The Vermont Climate Solutions Caucus held a meeting Thursday and advocated for big changes in how Vermonters drive, heat their homes and source their electricity.
The large group of legislators coordinate together on legislation related to climate change. The Senate’s climate caucus formed in 2019 and the House caucus formed in 2016. Over the years, the group has been known to push ambitious green policies with enforcement mechanisms so that Vermonters must adopt and pay for these new ways of living.
The participants, including at least three lawmakers, were adamant that the state should embrace big changes going forward.
“Of course there’s always pushback, but look at how quickly and profoundly we can make change in the face of a crisis when we want to — when there’s a shared understanding of the facts, when we are all looking at science and we say ‘this is killing us, this is dangerous, we’ve got to act and we’ve got to act together now,” Rep. Kathleen James, D-Manchester, said. “And yes, some of it is going to be hard and some of it is going to be different and some of it is going to involve a huge paradigm shift, but let’s go.”
Rep. Kathleen James, D-Manchester
In addition to working in media and politics, James has been active in climate change organizations including Earth Matters and MoveOn Manchester.
The next step for Vermont’s green energy policy is to see what ideas emerge from the newly formed Climate Solutions Council. The 23-member council, created as part of the Global Warmings Solutions Ac, has met a handful of times since November and is charged with developing a climate plan for Vermont, to be implemented in 2022.
According to James, five subcommittees derived from the council are meeting weekly to carry out the “nuts and bolts” of the work. The five subcommittees are Agriculture and Ecosystems, Just Transitions, Cross-Sector Mitigation, Rule Resilience and Science and Data.
She said all of the council and subcommittee meetings can be viewed on YouTube.
Rep. Rebecca White, D-Hartford, said climate change is an all encompassing issue for Vermont.
“As a young Vermonter, I know that my life is already being affected by climate change. Every decision I make, I make understanding that climate change will have an impact on it — whether it’s having children, where I live, how I source my food, all of that matters,” she said.
White’s resume includes having worked as a community organizer for the solar company SunCommon. She said fighting COVID-19 can also mean fighting for social justice and for the planet.
“With COVID-19 there’s a lot of overlaps with how equity and environmentalism fit together — it has exacerbated the problems that we see in our communities,” she said.
Ben Walsh, the climate and energy program director for the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, said he considers recent weather events to be the products of climate change.
“Just a couple of weeks ago we had a storm in Texas that killed many people, that is definitely linked to the climate crisis,” he said. “We have weather patterns destabilizing and all sorts of things that happen more frequently, or happening worse.”
Rep. Sarah Copeland Hanzas, D-Bradford, the chair of the Climate Solutions Caucus, said it’s an opportune time to advocate for green energy at the same time the state and nation are grappling with how best to respond to the coronavirus pandemic.
“I know there are so many families right now who are strapped and having trouble making ends meet during this pandemic recession,” she said. “It leaves me all the more committed that we tackle climate, and that we do it in the smart ways that help Vermonters in their heating and transportation needs.”
In January, President Joe Biden proposed spending $500 billion annually on climate policies — especially with a focus on “net-zero” carbon output.
In response, Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish author and president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, wrote an op-ed noting that New Zealand conducted an independent cost analysis of going net-zero.
“The Kiwis found the average best-case cost is 16 percent of GDP, or a US cost of more than $5 trillion a year by mid-century,” Lomborg wrote.
Michael Bielawski is a reporter for True North. Send him news tips at bielawski82@yahoo.com and follow him on Twitter @TrueNorthMikeB.
If they really wanted to lower CO2 around the world, all they have to do is pass a law that nothing made in China and India can be sold in Vermont. And work on making it national.
If crazy people can get together and form a very powerful caucus….
how come the sane people can’t do something as effective?
We have at least 17 sane people in Montpelier who believe in the rule of law. How can we help them, how can we make a bigger more effective caucus?
???????
Look at the companies these Greenies are invested in and realize they are profiteering rather than “saving the planet!” Look at the amount of cooper, lithium, silver and other resources used for these “green energy” ideas. The amount of resources used, needed, and yet to be unearthed from the ground is staggering. The truth is we are either coming upon a peak oil situation or we have a legislature and an administration full of grifters and corrupt insider trading going on.
I hope they are holding their breath while waiting for me to buy into this crap.
Rep. Rebecca White (D) Windsor 4-2, said climate change is an “all encompassing issue for Vermont” …. Why isn’t she accosting China with her ‘solutions’?
“As a young Vermonter, I know that my life is already being affected by climate change. Every decision I make, I make understanding that climate change will have an impact on it — whether it’s having children, where I live, and how I source my food, all of that matters”. – Go cry in the walkin.
