potential benefit and so that's what this data is demonstrating Looking at it on a one-year basis just going to 2022 and this includes in orange the plant operations So that includes some of the upstream emissions that are associated not just with the stack emissions But let's say diesel that's used for a loader at the plant for example So in orange there's a small slice here that adds to the emissions from the stack And again comparing to the annualized forest carbon and you could see the amount of forest carbon Tons, you know greatly outweighing the individual annualized emissions from McNeil Moving a little bit to a topic that is related and that really is a critical and important topic for us is district energy And I want to spend the last few minutes that I have how am I doing on time? We're doing okay I want to spend the last few minutes that I have talking about district energy This is a proximate issue that we have been working on for decades in Burlington That I've been working on certainly in my six and a half years at Burlington Electric And that we are a few months potentially away from having a system that is fully designed and feasible and ready to move forward to potential financing construction With needing a vote from the city council needing agreements from customers So we're not all the way there yet, but this forum in a way I think is aimed at providing information about this project to all of you to members of the public members of the council So what is district heat very simply district heat is the idea that we can capture? Additional wasted heat as well as additional steam at McNeil and pipe it underground either using hot water or in our case steam Getting it to large customers where they can use it and they can use less fossil fuel And and having multiple customers in a loop Essentially that are connected to this system McNeil was designed in its original permit to accommodate district energy the permit references district energy Back in the 80s and by becoming a district energy plant McNeil would be a combined heat and power plant So it's going to have more efficiency compared to today, which is a good thing District energy is also one of the four key pathways that have been identified in our net zero energy roadmap from 2019 Which was done by synapse energy economics from Cambridge, Massachusetts And it's projected to reduce commercial sector natural gas in Burlington by 16% and Folks may see on the news. We had a press event earlier today Releasing our 2022 net zero data for the city and commercial sector natural gas emissions is the one area where we're seeing some rebound relative to the pandemic lows District heat and the carbon fee policy for buildings and some of the other policies has the opportunity for us to bend that curve back down And so here again, we have a link to the evergreen energy site evergreen energy is our partner on district heat I'll touch on that in a moment This goes through the history and again, I wasn't kidding. This is and many of you know this This is a 40-plus year discussion in the city of Burlington around district heat We've gone through a variety of iterations in 2018 2019 We did have city council approval to file with the PUC to have a locally rate regulated system Here in Burlington and BED received legislative approval to fund some of the feasibility work related to the current effort and then this is the current effort with evergreen energy and We have gone through three phases of feasibility work all through the pandemic 2020 2021 2022 We have done the design and engineering Senator Lay he was able to secure before he left office over five million in capital funds to support the project We have a council approval to create a 501 c3 Which has been done called Burlington district energy that would finance and construct the project. There would be no city debt Associated with this project. This would be a nonprofit financed project Not adding to the city's debt burden We filed the first district energy act 250 documents in the history of this project Preliminary documents within the act 250 permitting process. So all of this is to say this is a very serious effort I know it's been going on for a long time I know that some folks at least are disappointed that it hasn't moved forward previously This effort is pretty close to moving forward and I wanted to convey that This is a schematic that I'll walk you through that shows what the developed business model would be for district heat So the idea is McNeil Using both steam from our boiler as well as a supplementary 100% renewable electric boiler Would provide steam underground and would transfer it to the district energy nonprofit Which would in turn operate the district energy system the district heat would connect to customers such as the medical center or the University the interval center and others they would receive the physical steam There would also be a renewable attribute that they could purchase that would be saying I have purchased not only the physical steam But I have the environmental attribute Or other customers can participate by purchasing that attribute as well So in that sense local residents local businesses the city itself can participate in supporting the project This is very similar to how we finance and operate community solar projects for example in Vermont So it's that sort of structure that's being contemplated for district heat Not that we have to linger on this but this would be the route essentially from the plant Which is at the top in the interval and the top would be the north and coming up to the hospital You know and coming through on Mansfield Avenue to Colchester Avenue to the hospital So just in case you were interested several different third-party analyses have been done on district heat One was the VEC study that I mentioned that looked at a little bit of an older version of the project But still very relevant because it looked at the hospital being a potential customer. It looked at the Upstream emissions from McNeil those are included here It looked at the emissions that would be offset in terms of natural gas use and the VEC studies says You could reduce by over 6,000 tons of CO2 equivalent annually by doing district heat More current We have and this is again This is on our website is what's called a great carbon score now This was referenced I have here the quote in the newly passed newly enacted over the governor's veto Affordable heat act that just passed this session that legislation that was passed by the Vermont legislature Specifically references using the Argonne National Laboratory greet model as a way to evaluate clean heat measures And so what we have is a carbon score under that model Conducted by a company called first environment Commissioned by Vermont gas is not commissioned by BED that looks at the greet score for District heat here in Burlington again everything. We're talking about the analyses. We've done are related to Vermont Related to McNeil related to Burlington or related to the areas in Vermont and New York where we harvest These are not meta studies or studies from elsewhere. These are from right here So this looks exactly at the greet score for District heat in Burlington and it finds that it would reduce greenhouse gas emissions the project over 95% Compared with natural gas so natural gas has a carbon score on a grams of co2 equivalent per megajoule of energy of 79 So the idea here is to have a common methodology across different energy sources So it's grams of co2 equivalent per megajoule of energy and you can see here the McNeil steam has a 3.76 in this analysis and the electric steam from the electric boiler has a point zero three nine But that would not be the primary outlet for district heat the McNeil steam would so when you do the runtime And combine those two it comes out to a 3.6 score For the McNeil steam with the electric boiler and this is initial modeling and it's draft analysis from first environments been posted on our Website subject to further revision But this to me is a significant new study and new development and it's consistent with the methodology that's been asked for under the State Affordable Heat Act and consistent with what the Public Utility Commission has asked for for these types of projects as well And then just lastly from evergreen's own analysis just to kind of finalize the district heat discussion We'd be talking about a hundred and ninety thousand MMBTU per year of renewable thermal steam that would be delivered through the project You would also achieve an efficiency at the customer site of thirty four thousand MMBTU of saved energy So that's your two totals and that's how you get to more than a sixteen percent reduction in the commercial natural gas related emissions in Burlington I have shared a lot with you. I know these are very dense slides I typically like to have slides with more graphs and and more visuals These are gonna live on our website. These are cited. These are meant to be a resource for folks who want to look at the analysis that we've shared and Review it for themselves. So I really appreciate the time I know we'll have a chance to perhaps, you know answer questions or provide more comments as we go forward But I want to stop there and thank you all for coming tonight. Thank you all for your time and listening to the presentation. I Thank you Darren and also the materials that are presented tonight. We're gonna make an effort to make sure That's all on the Tuke website under this agenda item as well. So it'll be a living document that we can use to Refer to as we have this community discussion going forward Next up we have Professor Rooney Varga and Professor Mooma who are gonna present next when you're ready. Yes, can you hear us? Okay One moment. Let me just get my my screen shared So we I guess I'll just start off by saying It is really an honor to be here today It's great to hear about What's happening here in Burlington to you know as an outsider as somebody who's coming from Massachusetts I have to admit. I'm a little bit jealous. I was driving up today Thinking, you know, how much I miss being in Northern New England and how much I love being here I live in Somerville, which is a very densely populated Part of Metro Boston and I really love being up here and it's truly an honor to share Our little bit of wisdom with you and to hopefully help you make an effective decision I also just want to take a moment to say also, you know, I really Applied Burlington. It's so wonderful to see so many people here concerned about this kind of in the weeds issue That's not always easy to understand And and also applaud Burlington for its climate ambition and climate action. It's truly an inspiration so Bill and I and I'll hand it off to Bill and then we'll kind of do a little back and forth good Yes, I'd just like to echo what Julia just said it's I actually live in Northwestern Massachusetts in Williamstown my northern property boundary is Palo, Vermont So I almost am in Vermont, but not quite Let me just begin by saying we're what we want to do is to share with you the the information that is Occurred mostly in the last five or six years including that from the most recent IPCC report By the way, I was an author of the 2007 report and there's actually more in there than you revealed Which is that energy has three three qualities to it. It can be renewable It can be efficient It can be higher low-carbon and In that we specifically pointed out that the burning burning wood is Is very slowly renewable And it is very high-carbon So those are just issues that we issue, you know facts that we have to deal with We all know the climate has changed And I won't go through each one of these the one of the upper right was a picture taken in New York just a few Last week when the smoke from the fires were there and it wasn't that climate change caused the fire in Quebec but it certainly made it much more intense than it would have otherwise be and If we look at the changes the damage that's caused by climate change that's increasing incredibly over the years And the reason for that of course is that the earth has gotten warmer The other thing that is not always appreciated the earth has not gotten warmer uniformly The Arctic is warming of something like four times faster than the earth as a whole and that's changing the whole dynamics of the jet stream The polar vortex that normally keeps cold air in the Arctic And we're also just getting reports of the same thing is happening with oceans The the currents and the oceans are changing in ways that are going to be affecting us in pretty pretty grim ways this is just showing since we've had temperature records the rise in in carbon dioxide which is Shown in the in the in the red here on the right and these are the average Temperatures for the year in every year they go up and down the ups are mostly El Nino years And we can see that there's a pretty good correlation between that We've we've added more gases to the atmosphere that absorb more radiant heat from the earth and Radiated back to earth and let me instead of letting it radiate out to space So the Quebec wildfires that really got everybody's attention question is what happened to the co2 from that and And well, we know the smoke in particular just made it all the way in New York City but what happened to the carbon dioxide and You heard something about a fast carbon cycle and a slow carbon cycle that's been talked about but there's really only one carbon cycle In fact, if we look at this Whether whether it's a a fire in Quebec the bottom one or from the Neal plant in the middle Or from fossil fuels at the top they all go into the atmosphere and it's allocated in this proportion 48% in any given year Net this is the net increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and and so less than half of the the increase in the atmosphere is less than half of what we put in from all these different sources and And about a quarter of it goes into the