Stalled Springfield, MA Biomass Incinerator Gets Building Permit

- by Michae­lann Bewsee, August 21, 2014, Arise for Social Justice

Fun­ny how bad news can make you want to fight even hard­er for justice.

Remem­ber the community’s fight to keep a bio­mass plant out of Spring­field? Yes­ter­day we found out that the Land Court grant­ed Palmer Renew­able Energy’s request to rein­state their build­ing per­mit, undo­ing the Spring­field Zon­ing Board’s deci­sion that the build­ing per­mit was invalid. That means that PRE gets its build­ing per­mit back unless we and/or the City of Spring­field can find a way to stop them.

How can we stop them? Stay tuned for more on that, but if you know Arise, and the coali­tion we formed, Stop Tox­ic Incin­er­a­tion in Spring­field, then you should know by now that we don’t give up.

I’m still sort­ing out the legal­i­ties of the deci­sion, but as I’m under­stand­ing it right now, the Court held that see­ing as the City of Spring­field didn’t require a spe­cial per­mit for oth­er kinds of waste incin­er­a­tion, why start now? And the Court held that green wood chips are not waste, even though those wood chips will come from waste wood! There­fore, PRE’s Build­ing Per­mit should be restored.

PRE’s inten­tions are to pro­duce 35 megawatts of ener­gy by burn­ing waste wood. Some of you may remem­ber that orig­i­nal­ly, PRE want­ed to burn con­struc­tion and demo­li­tion debris to pro­duce ener­gy, which would be very inex­pen­sive for them, but the com­mu­ni­ty uproar was so loud that the Dept. of Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion (DEP) put a mora­to­ri­um on all per­mits to burn con­struc­tion and debris. That’s when PRE decid­ed to burn waste wood instead. But of course waste wood still comes from trees—PRE has cho­sen to use the word “renew­able” in its company’s name, but trees are not renew­able [see fact­sheet here] in any time frame that makes sense when you con­sid­er the impor­tance of trees cap­tur­ing the car­bon that is alter­ing the cli­mate of our planet.

With near­ly one out of five kids in Spring­field liv­ing (or dying) with asth­ma, we have come to the con­clu­sion that burn­ing any­thing to pro­duce ener­gy is a step in the wrong direction.

It’s an admit­ted fact that PRE’s incin­er­a­tor will pro­duce 13.2 TONS of gaseous Haz­ardous Air Pol­lu­tants and 13.4 TONS of gaseous ammonia—and yet, those amounts are with­in what DEP con­sid­ers allow­able to receive an air per­mit. We’re work­ing with the Con­ser­va­tion Law Foun­da­tion to appeal the issuance of the air permit.

We’re also work­ing with Alter­na­tives for Com­mu­ni­ties and Envi­ron­ment to get Gov­er­nor Patrick to issue an exec­u­tive order on envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice that would be applic­a­ble to all state agen­cies, includ­ing DEP, Mass­DOT, and the Ener­gy Facil­i­ty Sit­ing Board, agen­cies that make deci­sions dai­ly that put com­mu­ni­ties like Spring­field at risk of unnec­es­sary expo­sure to envi­ron­men­tal and pub­lic health threats.

Last but far from least, we’re orga­niz­ing to get the City of Spring­field to adopt a Cli­mate Change Plan for our city. I think we in New Eng­land have been a lit­tle pro­tect­ed from the changes hit­ting some parts of our country—the flood­ing, the drought, the for­est fires—but we won’t stay pro­tect­ed for­ev­er. There’s so much we can do to improve the envi­ron­ment in Spring­field, to pro­duce jobs, to low­er ener­gy costs for Spring­field, to clean up our air—in oth­er words, to get with the 21^st cen­tu­ry, which the oth­er major cities in Mass­a­chu­setts are already doing.

We’re tak­ing a bus to New York City on Sep­tem­ber 21 to con­tribute to the People’s Cli­mate March, and we don’t intend to have a sin­gle emp­ty seat on the bus.

So back to Palmer Renew­able Ener­gy. The Land Court deci­sion was not the one we expect­ed or want­ed to hear. But we have a num­ber of tools in our tool­box. Stay tuned—and get in touch if you want to be part of the move­ment to pro­tect our health and our environment!