Plum Creek Greenhouse Gas Assessment
Land use development and global warming are inextricably intertwined, and as pressure to limit GHG emissions increases, Northeast states cannot afford to continue building sprawling, conventional developments that depend on automobile and plane travel--without forethought for their impact on global warming.
Background
In 1998 the Plum Creek Timber Company purchased 900,000 acres of Maine woods from a major paper company in the Moosewood Lake region of northwestern Maine. Six years later, Plum...
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To raise awareness about the potential GHG impact of a megaresort planned for Maine's northern woods, ENE estimated the amount of CO2 emissions that the Plum Creek TImber Company's development would produce -- from land clearing, building energy use and transportation. Another goal of the assessment was to recommend solutions for reducing carbon emissions to help Maine meet the objectives of its climate action plan.
ENE's Plum Creek Greenhouse Gas Assessment is one of the first of its kind. Massachusetts is beginning to require developers to assess the global warming potential of their projects, and California is similarly developing guidelines for developers to follow.
ENE's assessment found that the resort would produce the following major sources of CO2 emissions:
- Forest Land Clearing: between 387,378 and 501,081 metric tons CO2, of which roughly half is emitted to the atmosphere (during development) and the other half is lost carbon storage potential over a 50 year period. The half that is emitted during development is roughly equivalent to the annual emissions of the oil-fired Wyman power plant in Yarmouth, Maine.
- Transportation: approximately 9,566 metric tons CO2 each year, equal to the annual CO2 production of approximately 1850 vehicles
- Building energy: at least 13,018 metric tons CO2 each year
Thoughtful design modifications could reduce these emissions and help achieve objectives of the state Climate Action Plan, as well as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, and other state and regional policies. For example, clustering the residential units and decreasing the size of the lots could reduce the amount of land cleared up to 41 percent, yielding a corresponding drop in the amount of carbon dioxide emitted. Similarly, use of advanced building design could cost-effectively improve the energy efficiency of newly constructed buildings by as much as 50 percent.
