Editors,
I am writing on behalf of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Humboldt Chapter, concerning the Redwood Community Energy Authority’s Community Report insert included in the April 20 issue of the Journal. The BPF has expanded its interest beyond actions promoting peace to include environmental issues.
It is particularly concerning that RCEA repeatedly references its supply of electricity as clean energy as the Scotia Biomass Plant is neither carbon-free nor clean. These next 20 years are crucial to limiting global warming. The RCEA’s focus on solar and wind power is important and commendable. However, it should end its contract with biomass and be the provider of carbon-free energy for Humboldt.
The California Air Resource Board estimates the biomass plant produces 10 times more fine particulates, seven times more nitrogen oxides, 15 times more benzene and 5,800 times more formaldehyde compared to a natural gas fired power plant, while producing only one-third the energy (not that we’re promoting a natural gas plant for Humboldt).
Besides the damaging health consequences for locals, the biomass plant contributes to global warming by releasing CO2 from its incineration of wood waste. The Scotia plant emits the equivalent of 80 percent of greenhouse gas emissions from all Humboldt’s passenger vehicles.
The RCEA needs to correctly inform its customers and community that the 15 percent of Humboldt’s electricity produced from biomass, while being renewable, is neither carbon-free nor clean.
Lynda McDevitt, Trinidad
This article appears in The Soeth Files.
The claim that “The RCEA’s focus on solar and wind power is important and commendable,” ignores the habitat-destroying geographic sources of the current wind and solar electricity generators, as well as their electricity transmission over a 1000 miles of incendiary landscape. Large solar and wind arrays disrupt vital desert habitat and a wide variety of terrestrial and aerial critters. In fact, none of RCEA’s electricity is green: hydroelectric dams rivers, the PGE plant burns fracked natural gas.
Unfortunately, RCEA disregards widespread local rooftop solar, which can be networked with microgrids to provide more local jobs, more local resilience, more incentive to electrify transportation, heating, and tools, more savings when public buildings and parking lots are solarized, and more democratic revenue sources as people control, and sell, their own power, in favor of centralized electrical generation and control, and sale to us, by outside corporados.
It is time for a division solarizing the built environment in Humboldt to be created at RCEA, headed up by an industry-savvy leader with the commitment and know-how to implement this most environmentally friendly, low maintenance option benefitting all of us, while awaiting the offshore wind experiment.
If you care about the planet, you’d be vegan.
And if you are a Buddhist, you’d be vegan for Ahimsa.
Are you vegan, Lynda McDevitt, Trinidad?