On December 15, Naia Tenerowicz told the Valley Post that at least 24 people spoke against a proposed fossil fuel pipeline in Springfield at a public hearing the day before. The hearing was held by state regulators. Tenerowicz is a spokesperson for the two groups that organized a May 31, 2022 rally in Springfield to stop the pipeline. The two groups were the Longmeadow Pipeline Awareness Group, and the Springfield Climate Justice Coalition. The pipeline would go about six miles from Springfield to Longmeadow, Massachusetts. The pipeline would cost around $65 million.

Tenerowicz told the Valley Post that a long article about the December 14 public hearing in the Springfield Republican newspaper had an error. “The biggest error is in the paragraph addressing the cost of the pipeline: ratepayers would pay for the entire $65 million, not only $33 million. The other error is more misleading than completely factually wrong. The second paragraph says Eversource wants to build a pipeline and 'other upgrades to a 70 year old system.' This implies they are making improvements to Springfield's existing pipeline or distribution systems, which they are not doing. This project consists of a proposed pipeline plus a metering station in Longmeadow that would exist to connect the new pipeline to the Tennessee Gas Pipeline, and a new part of the Bliss Street Regulator Station in Springfield that would connect the pipeline to Springfield's existing distribution system.”

***********

On December 14, a spokesperson for the USDA told the Valley Post that his agency is allowing logging in the part of Green Mountain National Forest that is in the same county as Brattleboro.

On December 15, Zack Porter of the group Standing Trees (www.standingtrees.org) told the Valley Post that the part of the USDA that runs “Green Mountain National Forest continues to race to cut down mature forests that are critically important for the climate, and for the survival of species like the pine marten and Northern Long-eared Bat, which was recently listed as endangered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. World leaders are meeting in Montreal this week to stave off extinction of species just like these; what will it take for the (people who run) Green Mountain National Forest to get the message that our mature forests are worth more standing?"

Porter continued, "The Green Mountain National Forest is using faulty and misleading logic to excuse cutting of mature forests. The definitive study on the distribution of early successional habitat in New England, frequently cited by the US Forest Service, says that, 'The proportion of the pre-settlement landscape in seedling-sapling forest habitat (1-15 years old) ranged from 1 to 3 percent in the northern hardwood forests… Present day amounts of young forests in northern hardwood and spruce-hardwood forests in some regions may be several times higher than in pre-settlement times.' There is no shortage of early successional habitat. What's more, such habitat is best created naturally as forests age through wind and ice storms, and with the handiwork of beavers.”

Porter went on, “Meanwhile, the same study estimated that, pre-European settlement, old-growth forests covered 70 to 89 percent of the Northern Hardwood forests that dominate Vermont and New Hampshire. Today, less than 1 percent of the region's forests resemble anything close to the old forests that once blanketed northern New England. Management of National Forests should seek to recover old forests and associated species, which are best protected in large contiguous expanses like the Green and White Mountain National Forests."

On November 12, about 110 people attended a rally to stop logging in Green Mountain National Forest. Porter's group was one of the groups that organized the rally. The rally was in Rochester, Vermont, about 70 miles north-northwest of Brattleboro.

*********

The Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor is on the Connecticut river a few miles from Massachusetts. In 2014 it was permanently closed thanks to thousands of people who marched in Brattleboro, and hundreds who were arrested for non-violent civil disobedience outside the reactor in the town of Vernon, and outside the Brattleboro office of Entergy, the Louisiana corporation that owned the reactor. One of the groups that organized the protests has a web site at www.NukeBusters.org.

On December 14, 2022 the New York Times and the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper published articles about an experiment to use nuclear fusion to generate electricity. According to a December 15 article on the web site of the group Beyond Nuclear, “While the experiment delivered 3.15 megajoules of energy output to the 2.05 megajoules it put in, the 192 lasers that produced it required 300 megajoules of energy.... Fusion does not have now, never had, and never will have, any practicable applicability to electricity generation.” The use of nuclear fusion is to create nuclear bombs, the group says. A group that has a web site at www.nirs.org posted an article that's similar to Beyond Nuclear's.