This time they really jumped the shark.

by Rob Roper

It has often been pointed out that Vermont’s news outlet of record, VT Digger, is really just bunch of juvenile left-wing activists cosplaying as legit reporters, but this past week they dropped the costumes and makeup. The article “How a Koch-funded campaign is trying to reverse climate action in Vermont” is a 3500 word, all hands-on deck hit piece authored by Austyn Gaffney with help from Digger reporters Ethan Weinstein and Shaun Robinson, board member Jane Mayer and a Seattle-based climate propaganda outfit called Grist.

The story’s not just grotesquely biased, it is flagrantly misleading, and in many places plain wrong. It’s a pure example of pushing a narrative rather than reporting news – and there’s certainly nothing about it “in pursuit of truth.”

The narrative Digger wants its readers to believe (ripped from the press releases of VPIRG, Energy Action Network, Vermont Conservation Voters, and the Vermont Democrat and Progressive parties) is that happy Vermonters, minding our own business, have been diligently implementing popular policies addressing climate change over the years only to have a big, bad Nazi affiliated (yes, Digger actually makes that unhinged assertion), out of state, “dark” money climate denying machine, Americans for Prosperity, come in and tear it down amid a chorus of cries and a flood of tears from the local populace. Cow patties.

The truths Digger is trying to hide are multiple. The biggest being that the real out of state, “dark money” campaign Vermonters have been victims of over decades is the one pushing for these “first in the nation” schemes in our small, cheap-date of a media market so that they can be used as precedents for other states to follow – the cost and damage to Vermonters, our economy, and affordability be damned.

Even Digger has to admit that the $63,000 Americans for Prosperity spent in 2024 warning Vermonters about the costs and impacts of the Clean Heat Standard was dwarfed by the D.C. based Green Advocacy Project, which spent $180,000 promoting the law that could raise Vermonters’ home heating fuel prices by somewhere between $58 cents a gallon to several dollars per gallon depending upon whose numbers you trust. (Spoiler alert: it’s the bigger number!) The Vermont Conservation Voters, which is financially dependent on the out-of-state-based League of Conservation Voters, spent another $218,500. And on top of that, there’s all the out-of-state money raised and spent by VPIRG, the Conservation Law Foundation, VNRC and the rest of the usual suspects.

FYIVT just did an excellent breakdown of this dark money flowing into Vermont, so I won’t re-plow that ground, but will note that in writing its article, Digger itself partnered with Grist, an out-of-state pseudo-journalism propaganda site with an annual budget of nearly $9 million to write this story. Oh, the hypocrisy!

Vermonters have been victims of radical, out of state, deep pocketed Leftists treating us like lab rats for every whacky program idea from environmental to healthcare to criminal justice, and – looking at you, Digger! – non-profit “news” business models for too long. These experiments have been a disaster. Of course this gets yawns from the local legacy media. But a center-right leaning national organization spends less in an election cycle than what a competitive state senate campaign costs and let the hysterical shrieking begin!

Which leads into the next cock & bull notion Digger is trying to sell, and that’s the idea that Americans for Prosperity’s positions on climate policy are out of touch with what real Vermonters think and want, and they are spreading disinformation in order to turn popular opinion against things like the Clean Heat Standard and the Global Warming Solutions Act. But when you tease away the spin in Digger’s article, the intelligent reader can see that the opposite is true.

Digger writes, “The mailer [sent out by Americans for Prosperity in March 2025] said Vermonters should call their legislators and ask them to repeal Act 18, claiming the law ‘guarantees energy price hikes across the state,’” as if the claim were just the misleading ravings of a “climate denier”. But then it goes on to note, “Vermont’s clean heat standard would have been the first in the nation. But lawmakers never passed the program [by June 2025 adjournment], largely because a Public Utility Commission report found the program would be too expensive to implement without help from other states in the region.”

