By John McClaughry
Since my distaste for the unAffordable Heat Act has been vigorously demonstrated over the past two years, I naturally attract critics who are appalled at my views on that subject.
Last month I explained how the unAffordable Heat Act included a special sweet deal for Vermont Gas Systems, a regulated utility skilled in working the legislature to its advantage
This prompted a Caledonian Record reader, who I won’t name, to offer a rebuttal. He wrote of my argument that VGS will pocket a ton of corporate welfare with its renewable natural gas “is hard to take seriously.” Oh, and why is that so? According to my indignant critic, it’s because the “five major fossil fuel companies made profits of $200 billion in 2022.”
I patiently explained that the profits of the fossil fuel companies had nothing whatever to do with the corporate welfare scheme that VGS slipped into Vermont’s unAffordable Heat Act. I thought I had gone to some lengths to explain how VGS “will earn marketable Public Utility Commission credits by claiming to deliver ‘renewable natural gas,’ almost all from upstate New York landfills and manure treatment plants.”
Several Vermont environmental groups, led by Vermonters for a Clean Environment, have blown the whistle on this corporate welfare scheme.
I am always responsive to a well argued, fact-based rebuttal of my point of view, but very rarely encounter one. This reader’s was certainly not one.
John McClaughry is vice president of the Ethan Allen Institute. Reprinted with permission from the Ethan Allen Institute Blog.
Apparently some “fossil” or more correctly called Natural fuels are better then others depending how many lobbyists you have in Monpeculiar.
..Typical brainwashed Liberal, he said: “…five major fossil fuel companies made profits of $200 billion in 2022.”….That was only because a war started in Ukraine and was an energy panic. GO BACK 10-15 years and see the supposed “profits” of oil companies….like 2020 when oil went NEGATIVE and was around $15 a barrel. Oil companies lost tens of billions!
But look at what companies make obscene profits year after year….BIG TECH. Why don’t Democrats go after BIG TECH for “windfall profits tax”? Answer? Democrats and Big tech are intertwined! So here are the facts….in 2022 just FOUR Big Tech firms…Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft made together……$245 billion in net profit. Of course Dems never mention that? Oil firms are PAUPERS if you add ten years worth of oil “profits”, which are actually LOSSES…. Big Tech is massive profits, year in and year out. That is fact.
And the animating presumption behind this discussion is that profits are bad…they’re “obscene”. No they’re not…ill gotten, manipulated profits are the offence.