In their partisan zeal to thrust S.5 upon Vermonters, Progressive lawmakers reveal how little they are concerned with integrity in their purported moral crusade to “save the planet.” The hype used to frighten children about climate change is recruited to then weaponize those agitated youngsters as the rationalization to pass legislation unpopular with large swaths of voters. This is a betrayal of democratic representation, but also of traditional wisdom and of young people.

It is generally recognized that greater life experiences provide people with greater knowledge and insight as they mature. Some of these insights bear closely to the issues of economic and climate impacts contemplated by S.5:

Wisdom really does come with age, scientists say. Although older people’s brains slow down, experience and knowledge more than make up for it — helping them make better financial decisions, a study shows.

Recent justifications of S.5 have been premised not on the mechanics or efficacy of the bill, but on clarions of “But oh, we must listen to the young people”:

Miriam Serota-Winston [is] a 14-year-old member of the activist group Youth Lobby and first-year student at Montpelier High School. … “We have the data and the science,” Serota-Winston said. “We know that the earth is warmer, that the sea is rising. We know that climate change disproportionately affects people of color, people in poverty, marginalized communities. We’ve said it so many times before and we will keep saying it until politicians stop putting profit and political maneuvering before our lives.”

Did Miriam read S.5?

As child-leader Greta Thunberg ages, Vermont’s old-hippie far-left recruits replacement kiddies as pawns. Fuel dealers and thousands of adult, bill-paying voters have raised justified concerns about the dramatic economic impacts of S.5. It is clearly very regressive, leading race activists to criticize it strongly. But these experienced voices are trumped by children whose brains are undeveloped and who have never had to pay rent, heat, or real estate taxes from money earned with their own labor.

If S.5 is analyzed on the facts, childish plaints ring hollow. These claims are not borne out by the IPCC and other climate scientists, who do not assert that the world will be destroyed in these children’s lifetimes, and offer a range of possibilities of outcomes, not the dire Armageddons with which “politicians” have horrified youngsters. Aren’t S.5-supporting politicians “putting profit” of renewable energy manufacturers before real solutions? Renewable energy manufacturing absorbs natural resources and energy, and its proponents have spread grotesque misinformation about the supposed benefits of these technologies using the basest of “political maneuverings.”

Yet this same pattern of rolling out left-wing babes to eclipse the issues is seen every legislative session. VTDigger published this same one-sided perspective in 2021:

Climate change is no longer just a looming threat. It is here,” said Fatima Khan, a student at Essex High School.

… “Allowing GlobalFoundries to make that deal would not only be unfair to the planet, but all of us young people who’ve dedicated their time and energy into seeing these solutions put into action,” Groveman said.

Groveman and Serota-Winston do not speak for “all of us young people” -–  just the weak-minded, frightened ones indoctrinated into the leftwing climate cult. Democrats abuse these children by scaring them and then using them like programmed automatons. In the process, they abuse all the children who do not share these extremist, issue-avoiding views. Contrary to the claims of David Zuckerman and other adults charged to lead our state, not all young people are far-left acolytes.

Responding to the “mythology that has taken hold among many national Democrats,” a recent article by an alternative group of youngsters points out just how truly false this trope really is:

As political practitioners who have worked to mobilize our peers on behalf of mainstream, center-left candidates and campaigns, we know firsthand that our peers don’t fit neatly into the rigid archetypes projected onto us by older generations and the media. Not only is the median young voter a self-identified moderate, but young Americans are more moderate than the general public.

There’s a tendency among the chattering class to paint young people as a disproportionately far-left and uber-progressive cohort, a portrayal that obscures the bigger picture of a middle-of-the-road generation. Young voters have nuanced views and are not a monolith.

S.5 proponents and Vermont’s media propagandists manipulate left-leaning kiddos as partisan monolith: the Harvard Youth poll referenced in this article shows that 24 percent of 18-29-year-olds identify as conservative. Their views are simply avoided, along with the issues avoided by using children as political tools instead of addressing the merits of legitimate concerns of regressivity, costliness, administrative unmanageability, and effectiveness of S.5’s grand new scheme.

Perhaps some of those conservative youngsters offer wisdom about the dangers of future recession and inflation, how S.5 burdens low income taxpayers and people of color, or whether they agree that the planet is ending soon due to pesky carbon dioxide. Perhaps those youth are aware of the chemical pollution created when solar panels, EVs and heat pumps are manufactured, which exposes them to cancer, disease, and infertility.

John Klar is an attorney and farmer residing in Brookfield. © Copyright True North Reports 2023. All rights reserved.