So, in other words, AFP’s “claim” that Clean Heat Standard would hike energy prices – aka “be too expensive” — was accurate. A fact. Whereas the many people on the Left who claimed the CHS would “cost pennies”, save Vermonters’ money, etc. – folks who Digger quoted, pimped for, and defended over the three-plus years or so the policy was being debated – were lying. Or, most charitably, spreading misinformation in order to pass Act 18, which is, contrary to Digger’s reporting, still law. Digger covered for these economics deniers, and with this absurd article, continues to do so.

For example, Digger quotes and lets the statement of Speaker of the House Jill Krowinski (D-Burlington) go unchallenged, “The goal of the Affordable Heat Act is to help insulate Vermonters from fossil-fuel price swings, and to make it easier and more affordable for them to transition – if they want to – to more sustainable energy sources.” The problem is that the law, in practice, doesn’t do that. The truth, if Digger had any interest in pursuing it, was revealed not just by the PUC analysis, but also by the State Treasurer’s report which showed that a Cap & Invest program (basically a Clean Heat Standard for both the home heating and transportation sectors) would be economically devastating to low-income, rural Vermont households.

The final bone I’ll pick before this piece gets too long is the false narrative Digger tries to present about local opposition to these policies – basically pushing the story that there is none to speak of. They cite Ben Walsh of VPIRG, “Other groups like the Ethan Allen Institute, part of the State Policy Network, another Koch-affiliated group, have occasionally run conservative advertising campaigns in the state… But that group has far less funding and is not concentrated on climate policies, he said.”

First, the Ethan Allen Institute is no longer a member of the State Policy Network, so get that fact straight at least before entering into your little game of six degrees of Kevin Bacon. But more to the issue, to say that the Ethan Allen Institute (led by John McClaughry and for the last ten years between 1993-2022 myself) was “not concentrated on climate policies” is downright laughable. Misinformation Digger reporters should have been able to identify very quickly.

Maybe Walsh forgot the time back in 2013 when McClaughry and I debated his boss, Paul Burns, in a public forum over VPIRG’s call for a Carbon Tax. (The video above is an oldie but a goodie!) Or the time I debated Walsh in 2014 at a forum in Randolph on climate policies. (I guess he’s blocked out the memories because, perhaps I’m biased, Team EAI wiped the floor with VPIRG each time.)

Over the past decade plus, EAI took on the VPIRG carbon tax, its follow up proposal the ESSEX Plan, the Transportation Climate Initiative, and the Clean Heat Standard from its conception as part of the Climate Action Plan back in 2021 – all, I humbly submit, with solid degrees of success as none of these things is policy today. Not because we had large budgets, but because truth, common sense, and basic economics were on our side. I wish I could claim equal success regarding the Global Warming Solutions Act and the Renewable Energy Standard, but there’s always the movement to repeal!

Other local grassroots organizations have been fighting these policies as well, such as the Vermont Fuel Dealers and No Carbon Tax Vermont, all for years preceding Americans for Prosperity’s arrival on the scene. So, the notion that AFP is somehow barging in and initiating opposition to these bad policies is flat out false. Don’t get me wrong, they are more than welcome! Cavalry come to the rescue, reinforcements in the nick of time. Come in, the water’s warm!

And this is what has the Left and the activists at Digger hyperventilating. AFP is a well-funded, well organized outfit. The Left has been winning in Vermont for the entire 21^st century because they have enjoyed massive out-of-state funding for their issues and candidates while any opposition coming from the center-right has been for the most part been underfunded, or unfunded. The Left has been bringing guns to a knife fight where the Right couldn’t afford a plastic spork.

But last year saw a comparatively modest investment in center-right candidates and policy positions, mostly from Vermonters in the business community, not AFP, and the result was an electoral Red wave. So Digger and the special interests pulling their strings must know, if they their forced to fight a fair fight with an equally well equipped opponent, they’re looking at a butt kicking. And that’s why we were treated to this unhinged, hysterical, probably libelous article. Panic.

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