One definition of hypocrisy is pretending to have beliefs, values, or virtues that your actions do not match. In simple terms, it means saying one thing and doing another.
On June 4th, 2024, Maryland Governor Wes Moore signed executive order 01.01.2024.19, Implementing Maryland’s Climate Pollution Reduction Plan. It stated Climate change poses an existential threat to the economy, natural resources, and public health for every Maryland resident. Maryland communities, particularly historically marginalized and overburdened communities, are disproportionately impacted by climate change. Maryland’s Climate Solutions Now Act of 2022 set ambitious climate goals for the State, including reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 60% by 2031 and obtaining net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045. The Climate Pollution Reduction Plan estimates that the implementation of new climate policies will generate up to $1.2 billion in public health benefits, $2.5 billion increase in personal income for Marylanders, and a net gain of 27,400 jobs between now and 2031.
Clearly an ambitious plan to take on climate change that some describe as the greatest single threat to human existence. But how serious are the green advocates in Annapolis in taking on one of the single largest CO2 emitters in the state, and one that can’t possibly be missed while driving the interstate through Baltimore.
I am talking about that large smokestack along I-95 in downtown Baltimore. This is the Bresco waste incinerator, the waste-to-energy plant that burns up to 2,250 tons of Baltimore’s municipal trash every day. The Bresco incinerator is the 10th largest incinerator in the country, the largest single polluter in the city, and accounts for 36% of its total air emissions. Bresco’s one smokestack emits more NOx into Baltimore’s air than ever other stationary industrial source in the city combined, some 75% of the total releases. It is also one of the largest NOx emitters in the state. The NOx emissions are so large that closing the facility would be equal to taking over half the cars off Baltimore’s roads. Every year, the incinerator emits more sulfur dioxide into Baltimore’s air than all the cars and trucks on the road eight times over. It is also the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions, releasing 690,033 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Lead emissions have totaled over 10,000 pounds since the plant began operations in 1985. The plant emits between 60 and 120 pounds of airborne mercury annually. This is over 30 times more mercury emissions per unit of energy produced than regional coal plants.
Maryland is a member of RGGI, the regional greenhouse gas initiative, that caps and taxes CO2 emissions from fossil fuel power plants. According to a Baltimore Sun article, RGGI is equivalent to a 44% tax on fossil fuel power plant revenues and has, at least indirectly, caused most of the State’s coal power plants to become uneconomic to operate and voluntarily close. https://www.baltimoresun.com/2025/11/10/pavlak-green-policy-rggi/ Though the plant does generate usable steam for heating and cooling of 255 downtown businesses and electricity for up to 40,000 homes, the Bresco incinerator emits roughly double the amount of greenhouse gases per megawatt hour of energy produced than each of the largest coal power plants that had operated in Maryland.
One important goal of Maryland’s Climate Pollution Reduction Plan is to protect historically marginalized and disproportionately impacted populations from pollution. Yet 114,000 people living just a few miles from the incinerator, are exposed to its pollution daily. In a clear case of environmental injustice, Baltimore’s most economically and socially vulnerable neighborhoods are more affected by air pollution from sources like Bresco than Baltimore’s wealthy neighborhoods. Bresco is located in South Baltimore among predominantly low-income and Black communities. The combination of emissions from Bresco and local vehicle traffic have proven to be a toxic mix. South Baltimore is unfortunately home to some of the most polluted air in Baltimore City. As a result of this, South Baltimore has the highest hospitalization rates for asthma. The communities closest to Bresco also suffer from lower life expectancies. This all means that the communities Bresco affects most directly are also the communities least able to manage the health damages that Bresco causes. A report determined that the Bresco incinerator was responsible for $55 million in health problems a year for people living near it.
Considering the many environmental challenges this plant presents, one would logically be shocked to learn that not only is this plant not on the chopping block, it has been heavily subsidized by the State of Maryland. Since 2011 Maryland has classified waste-to-energy incineration as a Tier 1 renewable energy source under the Renewable Portfolio Standard, which requires electric utility companies to source a portion of their energy from renewable energy sources. Between 2012 and 2022, over $100 million in subsidies have been granted to the two in-state trash incinerators to maintain operations, despite emissions of more greenhouse gas per unit of energy produced than other power sources and including coal power.
Very recently the Maryland General Assembly passed legislation ending the “misclassification” of trash incineration as renewable energy and will end subsidizing companies that burn trash, instead redirecting these funds toward investments more green sources of energy generation such as solar energy. This does not mean that Bresco’s future will be in peril. When speaking with an important Maryland State Senator, I asked is it not better to put trash in a landfill instead of incinerating it? His response what that methane emissions from landfills was a greater menace to the environment the CO2 generated from burning waste. Perhaps he is unaware that modern landfills have the technology to capture methane before it enters the atmosphere and using it as a renewable resource. Studies have also shown that while methane has a powerful short-term impact on the climate, there is very little of it and it quickly dissipates once released into the atmosphere.
