By Brent Addleman | The Center Square
Gov. Phil Scott said that while he supports Vermont’s efforts to transition to clean heat energy, he said the state needs to be realistic about what it can achieve.
Senate Bill 5 was the focus of the governor’s weekly press conference on Wednesday. The bill, if enacted, would work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the thermal energy sector, calling for electrification, decarbonization, and weatherization efforts for households across Vermont.
Gov. Phil Scott
“It is too soon to estimate the impact on Vermont’s economy, households and businesses,” Scott said. “The way in which the Clean Heat Standard is implemented including the way in which clean heat credits are priced and how incentives or subsidies are offered to households and businesses must be established before meaningful analysis is possible.
“At the same time, those incentives or subsidies could be costly for the state, suggesting larger fiscal impacts in future years.”
The bill, which was the focus of a Senate panel hearing on Tuesday, calls for Vermont to move toward a uniform clean heat standard.
Scott discussed the financial ramifications that could be felt across the state if the proposal becomes law. He said the state needs to work on a thorough plan that would transition to carbon-free heating alternatives.
“So there’s no confusion, I want to be clear, my administration agrees with many of the same objectives as legislators, like reducing emissions from the thermal sector,” Scott said, “But, I firmly believe we need to help people make changes, not punish them.”
Scott reiterated his support of electrifying the thermal sector and believes there will be “long-term savings,” but it wouldn’t be proper to “ignore the fact that there are significant upfront costs.” He said those costs would be regressive and harmful to Vermont’s lower-income residents.
Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore said she stands by the cost estimate she provided, along with the principles the initiative represents.
“Transitions cost money, real money,” Moore said. “To date, my concerns and my cost estimate have been largely dismissed by the Legislature and advocates as ‘scare tactics.’ This is unfortunate. My goal in developing a ballpark estimate was to highlight what was missing from the discussion – careful consideration of the upfront cost of making big changes in how we heat our homes.”
Moore pointed to a host of studies that “need to address carbon emissions generated from building heat” and there needs to be a detailed evaluation of the Clean Heat Standard and how it would affect Vermont residents.
She went on to say, “The simple fact is, we don’t yet know.”
“Despite the rhetoric, it is important to remember, as the governor said, there is no disagreement between the Legislature and the administration,” Moore said. “We need to transition from heating our homes and businesses with increasingly high-priced and volatile fossil fuels.”
Moore said that while the bill is on track to be completed in June, lawmakers are voting on an idea and not a plan.
Governor Scott is the panderer-in-charge for a reason. Some of us know that every National Governors Association Conference is where deals and marching orders are made. Very few governors in the United States actually govern their individual states based on their constituency. Governor Desantis governs Florida. Governor Scott, Governor Kemp, Governor Baker, Governor Hochul, et al govern their states at the bequest and orders from Washington DC (via the EU and the Vatican.) No matter what Phil says, it is not his policy or his words at all. He is merely a puppet. The same goes for the Attorney General and Secretary of State. They do not represent Vermont. They represent the WEF, WHO, IMF, and the globalist elites.
You don’t say!
Needs some work?
What it needs is some demolition work.
Get that Vermont freezing bill scratched forever
Stop emulating dysfunctional California, which lost 350,000 taxpaying, long term citizens in 2021 and in 2022, and replaced them with a million plus unvetted, uneducated, sickly, untrained, poor desperados from where-ever
California is the bellringer for the nation. The land of Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon is rich with resources and dominated by the metro north and south – the middle is largely normal per se. Vermont is very small in comparison, but also rich with resources and dominated by mainly one county, Chittenden. Federal overreach via globalism and States allowing it is the crux of all problems in the USA. It all started decades ago and we are seeing the tares of those seeds sown. Infiltration, not invasion.
I would ask that our legislators read and understand this and 46 page reference linked documents – https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/2023-02-23-Challenging-Net-Zero-with-Science.pdf
Maybe they would have some pause to question if they truly believe what the media has perpetuated from the UN/IPCC Summary. The attached document illustrates how the science is reworded into an policy summary and then further into the public policy. The science has been disregarded by using “crisis”, existential threat, “burning”, code red, etc. That’s not what the science portion of the IPCC says!
Are they virtue signaling, ignorant, or sheep?
It’s Time To Admit It: EVs Are EVIL
If anyone should be ashamed, it is those who are smugly plugging in their cars each night.
