I applaud Martin Singer’s rejoinder in the Forum (“Dartmouth College may be part of the climate problem,” Sept. 17) to Carl Bielenberg’s Opinion column defending Dartmouth’s proposed biomass heating plant (“Biomass plant would cut college’s carbon footprint,” Aug. 25).
I consider the claim that biomass generation is carbon neutral to be misleading “greenwashing,” since the carbon sink of the forest disappears as soon as the wood is cut down, and the carbon is released to the atmosphere when it is burned. Only assuming that 100% of the forest area harvested will be re-planted, and only after a delay of 25 to 40 years of re-growth, would neutrality be achieved. Given the immediacy of the threat of climate change, this is not a realistic time frame.
The question of emissions should also be addressed, with scrutiny of the toxic effects on the populations close to biomass generation projects in the U.S. South and West. I recommend that readers interested in the Dartmouth project view a 30-minute documentary about the industrial-scale burning of wood for energy called Burned: Are Trees the New Coal? by independent filmmakers Marlboro Films, available online at www.linktv.org.
THOMAS KEHLER
Hanover
If you are yet to form an opinion of the fuel choice for Dartmouth College’s new heating plant you might want to see the most recent New York Times Book Review.
In his review of Inconspicuous Consumption, a book about environmental impacts by author Tatiana Schlossberg, Bill McKibben writes that a “dumb loophole in the relevant law … allows European utilities to claim that burning wood for electricity is ‘carbon-neutral,’ even though the science of the last decade makes it clear that turning trees into electricity actually sends a giant pulse of carbon into the atmosphere at precisely the moment when it could break the back of the climate system.”
He goes on to say that the book’s author has done a great service by bringing such “abuse” to light.
So why would the college want to abuse the environment?
For the answer we turn from the left to the right and Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby. In a recent op-ed piece headlined “The case against fracking is based on ideology, not science,” he quotes President Barack Obama’s 2014 State of the Union address in which he said that no country had reduced carbon pollution more than the U.S. The reason: natural gas. He also quotes former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper: “Fracking is good for the country’s energy supply, our national security, our economy, and our environment.” No wonder Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center converted from oil to fracked liquefied natural gas years ago.
So who’s going to bail the college out of a choice that it made only to avoid enviro-crazies staging a sit-in at the Hanover Inn corner?
DICK MACKAY
Hanover
I have read the Valley News almost every day since 1967 (when it was an evening paper) and in the years I was away from the Upper Valley. Editor Maggie Cassidy has continued the tradition of fine reporting, even with fewer personnel (“What I learned from readers on my ‘Valley News’ road show,” Sept. 14). I used to write letters to the paper regularly — pithy comments — but lately I find the news so discouraging that I have discontinued the practice.
JON APPLETON
White River Junction
I rejoice in the somewhat convoluted epistolary exchange between Sarah Crysl Akhtar and Robert M. Baum in these pages over the last few weeks and their radically different approaches to religion, President Donald Trump, and all manner of related issues.
Their refreshing discussion reminds me of the sage words of our great California-born New England poet Robert Frost, who concluded his A Considerable Speck with an observation far from what we hear daily from Washington:
I have a mind myself and recognize
Mind when I meet with it in any guise.
No one can know how glad I am to find
On any sheet the least display of mind.
STAN BROWN
West Lebanon