The latest word is that the 41 year old Bresco incinerator will likely continue to operate through the mid-2030s, according to a Maryland Department of Public works report.
Geoffrey Pohanka, Chairman, Pohanka Automotive Group
Capitol Heights MD
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
is it not better to put trash in a landfill instead of incinerating it? His response what that methane emissions from landfills was a greater menace to the environment the [than?] CO2 generated from burning waste.
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Methane from any source, it’s called swamp gas for a reason, is NOT a menace to the environment. Sir John Houghton’s Global Warming Potential number needs to given a good public airing that shows that it is nothing more than a mathematical trick designed to produce a large scary number. Methane is NOT 82.5 times more powerful at trapping heat than CO2.
The basic climate sensitivity of CO2 without feed backs considered is about 1.2°C Source:
IPCC AR4 Chapter 8 page 631
In the idealised situation that the climate response to a doubling of atmospheric
CO2 consisted of a uniform temperature change only, with no feedbacks operating
(but allowing for the enhanced radiative cooling resulting from the temperature
increase), the global warming from GCMs would be around 1.2°C
(Hansen et al., 1984; Bony et al., 2006)
Substitute Methane for CO2 and submit it to your favorite AI site and you will find that the climate response to doubling methane is about 0.3°C.
That makes CO2 four times more powerful than methane.
The Global Warming Potential Number misinformation train needs to be derailed.
FYI, the amounts of CO2 and CH4 in the air are so low these greenhouse gases cannot cause any warming of air as claimed by the corrupt IPCC and the unscrupulous collaborating scientists. Currently one cubic meter of air contains 0.85 g of CO2 and 1.4 mg of CH4. All these theoretical calculations about these greenhouse gases causing global warming and climate change are “just so much hogwash” as the late Senator Everret M. Dirksen of Illinois would often say.
Well, you are in good company:
“You can go outside and spit and have the
same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.”
Reid Bryson
Bryson passed away in 2008
Many municipalities cap their landfills when a section is filled and then capture and burn that methane to help power local power plants.
Milwaukee does that. Sometimes they burn it off.
If you run out of space (landfills) to dump it you’re left with burning or eating the trash you produce. So since you can’t avoid it entirely (recycling has it’s limits) take your pick.
The alternative of sticking it where the sun never shines is already covered under the option “eating”. It’s gonna come out there anyways SARC
Maryland’s problem is its inability to anticipate needs, plan and execute on a plan for power generation in the state. The state relied on coal up until the turn of the century but let aging coal plants shut down without replacement. The revolution in fracking should have seen the coal plants replaced with natural gas generation but activists worked hard to insure new pipelines could not be built. Solar did get built but the several hundred MW build out only has a capacity factor of 20-25%. There is a small amount of land based wind but offshore wind is stuck in perpetual planning cycles. So now we import more than 40% of our power but the grid was not set up to import the bulk of its power so new transmission lines are needed but they’re stuck in planning paralysis and lawsuits. See a pattern emerging here?
As you might guess, power prices in Maryland are going up very quickly. Along come data centers. Best thing that ever happened to Maryland politicians. They now have a scapegoat for 25 years of no planning and poor execution.
I’m fine with it as long as AC is outlawed in Maryland.
AC is what? Air Conditioning, Alternating Current or? Neither one makes any sense.
Might need to upgrade the plant, burning trash isn’t a bad idea. “The BRESCO waste incinerator does not use multistage burners to efficiently burn contaminants. Instead, the facility utilizes three mass burn incinerators with 15 sliding grates that move waste through furnaces operating at temperatures of 2,500 degrees to ensure complete combustion.
To manage emissions rather than burning them in a multistage process, the facility employs:
Fabric filter systems (baghouses) that replaced older electrostatic precipitators as part of a recent $45 million upgrade.
Selective Non-Catalytic Reduction (SNCR) systems that inject urea to automatically lower nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions.
The primary goal of these controls is to capture and reduce pollutants like NOx, sulfur dioxide, and mercury, rather than relying on multistage combustion to destroy them. “
Multistage burning (often referred to as staged combustion, gasification, or pyrolysis) generally offers superior combustion control. By separating the process into distinct phases (drying, pyrolysis, and oxidation), these systems can more precisely manage temperature and oxygen levels. This often results in:
Lower pollutant formation: Staged combustion can significantly reduce the formation of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and dioxins during the burning process itself, rather than just capturing them afterward.
If they can be separated and captured, both lead and mercury are industrial metals with commercial value.
Yes . Clean burning of waste for energy makes a lot of sense .
Nice words of promise in your. following text (“offers”, “can”, “often results”, significantly”) . . . got any hard facts (numbers) to go with those?
They seem to be able to do so in Vienna.
Humans exhale 8 million tonnes of CO2 everyday. The amount of CO2 emitted by the incinerator is a mere drop in the bucket compared to human emissions and are nothing to worry about.
Milwaukee produces Milorganite from sewage. When the wind is out of the east you can smell it. I would expect that Baltimore’s incinerator is also stinky.
