Climate Council remains an expensive, incompetent, very bad joke.

by Rob Roper

The Global Warming Solutions Act of 2020 created the Climate Council and charged it with coming up with a plan to meet the greenhouse gas reduction mandates codified in that law. That was five years ago. Their first “plan,” released in December 2021, was/is, as I pointed out at the time, not a plan. It was/is an a la cart spreadsheet of roughly 250 potential action items – an everything and the kitchen sink list — ChatGPT could have come up with in a nanosecond. No defined priority pathways to meet the targets, no task timelines, no cost estimates. Not a plan.

Their excuse was that they only had a year to recruit and set up the Council of twenty-three special interest hacks, er “experts,” hire consultants, and come up with something. Well, now it’s FOUR YEARS later, FIVE YEARS in, and time for Climate Action Plan 2.0. And… drumroll please… Still no defined priority pathways to meet the targets, still no task timelines, still no cost estimates. Still not a plan.

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What are we getting after four more years and the multiple millions of dollars dumped on this clown car? They’ve narrowed their 250 random items down to fifty random items with a David Lettermanesque Top Ten List that give them the biggest warm fuzzies – regardless of their practical application to the task assigned.

Just a quick reminder of what the law says the Climate Council is supposed to produce:

The Plan shall include specific initiatives, programs, and strategies that will: (1) reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation, building, regulated utility, industrial, commercial, and agricultural sectors;…. achieve net zero emissions by 2050 across all sectors;…

[and] to prioritize the most cost-effective, technologically feasible, and equitable greenhouse gas emissions reduction pathways and adaptation and preparedness strategies informed by scientific and technical expertise;

In other words, these jokers were supposed to come up with a specific set of programs that outlines, in a nutshell, “The state needs to do X, Y, and Z by such and such dates, requiring this much revenue in order to meet the ghg reduction targets in the GWSA.” They haven’t done this. Not even close. Despite five years and millions of taxpayer dollars wasted on their efforts, for lack of a better word to describe the Council’s seemingly endless, self-important mental masturbation sessions.

Here’s my one point of sympathy with the Council. The task the legislature gave them is impossible; a policy Kobayashi Maru test (Star Trek fans get the reference). As it turns out there are no “cost effective, technologically feasible, equitable” pathways to ripping out our existing fossil fuel based infrastructure and replacing it with more expensive, less efficient electricity-based alternatives for which the supporting infrastructure does not exist.

Case in point, guess what the Council’s number one policy recommendation is? “Join a cap-and-invest program, such as the New York Cap and Invest (NYCI) or Western Climate Initiative, covering emissions from multiple economic sectors (transportation, thermal and potentially other sectors.)” Yes, the same Cap & Invest policy that our Treasurer’s Office just determined in their official analysis, “informed by scientific and technical expertise,” was not cost effective, was not equitable – is in fact horribly regressive – and not technically feasible because, minor detail, the NYCI doesn’t exist yet. If it ever does, which looks less likely by the day, it will certainly not be in time for Vermont to join and meet the upcoming 2030 GWSA mandates. So, why is this still the Council’s number one policy recommendation? They got nuthin’ else.

And, even if Cap & Invest were a viable program, for all its unaffordable costs (it’s essentially a massive tax on gas, diesel, and heating fuels) it still doesn’t do nearly enough to meet the greenhouse gas reduction mandates on its own. As the Draft CAP plan notes,

However, alongside such a program [Cap & Invest], additional policies will be needed to target reductions, deliver benefits to lower-income Vermonters, and to achieve the scale of emissions reductions required by the GWSA. In the thermal sector, the Council recommends the adoption of complementary policies to accelerate the transition to non-fossil heating fuels. Options include a thermal energy benefit charge and thermal sector performance standards, such as a modified clean heat standard, equipment standards, and fuel standards.

Discussion of the above paragraph prompted this comment from Agency of Natural Resources Secretary, Julie Moore, “I feel like this is a huge thing we are recommending, and to immediately say, ‘and by the way it’s not nearly enough and we’re going to have to do a bunch of other things too,’ is a disaster.” Disaster indeed. But if that’s what the Global Warming Solutions Act requires – and it does — the Council needs to acknowledge and plan – really, actually plan — for that. And this they refuse to do.

At one point in the discussion a Council member did utter the unmentionable question (sorry, the Zoom recording didn’t allow me to identify exactly who this was), “What do we do if we determine none of this is affordable? I mean, we put so much on affordability, but if it comes back that it’s not going to be affordable, what are we doing then?” This was followed by a long awkward silence and then a quick deflection to another topic.

But I’m happy to answer the unidentified Council member’s query. It’s not your job to do anything if the facts say the GWSA is unrealistically expensive. It’s your job to come up with a plan for what Vermonters need to do by when and how much it will cost to meet the requirements of the law — affordability be damned. So far, you’ve failed.

But if the plan you eventually, maybe someday present proves too expensive and just outright ridiculous, it’s the job of the legislature to repeal the GWSA in order to avoid “a disaster” to use the Secretary’s apt term. And I suspect this is why the lawmakers who passed this mess (and the press that propagandizes for it) are letting you slide on not coming up with an actual plan, because as soon as you do they’ll have to reject it to their significant embarrassment.

Rob Roper is a freelance writer who has been involved with Vermont politics and policy for over 20 years. This article reprinted with permission from Behind the Lines: Rob Roper on Vermont Politics, robertroper.substack.com