ocean and a little and more than a quarter of it goes into the forest and the The point is that forest and ocean carbon dioxide removal does not privilege carbon dioxide from wood burning or from power stations over fossil fuels It's treats them all equally. There is not a tree I have ever met that could tell whether a carbon dioxide molecule came from burning wood or burning coal Right, it just doesn't work that way. So it's really a single thing and that's the way it is it is treated. We know that The the the forest carbon if it's burned it as it's shown here at the bottom Or if it goes to McNeil, it's burned and we know that That if the if if there's less of that then then then then the forest is growing then we have Just as you showed And as you correctly pointed out, it's not because you're harvesting that those trees are growing that way You're getting more forest growth there. It's just that your growth of carbon is being less than the forest growth and if Those trees were not harvested the growth would be even greater and the carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere would be greater so this is a the way in which the scientific community analyzes the carbon cycle and You can see over here This is the emission from fossil fuels And it's for it's 35 billion tons a year and this is the emission from the land which includes fires and and land use change from you know The loss of forest to development and so forth and that's that's five So the total is about 40 billion tons between what we emit from fossil fuels and from the land and yet the increase is only 19 Now that's just almost miraculous Because about 20 billion is being removed by the land and by the oceans. So that's all in a single cycle Now what are we going to do about climate change well Governments decided in 2015 we should not let the temperature rise before one and a half degrees Celsius You know, which is 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit Because it causes irreversible change. How do we avoid this and Through governments went to the integral panel and climate studies that prey dear scientists tell us How do we keep the temperature from rising more than one and a half degrees Celsius and in a special report? They concluded to keep the temperatures from rising above one and a half degrees Celsius global net Anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions must decline by about 45 percent from 2005 levels by 2030 Reaching net zero around 2050 and then be net negative from there beyond 2100 So we hear about net zero is always something we can get done today. We can't we can't this is this is in order to keep the temperature from rising We basically have to Not let the temperature or the concentrations rise in the atmosphere much further So there are two different roles for forests The traditional one is that forest or were removed to make way for farms and urban development They provided materials for buildings and fuel for energy and today the US Forest Service classifies 97% of all forest and Vermont as timber lands, which means they're suitable for producing timber But they are also a critical component of the earth's operating systems They absorbed as we saw about 29% of all fossil fuel emissions They store and not only fuel emissions, but all these emissions They store approximately as much carbon in the trees and soils as in the atmosphere if managed differently They might store twice as much carbon and this is a point that we have to realize We could be getting more out of these the amazing forests that we have if we manage them differently And this study that came out in 2018 estimated we could store twice as much if we manage them for that purpose and in and In in the internationally agreed climate goals This is the point that's often overlooked. It is to achieve Concentrations of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that will avoid dangerous interference with the climate system So it's the amount in the atmosphere that's important And we often talk about it in terms of of emissions and removals that's just what the way of getting it there or taking it out and In 2015 they came up with this whole business about keeping it below one and a half degrees And they said should do everything we should do it also do take it out by forest and By the way global temperatures have already risen by 1.2 degrees Celsius And we're trying to hold it below one and a half as a scientist. I can tell you we're not going to succeed at that We are not going to succeed at that We have not come close to removing 45 reducing our emissions by 45 percent by 2030 We just can't possibly get there from here But let's do everything we can to get it as low as possible as quickly as possible So in the in the updated IPCC report that just came out last year It says that safeguarding biodiversity and ecosystems is fundamental to climate resilient development with very high confidence This is the first time the IPCC has said anything about the natural world other than that it was there and it was taking out carbon dioxide Maintaining the resilience of biodiversity and ecosystem services at a global scale depends on effective and equitable conservation of approximately 30 to 50 percent of earth's land fresh water and ocean areas including currently near natural ecosystems What that means is We're not here to tell you that there shouldn't be a forestry industry Let's just say there can be a forestry industry on the other half But we can't do both of them at the same time In the same places most of the time the summary for policy makers That's what that's from And then there was this other statement which really really surprised me It is also the case that protection of existing natural forest ecosystems is the highest priority for reducing greenhouse gas emissions And that refers to a paper that iron colleagues published in 2019 And you can find it at this at this site And the reason for that is that if We have we by managing our forest sustainably We have kept them all at a much lot younger age and much smaller size Then some of them would get if they were allowed to keep growing And we'll take a look at some of those factors in a moment so um So we we need to um um Move it Closer to the mic. All right Now the combustion of biomass generates about Amish is that better? Okay, good Roughly equivalent to the combustion of fossil fuels as you heard correctly the Counting system says we don't count them at the stack, but we count them as Removing carbon from the land And both of those are important if you have removed it in other words Carbon that was stored in a forest is no longer start in that stored in that forest and therefore We're not in as good a shape as we were before And it's it's sort of an artifice of the of the system to say we don't want to count it twice So we just arbitrarily chose to count it as a land factor rather than a stack factor But where do you get the number from from the stack because that's what you can measure exactly You can't measure it on the land um And the the report goes on to say the neutrality perception is linked to a misunderstanding of the guidelines for greenhouse gas inventories In the specific case of existing forests that may continue to grow if not used for bioenergy Some studies employing counterfactual baselines show that forest bioenergy systems Contemporarily have higher cumulative carbon dioxide emissions than a fossil reference system In other words, it can be worse than burning a fossil fuel And I think that's important to recognize Because it is the removal. I mean the trees that are cut are no longer removing carbon dioxide That needs to be put into the equation or they're not storing it and they're not removing additional And they're not accumulating more and they're not getting to where they could be So um Let me just turn it over to uh juliette here For the next phase. Okay. Thanks pal. Um, can you all hear me? Okay? Okay Let me see if that way. Yeah Just a little bit here. Okay, so um what I'd like to do and I'm In order to answer the questions about mcneal and about whether or not. I mean really fundamentally What makes sense for the future of mcneal in order to Ensure that burlington meets its climate goals and climate commitments Um, I thought I would share with you a little bit You know again kind of framing the context in terms of carbon budget Where we are versus really a very different time Which was when mcneal was when the decision was first made to build mcneal 1978 And when mcneal first started operating in 1984 versus today where we are in terms of Our climate crisis our carbon budget And also our climate goals are very different um So if we look at kind of that context first here, we are out to 1984 These are co2 emissions in gigatons or billions of tons per year From 1900 out to that time when mcneal first started operating so six years after The decision was made and I just ran a little model and calculation to take a look at you know In order to meet our current understanding of the remaining Carbon budget in other words how much more carbon we can put in the atmosphere And still have a 50 50 chance of staying under or within that 1.5 degree c target And this kind of hurts to say this um, I'm a mom of three kids and that's really that's really the reason I'm here tonight honestly um is If we had started doing this when I was a kid if we had had this meeting in this conversation We could have flat lined our emissions in 1970 or sorry in 1984 and we still Would have been easily under the 1.5 c degree carbon budget And not had to start cutting emissions until well after 2050 instead sadly We did this we we our emissions continued to rise and now Not even according to the 1.5 degree c budget according to your goals here in burlington and vermont We have a 20 my understanding is a net zero goal by 2050 So if we really understand what net zero means it basically means zero And that means a an emissions curve Reducing like this red line In reality sadly because emissions have continued to rise in the last few years and our understanding Of the limitations of that one and a half degree c budget have also improved It's actually worse. It's actually more like a 20 37 Zero goal. So that's pretty tough. It's a steep We're in I mean really when I think about my kids. I think about We're kind of in an emergency here like we need to cut emissions as quickly as possible Okay, so why am I bringing this up? I'm bringing this up because I'll I'll give one more background context before I kind of dive in I guess so another another thing that we've heard about today is that The Forest forests are growing in vermont landscape carbon is accumulating in vermont This is actually an image that bill shared with me of carbon density Um, so if you look at the it's a little bit hard to see but if you look at the color scale there You can see what that represents is metric tons of carbon per hectare in um the northeast northeast forest so pink is a low number and We know that 95 percent of new england forests are less than 100 years old Much of the area we think where mcneil is getting its wood from has potential to grow substantially more um, and new england forests could continue to accumulate Additional carbon for more than 100 years. So if we think back right we're starting from a situation where european settlers came here um You know a couple hundred years ago and at that time they denuded the landscape We ended up with about 15 forest coverage now. We're at about 85 percent So you could say that we're still repaying the carbon debt of those original settlers okay And the good news is that the trees are doing that for us right the the carbon is accumulating in those in those trees okay, so Back to our context yesterday versus today that you know if if only I had a time turner to go back to 1984 um, we were looking at a stable climate The impacts of climate change were uncertain. They were far in the future. I mean think about the discourse There was no discourse about climate change We were worried about peak oil Right There really wasn't widely available and affordable zero carbon energy like we have today. I mean, I just drove up I just drove our bolt up. I stole it from my kids I charged it at a renewable energy outlet at least that's what it said to me. I don't always believe these things But we have now right solar wind hydro and most important importantly the cheapest form of energy The most abundant form of energy is energy efficiency The energy we don't use it is widely available So back in 1984 it made a lot of sense to have a counterfactual in other words If we're not using wood, what are we doing if we're not using wood? We're burning fossil fuels um, but today Warming is accelerating. We're not in the new normal. We're in an accelerating pace of change Right, it's like we're seeing this now and unfortunately with El Nino here We're going to see it even worse in the next um, couple of years We need to have immediate and steep cuts and carbon emissions and in fact, we have legally binding goals to to achieve those things But the good news is that not only is zero carbon energy far more accessible and affordable But it comes with a whole climate tech economy jobs and opportunity um and now The appropriate counterfactual is not continued use of fossil fuels I think we all agree right the appropriate counterfactual is rapid transition to zero carbon energy and Let our forests grow because what we need to do What we need to do is transfer carbon from the atmosphere to our forests and i'm going to just again as a mom i'm going to just I'm going to use this really Simple tool that my kids get really clearly, but actually it it's basically Says exactly the same thing that our complex dynamic computer model that you know We published in peer review papers. You can check out also says Which is that carbon behaves according to the laws of conservation of mass Whether you can see it smell it or not We can't see your smell carbon dioxide