Not long before the election, back when "climate" was still a campaign issue, Emma Cotton asked "At what cost? Utility leaders and environmentalists debate Burlington's wood-burning plant" (VTDigger, Oct. 15). Her timely post followed after Rep. Becca Balint's query in many emails: "I'm headed to Washington. What should I prioritize?"

Answer: Repurposing and transforming the McNeil and Ryegate power plants to double their operating efficiency and to make them "carbon negative" should be a top priority for Vermont and a good example for all countries. Here follows a summary of numerous op-eds in VT papers outlining a profitable, free market, climate solution that supports the goals of the VT Climate Council, the Global Warming Solutions Act, the Affordable Heat Act and the IRA Climate Act of 2022, which only passed with Kamala Harris's deciding vote. A lucrative CO2 solution backed by private money may yet help us reunite our divided country. Millions of construction and farm jobs are at stake. State policy can still spur investment for jobs and CO2 benefits despite Trump's climate denialism in Washington.

Thanks to new chemistry and agronomy, it is now profitable to repurpose the McNeil, Ryegate and Yankee plants to make them intrinsically "carbon negative" - not just "carbon neutral." Instead of emitting 600K tons of CO2 yearly, McNeil and Ryegate can be redesigned to remove 600K tons from air. Besides, Vermont farmers need new cash crops. Appropriate sustainable biofuels can be made from "cover crops" like hemp, sorghum, rapeseed, pennycress and agricultural residues. Cover crops benefit soils, cut erosion and remove CO2 from air 2-3 times faster than forests per acre. It is far better for climate to burn sustainable biofuels, not fossil fuels or precious trees. Let carbon forests thrive and multiply! Foresters should sell no trees before their time, i.e. with carbon offsets for more money.

Power plants can be reinvented by augmenting their exhaust systems with CO2 capture and reuse capacity to make synthetic fuels and feedstocks from CO2 exhaust and H2O. These synfuels, i.e. synthetic methane, ethanol, gasoline & diesel, can supplement primary fuel for the same furnace or engine the CO2 is from, thus forming and activating a highly lucrative, verifiable, CO2 removal system. Or they can be sold in the general fuel market. Or CO2 can be used to make calcium carbonate for concrete or graphite for graphene, which enhances concrete and electronics. In any case, CO2 can be removed and reused profitably in ways that keep its carbon out of the air. The same applies to all conventional power plants, not just in our brave little state. Valuable carbon offsets, carbon removals and carbon credits can be garnered by this approach, which is consistent with and supported by the IRA Climate Act.

In the process, the average operating efficiency of the US power fleet can be raised from about 35% presently to at least 48% by a) installing air and ground based heat pumps to preheat boiler water, b) reusing waste heat from the stack for additional fuel-free megawatts via the Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) method or with Stirling Engines and c) production of hydrogen and synthetic fuels made from H2O and CO2 exhaust. Combined operating efficiency of the McNeil and Ryegate plants, presently only 24% when they are running, can be effectively doubled with a multi-system approach. Local agrivoltaic farms can supply biofuels to the furnace and extra watts to the switching yard, thus increasing total operating efficiency and output. Farmers get two paychecks, one for fuel crops and one for PV. CO2 from tailpipes, buildings and factories can be treated similarly. LanzaTech, Aker Solutions, Carbon Clean, SkyNano, MIT and EPFL are among the leaders in Carbon Capture & Utilization (CCU) and sustainable biofuels.

Sustainable biofuels do not include monoculture palm oil, corn ethanol or wood chips from clear-cut forests. CO2 emissions from these sources are similar or worse than burning coal. Then too, net-zero by 2050 is a laudable goal but not soon enough to help save us in time. The planet needs to reach net-zero by mid 2030's to achieve substantial net-negative emission by 2050, as the IPCC should have said by now.

A similar approach can be applied to Vermont Yankee and all existing nuclear plants, which are all 40-plus year-old antiques and similar to Fukushima, Chernobyl and the Three Mile Island plant, which is reopening soon to supply power to Microsoft - not a good idea. All of these plants used 1960s era, boiling water reactors located next to rivers or oceans for cooling. Global flooding and frequent hurricanes due to rapid climate change were not anticipated. Likewise, rampant wars threaten old nuke plants with terrifying consequences as we see in Ukraine and Russia.

Fortunately, all of these antique nuclear plants can be transformed into negative emission, power and storage stations by cutting out their nuclear hardware, keeping their switching yards and generation capacity and then installing batteries and new furnaces with CO2 scrubbers that run on sustainable biofuels. CO2 in turn can be sanely reused.

Yet, even Bill McKibben is flirting with nuclear power despite his long struggle against it. Indeed, any nuke plan for Vermont Yankee, if seriously proposed, is likely to become a radioactive third rail to most voters in the tri-state region. In any case, even if modern reactors are safer to operate as anticipated, they will not solve the underlying crisis of nuclear waste, which typically remains highly radioactive for hundreds, thousands or millions of years. That waste is piling up on-site around the world to this day. I have always hoped that Bill would run for office someday but not on a nuke platform. Bill should get behind sustainable biofuels and negative carbon emissions. Besides, farmers need new cash crops that protect and enhance the land.