Burning Wood In Vermont: Climate Change Friend Or Foe?

The McNeil wood burning electric generating plant in Burlington.
Photo by Bear Cieri, via Seven Days.

A lot of Vermonters burn wood to stay warm in the winter.  It's kind of a tradition, really.

In the age of climate change, is this a good idea? On the one hand, wood is renewable.  Chop down trees for firewood and new trees grow back.

But the new trees are at least temporarily smaller.  And if the rate we chop down trees exceeds new growth, that's not carbon neutral.  Wood burning also emits other pollutants, especially particulates, which are a health hazard.

All this means there's two sides to looking at this. Inside Climate News collaborated with the Weather Channel recently took a pretty deep dive into Vermont's wood burning culture.

About a quarter of us Vermonters use wood as their primary heating source. Vermont touts wood burning as a way to cut the use of fuels that worsen climate change.

"With the capabilities to burn wood that we have now, with sophisticated equipment, it's our local homegrown renewable energy source," Emma Hanson, the wood energy coodinator at the state Department of Forest, Parks and Recreation, as quoted by Inside Climate News and the Weather Channel.

We Vermonters are smug about our wood burning, too. Aren't we special and carbon neutral because we burn renewable stuff instead of fossil fuels. We're doing our part for climate change, right?

Maybe. Does burning wood in Vermont really ease climate change in some small way or make it a bit worse?

The conclusions I draw from this Inside Climate News/Weather Channel collaboration is that it depends. If you maintain the percent of the state covered by forest and don't cut down too many trees, it's probably close to carbon neutral.  That's especially true of a lot of wood pellets are made from sawmill waste instead of trees cut down just to burn for heat.

But the news collaboration says that black carbon and methane are also released when burning wood, so that makes things not exactly carbon neutral.

By the way, we burn a LOT of wood.  When the McNeil electric generating plant in Burlington goes full tilt, it can burn 76 tons of wood in an hour, according to Seven Days.  Much of that wood is recycled from discarded wood pallets and Christmas trees, but a lot comes from logging operations, too.

Hardwood trees go off to sawmills for furniture and lumber, but the limbs and bad tree trunks go in the chipper and are shipped to McNeil and other wood-burning electric generating plants.

By the way, the Seven Days article from October is a very good read, a nice deep dive that weighs the good and the bad of Vermont's wood burning and how it relates to climate change

There is one more problem with burning wood.  It releases fine particulates in the air, which of course is a form of pollution.  Emissions from wood stoves, and especially pellet furnances have gotten much more efficient and much less polluting than in years past, but they still emit pollution.

In the winter, we often have inversions, in which cold air is trapped in valleys and warm air aloft forms a lid over that cold air.  Which means wood stove emissions in that valley just sit in air within that valley, and air quality gets worse and worse until the inversion breaks and winds can blow that yucky air away.

There are sometimes air pollution alerts in Vermont during the winter, especially around Rutland, which sits in a bowl shaped valley. Emissions from both cars and wood stoves makes the air there unhealthy sometimes.

Yes, Vermont is being all nice and "renewable" when it comes to burning wood, but it's certainly not perfect.  Of course, it is hard to find alternatives that don't cause some harm.  At least we're not all using coal to heat our homes, right?