without instruments, but it still behaves according to the laws of conservation of mass So if I have if you think about the water in this cup as carbon in the atmosphere And we have a finite atmosphere and water and you know carbon accumulates in it if we emit carbon to it I think we all are on the same page about that If I have water in this cup representing carbon in our forests I don't think it takes that you know It's it's not that hard to get that if I harvest and burn the wood i'm doing this And carbon is accumulating in the forest as a result now. We've heard that Carbon is also accumulating in the landscape That would be this right and we can argue I think so we can argue a lot about the details of how fast those flows are happening What is driving them what the counterfactual is etc. That's where the complexity is in this question about biomass But what I want to argue here today is that the fundamental the fundamental counterfactual that we should be addressing is that well a We have an opportunity to let our forest grow which does this and ends up with less carbon in the atmosphere and um and also I want to just mention that we need to be careful about What we're giving Biomass credit for in other words does it make sense to assume that It is because we're harvesting wood And transferring it to the atmosphere that landscape carbon Is going up in the forests of vermont or does that not make sense to get credit for and that gets back at that fundamental question of Where do we account for carbon? We don't want to double count it Should it be in land use or should it be in emissions associated with energy, which is what we're using it for Okay, so now i'm going to get into So I want to just get into the model i'm not going to bore you with You know calculus equations and whatever else, but I just want to give you kind of the overview of what we modeled And i'm happy to share with you, you know dive into the nuts and bolts in more detail if you want to afterwards Okay, so fundamentally When and I don't think any of us are in disagreement about this um when we Harvest and burn wood for energy There are fossil fuel emissions associated with that activity, right? We all agree about that and you could argue that that should be accounted for in transportation or whatever other sector You want to account it for in I know at McNeely you do account for fossil fuel emissions associated with wood Which makes sense because you wouldn't be doing that fossil fuel activity if it weren't for needing to burn the wood So we have fossil fuel emissions associated with harvest transport processing and potentially transport again It depends on the details That all as we've already talked about ends up with transferring from fossil fuels carbon into the atmosphere We also have of course Burning of the wood itself, which leads to carbon emissions at the stack, which as we talked about already The case was made that it doesn't make sense to count that at the stack I don't know we can we conserve carbon associated with a pulse of use of bioenergy and we count we count that not in land use but at the stack so we're not double counting it um and There is also carbon leaking from those ecosystems as you cut trees or remove trees You have organic carbon that the soil warms and respiration occurs and carbon leaks from the soils Counterbalancing that is carbon that's taken up by forests that regrow right? It's that thing that happens afterwards So you cut you harvest and then the forest regrows Okay, so again looking at this idea of how do we account dynamically account for carbon Um, I want to show you what our models show If you just take a pulse Of bioenergy and what this y-axis show shows you is the percent of the original carbon in biomass Okay, so we're starting off with a new england maple maple beach birch forest like you have in the hardwoods around here that are about 100 years old That could continue to grow if it were left alone And that's why you see here this no harvest line shows that it does continue to grow it it adds more carbon as it As it as it grows I'm showing here now a pulse that results from a 25 percent harvest or 25 thinning versus a 95 percent thinning And i'm not at all saying that mcneil is doing the 95 percent thinning. We could argue about this But the point is that there's some harvest that's happening and as a result of that harvest you get a decline in carbon in in the forest biomass, right? It's just this piece here And then it takes time, but then you see that the forest regrows and that's that that's that carbon coming back into the forest accumulating back Okay, but look at this axis here. We're down at 2023 So it's today We have use of bioenergy in 2023. So carbon immediately goes down in the forest And I just want to point out that it's the area under these curves that represents the net carbon That's transferred from the from the forest to the atmosphere, right? So we're all on the same page This is not net zero Okay, this is net transfer to the atmosphere We would need to get Way past 2050 To get to net zero So you could ask well Don't the thinned forests grow faster Okay So here this black line that you see, right? That's just the tangent there and I'm already hearing my son He was taking you know multivariate calculus Yelling at me. Well, you should have taken it from here, right? So no, it's just taking it as a random example Here is I'm different. I could take it anywhere But here I'm taking a tangent there to show the slope of the line The slope is going to be the percent or the amount of carbon Fixed per year the amount of carbon going back into the flow, right? That's this So the slope of the line shows how fast it is. Yes The slope of the line is steeper showing faster growth For the harvested forests. I'm not at all arguing with that That's not what matters. What matters is Where is the carbon? Is it in the forest or is it in the atmosphere? And the problem is that it's in the atmosphere Okay, well we get back to this question. Well, if we weren't burning what at McNeil would be burning gas So if we take a look at this question of is it better than burning gas? Sadly the answer over any Time that's relevant to the policy we're talking about is no If we have so on the y-axis here What you see is a percent of emitted carbon that remains in in the atmosphere Okay So if I if I start off at my 2023 pulse and here I've got a case of The 100% shows what happens if wood displaces Zero carbon energy like energy efficiency solar wind or hydro With a 25 harvest or a 95 harvest And the bottom line shows what happens if wood displaces gas so in other words Gas is emitting we're counting for that by this difference between the zero carbon and the gas scenario But in in both cases, you know, whether I had this black line coming from here So if if I'm displacing zero carbon energy I actually end up with a situation where I'm pretty close to 100 percent So this 25 percent harvest is about 96 percent in 2050 of the original carbon emitted is still there If I compare it against gas, it's a little bit better. I'm more at like 75 percent But still we're not anywhere close to net zero Okay, and I know that our model is looking at, you know, not just residues but at Finning of trees as well And so I just want to point out that while I don't have that modeled Precisely, we do have carbon payback time So research showing the carbon payback times for burning residues is years to decades compared to decomposition And that there are economically attractive counterfactual so you could instead use that carbon for You know building materials or other materials instead of burning them insulation for example I don't I don't I'm not Haven't been involved in all of the hard work that's been done to plan for this potential steam line I don't so, you know, I'm fully acknowledging that I'm working from limited access to information and and not having you know But I think the the the key point is like this key question about whether it makes sense to invest in the steam line or district heat whatever you want to call it Do we end up with A better situation or a worse situation? I guess that's the fundamental question We know that fossil emissions from wood harvest processing and transport would add about 16,393 tons of carbon dioxide equivalents per year But the emissions at the stack would be far more Sorry, I'm and please forgive me. This is not from the additional Investment. This is from current current activities Um, please forgive me. I was jumping ahead to another slide um So that that refers to so this slide refers to the difference between Emissions that are currently counted at mcneal versus the emissions that are not counted directly, but that are coming out of the stack Okay, but before I wrap up and ask the question about investing further in mcneal I want to share with you one more analysis from our work with with model-based analyses And what this graph shows is basically a run that we did where we looked at this question of what would happen if You have a pulse of carbon dioxide emissions from whatever source would fossil whatever you want to burn For 20 years followed by Another 20 year period where every single molecule of co2 is sequestered back out of the atmosphere So this is perfect sequestration in a short time period Even when you think about something like residues The resulting carbon dioxide slowly, you know, you have a pulse of emissions The the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere builds over time until the emissions go negative at which point it starts to drop but Because of the time that it takes for heat to accumulate in our climate system And especially our oceans where 93 of the heat that's accumulated so far currently is And the time that it takes to dissipate that heat It is centuries before The carb the the heat from that pulse of carbon and and subsequent sequestration of that carbon dissipates in other words, you are warming the climate for centuries even if you sequester every molecule within a 20 year period What does that mean? It means that delayed carbon neutrality in other words waiting for the trees to grow back Is not climate neutral And it also means that in the interim Climate damage that happens because of that worsened climate change during that temporary if only centuries long period of time Is not reversed right the the the houses that are damaged by intense storms the wildfires that happen The glaciers that melt the sea level that rises does not magically Like go backwards, right? It's still happened Even if every molecule of co2 is sequestered Okay, so now to get to the thing that I don't you know that this idea of do we invest more in mcneil or not Do we expand the use of bioenergy in burlington or not? um, our best estimate was that additional biogenic emissions from that investment would be You know not massive but would be certainly additional and substantial on the order of 15,000 tons per year So that would both increase the use of emissions and increase would bioenergy but also maybe more importantly We can argue about these numbers. It would prolong burlington's commitment to this plant. It would invest in Keeping this plant going And I think that is a risky proposition for a city that is committed To climate action and also in a changing policy environment. We know that Massachusetts for example as we'll mention in a bit Has passed a new law that takes wood bioenergy out of the renewable portfolio standard. You can't count it as Renewable or zero carbon anymore in massachusetts So as burlington is vermont likely to follow. Um, I You know, I would wager yes um, and then also I just want to point out that You know, this again is our model based analysis. It's from a national level. So I I fully Acknowledge that but it's again down to this simple system If I continue to you know Harvest and burn, right? That's what I'm growing the use of bioenergy if I do that Faster than I can pay it back. What I'm doing basically is paying for credit card debt with a credit card Right and you end up continuing to accrue Carbon in the atmosphere. So I think the problem is You know again thinking back to 1978 1984 it would have been okay to have Some use of wood going on for a while. We had more time then Now the problem is we're talking about increasing the use of bioenergy And continuing to accrue that carbon debt That's going to put us in a hole that we don't want to be in So again, I think just a just a warning from down south Um, and I hope you're going to let me back up here. Um, we have This changing policy context, you know people are Policy makers are starting to understand this is a new Reclimate reality that we live in And we don't have wood in our rps In massachusetts anymore. So there are no subsidies. And yeah, there are no subsidies no wrecks Hand it back over to bill one of the things that We've come to realize just literally Since since the mid well about 2015 or so Of 2014 actually, um, is the importance of very large trees in forests And a colleague of mine bob leverett who actually goes out and measures trees. He doesn't just use the The the the models and so forth, you know, he goes out When his younger days used to climb to the top of a 170 foot tree and drop of A a measuring tape down. He doesn't do that anymore But he uses a laser Range finders to do this work and at the request of Of a of a town in Massachusetts that was where there was a big debate going on they wanted to cut down some big old trees And he said, oh, don't worry. We'll plant another one in its place I will plant two we'll plant 10. How's that? And so people said bob. What does that mean? So this is a on the left. This is a A 150 year old mature red oak And it stores about eight tons of carbon And the question is if you had Younger trees that were 50 feet tall This is 100 feet tall and 54 inches in diameter If it was 50 feet tall, how many trees of that size would it take to store eight tons of carbon? The answer is 35 and and Then if