The property can now be taken by the town for unpaid back taxes, a process that already was under way, Webber pointed out. The project was completed with restoration and cleanup of the site. Since the underground tanks were found not to be leaking, they were left in place, filled with foam and sealed. The project was organized by the DEP in 2017 as part of the state agency's Small Town Environmental Partnership program, which identified the 1,800-square-foot Stockbridge Motors site as "a property of concern."įederal funding for the cleanup was secured by the DEP from the EPA's Leaking Underground Storage Tank Trust Fund.Īfter soil and groundwater samples were analyzed, the abandoned property was classified as a risk because of the contaminated soil and groundwater, which required not only excavation but also pumping out remaining gas in the three underground storage tanks, as well as removal of the onetime service station's pump dispensary islands, overhead canopy and underground fuel lines. Details of the cleanup were provided by the DEP's Springfield office. The polluted materials were excavated, de-watered and removed to a federally licensed out-of-state facility, interim Town Administrator Mark Webber told the Select Board at a recent meeting. Rather, the prospect of making cars far greener than they are today should count as yet another argument against the nation’s continued reliance on dirty coal.The entire project cost about $400,000, funded by the state and federal environmental agencies and a $50,000 site-assessment grant secured by Melissa Provencher, environmental and energy program manager at the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission. To use the nation’s reliance on dirty coal as an argument against electric cars is to get things backward. The technology isn’t advancing exponentially, as it has with computer processors, but it is advancing. Meanwhile, Tesla, Nissan, and other automakers are working feverishly to increase the efficiency and reduce the cost of batteries. Besides, a lot of electric-car owners are already investing in solar power to charge their vehicles. If that trend holds, the Model S and other electric cars will only get cleaner. grid each year is skewed much more heavily toward renewables than the current mix. Natural gas has already reduced coal’s share of the national energy mix in recent years. Environmental trade-offs are changing all the time, mostly in electric cars’ favor.
The present is short, and the future is long. But there’s a reason scientists aren’t scrambling to write papers evaluating the precise present-day tradeoffs between electric cars and their internal-combustion counterparts.
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