There seems to be a recurring myth about New England Clean Energy Connect, and I am trying to purge this myth from the record. 

Electrical power from Hydro-Quebec is not clean. “Politicians who describe dams as ‘clean energy projects’ are talking ‘nonsense’ and rejecting decades of science, says David Schindler, a leading water ecologist,” The Tyee, a Canadian online newsmagazine, has reported. 

At an Army Corps of Engineers hearing on NECEC in Lewiston on Dec. 5, Bradford Hager (a Mercer resident), a professor in MIT’s department of earth and atmospheric sciences, submitted testimony in the form of two peer-reviewed scientific journal articles stating that hydropower from Quebec is as dirty as coal-fired heating plants.   

 The impoundments created by these large dam projects are measured in hundreds, if not thousands, of square miles. They flood millions of acres of woodlands, and the vast, shallow impoundment lakes created slowly rot trees and other vegetation and produce methane, which is 34 times more damaging to our atmosphere than comparable molecules of CO2, while the methyl mercury produced contaminates the groundwater.   

The climate change issue that Central Maine Power uses as reasoning for implementing the NECEC project is equivalent to smoke and mirrors because the Hydro-Quebec power is not clean, and the 3,500 acres of land that will be cleared for the NECEC corridor and additional power lines are not a credible response to mitigating the effects of climate change.    

The only dilemma facing environmentalists is how to help separate fact from fiction for NECEC. 

Richard Aishton

Farmington

« Previous

Letter to the editor: For Susan Collins, a ‘modest proposal’

Next »

Letter to the editor: All-cash tolls will thwart turnpike scofflaws