White’s resume includes having worked as a community organizer …. for the solar company SunCommon …. please
She said fighting COVID-19 can also mean fighting for social justice and for the planet …. These are the minds UVM is producing?
Let her know what she somehow fails to understand – that Vermont’s ‘white privileged’ trust fund babies are relentlessly assaulting the state’s poorest and impoverishing the middle class with their green new virtue.
Email rwhite@leg.state.vt.us
Phone (802) 777-4517
This report by Ms. James is questionably bogus as any of the rest we have seen. These people who are on a mission to enshrine the population in a world of misery that has no end, need to be lassoed and tied to a post that will not be removed.(This is symbolic, of course).
Willem Post (no relation to the post referred to above) is the only person who goes from A to Z in great detail, expounding on cost detail and net benefits to the end user.
These people who are proposing a world of misery forever and ever, have done none of that, for the chief reason they cannot. If they cannot and will not, then there is reason enough to kill that project before any more real damage is the result.
I rest my case.
It’s like these politicians are in a tofu induced haze. How they connect raising electricity utility costs to bailing us out of a pandemic is mind
numbing.
Vermont’s total energy consumption is the smallest of all the states, which contributes to Vermont having the lowest carbon dioxide emissions of any state.
Perhaps we should keep doing what we’re
doing and turn these fruity politicians out to pasture so they can start grazing where they belong.
There seems to be a huge disconnect between the Governor and the GWSA Committee of 23.
DO THEY TALK TO EACH OTHER, OR IS IT THE BLIND LEADING THE BLIND?
Here we have various Legislators, WITHOUT any meaningful experience in energy systems analysis, blathering about Vermont being overwhelmed by Climate Change, which is another subject about which they KNOW next to nothing, other than repeating the usual scare-mongering shibboleths about fires, and floods, and ice storms in Texas, and heat waves in California, and COVID.
Vermonters, nor Texans, nor Californians, not even the entire US (according to all-knowing John Kerry) cannot do ANYTHING about them.
THOSE TWENTY-THREE are going to lead Vermonters to a safe/secure NIRVANA?
All Vermonters would have to do, is accept all sorts of suffering, and do a lot of useless spending, to be absolved of their sins, and finally, after decades of struggling, EARN a place in NIRVANA?
All of it is too absurd to even contemplate.
Here is just one disconnect:
Vermont’s Governor: “Investing in more energy-efficient public transportation is important for our economy and environment,” the governor said. He added that the COVID money is enabling the transportation agency to replace as many as 30 buses and fund energy-efficient projects.”
ELECTRIC SCHOOL BUS SYSTEMS NOT COST-EFFECTIVE IN NEW ENGLAND AND CANADA
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/electric-bus-systems-likely-not-cost-effective-in-vermont-at
30 electric SCHOOL buses, at $352,500 each, would be $10.5 million.
Multiply that all over Vermont, and we are talking several $billion
They have at most a 15-year life.
Amortizing ONE electric bus $352,500 at 3.5%/y for 15 years would be $30,240/y, or 30240/12000 miles = 252 c/mile
Amortizing ONE diesel bus $100,000 would be 8,579/y, or about 8579/12000 miles = 71.5 c/mile
Annual O&M savings would be (47 c/mile, diesel – 42 c/mile, electric) x 12000 miles = $586/bus. See table 3
Annual amortizing cost difference would be (30240 – 8579) = $21,661/bus, about 37 times annual savings!!
CO2 reduction cost of electric bus vs diesel bus would be $2,083/metric ton, which is off-the-charts expensive!!
NOTE: Energy efficiency measures to reduce 1) energy consumption, 2) CO2 emissions, and 3) energy costs, such as changing light bulbs to LED bulbs, and insulating and sealing energy-hog housing and other buildings, cost $50 to $200 per metric ton.
Thank you for a simple example of the lunacy afoot! If the math is good, the market will seek it out vs. politicians.
Roger,
Thank you.
I can assure you the MATH IS GOOD, thanks to the excellent, well-organized data, with SPREADSHEET, in the SSI, British Columbia report.
In comparison, the VEIC report is a masterful mix of facts and obfuscation. Gee, what ARE they saying?
VT Legislators love those energy reports from their quasi-government “in-house think tanks”, because they are written on a feel-good, elementary level, and provide the CYA and talking points needed to bamboozle/deceive most Vermonters.
After spending $2-plus BILLION on energy programs for the past 20 years, the net result was an INCREASE IN CO2, i.e., the programs were set up as failures.
Those same people want FIVE TIMES more $ per year to implement the VT-CEP, because the unconstitutional GWSA requires it!!
VEIC made a dubious claim regarding “no demand charges”, to make electric buses look extra good vs diesel buses, but did not realize the implications.
The VEIC claim of 1.47 kWh AC/mile for electric buses in a COLD climate is invalid
The VEIC assumption led to a charging percent of only 1.47 kWh AC/1.390 kWh DC = 5.8%.