you look at street trees that are 40 feet tall it would take 151 of those. They're only 16 years old And if you got them straight for landscaping in 25 feet tall four inches in diameter at 465 I mean, it's just it's just is this whole business of well We're going to cut down big trees and replace them with faster growing little trees Makes no sense at all. It is absolutely destroying the forest and its carbon capacity And it's the member it's the amount that's stored And we we we did a study And okay, it wasn't here. It was out in the Pacific Northwest but all the national forests in in Oregon and it turned out that They they had not Cut any trees bigger than 20 inches in diameter Back in the 1990s in order to save the spotted owl Lo and behold They decided in the end of the trump administration to get rid of that rule And so a young scientist came to a group of us older scientists and said I found a data set of the Of this forest service that has measurements of 700 000 trees in those forests How much carbon is in those greater than 21 inch trees? Turned out it was only 3 of the trees But they held 42 of the carbon That's pretty astounding and in study after study we're seeing the same sort of thing So this is an important thing to remember Managing and sustainably for logging keeps the trees young and relatively small And so we don't get the big trees that really accumulate the carbon That's why I think we need to have some forest set aside and maybe this initiative by president biden to Mature and old growth trees is is the way to do this and we'll start with federal lands and public lands Then we may find people in private lands who'd like to help and do the same thing This does not put an end to forestry It just says it can't be done everywhere So here's just a big tree. This is a tree that's storing about eight or nine tons of carbon It's it's half that half the weight of the wood is carbon And um, so to get that to to got to let them grow And this term that we introduced which is caused great consternation in the forestry world There's there's a deforestation where you undo a forest There's reforestation where you replant an undone forest And there's there's afforestation where you plant trees somewhere else that wasn't a forest But there was no term for allowing this Any existing forest to keep growing To take advantage of the fact that they would produce these very large trees storing great amounts of carbon We use the term proforestation A lot of people in the forestry industry don't like it Let me just stay right now. I never intended it to mean we should never cut down another tree It just meant that we should allow more trees to continue to growing in order to really accumulate the great amount of carbon that they're capable of And so, uh, it's all stored in their limbs and in other places the soils Until only 20 years ago. We had no idea what all those Fungi and the soils were doing it turns out they're a huge carbon storage and they're a system of Sharing nutrients among trees making them actually grow better faster larger um I'm just going to close I'm just going to read the statement in each of these. I'll just give you four examples of some of these recent research This this blockbuster paper in 2018 in the journal nature, which is one of those prestigious journals there is By jim lutz and uh, and about 50 co-authors Studied 48 forests around the world of all types But they found the largest one percent of trees those greater than ones in about three eighths of an inch in diameter Comprised half of the above ground living carbon In other words one out of every hundred trees the biggest one out of every hundred trees held half the carbon There's one for one of those forests was harvard forest here in new england Instantly interestingly enough The largest one percent only held 30 percent of the carbon The reason is new england forests are still recovering from the decimation that took place in the 19th century so, uh interesting um Richard birdsy, uh, just published in january this paper uh, and um And and and just that just found that forests in the later stages of their development Played this outsized role in the accumulation in long-term storage of atmospheric carbon And subsequently enabling their protection where lacking has been recognized an effective nature-based solution So that was looked at all the national forests in the whole country including green mountain Here are just two other papers the paper that was referred to by stevensson Uh, they majored 403 top tropical and temperate tree species showing that for most species mass growth rate increases continuously with tree size in other words the The amount of carbon that's accumulated Just keeps increasing as trees get bigger and bigger And then there's the paper that i published with co-authors Which simply said that growing existing forests intact to their ecological potential Turn pro-forestation is a more effective immediate and low-cost approach that could be immobilized across suitable forests of all types And again, this is not saying how we manage all forests We have need for forest products and we'll continue to have need for forest products And we can manage forests sustainably With even less carbon loss than we have today by making better use non-combustion use Of the now residuals the tops the branches and so forth and um So I think that this is just uh, we we really need to work together on this And um, I'll turn it back to uh, Julia just to sum up. I mean, I think We we um recommend that Wood bioenergy emissions are counted at the stack um that it makes sense to Not invest more in continued use of bioenergy um or released from wood um And certainly not growing that investment because it's risky Um, it makes sense to create strategic forest carbon reserves as bill is talking about to support forest growth and pro-forestation And we recognize the need to incentivize private landowners to preserve forests for long-term accumulation of carbon Um, and that you know that you need to compensate people to do that So I think that's all we have um to share tonight and and happy to field any questions Although I guess maybe that's at the end. Okay. Yeah Thank you Next, uh, I wanted to allow um our other panelists. Um, dr. Kaseba Adam Sherman and Harris ron to offer any of their thoughts on on the the uh, the tuc prompts So in any particular order go ahead Okay, there we go. Um Well, I guess I'll sort of maybe just also comment on on sort of the presentation So I am a forest ecologist. So I'm really speaking for my deep knowledge of vermont's forest here and in the region I spent a lot of time out on private lands um, uh and public lands, you know state lands and lands managed by I by conservation organizations And you know, definitely we're in a climate crisis That's I'm deeply concerned with where we are right now and that we haven't as a world Made better strides to reduce fossil fuel use. It's really frustrating that we've come to this point We are also pointed out in a biodiversity crisis. Um But one thing that I really get concerned with and it happens in our state accounting We don't account for all of our imports And this is something we don't do here in vermont. We don't do in massachusetts And it's really concerning because there is a really Easy way for us to push our impacts elsewhere and outsource our our resource demands. And that's you know, climate change That's one of the reasons where there is not really paying the full price for all of our needs and resource demands and how we Work and live in this world. Um, and so, you know, for example here in vermont, we produce about we harvest about 90 of the wood that we use And that's great, right? We have this great amazing resource covers about four and a half million acres of forest In in massachusetts where they also have a lot of forest. It's two percent They are harvesting two percent of the wood they use that means 89 percent are coming from elsewhere That might mean plantations That might mean the amazon that might mean lots of different things that's out of sight out of mind And I think that's a really big concern for me And so in my work a lot of what I do is how can we manage forests better, right? How can we leave big trees so I talk to foresters about that talk to landowners, right? We can I think there is a way that we can do both and I will say for You know biomass it's we're there harvesting other wood products and biomass is usually An added thing that makes it profitable because this is a thing wood is actually Not that profitable and so to actually get some of this work to happen in the woods You have to pay a logger and a forester and a trucker to get the materials And so that usual that biomass can be that little bit extra that allows the work to happen I look around this building. I see a lot of carbon being stored, right? That's wood products We have needs we have resource demands. How can we do that in a sustainable way? In our forest it values all our forest and you know thinking about what we love about the state It's mostly the forest, right when we look out our green mountains And so we have to really think carefully about How to keep that land forested right now in our state? We're losing about 14,000 acres of forest land a year mostly to housing And it's not usually sustained out like Affordable housing units. It's usually big houses out in the woods And as we see we've seen this in other places in the country. There's been lots of studies when Logging is not feasible economically or when there's a lot of barriers politically Land is easier it's it sells it parcels and we're seeing this our parcels are getting smaller We're having our forest fragmented We're losing our forest cover and to me that's a really big concern and so You know valuing all the parts of our forest and all the services including You know the amazing service of carbon sequestration storage, but also all the other benefits our forest provide I think you know is a really nuanced and complex discussion That we need to keep in in the back of our mind So that's one of my big concerns is the easy thing we can do of pushing some of our impacts elsewhere But also making sure we're we're keeping our forest land forest And I think that's sort of all I'm going to say right now. I'll pass it on Good evening everyone. Thanks for having me My name is Adam Sherman and I was part of the 2022 Study that looked at the carbon impacts of the McNeil's generating station Darren covered all the methodology and the background and the results I think there's a numb. I'm delighted to be here and to have The opportunity to talk about like the pros and cons of where our energy comes from And the fact that we have a local energy source. We're making our electrons locally I think it's a privilege to be able to you know have a open conversation and exploration and debate about like the merits of of that as Ali alluded to when our resources Including our energy come from further away It's out of sight out of mind and I think We have the honor and privilege to be here. I know having this conversation I think the same debates play out in any energy generation source whether it be solar or battery and mining cobalt So I think there are a lot of parallels here and there are no perfect solutions I think wood energy is a A tool in the toolbox and the scale of our climate Challenge requires every tool in the toolbox moving forward and so there are no silver bullet energy choices but You know we can use pieces of silver buckshot to cobble together and move quickly to displace fossil fuels There was a lot of kind of discussion around the carbon Frameworks and I just wanted to mention that a lot of times people get really hung up on why One scientific paper says you know wood energy is great and another one says it's worse than coal And the thing to remember about carbon accounting is that it is an accounting framework And that the researchers choose the boundaries of that analysis So when if you only look at a single stand that was harvested and there was a hundred tons of carbon inventory in that stand And it was brought down to say 50 tons and you're looking at that time frame to regrow That's a stand level analysis. And so oftentimes The the narrower boundaries of the accounting studies Are the biggest predetermined of the conclusions of the study So when you have narrow focused boundaries, you tend to paint a picture that is not favorable for wood energy general studies that have taken a broader and wider framework and boundary of their analysis looking at the fossil fuel displacement of wood energy tend to have more favorable outcomes So just in terms of reconciling wide does one study say, you know, this is great and another studies say it's bad I think it's really important to look at the other thing to keep in mind is that landscape level framework, so if you zoom out from one parcel of a plot of forest land that is harvested For every one acre that is harvested you in vermont, we have You know 4.5 million acres of of forest land And for every one acre that's harvested you have dozens of other acres that are part of the management system part of that wood basket and the the growth of new wood on those parcels that in that given you aren't being harvested are balancing out so you know, I think that's really important to look at the Not just the time scale of the accounting frameworks, but the spatial scale or the landscape scale of this I'll pause it there and turn it over to to harris Thanks, adam My name is harris ron. I'm a forester and I live in burlington. I'm a burlington resident, so I recognize a lot of people here And I'll try to keep this short. I I'm not a you know carbon accounting expert like some of the other people here But I do manage properties in vermont all over northern vermont and I you know appreciate the comment from professor mumo that You know what I'm saying is that we shouldn't harvest that What I'm saying is that we shouldn't harvest there