Meet Your Neighborhood Greenhouse Gas Emitters

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This story was produced with support from the Markham-Nathan Fund for Social Justice.

In recent weeks, brush fires have seared swaths of forestland across Massachusetts in what state officials have called “a historic fall fire season.” State officials announced that 203 brush fires had ignited across the state last month, including in western Massachusetts — a massive increase over the historic October average of 15. Cities across the region are experiencing record droughts as 2024 stays on pace to be the hottest on record worldwide.

New England is heating up faster than other parts of the country, federal data show, and climate scientists say periods of drought and flood are both likely to become more common as climate change worsens. And while the causes of climate change are global in scale, western Mass has its own share of large scale carbon emitters. 

Statewide, transportation and buildings account for the largest portion of greenhouse gasses — 72% together, according to Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection data. Another 20% of those emissions come from the generation of electrical power. While sources of transportation emissions are more geographically spread out, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency does keep data on the facilities that contribute most to regional greenhouse gas pollution.

The EPA’s data show that the Connecticut River Valley’s biggest greenhouse gas polluters include power plants, large factories, and landfills. And most of them are located in the county with the second-highest percentage of ethnic and racial minority populations in the state: Hampden County.

“A lot of the marginalized communities just don’t get invested into and they’re always getting divested,” said Zulmalee Rivera-Delgado, an event coordinator with the nonprofit Neighbor to Neighbor, which has organized against environmental injustice and racism in western Massachusetts. “When you look at that cycle … you see these very same communities don’t have the ecosystem around them to live in a healthy environment.”

Rivera-Delgado was one of the many local residents who successfully organized against the construction of a wood-burning power plant in Springfield, which at times in recent years has ranked among the communities with highest levels of asthma in the entire country. Air pollution from gas-fired power plants can increase the risk of asthma in neighboring communities, as can similar air pollution from wildfires and vehicles. Rivera-Delgado said that environmental activism on the local level has had a positive impact.

“I think we have a shift happening right now where people are really seeing how their health is impacted based on where they live,” she told The Shoestring. “Asking questions, coming to community meetings, learning to speak up and coming together, learning to organize. It’s a slow trend, but I have the hope that it will continue to happen.”

At the top of the list of the region’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters are two power plants, according to the EPA data: Vistra Energy’s Masspower plant in Springfield’s Indian Orchard neighborhood, which produced 283,431 metric tons of CO2 equivalent in 2023, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s physical plant building, which produced 103,468 metric tons of CO2 equivalent that year.

Other power plants that appear among the EPA’s data include the Massachusetts Municipal Wholesale Electric Company’s Stony Brook power plant in Ludlow and two Agawam-based facilities: the Tenaska-owned Berkshire Power plant and Tennessee Gas Pipeline Station 261, whose parent company is Kinder Morgan.

Two large factories also made the 2023 list of largest greenhouse gas polluters in the region: the Erving Industries paper mill in Erving and the Eastman Chemical Company factory in Indian Orchard.

Vistra Energy, the MMWEC, and Tenaska, did not respond to requests for comment for this article, nor did Erving Industries and Eastman Chemical Company. Kinder Morgan acknowledged receipt of The Shoestring’s interview request but did not provide comment or make any company representative available for an interview.

Several landfills are also high on the list of regional greenhouse gas sources. Those included the capped landfills in Granby, Chicopee, and Northampton. Landfills constitute a significant source of methane emissions — a greenhouse gas that is at least 28 times more effective than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere, according to the EPA. That’s because organic matter that makes it into landfills, like food scraps and wood products, releases methane when it decomposes.

Shaina Sadai, a western Mass climate scientist who works as a visiting assistant professor of geology and geography at Mount Holyoke College, said that for a long time the dominant narrative around greenhouse gas emissions has been one of individual “carbon footprints” and how people can reduce theirs. That idea isn’t entirely off base, she said: Americans consume far more energy than people in other countries, for example. 

However, Sadai said that large companies play a disproportionate role in fueling the climate crisis, especially those in the energy and fossil-fuel sectors. That includes emissions, which she said are likely undercounted in the EPA’s data, but also lobbying the government to maintain laws and policies that benefit their bottom lines at the expense of the planet. 

“We’re really trending in absolutely the wrong direction and the large corporations are playing an outsized role in keeping us in this disastrous situation,” she said.

Sadai also said that the environmental injustice that communities like Springfield face isn’t just limited to the pollution disproportionately spilling out of facilities in their neighborhoods. Because of what’s called the “urban heat island effect,” cities are warming much faster than surrounding rural areas.

“They’re also disproportionately impacted by the eventual climate impacts of this pollution,” Sadai said. She praised the work of  community activists working on the local level to challenge greenhouse gas emitters, which she said is the most hopeful strategy. “Getting connected to the broader local and global movements to push these large polluters out of our world all together.”

As for the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the school’s Deputy Chancellor for Operational and Organizational Strategies Tilman Wolf explained in a phone interview that the university has its own plant that provides heating and electricity to a campus that is about 13.5 million square feet in size. That includes dorms that house more than 14,000 students, research labs, teaching spaces, and other buildings. 

“We are like a small city, and all of that is powered through our central heating plant that uses fuel to generate the steam and electricity we use on campus,” Wolf said.

(Disclosure: The author of this article teaches journalism at UMass Amherst. The Shoestring’s newsroom operates independently.)

The main fuel the campus uses is pipeline gas — a fossil fuel, but one Wolf described as more efficient than the coal-fired plants the university used to run. For times of peak energy use, like on cold winter days, the school also has stores of liquified natural gas and ultra-low sulfur diesel it burns to keep up with demand, Wolf said. A smaller source of energy comes from the solar canopies located over parking lots and on campus rooftops. 

“It isn’t a huge part of the overall energy portfolio but I think it’s important,” Wolf said of the solar installations. Wolf said that the university is also working to improve efficiency on campus — installing LED lighting and better temperature controls, for example — and has been able to cut carbon emissions from buildings as a result. 

However, the school’s overall emissions have not dropped over the last 13 years despite those improvements, according to the EPA data. Wolf said that is because of the university’s ongoing construction of new buildings like the Life Sciences Laboratories and Commonwealth Honors College. And UMass Amherst is soon to open two new buildings, too: a computer-sciences facility and sustainable engineering lab.

Wolf said those two new facilities will have to comply with state rules that require them to be heated using electricity, which, although it is now generated in large part by burning fossil fuels, can be decarbonized with energy sources like solar and wind. Wolf said the buildings will use ground-source heat exchange systems for warming and cooling and will feature other technological innovations like capturing heat from the computer-science facility’s computer servers to warm the buildings. He said the university hopes it can be an example for other big institutions working to reduce carbon emissions. 

However, Wolf said retrofitting older buildings with greener technology is a bigger challenge than building anew, partly because of the high cost of those repairs but also because improvements to the facilities can trigger requirements to bring the entire buildings up to code.  

“It is a very expensive proposition,” Wolf said. 

Massachusetts has itself committed to reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 through a combination of reducing emissions and “carbon sequestration.”

Wolf said that because of those steep costs, the university has to balance its investments in carbon-emission reductions with the other costs of running a university. He said the school’s hope is that there will be significant support from the federal government to lower greenhouse gas emissions. Asked about the likelihood of that with the election of climate-change denier Donald Trump as president, Wolf directed his focus, instead, to leaders on the state level, who he said are committed to that work.

“We want to partner with them to achieve that and be a showcase for the technology and progress you can make,” he said.

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