That charging percent is not just too low. It is a physical impossibility!!
That charging percent would be only 5.8/17.5 = 33% of the values of Teslas and other EVs!!
See URL and charging percent of four real-world examples in Appendix
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/poor-economics-of-elec…
NOTE: The typical 17 to 18 charging percent of EV cars would not apply to school buses, because:
1) They have idle time of about 90% of the hours of a year, and would be parked outdoors, unlike almost all EVs,
2) They are required to provide high reliability of service on Monday morning, even after they have been parked on Saturday and Sunday, especially during cold days.
NOTE: The VEIC report should be revised.
“the market will seek it out vs. politicians.”
Socialist DEM/PROGS do not care about markets, the reason Vermonters have a near-zero, real-growth economy, a la East Germany, before the wall came down in 1990; and Cuba, and Venezuela; and the USSR, before it collapsed in 1990.
They care about Power and Command/Control, and creating and protecting (with “free” federal COVID money) lots of inefficient government programs.
Those programs aim to create guaranteed voting blocs, including by means of wildly out-of-control, open-border , walk-in, immigration of unverified, unhealthy, uneducated, unskilled workers.
Such immigration will create chaos, will further weaken the US vs other countries that actually behave like nations, by controlling their borders.
Addition:
The SSI, British Columbia, Canada, project involved 10 Lion electric school buses.
Turnkey investment was about $3.5 million
Annual O&M savings were $5,000/bus. See spreadsheet in URL
Annual cost of amortizing capital cost difference was (30240 – 8579) = $21,661/bus, about 4.3 times annual savings!!
CO2 reduction cost 21661/12.41 = $1,745/Mt, based on 12,000 miles/y. See Note and table 2 in URL.
https://www.myamortizationchart.com
Massachusetts Electric School Bus Pilot Program.
Annual O&M savings was (47 c/mile, diesel – 42 c/mile, electric) x 12000 miles = $586/bus. See table 3
Annual amortizing cost difference was (30240 – 8579) = $21,661/bus, about 37 times annual savings!!
CO2 reduction cost $21661 / {(1633 – 766) g/mile x 12000 mile} = $2,083/Mt, based on 12,000 miles/y. See note and table 2 in URL
NOTE: SSI, BC, electric school buses have greater annual savings than in New England, because: 1) SSI electric school buses use less kWh/mile, due to mild climate, and 2) the electricity price, c/kWh, is much less, due to the BC grid having 92% low-cost, very low-CO2 hydro, i.e., minimal heavily subsidized, expensive, grid-disturbing, variable wind and solar.
Not only that, many parents drive their kids, in big SUV’s to school. Look at any school yard. The power of group think and zero investigation is extremely powerful.
What is Rep. Sarah Copeland Hanzas thinking when she tells us ” it’s an opportune time to advocate for green energy at the same time the state and nation are grappling with how best to respond to the coronavirus pandemic”.
At a time when people are out of work, can’t pay their rent, can’t pay their other bills and are experiencing food insecurity she thinks this is good time to put more stress on them?
At a time when the federal government has to borrow or print trillions of dollars the country can’t afford to provide cash payments to people crippled by Covid……..This is the time Rep. Hanzas thinks it’s a opportune time to put more stress on people.
What are you thinking Rep. Hanzas?………Please tell us how this is an opportune time to spend money we don’t have and put people who are struggling under more stress.
Government interventions in the free market always end badly. The taxpayers and consumers are going to be robbed to satiate the ideology and fill the wallets of politicians and Big Green corporations.
The article quotes” Rep. Kathleen James, D-Manchester, as saying: “And yes, some of it is going to be hard and some of it is going to be different and some of it is going to involve a huge paradigm shift, but let’s go.”
Now, Rep. James also needs to add to her list of difficulties: Its going to be excessively expensive, its going to hit low income people the hardest, we really don’t know how expensive, but details like dropping billions of dollars of expenses at the feet of Vermonters shouldn’t stop us and the technology doesn’t exist to transition out of fossil fuels.
Then Rep. James could also add to her difficulty list Climate Czar John Kerry’s pronouncement to the American people that if CO2 emissions are totally eliminated by the United States there would be no impact on climate change.
Then Rep. James must own up to the fact that after all the difficulties she tells us we must endure there will be no impact on climate change…. Nothing……Get that, Nothing will be accomplished……. just as John Kerry has already told us.
So why would any rational person want to follow Rep. James and spend billions, put Vermonters through financial pain on a boondoggle that will accomplish nothing?
The climate change zealots need to lead by example. They need to have divest themselves from using any gasoline, diesel, propane, fuel oil or any product that requires creation by the use of petroleum products. Show us your courage.