just should be some areas maybe that we shouldn't and I would agree with that and I so I just want to give an example maybe of how you know harvesting can over time, you know improve All the things that you mentioned the biodiversity, you know the the carbon storage and sequestration you know the old growth and and the example I'll give is I know for years ago is a stand of pine trees that were coming up from an old agricultural field 100 years ago. Maybe That was abandoned is coming up to this pine There you could see they're dying, you know, there are some holes in there That were you know going to just expand over the time and it was going to die you have some beautiful hardwoods coming up underneath it And so you could see what was going to happen and maybe Another 50 years or so those pines were going to die the hardwoods are going to come in and take over and use that site much better What you know, I did with working with a landowner and writing a management plan and working with McNeil to get it approved and all that is to Take out that pine So, you know kind of move forward what was might have happened in 50 or 75 years make that happen in You know 20 years that that those hardwoods would be growing in better and using that site better and And shipping that would Some of the wood not, you know, we utilize the saw logs we utilize the firewood But the stuff that's lower quality than that ship it to McNeil and and keep the lights on here So I really don't see what's wrong with that Uh, we it's an abundant local Renewable resource more of it's growing that it's being cut I just don't see the problem. Uh, I'll just leave it there. Thank you Well, thank you and thank you to all our panelists for those, uh, those opening remarks on the two prompts. Um We're going to go to next to a short five minute break Um, and then we'll come back and and have some more q and a Your seats, please Okay, everybody we're going to get going again Thanks I know I know we're trying to do a lot and a short amount of time tonight So we're going to be a little bit draconian on the timekeeping from here on out um during the break we uh looked at the questions we had curated from a lot of the ones submitted and and uh, some have been answered by through some of the presentations and commentary So we we focus we're going to focus on three. So this next segment might be a little bit shorter If your question isn't asked you can always and you're here tonight. You can always ask it at public comment as well So our first question came from uh, Todd Waldron and Maddie's put the question up. I'm not going to read the whole thing But essentially it's asking while emission reductions are a key consideration Could you our panelists? Speak to other co-benefits and or impacts that this project and we're assuming the Project means sort of the McNeil enterprise in total Can bring to the table for biodiversity forest health and climate resilience? and so If anybody would like to speak to that It's sort of my wheelhouse of work to work in Yeah, so um as I was mentioned You know most of our forests are fairly Kind of middle-aged um following they're we call them second growth. So they're following agricultural land abandonment A lot of our other forests that weren't cleared were often logged in unsustainable ways We didn't know a lot about ecology back then people were opportunistic with Harvesting the biggest trees um certain species over others And we had grazing in our a lot of our forests So these long-term effects have left some of our forests in conditions that maybe aren't what we would consider the most resilient So they might have limited species diversity not a lot of different age classes in the forest things like lacking ecological characteristics like dead logs and dead standing trees And so we are there's a number of us that work to Encourage landowners and foresters and loggers To add and consider these attributes in their forest management Actually Harris has a great document that is published by my colleague at UVM Dr. Tony DiMotto and Extension colleague down at UMass Amherst Paul Catanzaro about managing for old growth characteristics So we can actually you know the idea being that recognizing we need wood products How can we do that and harvest timber and then? Elevate and accelerate the forest condition With some of those characteristics and we know that those characteristics lead to higher resilience in a changing climate Because I will say one thing that hasn't come up really although you touched on forest fires Is that climate change is a threat to? Forests and the carbon that they store in sequester And so one of these ideas is risk spreading and is having forests that have diversity complexity and we have diversity across the landscape That gives us a lot more resilience when we do get an invasive insect coming in that we don't know about right or That frost event we had a couple weeks ago. I don't know if you were out in the woods It it hurts certain species over others, right? And so we know this we know diversity and complexity is really beneficial And so we're doing a lot of that work in our forests I know lots of foresters that are doing this lots of landowners that are interested And so it can complement sustainable forest management Yeah, and I have extra copies of this. So I'll leave these here if anyone's interested Would anybody else like to comment on that question? If not Actually Dr. Gaseba and I are now serving on a on a joint Dr. Gaseba and I are jointly we just started working together on a work in a working group in Massachusetts Where we're going to try to deal with these kinds of issues And what she says is very important. We need to understand what are our most resilient For us And which are most likely To be resilient to a change in climate As you said, I mean, I'm just just shocked now when I go into our forest and I just see that You know the damage that's being inflicted by By invasive species and by you know emerald ash borer and willy adelgid and the and the Beach bark Damage and so forth And and and and yet when I go to see areas that have been been recently heavily logged. I find that You know, they're what's coming back or a lot of it a lot of invasive species That was not a problem when all these rules of forestry were put in place, right? I mean in these Barberry for example, we have a lot of it in our area And it's 10 times has 10 times the number of ticks that that that the native Pre-cut area has And So they're we we we have we have an interesting situation. We have by benign neglect we have the largest most high density carbon forest in the northeast From western massachusetts up through vermont southern vermont new and new hampshire all the way up And it's the only thing that rivals it, of course Are the adirondacks Which still have lots have have the largest amount of primary forests left in the northeast So we need to be, you know, I think we need to read nature And also understand the consequences of our past management or non management Which has led to the state of the forest that we have today and then make some decisions Which of those are we going to be trying to maintain for the operational Purposes of the planet and which we're going to try to maintain for the production purposes of our economy Thank you If no one else wants to speak to that we'll go to our next question from alan tomson And alan asks can sustainable forest management be used to improve carbon storage sequestration and climate resilient forests Do you want to have a crack at that? Well, I would say yes And You know that that's The goal it does get complicated by the fact that Most of the land in vermont is privately owned And of that, you know, probably Two-thirds three-quarters of it is small landowners, you know, family owned properties It's you know the vast majority of the land in vermont So you Need to also be working with The owner to to educate them to try to help them reach their goals In some cases it might be, uh, you know, we want to store the most carbon possible And that's you know, we just wanted to let it grow and that's all we want to do and that's fine. We need that other ones They Need to get income from their forest, you know, they just have to to in order to keep owning it And if not, they they won't be able to pay their taxes won't be able to own it And so we try to help them also, you know, with harvesting and getting income from it, you know And as sustainable a way as possible and and it's it's it's usually doable. It depends what's growing there But you know, we we don't want to get into a situation where if Landowners aren't able to get income from their forest then it will just have rich people owning all the land in vermont You know, basically is what's going to happen. It's not the way it is right now You don't have to be a wealthy person. You can kind of keep that land In sustainable production And managed for the old, you know, these other things as well. So I don't know if that answered the question But yes, I think it is possible anybody else I would just say if it keeps trees if it keeps trees at the age of 50 on average, it's not going to do that job It just what it just doesn't it it it Our forests have become ever more like a through the management that we've had ever more like like tree plantations, I mean the The the the species that have the highest value are taken out And the For lumber now, there's also this harvesting for I still don't understand how how can somebody ask it to tell me how much does somebody get for a ton of What is going to become wood chips that makes it possible for them to keep their land in forest or not? I mean, how much is it? Yeah Stumpage or at the gate? How much? Stumpage or at the gate? No, at the gate. Please speak into the mic. What does the landowner get for one ton of wood taken off to become burned at A dollar a ton. That's what it is in massachusetts That's what it is in massachusetts Yep, I'm sure that's true But I'm hearing that that without a market for low quality wood Landowners won't be able to keep their land in forest Yeah, that's right So I'm gonna bring this back just because only I'm just trying to keep time, but thank you for your remarks And and I didn't know if anybody else wanted to weigh in on this before I continue I was just gonna make a just a brief comment It's related to the discussion, but I think what may not be fully understood is When somebody is part of a harvest that is selling wood chips to McNeil Our foresters are working with that property owner to put in place a forest management plan Now we may not be the highest value economically in that harvest But by being a market and by having standards that we have for forest management We're applying that standard to kind of a broader set of operations And so I just wanted to kind of in speaking to the question and getting into the discussion You know, how can BED play a role? How can McNeil play a role in improving forest management? I think the work of our four foresters is really doing that in the properties where we harvest and maybe having an outsized impact Both economically and with the forest management plans in supporting Sustainable forestry. Yeah, I guess I just wanted to comment on bill was mentioning Keeping a tree at 50 years old. I would just say, you know, there is a We manage for diversity of things in our forests And and this is one of the great things about forestry in Vermont is that we have a licensed forester Populations you have to keep up a license for a license to be a forester here That means continuing education. That means landowners have a management plan We have the great current use program our use value appraisal program And that's given Allowed for this long term vision in forest management because you can't have a short term vision in a forest You really need to be thinking about trees last a long time. They live a long time There's a lots of dynamics at play out And so, you know, it really doesn't make sense For a landowner for a forester to really oh, I'm going to liquidate this forest and not have we're thinking about How do you keep that value over the long term and also landowners are managing for many many different things In addition to timber right biodiversity, maybe wildlife habitat, maybe recreation trails So managing all of that. But, you know, if we had this really myopic view on on on our forests We wouldn't have a forest resource So really people are managing for multi-aged forests out there for forest complexity for thinking about Having that diversity on the landscape and how can we You know harvest timber and get some of those attributes in our forests As you know as they develop I think one question that I I think is worth asking too is back to the like low quality wood products or use of low quality timber like What else could you do with it? Could you, you know, are there opportunities for like other than burning? I think that's really the question because immediate transfer to the atmosphere That's and granted. I get it that like climate is just one of many Things that you could manage a forest for and it is like what I'm focused on obviously Um, but it is also kind of part of where we are in this time, right is Is can given our climate goals glib it given our climate reality? Can we look to you know? Yes, you need to manage your land in a way that you can live on that land Obviously, that's critically important. Can we? Either are there other opportunities other uses that don't transfer the carbon immediately to the atmosphere I think that's you know, and and can you actually make more money in some cases off of those uses Now the two examples that come to mind Since I've I've lived with both of them and when I built a home One is using Using the the smaller pieces to make oriented strand board. I mean the Everything from the rafters to the floor joists Are all made in i-beams out of out of oriented strand board and my daughter just put in new basement stairs What do they put in