They are the ones responsible for raping the planet, poisoning entire communities, enriching genocidal tyrants, and creating a massive hazmat problem while doing nothing to stop “climate change.”
Does that sound harsh?
Here’s one recent bit of evidence. A Bloomberg investigation found that the aluminum Ford is using to build its “eco-friendly” EV pickup comes from Brazil.
“There, in the heart of the Amazon, rust-colored bauxite is being clawed from a mine that has long faced allegations of pollution and land appropriation,” it found. A class action lawsuit against the mining company accuses it of polluting the water, causing cancer, hair loss, neurological dysfunction, birth defects, and increased mortality.
While all cars use aluminum to cut pounds, EVs use far more to offset the enormous weight of the batteries themselves.
“For consumers seeking to lower their carbon footprints, the environmental and social costs of electric vehicles may be greater than they realize,” Bloomberg says.
No kidding.
Here’s the dirty, rotten truth about EVs.
EVs aren’t “zero emissions” vehicles. All an EV does is shift the emissions elsewhere — namely, over to gigantic monopoly power companies that burn natural gas, coal, garbage or, horror of horrors, employ nuclear fission. Plus, making electric cars releases far more CO2 than is emitted in the production of conventional cars.
EV enthusiasts say these aren’t problems because over its lifetime, an EV will produce fewer total CO2 emissions.
But that claim depends on a wide range of variables — such as the range of an EV, how long the batteries last, the energy source used to produce electricity, etc. — that can dramatically affect the EV’s carbon-cutting picture.
One study by the University of Michigan found that EVs can emit more CO2 than conventional cars. It said that depending on the fuel used by power plants in a given area, an EV can produce as much CO2 as a gas-powered car that gets just 29 miles per gallon.
EVs aren’t cheaper to operate. Another selling point of EVs is supposed to be that, while they are far more expensive to buy, they are cheaper to drive. But that depends entirely on the relative cost of electricity and gasoline.
A study by the Anderson Economic Group found that with gas prices on the decline and electricity costs climbing, it’s cheaper to operate a mid-priced gas-powered car than a comparable EV, particularly when you factor in the extra time and hassle involved in recharging an EV.
EVs are built with slave labor. While gasoline is produced almost entirely from domestic supplies of oil, the lithium, cobalt, graphite, and rare earth minerals needed to make batteries mostly come from places such as China, Congo, Indonesia, Iran, and other countries that are noted for gross human rights violations, and are often mined and produced using forced and child labor.
“The road many of these materials take to consumers is littered with human rights abuses,” says Human Rights Watch.
Take the cobalt mines in Congo, where most of that stuff is found. Siddharth Kara, a fellow in public health at Harvard, describes it as “modern-day slavery. It’s not chattel slavery from the 18th century where you can buy and trade people and own title over a person like property. But the level of degradation, the level of exploitation is on par with old-world slavery.”
EVs are environmental rapists. Mining and refining the minerals needed to make EV batteries is also an environmental disaster. To make just one EV battery requires 25 pounds of lithium, 60 pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds of cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic.
Writing in these pages, Ronald Stein noted that “you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just one battery.”
In Indonesia, where nickel for EV batteries is largely produced, “polluted air and water are causing respiratory problems, sickness, and eye injuries and destroying forests and fisheries. The rush to expand production has pushed local communities and infrastructure to the brink of collapse,” Wired reports.
“So, the next time you are thinking about purchasing an electric vehicle or driving your EV car, before congratulating yourselves on saving the environment, remember that it came at a cost of entire mountains in developing countries, thousands of square miles of land, and billions of gallons of oil and fuel,” Stein writes.
Processing this stuff also requires massive amounts of water. It can take half a million gallons of water to produce a metric ton of lithium, for example.
Aimee Boulanger, executive director of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, told the Washington Post that “It is hypocritical to say we are here with these electric vehicles to solve our climate problems if, in making them, we contaminate a community’s drinking water or dry up the irrigation wells they rely on.”
There’s also the looming problem of what to do with the mountain of used lithium-ion batteries that will soon pile up, along with their tendency to burst into flames and emit toxins into the air, ground, and water.
It’s time to end this hypocrisy.
It’s time to admit that EVs are being wildly oversold.
It’s time for EV owners and manufacturers to answer for the environmental and human rights crimes they are bankrolling in the name of “climate change.”
