WCAX has this cute little piece about biologists and foresters colluding “to understand and manage a forest in a changing climate.” This is just a suggestion, but you may want to focus on the reality of what Climate Change politics will do to Vermont’s forests.
Related: Is Vermont’s Land Grab About Conservation or Securing Real Estate for Wind and Solar Farms?
First, the fantasy.
It’s called adaptive silviculture, where foresters and biologists team together to try to understand and manage a forest in a changing climate. Essentially, doing research on the area.
Studying things like habitat life, how the forest shifts over time, and the difference between old and new areas of the forest.
Leading forester of the project, Ethan Tapper, says the project has already taught Vermont so much.
“They have been collecting birding data. So, we want to see the way different species of birds are utilizing the area that we are managing before, and after. Because we are recognizing that our bird species are in decline. That a lot of our forests are missing a lot of critical attributes for their habitats,” said Tapper.
Tapper has been leading wildlife walks through the forests to help educate people on the project and how they can safely co-exist with wildlife.
It sounds excellent, and I’m a big fan of husbanding the wooded environs. I used to hike a lot, always carrying out more than in and doing my best to leave footprints and nothing else. And that will always be an issue that needs attention, especially when you have so little wooded landscape to protect. Vermont can’t have Net Zero and protected wildlife unless it plans to outsource environmental destruction and import the power.
I’m not saying they won’t do that; offshoring emissions is already common. But not everyone is all-in on the nightmare. The all-electric future without nuclear or hydro is land intensive. Vermont currently gets a lot of electricity from hydro (imported from Canada), which may need it back because Canada’s pols are also infected with the Nut Zero infection so that the Green Mountain State might have a problem. Their intermittent weather-dependent generation scheme will require a massive amount of ground area. You can’t build solar farms and keep trees, so those must go.
You’ll also need massive battery backup plantations to store power when the intermittent infrastructure can’t meet demand. There’s a detailed analysis of the problem here, but to keep things simple, you need a battery backup capable of retaining an estimated 25.4 days of constant extra power, and maybe more the further north you go. Add storage for on-demand and peak demand, and you better sharpen your axe.
Mathematically, the lower 48 states would need “an annual energy storage requirement of approximately 233,000GWh.” Using an example from the same report, in Queensland, Australia, they have a plan for a 150 MWh battery facility. This is a rendering.
The researcher did the math; we would need 1.55 million of these facilities at several acres a piece (plus surrounding acres of cleared land in the event of a fire) to meet the demand for the lower 48 US states alone—an intractable problem exacerbated by two facts. No one knows if that’ll work, and everyone knows that these are not US Senators. You need to replace every lithium battery on a schedule of a few every few years, even if you get a flawless decade of life from most of them.
That means rebuilding and replacing (can we say renewing?) pricey “infrastructure” with an annoying and incredibly costly frequency without even broaching the problem of the availability of rare-earth metals, mining and manufacturing emissions, transportation, construction, new transmission infrastructure, and the rest of it – most of which will continue to be impossible without fossil fuels.
And impossible to achieve, even if it were tenable, on the estimated timeline.
In other words, the greatest threat to Vermont’s forests is not the fantasy of man-made climate change. It is the reality of Climate Change policy. You will need to clear hundreds if not thousands of acres for solar farms and at least as many, if not more, for local battery backup facilities and access roads for the build and unavoidable upgrades. None of this is possible, even if we had the material and technology on the advertised timeline.
To get anywhere near there from here, the flat land will be covered in solar farms and the green mountains peppered, if not covered, with wind turbines taller than trees (or you’ll be cutting those down, too), with which much of the indigenous wildlife cannot coexist.
Worry not. We are on a similar arc at the end of which you will not likely be able to complain without it affecting your social credit score or some other metric of obedience to the masters who have, ironically, set modernity and environmental protection back a few thousand years in the name of progress.
But it is cute how they think that won’t happen, and I only sort of kind of feel sorry for them.