oriented strand board? That's all unusable For making for lumber for temper for making lumber And the other one which I think has a wonderful Additional value is of course the cellulosic fiber which used to go into making newspapers Now makes makes to go directly into insulation for homes instead of doing what I had to do which was to Use shredded recycled cellulose fiber from old newspapers It's one of the best insulations you can get And it's being used in europe a lot There's a there's a company trying to get started up in main And that is that just keeps on giving for for climate change, right? I mean if you have better insulated walls You know what a great use for a low quality Leftover part of the of the tree that you can't use for temper for lumber Just to have a little bit of a reality check I would I would love to have an oriented strand board factory in vermont that I could ship my wood to Try building one under the current permit Regime that we have here now You're not going to be able to So, you know what is really the alternative? I'd say change the rules No, but but really I mean you don't think we were trying Yes, yes, you don't think we're trying to do that. I mean, I know yeah All saying like, you know, believe me there's there's um There's so many things that we need to consider and think about how we can like change policy to foster The kind of action that we want to see right? That's what we're here tonight to talk about and it is complex and difficult I mean, I think also to speak to your point about about Landowners decisions. I mean we know you need to find ways to incentivize people right to to keep To manage for carbon. Why else would you manage for carbon unless you're not, you know, if you're not being compensated for that in some way Um, it's a social good and and I and I'm not saying that's simple or easy and that you know We can wave a magic wand and boom the policy's there, but it's something that We need to work towards I think in the current reality and other states are doing that right now working toward it They don't have it yet, but that's on the agenda. So There's always a first time If I can just offer a brief comment, um, I think the reason that folks are clapping is because McNeil is the market for lower Value would and they would love a competitive market that offered a higher price than what we're able to pay and that doesn't exist in Vermont And so, you know, when we're I just want to bring that, you know, consistent with what Harris was saying Like it's great to talk about those things and those are good things and we're support. We love weatherization We we have a weatherization program But in the reality of Vermont 2023 McNeil is providing that market and there is not an alternative And I don't think an alternative is going to present itself in the you know, kind of near term That that would be along the lines that you're suggesting even though I think we all agree That would be a good thing and we'd be interested in that. Um, so I just wanted to speak to it. Yeah It's a business opportunity. Let's leave it at that Well, thank you. Thank you for those comments We are going to in the interest of time. It's 8 38. We're here till 9 30 We know there's a lot of people who want to speak so we're going to go to public comment next a public forum I have the sign-up sheet. We're going to do it a little bit differently than normal public forums. You may have attended we're going to do Five speakers for two minutes maximum and then we're going to allow our Panelists to comment on what they've heard and we're going to do that up to three times So we're I don't think we're going to make it all the way through but We'll give it a go our first Person to speak is Jill Clark Gowan No The next person is rich gallub No Judy judy dow Excellent Yeah, so Make make sure your mic's on too Thank you I served on the ag and ecosystem committee the biomass task force and the life cycle analysis With most of these people and there are several things I learned the first thing I learned was that They had different definitions for sustainable renewable and net zero I taught school For 38 years I had a steep learning curve Um the second thing I learned was that I had to keep track of all of this So I created a bullshit detector to help me with that and It covered everything from white lies to malicious and serious lies And there's it's still happening So like tonight we heard one stamp statement from Jared ulmer about Um biomass but on that same presentation he gave He didn't recommend biomass So there's a lot of flipping and flopping of of comments that has been happening here tonight The other area that hasn't been Discussed is the archaeology and there was a meeting sometime here in january and I think it was january And baren you said that you had all the archaeological reports done that needed to be done And they were all approved And I want to let you know that the one that was just recently done was turned back To be redone and my question to you is has it been completed in a proper format? And um there are many other things that Have come up here today that have been bothersome to me and some of them include The life cycle analysis that vermont has just Requested be done on an annual basis and Next is phil merrick. I think I had a four minute Things set up here because I didn't know we'd have the two minute time or so. I'm gonna have to kind of wing it um Yeah, so one of the things that I see happening a lot is false accounting What darin put up earlier tonight was a good example of that where he showed how much sequestration had happened In the uh in the plots and how much they'd burned and compared it But he didn't compare how much sequestration would have been in that plot had they not cut the plot And so it's really, you know, that's false accounting because if you're going to claim and this is this is greenhouse gas rules If you're going to claim A removal Of greenhouse gas from the atmosphere you have to show additionality and what you showed was subtraction There was no additionality there and then when adam talks about landscape values for Sequestration that's false accounting because that's my landscape You can't take the landscape up on camels hump and apply that to your Electric generation you can only use your land where you cut And that's called operational boundaries and it is also greenhouse gas rules So you guys got to get your accounting together and you need to tell the people of the city how much Carbon dioxide is coming out of the stack And don't tell don't tell me it's more It's like 85 percent more efficient When you're not even telling the public that there's 400 000 tons coming out of the stack It's false accounting Let's get the accounting straight and then come back and have this discussion again. Would that be good? Thank you Uh, thank you phil Next we have joe nelson and after that is nick persampiaire After uh, so i'm joe nelson. I'm a forester. I live down in farrisburg. I've been practicing forestry for 35 years and I've been working with burlington electric over the years as I manage private lands I have to make decisions all the time about how i'm going to manage those lands. I talked to my My clients get their input And then I make decisions about the harvesting system that i'm going to use And the markets that i'm going to utilize and sometimes I decide that it's appropriate to use burlington electric As one of the markets for the harvest that I manage And when that happens, I contact burlington electric. I talked to the boys back here Seth don and kevin And bet see I know them all they know all of us out here in the in the world of forestry and We have a great relationship. They come out and they spend time with us in the woods So that we get it right so that we know what we're doing so that we know we're not Harming bats. That's one thing you Especially in the shamblain valley, we have to be very careful about bat habitat When we're doing a bed harvest That doesn't happen Except if we're using bed as a market Those folks are really professional. We use them all the time and And then we we put together prescriptions. We have interactions with burlington electric foresters about what the prescription will be We they give us input about Layout of the harvest the roads Protecting water quality protecting biodiversity And utilizing that that market it allows me to protect and improve Biodiversity through the better utilization of low-grade markets. I can get rid of certain species that are Over abundant in certain areas. I can create more diversity in the forest And I really enjoy working with them Nick persampiari. I live in burlington ward 2 Burlington electric relies extensively on a memo prepared by veic in april 2022 Including for the preposterous Conclusion that mcneil reduces greenhouse gas emissions by at least 85 percent compared to natural gas Generators that conclusion has reached by not counting the emissions going out of the stack This report has no credibility whatsoever you look at first veic In july 2012 acquired the biomass energy resource center That is a pro biomass organization Which works to advance the use of biomass energy throughout north america and beyond adam sherman Ran that program. He was the manager of berc He continues to Manage that program now at veic Mr. Sherman has also been a member of the Board of the biomass thermal energy council, which among other things lobbies for the biomass industry He's been on the editorial board of biomass magazine And he serves on the alliance for green heat which promotes wooden pellet stoves And the other author of the report daemon lane admits that The the the carbon emitted by burning wood is sequestered during a human time scale So he admits to the time element and he concludes while i don't believe biogenic admissions are as bad as fossil fuels Stopping all combustion as soon as possible needs to be the goal Thank you And our last speaker in this round is fred glansberg Okay, so my name is fred glansberg. I am a forester working out of randolph vermont Um, that's the first thing i'd like to say is that we certainly i myself and most of my associates and colleagues here Do are working diligently to try to maintain a resilient growing forest In order to have that It's been acknowledged in much of the training i've been going through lately that we need to establish A diversity of age classes within the stand Where we are taking the I hear a lot about not growing trees to size Much of the trees that are going to the biomass plant A good example would be Disease beach trees, which we have an awful lot of so A lot of our work is making a group We try to keep them between a quarter to a half an acre. Sometimes they get as large as four or more But these are deteriorating trees Like we are creating To we're doing two things one if I have a Younger age class developing in places. I try to open that up to allow that to grow vigorously um We are maintaining large trees within the the stands that we cut and certainly keeping all this in mind um So the last thing I'd say one example of a biomass harvest that we recently Completed was on a dairy farm, which is now converting to a grass-fed dairy, which I think Can be generally acknowledged as a much more carbon friendly way of producing milk In order to do that they need more pasture. We cleared cleared five acres of pasture To add to their um their land base. We also Sent took approximately 25 percent of the saw timber and low grade timber out of the woods supplement their income Thank you for that And now I'd like to Allow our panelists to comment on what they've heard from the public forum speakers Go ahead Darren. Just a couple brief comments. Um For judy for the archaeology studies, I'm assuming you're referencing act 250 documents for district heat If if that's the case Burlington district energy, which is the nonprofit that was formed to support the potential financing construction operation of the district heat project Is managing the act 250 filing and so they're taking that work on and if there's a document that they submitted that was turned back I'm confident they'll work on that Okay Okay We we we know that there are archaeological areas within mcneal that we Purposefully make sure are not disturbed But in terms of the district heat project, they're managing that The only other archaeological kind of study that i'm aware of would be related to we're putting in a solar test center with uvm As part of a change in our waste wood yard. So Those are the two that i'm aware of I don't know what you're referencing if it's not the solar test center or the district heat project, but I don't recall what you're referencing, but try to provide some context if I could um in addition Relative to the stack emissions. I just want to be really really clear our reports that I shared tonight in the power point Reference the stack emissions. They're all right there. They're in blue in that chart. Uh, so fulfill who I've met with, you know, we've No, I understand but and I think you may have made a comment or there may have been another comment about The stack emissions we aren't we aren't Referencing the stack emissions. We report them annually. They're not a secret. They're out there for the public. They're in the report There's some interesting kind of discussion around counterfactuals, right? If we weren't doing x would we be getting more sequestration? Those are all interesting But we are doing sustainable harvesting. We are seeing net additions of carbon on the lands where we harvest I think that's an important point. I want to reemphasize and I also want to reemphasize, you know with respect to Kind of some of the discussion earlier We turn off mcneal. You don't end up with more wind or more solar or more hydro The new england grid does not have that to offer If you turn off mcneal, you have more natural gas and my understanding was this community back in 2004 made a commitment that we Don't want more nuclear and we don't