For Immediate Release

This week, the Danskammer company filed its latest supplemental analysis to the Department of Environmental Conservation. The filing is an attempt to explain how a massive new gas-fired power plant along the Hudson River would conform  with New York’s climate law, which requires substantial greenhouse gas reductions in the coming years. 

The company’s report argues that Danskammer will eventually displace older, less efficient power plants throughout the Northeast, and that the facility would eventually transition to running on gas derived from sources like factory farm manure and sewage. 

In response, Food & Water Action organizer Emily Skydel released the following statement: 

“New York’s new climate law makes polluting facilities like Danskammer obsolete. This study is little more than a desperate attempt at greenwashing by the company’s Wall Street investors to expand fracked gas power in our state.

“Beyond the climate impacts, the Danskammer study ignores the severe health effects this project will have on communities in the Hudson Valley, who will suffer from the particulate matter and dangerous pollutants the plant will release.

“The analysis makes the absurd claim that building more fracked gas infrastructure will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, mostly by suggesting that this plant will eventually run on dirty energy sources like manure derived from factory farms—something the fossil fuel industry ridiculously brands as ‘renewable natural gas.’ Relying on this dirty energy source would incentivize the expansion of factory farms by monetizing animal waste, and more factory farming means more water and air pollution affecting communities near those sites. To make matters worse, the inevitable methane leakage in a ‘renewable gas’ system will have the same negative effect on the climate as fracked gas.”

“Danskammer’s cynical claim that a plant that runs on gas from animal waste is clean energy isn’t just absurd—it stinks.”

###