It’s time for those of us who drive gasoline-powered cars to take pride in the fact that our vehicles are safe, efficient, reliable, and don’t require ritual human sacrifices to build.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Besides the fact that lithium is a poison to the planet and mining the minerals has been outsourced to children slaves not in our backyard the deforestation of S. America has escalated again for the mining revenue.
The smugness and hypocrisy of ignoramus EV owners, including the governor in his for-free, pampered, always-clean, always-charged, chauffeur-driven SUV EV, is off-the-charts, because “we-high-income folks are saving the planet; we are part of the solution”
Whoopi!
And how in hell would we electrify everything, on a day like this, with no to minimal wind and solar panels covered with snow?
The insanity of it all is far beyond rational.
The nincompoop Legislators, who likely never analyzed, designed or operated any energy systems are nowhere near qualified to pontificate on energies systems.
The wind/solar approach has brought disaster to energy/resource-starved Europe, and will do the same to the energy/resource-rich US, if idiot folks have their way.
Why are more UVM professors of energy and physics, who surely know better, not speaking up?
Would they be jeopardizing their tenures and their jobs?
They likely would be blacklisted and unemployable, if they spoke up.
Scott shocked me by bringing up the rejuvenation of the Vernon Nuke plant. I almost had a coronary when i heard him say that new nukes should be a viable option.
DBean,
CO2-free Nuclear is the only sensible approach.
The entire world should mass produce small nuclear power plants that are built on special ships.
The Russians have already been doing it for 15 years
These ships are docked in a harbor and provide hot water for space heating and electricity to an entire town and surrounding areas
Once again Scott is a voice or reason while attempting to deal with a legislature dominated by Democrats and Progressives that is ideologically driven.
I was listening to Senator Becca White a sponsor of this bill speak on Vermont Public Radio. She reminded me of Representative Sarah Buxton, another bright perky young legislator who pushed the education bill Act 46, claiming all kinds of benefits that would happen as a result of the law.
The problem is there is never follow-up to see the actual costs and benefits of these major bills that end up shaping our State. This was the case with Act 46, It will likely be the case with last year’s pension reform bill, which made minor improvements, but still relies on overly opomistic projections and will end up not addressing the addressing the accumulated shortfall in the pension funds.
In the end these legislators move on and we are left to deal with the results of their flawed legislation.
Liberals love spending other people’s money. Liberals have destroyed my state. They need to be removed by any means necessary.
All I guess is that Gov. Scott stays in as Gov just for the money & benefits.. He is all things to everybody. I see no conviction. He labels himself Republican, but isn’t. He sides with Dems often. He agree’s with much of climate fraud, but then seeks veto. He is for things, then he’s against things. He fancies himself as VT’s “hard charging” CEO, but all he is a neutered eunuch (eunuch: “An ineffectual or powerless man”..with a super majority Liberal legislature. And he dares not ever anger the super majority….because his salary & job depend on getting the huge DEM votes to keep his job! He always “makes nice”. Basically, all he does is talk out of both sides of his mouth, because he wants everyone to like him ( I hear he is a very nice guy)….because he is so “balanced”? He stands up for very little because he is always on everyones side? I don’t think he has any convictions at all, honetsly.
You have perfectly described the governor.
You have perfectly described the governor.
“Gov. Phil Scott said that while he supports Vermont’s efforts to transition to clean heat energy, he said the state needs to be realistic about what it can achieve.”
SCOTT should support burning natural gas and propane for heating buildings, because THEY ARE NOT DIRTY.
Electrifying everything “to be clean” is a nightmare regarding investment/operating/maintenance/amortizing costs.
Do the numbers, instead of just blathering
HEAT PUMPS ARE MONEY LOSERS IN MY VERMONT HOUSE, AS THEY ARE IN ALMOST ALL NEW ENGLAND HOUSES
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/heat-pumps-are-money-losers-in-my-vermont-house-as-they-are-in
EXCERPT
Any experienced energy systems engineer can readily calculate the hourly cost of operating HPs and propane furnaces.
The HP operating cost per hour would become greater than of an efficient propane furnace, because HPs would become increasingly less efficient with decreasing temperatures. See table 3
Cost Reduction Due to HPs is Minimal
– HP electricity consumption was from my electric bills
– Vermont electricity prices, including taxes, fees and surcharges, are about 20 c/kWh.
– My HPs provide space heat to 2,300 sq ft, about the same area as an average Vermont house
– Two small propane heaters provide space heat to my 1,300 sq ft basement
– I operate my HPs at temperatures of 15F, or greater; less $/h than propane
– I operate my wall-hung propane heater at temperatures of 15F, or less; less $/h than HP
– My average HP coefficient of performance, COP, was 2.64
– My HPs required 2,489 kWh to displace 35% of my fuel.