want more fossil fuel and fossil fuel is the driver of the climate crisis We know that and we want to move towards renewable energy and that's what we've done And that's why we've done it and so with mcneal We're not at a point where and maybe there's a point at some point distant in the future where you could Relay on those resources, but we're not at that point now We're not at that point in the near future and I just wanted to emphasize that I also thank thanks for that and I think to To have those conversations about counterfactuals and also, you know Want to again applaud the work that that you're doing the bd's doing in terms of What we're hearing about sustainable harvests and benefits to biodiversity, etc Um, I just also wanted to share because there was also this question about stand level versus landscape level And while I don't have time tonight to go into the details of our model But I wanted to share with you actually a global model and also to address this question of What is the driver of the climate crisis, right? The driver the driver of the climate crisis is You know prime is greenhouse gases in the atmosphere whether they come and whether a molecule of co2 comes from Um coal oil natural gas or wood it has exactly the same radiative forcing impact in the atmosphere, right? It behaves the same way If I can share my screen for just a moment I'll share with you this model that is a global model. It's called enroads and i'm happy to dive into it More deeply but partly from the bio energy modeling work that we did we've brought that into a global scale And you can look and see what happens if we Here you've got the global mix of energy. So coal oil natural gas renewable solar oil Solar wind hydro and then this pink is bio energy These are global emissions out to 2100 and the resulting temperature increase If we do what basically we're doing at mcneal, which is to Provide a subsidy for wood bio energy and we did that at a global level What you see is that co2 net emissions go up And temperature actually goes up. So I don't think I don't think there's a question about You know, do we have enough solar wind energy efficiency all that? No, we don't we need more Um, do we have a climate crisis? Yes, we know we have a climate crisis Do landowners need help with having incentives to manage their land for this new climate crisis? Yes Um, the question really is is more wood bio energy the solution that we need right now Or no, and I think that's kind of it's hard, but I think It it it's we get more warming not less if we Increase the use of bio energy. That's unfortunately reality Do I just want to comment on this? Yeah, just curious if the model um accounts for Whether it was that switch to natural gas would that go up even more in that model? I mean, I think that's what we're talking about is like if not McNeil Then natural gas and that's the crux of it. So if you're comparing it against nothing Yeah, you're going to see a net increase. Yeah, no if you if you compare it to if you compare wood to natural gas You have a higher carbon intensity for wood Right and and you lose the capacity the growth capacity of the question to that's right. So yeah And there is a real world example of this it's in Tasmania, Australia Which may in a way people here, but it's the only place it's actually happened They stopped harvesting half the forest there and within 10 years They went from being a net emission as an entire state to being net negative In other words the avoided the avoided emissions from harvesting most there's amazing studies Have been done by the u.s. Forest Service about the emissions that come from forestry And in fact, you know the leading cause of of the death of trees is harvesting It's five times greater than fire and insects and And land conversion and everything else. I mean we talk about about a few thousand or 10,000 acres being converted But the emissions from that Are dwarfed by the emissions that occur from harvesting now That doesn't mean we should stop harvesting because of that But it means we should do it more carefully And I was very pleased that the one gentleman who came up and spoke about how he was advising His clients in terms of how to manage their their harvest So it's it's you know, it's just a case that That we we're doing so many things that are causing emissions And I would agree with the person who said we have to get the accounting right And we can't have Accounting that is misleading So let's let's see if we can all agree that we'll all try to do the accounting Properly that as it appears in the atmosphere and therefore with climate Thank you We're going to go to the next round and the first public speaker is going to be luke mcnally Followed by jeff comstock I would like to introduce the fields of forest restoration Forest stand improvement and managing young forests for old forest characteristics Many wildlife species depend on really old forest characteristics These species include black bear pine martin flying squirrels northern goss hawk and wood thrush Other species of warblers whipper will fly catchers wood turtle box turtle common five-line skink And the eastern rat snake require young forests for either part or all of their habitat needs The fact that the northern goss hawk an old forest dwelling species Praised upon the rough grouse a young forest dwelling species Demonstrates the interconnectedness of forest ecosystems Our forests in vermont are now existing in a state of recovery from human disturbances Hundreds of years ago this balance between young forests and old forests would have been maintained by beavers fires floods and other forms Of disturbance that tip the scales between disturbance and stability Sustainable forestry enhances both young and old forest characteristics What we're doing in vermont currently is moving toward a forested landscape mosaic where we have the greatest diversity of forest conditions Including both shrub lands and thickets of young forests Which are really good at taking a lot of carbon out of the air As well as ever-aging and older forests that are really good at storing carbon that was sequestered already And vermont is a thought leader in this space. I have a booklet here on managing And restoring old forest Characteristics, but it takes some active management To enhance some of these legacy trees and create some of the really old forest characteristics that dr Mumma has referenced and we can do this through active management This is from uvm by the way Oh, thank you very much A sustainable forestry is a lot easier on the land than any other land use This is a triple bottom line win-win-win solution that helps reduce our dependence On fossilized carbon. I think it's a wonderful idea and I urge you to join me in supporting it Thank you After jeff uh is charol joy lipton Hello, my name is jeff comstock. I live here in burlington And it's my understanding that uh, burlington electric essentially operates as a vertically integrated utility even though you operate within the new england iso system and I bring up that operating distinction because I came across some data reported from aarp That highlights the average household utility costs energy costs across the country And the new england iso is the highest energy Expenditure for common households across the country And that operational distinction is also important because if you look across the country All of the areas of the country that have the highest household energy costs are all in the iso operating parts of the country So let's see So, uh, let's see Yeah, so I guess the point I wanted to make about that is that um I I think that it is somewhat of a self-righteous expectation that burlington or the state of vermont is going to solve the climate crisis and Uh all by itself, okay So I think that the city council and the state legislature ultimately have a decision Or the decisions made Cannot be Disadvantaging Burlington or the state of vermont Because I I think our governing bodies actually have a responsibility To a deal with the cost of living in the affordability In new england where we're already operating In a highly Cost disadvantage part of the country and so I ask that you Take that into consideration in terms of your Future support of the Thanks, jeff b. E. D. Thank you Next is Cheryl joy lipton followed by Howard Jennings Hi, thanks. I'm an ecologist and I live in chester And I think it matters to me also even though I don't live in burlington because these are my This is the same forest as for everybody. It matters to us here in vermont. It matters to people in australia It matters to everyone Everywhere. It's not just a burlington issue One thing I think that people have forgotten Is that we're not talking about not harvesting We're just talking about not burning the trees not burning the wood I do want to and And As as was said we should have stopped burning a long time ago What's the answer? Instead of burning the wood No, it's not gas. No, it's not fossil fuels. It's reducing our consumption We can't keep living the way we do We shouldn't have been increasing our consumption From a long time ago All of us here when we were younger consumed a lot less I do want to bring up a couple of things that haven't been that are erroneously spoken about and one of them is biodiversity and old forests and old growth and The fact that you can manage for old growth Characteristics doesn't mean you can actually have an old forest. There are some lichen species And insects that don't show up for many decades many hundreds of years actually And it's you can't you can't make that happen You can have some dead Dead things laying around you can increase course woody debris etc But you can't actually create an old forest until the actual forest gets that old Okay, well we need to stop burning things and it's fossil it's not fossil fuels. It's greenhouse gases Yep, thanks Next is Howard Jennings followed to be followed by Ashley Adams Thank you. I'd like to add a couple of notes of timeframe to this As has been noted we're at 1.1 or 1.2 degrees Celsius above the baseline and at 1.5 We are very likely to be over a tipping point of no return And the IPCC tells us that's going to happen between 2030 and 2040 That's seven to 17 years from now And I am deathly afraid that my two-year-old grandson is going to spend his entire life in an increasingly degraded world Because we're going to miss those deadlines and it's going to get worse and worse and worse And if we think it's bad now just check in in five years on the level of disasters and their frequency that are happening So the message is that one of the most immediate things we can do to stave this off is keep old forest standing All the other new carbon sequestration technologies take time to ramp up and build up secure capital and all of that Right now is when we need this climate sequestration and As has been documented by some of dr. Moomaw's and others research when you cut a stand for whatever purpose That stand the cut area becomes a net source of carbon of the atmosphere for about 20 years Before it becomes a net carbon sink So that tells me and all of us that we really need to be careful about what we cut a stand for so Anything that's not an absolutely essential use of the wood Needs to be really scrutinized hard. So non essential optional uses And biomass is one of those need to be carefully ramped down not ramped up and permitted for another 10 or 20 years There are lots of competing interests of great value here But we have to look to this big picture here and not continue business as usual right now And i'm afraid that's what the mcneil plant will do is permit for 10 years business as usual. So thank you Thank you. Next is ashlee adams Thank you Um, I first of all, i'm so grateful to have Two members of the scientific community here with us this evening And can everyone hear me? I am so grateful to have two members of the scientific community here with us this evening and I cringe Quite a bit when I sit here and see this false equivalency between The science and the biomass promoters Um, I think that you know, it's clear that we have a choice do we burn wood and hence Continue pumping over 400,000 tons of co2 into the atmosphere every year and simultaneously Take down the very things the trees that are sequestering that carbon So that's our choice. You know, I think that's very simple Sure, there are economic considerations Those are policy issues that must be dealt with Okay Everyone needs to make a living everyone deserves to Support themselves and that's an equitability issue. That's a policy issue. That is not a climate issue I just just needed to say that and I I'm happy for folks on the panel to respond But I am up to my eyeballs with hearing from burlington electric and the greenwashing Bullshit that I've been subjected to as a burlington resident all these years. So had it with that Happy to hear from the experts. Thank you pardon the language And that concludes our next round of five and we'll go to our panelists for comment For 10 minutes I'll just I'll just make a quick comment on the point about Growing trees to sequester carbon and store carbon and how important that is to do right now, which it absolutely is And but I You know tie that in with the fact that the Wood at least that I sent to mcneil and I think I don't know the statistic was 85 percent of it You know is the tops and the branches and the stuff it's the trees are getting cut anyways for the saw logs it's it's not In my mind going to reduce a whole lot of the amount of trees getting cut by Not sending them to mcneil if that makes sense I'm happy to just offer a few thoughts first. Um, I appreciate that. We're all coming at this from a climate standpoint regardless of kind of what Perspective folks are bringing. I've spent my entire career working on climate and energy I I wanted to work at burlington electric because we were the first 100 renewable utility. It's my utility I'm a burlington resident and I think