Since the RGGI taxes only CO2 from fossil fuels, this plant would seem to be A-OK.
At best, one ton of CO2 from this plant would replace one ton from a fossil fuel plant.
In reality, since this plant is a lot less efficient than a fossil fuel plant, the plant results in an increase over fossil fuel alone.
In other words, They ain’t doing what they claim to be doing.
Of course not. It is all virtue signaling. It’s not about the CO2 or human health.
In New York Westchester county Peekskill we burn trash and generate 80 megawatts of electricity. I never hear of any pollution problems from that plant. Why doesn’t Baltimore just do like 80 other cities are doing or are they too dumb?
Before assuming your trash burning is clean in Peekskill you should check out the article at: https://www.michaelshank.tv/westchester-cant-tolerate-its-largest-polluter-the-peekskill-incinerator-any-longer/. Quoting the 2nd and 4th paragraphs of the article we have:
“The local community of Peekskill, New York, which lives in the shadow of Westchester County’s largest industrial polluter, isn’t celebrating four decades of trash burning…
“Over the last forty years, the incinerator has dumped 8 million tons of toxic ash into the community, along with 40,000 tons of nitrous oxides, over one ton of lead, and 840 pounds of mercury. The incinerator has also generated over 31.8 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions, in CO2 equivalents, spewing 800,000 tons per year (estimates based on 2017 Air Emissions reported to New York State Department of Environmental Protection).”
I don’t know how reliable the article is but it showed up as the second item of a Google search.
“Yet 114,000 people living just a few miles from the incinerator, are exposed to its pollution daily. In a clear case of environmental injustice”
Are they venting the incinerator through the dwellings? Seems a bit hyperbolic. How about building a smokestack?
There were ground-level measurements made of the various pollutants (NOx, SO2, particulates) in the area in support of the claims for a (potential?) law suit.
The article says there is a smokestack, but not whether there are precipitators or bathhouses, SO2 scrubbers or NOX catalyst. If the pollution is that much of a problem, there are solutions.
The above article is, for me, truly the first time I’ve heard that trash from households (aka “municiple waste”) is being classified as a “renewable resource”. Really???
Up to now, I thought environmental activists were advocating for reductions in household waste streams, but now it appears some favor increasing such in order to “renewably” fuel projects such as the Baltimore’s Bresco waste incinerator.
Not only is the heating value of household waste—measured as either HHV or LHV—less than even common biowaste (wood chips) due to unavoidable inclusion of incombustible items such as aluminum fuel and other metals and the presence relatively large average moisture content from food scraps, it will certainly also produce a much higher percentage of toxic substances and waste ash upon burning it in the incinerator, as is already evident from the article’s mention of the Bresco incinerator emitting over 30 times more mercury emissions per unit of energy than produced by regional coal plants. Yikes!
Time for some lawsuits to fly to rectify the mistakes of truly ignorant bureaucrats . . . that ignorance being the greatest existential threat to mankind that must be addressed.
And I did read:
“Very recently the Maryland General Assembly passed legislation ending the ‘misclassification’ of trash incineration as renewable energy and will end subsidizing companies that burn trash . . .”
but it remains to be seen if this results in any meaningful change, especially across the other member states of the RGGI.
I contend it makes much more sense to burn waste for energy rather than put it in a hole and call it land treatment. Things like plastics are perfect for incineration. They started off life as oil and have great BTU value. Despite all the hype, recycling plastic is not effective or economical. And, not without emissions and environmental impacts. Incineration reduces the volume of the waste 95 to 98 percent, vastly reducing what has to be managed. If the WTE facility has high emissions, perhaps they are due for emissions controls upgrades. I was an incinerator plant engineer and my facility was able to meet easily meet MACT standards.
re methane “quickly dissipates once released into the atmosphere”:actually, methane breaks down quickly into CO2 and H2O. That’s different to ‘dissipates’.
The low concentration of CH4 in the air is due to its combustion along the path of the discharges of lightning. There is no propagation of combustion due the low concentration of CH4 in the air. There are over 8 million discharges of lightning everyday (cf. Wikipedia). Discharges of lighting generates ozone which would oxidize CH4 to CO2 and H2O.
CH4 is slightly soluble in cold water. One liter of ice cold water can hold up to
33 mls of CH4. In the cold polar waters the absorbed CH4 slowly diffuses to the ocean floor where under high pressure it is converted to a solid clathrate known as methane ice. There are vast deposits of methane ice on the floors of the oceans.
Jet planes with their big engines are flying incinerators for CH4. All processes of combustion using ambient air burn up CH4.
The claim that CH4 is 80 times a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 is based on a theoretical analysis of its IR absorption spectrum. However, CH4 has few absorption bands in thermal emission spectrum of earth’s surface. Since the concentration of CH4 in air is so low , it absorbs little out-going IR light emanating from the warm earth’s surface.
Bottom line: We need not worry about emission CH4 from activities of humans.