– My HPs would require 8,997 kWh, to replace 100% of my fuel.
– The average Vermont house COP is about 3.34, because the HPs typically operate at about 28F to 35F and above
– The average Vermont house requires 2,085 kWh to displace 27.6% of its fuel, per VT-DPS/CADMUS survey. See URL
Before HPs: I used 100 gal for domestic hot water + 250 gal for 2 stoves in basement + 850 gal for Viessmann furnace, for a total propane of 1,200 gal/y
After HPs: I used 100 gal for DHW + 250 gal for 2 stoves in basement + 550 gal for Viessmann furnace + 2,489 kWh of electricity.
My propane cost reduction for space heating was 850 – 550 = 300 gallon/y, at a cost of 2.339/gal = $702/y
My displaced fuel was 100 x (1 – 550/850) = 35%, which is better than the Vermont average of 27.6%
My purchased electricity cost increase was 2,489 kWh x 20 c/kWh = $498/y
If I were to use my HPs to replace all propane, my savings are about $189/y. See table 1
My energy cost savings due to the HPs were 702 – 498 = $204/y, on an investment of $24,000!!
Amortizing Heat Pumps
Amortizing the $24,000 turnkey capital cost at 3.5%/y for 15 years costs about $2,059/y.
This is in addition to the amortizing of my existing propane system. I am losing money.
https://www.myamortizationchart.com
Other Annual Costs
There likely would be service calls and parts for the HP system, as the years go by.
This is in addition to the annual service calls and parts for my existing propane system. I am losing more money.
MORE WORK?
Gee
Clean heat energy is not, the officially sanctioned, burning trees in wood stoves, which is a dirty business, even with so-called “clean” stoves, and certainly not renewable, and not CO2-free.
Those trees should be left standing so they can absorb more and more CO2.
McNeil is by far the biggest polluter and CO2 emitter in Vermont
The equivalent energy of 3 out of 4 trees is wasted, when a plant operates at about 24% efficiency.
Almost all of the combustion particles coming out of the McNeil chimney are less than 1 micron, less than one millionth of a meter, less than one thousandths of a millimeter
They are invisible to the naked eye
They are mixed-in with the visible, condensed water vapor coming from the chimney
Almost all of them are not caught by air pollution control systems
They give the politically attractive APPEARANCE of a “clean stack”
During days with little wind (and little wind power), the polluted air stays in the vicinity of McNeil, often for days.
The particles from tree combustion are every bit as toxic as those of demonized coal.
Modern coal plants are about 42% efficient, and have much less CO2/kWh than McNeil, which is only 23 to 24% efficient.
The particles damage the fragile lungs of children, reduce the oxygen supply to the brain, slow down attention and learning, year after year.
The dirty truth is hidden under blankets of happy, self-serving PR releases.
Every teacher and parent should be told the truth by the VT Media.
However, the VT Media is in cahoots with the harm doers, by endlessly repeating their self-serving PR releases…
The same is true for old and modern wood stoves
Their particles are also less than 1 micron, etc.
A number of wood stoves in a neighborhood, on a windless day, will smell up the neighborhood, due to pollution.
In comparison, natural gas (which the US exports to Europe for geo-political and profit reasons) and propane have vastly less combustion particles than wood and coal.
Some EU groups, NGOs, are financing the EU inflow from Africa, which prods traffickers to use rickety boats to transport hundreds of untrained, uneducated, inexperienced, poor folks per trip, which during foul weather, break up an drown those folks.
Some world we live in.
What is going on in Montpelier is a travesty, and has nothing to do with “saving the world” and everything to do with Centralized Command/Control of Vermonters to implement an extremist Dem/Prog Party agenda, “for as long as it takes, and for as much money as it takes”, similar to the black hole called Ukraine
What we are doing in Ukraine is just about what we did to end up in Vietnam for 20 years of endless, unwinnable war. — I favor a draft to bring that fact home to the liberals.
If the U.S. tried shock and awe in Russia, as it did in Iraq, a few of Russia’s unstoppable hypersonic missiles would create a tsunami with 100 to 200 ft waves, and wipe out everything and everyone on the east and west cost, and the Mexican Gulf Coast, for at least 25 to 30 miles, all within about 30 minutes.