we're doing quite a bit well And folks here can agree and disagree and that's great. That's that's what we're here to do I want to just say that the proximate decision before us is not whether or not to open a wood chip Electric plant we have a wood chip electric plant. It's a key part of our portfolio It's a key part of the vermont reliability and the new england system reliability in this region The question that's before us and that we've been working on is should we try to make that plant more efficient? Should we try to use the steam and waste heat from that plant to reduce natural gas in our community? And that's the question that's before us and that's an important question mcneil has a role to play regardless of district heat mcneil is important for us from an electric standpoint from a reliability standpoint from an economic standpoint And some of us would argue from a climate standpoint So I would just want to run, you know refocus the the discussion a little bit on that proximate question Because that's really what's before us as a community in the coming months And just lastly I know and it's a good debate to have and I appreciate and respect the professor's viewpoint on this Absolutely, it is greenhouse gas emissions that matter But my understanding and what I and I came to burlington electric without a preconception about mcneil and we've dug in on this issue My understanding is with wood if managed sustainably if managed to create net additions in the forests You can have a sequestration and storage of those emissions. We can debate the timescale We can debate whether having the tops in the limbs is creating a better result than than would otherwise be the case With fossil fuels, there is no re sequestration. There is no storage that carbon goes one way It goes up and it stays up and it's creating climate change And that's why we do the work that we do and that's why we care and we can we can debate that All day long and maybe we will I'm just trying to make the the simple point that for us that fossil fuel never is Re sequestered it goes up one way The biogenic emissions have a life cycle and that's the main point that I was trying to make Just just one correction to that is that The emissions from fossil fuels are sequestered by trees In fact, there's a whole international market in buying offsets Many of which are fraudulent by the way, but nonetheless the idea is If you let if if I pay you to keep your trees growing I get to keep Emitting my carbon dioxide from my fossil fuels This is almost the same sort of thing. It's saying that that That we're we're going to use Wood and and the claim is made that okay, so more trees grew but wouldn't still more trees have grown had those Those trees not been harvested and burned I think that's pretty clear in fact and and again, it's back to Where is the carbon stored and I also just want to say like I I a hundred percent like I don't I feel like we're getting it Like I I have a huge amount of respect for you and I just want to say like thank you for the work that you've done and there's no reason to say that like Based on the science that was available at the time what you're saying made sense The problem is that we're in a different situation now and we know that The carbon is not like compared to gas. It's worse The carbon intensity, you know at the stack is about one and a half times of coal And the payback times are too long. It's just the reality. So it's not it's not like anybody's I feel like in a way you're in this like super hard position because You're rightly proud of the work that burlington has done to be on the forefront of climate action It's like my alma mater is colby college and they're also claiming carbon neutrality Because they're burning biomass Which made sense a while ago, but it doesn't make sense now I think that's the thing that's a kind of um and and um I'm sorry. It has passed my bedtime. So I am a little bit tired right now But I there was one other point that I wanted to make which was The cost issue There was a really important point raised about the cost of electricity here in new england and how it's so expensive But I would and I don't and I'm not in the weeds on this like you are I don't know all the details, but what would the cost of This plant be if you weren't able to sell rex or buy rex and you know like if there was no Which I I would wager that there will not be a rec market for for for energy produced at McNeill with wood And if that were the case You right now you have subsidized electricity if it weren't subsidized It wouldn't be do run. I I I would have a hard time believing that it would be Less expensive than the alternatives of energy efficiency solar wind and hydro that we have now We have to build and acknowledge we have to ramp them up. They're not they're not it's not like that I get that But we do have the opportunity to build them to make that choice I'd also just like to add that that you know time is running out the the The scientists the the IPCC has asked how many more tons can we burn and stay below one and a half degrees This is a silly is a silly accounting to as far as I'm concerned You know we and basically we basically have to be reducing by about 25 or 30 percent a year from right now on for the next 10 years And we're not doing that. We're not even doing 3 percent. We're increasing by 3 percent a year You know, so we're going in the absolute wrong direction. So we have to get hold of that and as as Julia said You know the the cost of improving I prefer to call it energy productivity rather than energy conservation Do the same job with less energy provide the same energy service Amory lovens once said nobody needs energy. Everybody went horrified. How do you mean we don't eat energy? No, what we need are energy services the services that energy provides How can we do that with the least amount of energy at the end? And of course the most dramatic example we have with that is is the development of leds Six times more efficient, you know use one six the energy for the same amount of light as a tungsten lamp We're not going to see a whole lot of in technological innovations with that kind of a of a gain Uh, but that made a huge that that actually slowed slowed the growth of of electricity demand as that has come in But we need more of that and some of its behavioral That doesn't cost anything except a few moments of thought when you do something I just went upstairs to use the restroom here. I went to wash my hands. I almost scolded them You know the hottest water that the human hand should ever touch is less than 115 degrees Those must have been 140 or more And it would save money. It would save pollution Right, uh, most of our buildings in the summer even here in vermont and massachusetts are over air conditioned You know, these are things we can do just by by by, you know, turning a little dial This is not huge any expensive And I just let the comment on one other thing somebody said we shouldn't Think that vermont and burlington can make a difference The united nations has this great treaty it points the direction But it's not going to it's not going to remove a single molecule of carbon dioxide It says what we ought to do and we've all agreed we're going to do and then we as our governments have not done national governments The action is at the state level Is at the city level And it's at the household level That's how we're going to get this thing solved And I think if we all do that, I mean we could you could reduce the emissions coming out of this stack of of mcneil by using less less electricity And um That's something that we can all find ways of doing So, you know, don't don't don't assume we can pull this off to somebody else or wait for fusion power Or direct air capture You know how much energy it takes to capture One pound of carbon dioxide You know it costs about five hundred dollars We don't have enough five hundred dollars to do enough carbon dioxide to make it matter So we've got to do it ourselves So do it at burlington do it in vermont do it at home We're we're sort of running out of time like I knew we had a packed agenda when we started but We're at 9 21. We need to start wrapping up. I know that there are still some folks in the Uh public forum queue Know that this is a this is a conversation that we will be continuing in the in the coming months So there'll be other opportunities, but at this point, I'd like to uh offer our panelists an opportunity to make any Closing remarks that they might want to make and and then we we will wrap I just want to say I'm so impressed. Um, you know, I I Am incredibly it's it's like 9 20 and you're all still here so So I just yeah, I just want to say I am so impressed with the engagement and this is what democracy is This is what climate action is and and thank you for Um, you know, I'm going to be able to go home and say I'm glad I came so thank you I've certainly seconded that I think it's it's uh This this is a great sign of involvement and engagement and that's what we need and with our country so Ripped apart and politically in every other way Uh to be able to come together and have a discussion like this where we don't all agree on everything about it But they're willing to sit here and listen to each other That's really important for getting the problem solved I mean, it's climate climate change is addressing climate change is about cooperating And as if we can get the numbers right We'll be able to get the job done right Yeah, I just I want to agree with a lot of what you've said on energy efficiency And a lot of the work that that needs to happen there We may not fully agree on district heat or wood energy I you know, I appreciate that there are folks with different views in the room Many of whom are burlington electric customers and and we appreciate and respect your engagement I hope you appreciate what we're trying to bring in terms of information We'll continue to engage on the topic We'll continue to do the work the broader work on net zero that we're trying to do with electric vehicles And heat pumps and all the other Technologies that we're looking to use to reduce emissions and appreciate the toke for holding the form. So thank you Yeah, just appreciate being here and being invited and hearing all the different views and Just giving my kind of global take on it is that You know, we just have this abundant local renewable resource and chance to make mcneal more efficient with the district heat and It just it just makes a lot of sense to me Okay Sure. Um, before we get to maybe that I'll offer any of the toke members here with me If they'd like to say anything and then I Do you anything you'd like to say? Just thank you for all of the thank you to all of you for coming It's dangerous to give me The microphone, um Start the timer. Yeah No We we wanted this to be a conversation not a debate. I think it was and so thank you all Thank you all because What I was looking when I initiated this brainiac idea Was to see if we could come to some common understandings about science to come to understandings about language So that we could have the disagreements about policy Talking not like ships passing in the night And I think we're closer To that I don't think we're there yet and I think the toke Needs to be working to get those um those comments and try to figure out a way that we can do that and maybe This will have advanced The conversation so we don't replicate this the next time but maybe we talk about you know how to proforestation and be able to get the tops and be able to increase the efficiencies And reduce emissions at the stack. Well, wouldn't that be freaking amazing? Right, so but I do think that you know like hope dies last so We are In this and I So I want to thank you. Thank you for being respectful. Um, thank you for bringing up babies um And and I always bring up at the city council the babies babies. So, um We've got we we have a lot of work to do Hopefully we will have the time in the conversation about district energy That will allow us to sort through Some of this stuff. I don't think that we are there yet, but I actually think there are glimmers of hope that says that we can be there be there for BED and be there for the foresters and the people that own those Properties be there for those of us who are having a hard time paying the bills and Those babies babies and if we can squeeze out the time knowing full well the time is really tight all the way around Who knows what we could accomplish. So thank you all for indulging us And I'll get the final word Thank you all. I'll agree with everything gene said I was hoping we'd come out of here Tonight with sort of common a common understanding a common sort of framework to to move forward in I don't I I'd also think there I have I have some questions. We had an enormous amount of information um that we've uh been presented tonight and talked about and it's going to take me a little bit of time to sort of You know go through it again and and develop some questions And that'll that'll be part of the next conversation that we have To the gentleman who asked if we if we would accept we're in comments, certainly you could direct them to The members of the toke if you'd like I don't have a form up. I suppose what I could do is put a form up if people want to Enter comments about the symposium um I will commit to doing that and it'll be under this agenda item On the toke web page again that url is Burlington vt.gov slash city council slash toke t e u c And you'll see this meeting along with the material there And I'll form a link to there that you can submit comments on And I will also ask if our presenters tonight could provide their slide deck so that I can put that up there as well And I also want to thank maddie saunders who's our Person from Who is committed to staying here tonight and uh and helping us with all the Technical aspects of it and into town meeting tv for also covering it So thank you everybody. Have a good night