In the week before the House vote, the Ethan Allen Institute polled 300 registered Vermont voters online and by telephone. Only 189 knew something about the bill but of those, 40% opposed the legislation, with only 27% favoring.
Needing a two-thirds majority vote to override Gov. Phil Scott’s veto of Senate Bill 5 on Thursday, the House of Representatives voted 107-42 to pass the measure, which one public policy group said could cost Vermonters billions of dollars in the coming years.
S.5 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.
The public policy group said that while 31% of those polled strongly opposed the bill, only 13% strongly supported the legislation.
One of the favorite talking points supporters of the Clean Heat Standard, S.5, like to pull out is that it will at most only add pennies to the cost of a gallon of heating fuel.
The Vermont Senate on Tuesday morning voted by the required two-thirds majority to override Gov. Phil Scott’s veto of S.5, the Affordable Heating Act.
This week a majority of Progressive Democrats will ignore their constituents in order to override the reasonable and considerate veto of the most popular governor in the country so that they can pass the most unpopular piece of legislation in Vermont in nearly 20 years.
The claim that S.5 is just another study is incorrect. This is clearly a major step to implementing a carbon tax on those businesses and households that cannot easily convert to fossil free heat.
Among those who know of it, Vermonters oppose the Affordable Heat Act 40% to 27%. If the Affordable Heat Act causes any increase in fuel prices, Vermonters oppose the Act by 61% to 26%.
Scott released a video Saturday morning on social media urging Vermonters to contact their legislators to ask them to vote to sustain his veto of the bill. This push comes as Democrat Party leadership appears to be rushing the override vote.
This program is extremely expensive and extremely regressive. It will cause a lot of pain for Vermont’s most vulnerable citizens. And the worst part of it all is that all this pain and expense will achieve exactly nothing in regard to “solving” global warming.
What this portends, given our current policy prescriptions, is that Vermont will spend the next decade and a half converting our oil furnaces to electric heat pumps, our gas stoves to electric induction, and our internal combustion engine vehicle fleet to EVs, only to see the cost of electricity explode when our contract with Hydro-Quebec expires.