Sen. Dick McCormack, D-Windsor, suggested that the committee consider scrapping the whole thing and simply enacting a carbon tax on fossil heating fuels and use the money to fund programs that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
It’s hard for a state government to argue for taxpayer money to subsidize the high cost of something they’re simultaneously trying to price consumers out of the market.
Imagine taxing all vegetables but not beef, then giving the receipts to rich people to buy hamburgers and steaks, who could then eat more meat and fewer vegetables, becoming richer and fatter.
Vermont’s so-called progressives have implemented an array of tax, electric rate, and regulatory burdens on low-income Vermonters and small businesses that benefit wealthy nonresidents and mega-corporations.
Implementing an “economy wide” “cap and invest” program is the latest curlicue fluorescent lightbulb to go off over the heads of the 23 zealots charged with totally restructuring our economy around greenhouse gas reduction.
Watch every Democrat candidate in the recent lieutenant governor debate voice their support for a carbon tax on home heating oil, propane, natural gas, and kerosene — and throw gasoline and diesel into the mix.
Scott indicated that when the clean heat standard policy, costs and impacts are more fully worked out, a “revised” CHS might yet win his support. That was not encouraging news to the fuel dealers and their customers who will pay the CHS bill.
Are you ready for the coming carbon tax on your home and business heating bill? The Vermont House is working at flank speed to enact the “Clean Heat Standard” (CHS) concocted by the Climate Action Network, and adopted by the Vermont Climate Council.
In what is believed to be the first time a carbon tax has been put to a national vote, upscale urban regions including Geneva, Basel and Zurich voted in favor of the CO2 law, but 51.6 percent of voters, and 21 of the country’s 26 cantons, said “get out of here with your carbon tax.”
After the push for the carbon tax fizzled out in 2018, the climate change game turned to enacting a carbon tax by disguising it as something else. The latest version is called “the Thermal Energy Efficiency Charge,” and Sen. Chris Bray has become its most ardent promoter.
The proposed “Enhanced Energy Savings Act” is a carbon tax, and maybe the Senate should “own it and come out swinging,” one senator told his fellow Natural Resources and Energy Committee members yesterday.
TCI was a bad idea before the COVID-19 recession. Today it is absolutely unthinkable.