I faciliated a Berkshire Greens meeting two days ago where Peter Vickery introduced this issue and petition, which I signed yesterday.  Maggie Zhou, a fellow Green-Rainbow Party member and climate scientist who serves with me on the GPUS National Committee, articulated disagreement with the petition, generating some good internal discussion.  Peter made a response.  I’m not making a habit of posting discussion points raised by others here on GMG, but I did get both Maggie’s and Peter’s permission to post the thread here.

(I chose not to read the editorial that was linked because it involved getting logins-passwords-and paying a fee.)

First, Maggie.  Then, Peter.

Maggie:

I strongly DISAGREE with this petition.

It argues for burning ‘natural’ gas, not coal, at this plant as a ‘transition’ fuel.  

Here is summary of a study that is now being peer reviewed, that found natural gas life-cycle emission of GHG to be similar to coal, and if using the more realistic estimate of methane leakage rather than industry estimates, then even worse than coal.  Prior to this there has been deliberately no research on the life cycle emissions of natural gas.

At the same time, hydraulic fracturing, the technique that lead to the abundant availability of shale gas in the past few years (and is poised to expand dramatically over the next 3 decades) is a huge source of chemical and radioactive contamination of rivers/streams, ground water, air, and soil.  Here is a 17 minute investigative report by Earth Focus and UK’s Ecologist Film Unit: “Fracking Hell: The Untold Story” – I recommend watching it.

Other resources:

[Oil and Gas Collection: Hydraulic Fracturing, Toxic Chemicals and the Surge of Earthquake Activity in Arkansas

Fracking the life out of Arkansas and beyond http://www.globalresearch.ca/i…

Fracking fluid dissolves uranium that is concentrated in the shale:

Is New York’s Marcellus Shale Too Hot to Handle?

Another insight:  “As gas-drilling operations proliferated in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale over the past couple of years, most of the hundreds of millions of gallons of briny wastewater they produced was eventually dumped into the state’s rivers. Much of the rest is unaccounted for.”

In short, switching the plant to burn “natural” gas instead of coal is switching one form of destruction for a slightly different one, to a different location on a different population (near the drilling site instead of near the power plant), but ultimately it harms all of us just the same.  Ground water flows underground over large distances.  Rivers flow where they flow, entering the same oceans where all of us get our sea foods, and irrigating the lands where our foods are grown across state borders.  Contaminated air flows everywhere, and with hundreds of thousands of drilling wells being planned in the next 30 years, the environmental destruction from fracking is simply mind-boggling.  It is not a responsible position.  It pits one community (near power plant) against another (near drilling sites), and all of us lose.

In fact it is a complete mis-judgement to call for a step-wide phasing out from coal via ‘natural’ gas.  The petition says “switching to natural gas only if the repowered plant emits as little CO2 as possible”.  ‘As little as possible’ demands nothing.  And in any case, power plant emission is only a part of the entire life-cycle emissions from ‘natural’ gas.  See the first link above.

The demand should be to shut down the power plant, not to transition. If it is to be phased out, it should be done via improving air pollutant clean up requirements at the plant, and drastically reducing energy consumption, while increasing renewable energy capacity, so that the plant output could be reduced and then eliminated rapidly.  In my view even 10 years is too long…

Now here’s Peter:

For the sake of clarity, here’s the text of the bill (attached). As you’ll see thefirst part reads as follows (with the gas language in bold):

“Notwithstanding the provisions of this chapter or any law to the contrary, on or before December 31, 2018, all persons (including but not limited to electric, gas,  transmission, generation, and distribution companies, and corporations to which chapter 164 of the general laws applies) that own or operate coal-fired electric generation facilities or cogeneration facilities in Massachusetts shall submit to the commissioner of energy resources a plan for (1) retiring their coal-fired facilities by December 31, 2020, or (2) replacing such facilities with, or repowering them for (a) renewable energy generating sources or (b) natural gas (so long as the new or repowered facility’s carbon dioxide emissions are equivalent to or less than those of a combined heat-and-power natural gas generating unit) by December 31, 2020.”

A combined heat-and-power unit, so known as co-generation, is the state of the art in terms of efficiency and emissions. This is about as stringent a CO2 standard one can frame without ruling out the use of natural gas entirely.

Just to make it clear: Would biomass qualify under our bill? No. Would nuclear qualify? No. Would natural gas qualify? Maybe, so long as the facility met the high standard of co-generation.