"In Glover, a small dam was built on the Barton River to form Mud Pond, which held water to power the mills serving the community. In an effort to increase the water level in Mud Pond, a group of townsmen went upstream to enlarge the outlet from Long Pond, the source of the Barton River. On June 6, 1810, they expanded the outlet and unintentionally released Long Pond, called Runaway Pond after this event, allowing it to rush down-river and wash out most everything in its path, including much of Glover." (From Fueling Vermont's Future, Vermont Department of Public Service, 1997.)
As the townpeople of Glover, Vermont found out in 1810, expanding a community's energy supply sometimes has unintended results. Today, Vermonters don't worry about flooding from poorly planned hydropower projects, but our growing energy use has other unintended impacts on humans and the environment, including global climate change, air emissions problems, and radioactive waste.
How Much Energy Do Vermonters Use?|
Global Climate Change|
Byproducts of Energy Use|
Nuclear Waste|
Costs to Future Generations|
What We Can Do|
How Much Energy Do Vermonters Use?
Paralleling national trends, Vermont's energy use decreased between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s due to high oil prices, improving technologies, government regulations, and economic recessions. Since then, however, energy use has increased again; in Vermont, it grew by about 37% between 1980 and 1995. Currently, the transportation and residential sectors each account for about one-third of the state's energy use, while the commercial and industrial sectors account for the rest. Almost two-thirds of our energy comes from oil, with nuclear and wood energy a distant second and third. Altogether, Vermonters spend an estimated $1.3 billion on energy in 1995, with aobut 45% of those expenditures going for gasoline, heating oil, and other oil products, and 42% going for electricity.
The impacts of Vermont's energy use will continue to multiply in the future if population and energy use increase. Population is expected to grow by 11% between 1995 and 2015; meanwhile, under a business-as-useal scenario, energy use is expected to grow from 145 TBTU in 1995 to 187 TBTU in 2015, a 29% increase. 1 (See Chart)
1 Numbers for energy use given in this fact sheet include electric energy generated outside the state but used within Vermont, and the energy lost in the gerneration, transmission, and distribution of electric energy and natural gas. TBTU is trillion British Thermal Units.
Global Climate Change
Energy use has many negative impacts on humans and the environment, but the future impact of global climate change is one of the most threatening. Carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane, eht "greenhouse gases" emitted from fossil fuel combustion, contribute to future climate change by trapping heat in the earth's atmosphere that normally would have radiated into space.
Vermont released about 9.7 million tons of greenhouse gases from energy use in 1995.2 Between 1980 (when the decline in energy use was nearing an end) and 1995, the state's emissions of greenhouse gases from energy use increased by 31%.
Driving is the main cause of greenhouse gases in Vermont. About 43% of the state's greenhouse gas emissions from energy use came from the transportation sector in 1995, while 32% came from the residential sector.
2 In CO2 equivalent tons.
Byproducts of Energy Use Fossil fuel combustion produces air emissions that cause many immediate and longterm problems for human and environmental health. Human health problems include respiratory disease, eye problems, heart stress, nervous system problems, cancer, and others. Emissions impact the environment in a variety of ways, including crop damage, wildlife stress, and degraded visibility. Surface water, gourndwater, and marine life are also degraded by our energy use through air emissions and other causes such as run-off polluted by oil and gasoline.
Ground-level ozone emissions (smog) caused by fossil fuel combustion cause many of the adverse impacts on humans and the environment in Vermont. In addition, the emissions that cause acid rain and snow are especially serious problems for the state because emissions travel here from coal power plants in Midwestern states. Acid precipitation causes lakes and streams to acidify and contributes to the decline of high-elevation spruce-fir forests.
A few specific emissions released by statewide energy use have decreased since the early 1980s, but most are released in greater amounts now.
Nuclear Waste
Impacts from nuclear power are especially problematic for the state because the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station is located in Vernon, and because nuclear power carries many serious, long-term risks to our own and future generations, including the potential of accidents that release radiation into the air or groundwater.
High-level radioactive waste from nuclear plants remains radioactive for thousands of years and must be carefully managed for thousands of gernerations. However, there is no permanent storage space for this waste yet. Virtually all high-level waste, including the waste at Vermont Yankee, is now stored at nuclear plants; a permanent storage site has been under investigation in Nevada since 1987, but progress on the facility is stalled. No matter where high-level radioactive waste is ultimately stored, there will be strong opposition from people who live nearby and along any route through which the waste must be transported.
Low-level radioactive waste is dangerous for a shorter amount of time, but the ultimate storage for much of this waste is uncertain as well. Currently, Vermont Yankee is seeking to store its low-level waste at a proposed underground site in a west Texas town. However, opponents have raised environmental justice concerns over the proposed location of the facility, saying the predominantly low-income, Mexican-American community had no money or political clout to fight the facility.
Costs to Future Generations
Because we transfer many of the costs of energy use to future generations, our energy use is not sustainable. Artificially low energy prices, in large part, create this problem. Health costs from air pollution and nuclear power accidents, military costs for protecting foreign oil interests, government subsidies to polluting fuel industries, crop losses form air and groundwater pollution, unknown climate change impacts, and other costs are not included in fuel prices. As a result, policy-makers and consumers make wasteful choices. If fuel prices included the What We Can Do
Because Vermont's population is expected to increase in the future, each peron must begin to create fewer impacts on the environment, or total impacts will rise even more. For our energy use to become more sustainable, we must use significantly more renewable energy. A few important strategies that can reduce each person's impact on the environment and human health include:
full costs of energy production and use, less energy and cleaner energy would be consumed. The higher oil prices of the 1970s, for example, increased our use of energy efficient technologies and practices, and energy use and emissions fell.