No funding to pay people to design the program, let alone run it!
The Democrat supermajority passed The Clean Heat Standard (Act 18/S.5) last year over the Governor’s veto. That law appropriated $850,000 from the General Fund to hire three new employees at the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) plus some cash for subcontracting out research and technical support – all for fiscal year 2024. FY24 ends in July of this year. There is no funding allocated for the PUC to continue work on the Clean Heat Standard after that. And, at present anyway, no place left to find it.
The PUC’s completed plan for implementing and operating the Clean Heat Standard – as of yet not started – is due in January 2025. Oopsie. Let the finger pointing begin!
Here’s how it played out in the House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday (February 13, 2023). Ed McNamara, the brand-new chair of the PUC, made the annual pilgrimage to the money committee, hat in hand. What he asked for was another General Fund appropriation of $875,000 for FY25 to keep the lights on at the Clean Heat Standard so they can, you know, get around to designing the program. This did not go over very well.
Representative Kari Dolan (D-Waitsfield) admonished McNamara, pointing to specific language in Act 18 instructing the PUC to use their FY2024 funding to research and recommend a new, non-General Fund source of revenue to pay for the program thereafter. “So,” Dolan said with an unenthusiastic wrist-flip at the budget document, “I’m a bit underwhelmed by this.” And, she scolded, the PUC should not look at the General Fund as an “easy way out.”
Of course, sluffing off responsibility for identifying revenue sources – aka politically unpopular taxes and/or fees – onto the PUC is a prime example of Dolan and her colleagues looking for and taking “an easy way out.” The intent of the law was to allow cowards like Dolan et al to hide behind the unelected bureaucrats at the PUC when the bills for this monstrosity of a Home Heating Carbon Tax come due. What this Clean Heat Standard will cost and where the money would come from should have been determined by the legislature before they passed this absurd law. Alas, that’s not how these jokers roll, so here we are….
Representative Jim Harrison (R-Chittenden) asked if the money for the PUC’s Clean Heat Standard was allocated for in the Governor’s budget. The answer was no; that the Administration instructed the PUC to get the money from their existing, dedicated funding stream which comes almost entirely from the gross receipts taxes on utilities (primarily electricity), plus a little from applications fees. The problem is that all of that revenue plus a dip into the PUC’s reserve fund is necessary to fund all the other stuff the PUC is supposed to do. There’s nothing left over to fund this new arena of mission creep into Clean Heat Standard too.
With the question “So, do we get the money?” (though not articulated exactly thus) hanging in the air during an awkward pause, Committee Chair Diane Lanpher (D-Vergennes) ended the testimony with by cryptically muttering, “It’s a hard year.”
A couple of observations….
First, this whole exchange drives home just how incompetent and cowardly the framers of the Clean Heat Standard law were/are. They wanted to hide the ultimate (going to be massive) cost of this Rube Goldberg Carbon Tax on home heating fuels from the public, so they tried to get away with piecemeal funding. Now that the next piece is needed, the cupboard is bare – and they still don’t want to stand by the cost of the program. Bad lawmaking.
Second, and most importantly, if the state can’t afford to fund a handful of eggheaded pencil pushers sitting in office cubicles simply writing the rules for the Clean Heat Standard, how in the world do they think we’ll be able to afford the cost of actually implementing this extremely complicated, bureaucracy heavy scheme with its Clean Heat Measures, Clean Heat Carbon Credits, Carbon Credit bank and trading floor, Default Delivery Agent(s)…. No way, no how.
Moreover, the PUC blew their whole $850,000 FY2024 wad on the relatively simple tasks of designing an online registry for a couple hundred fuel dealers and recruiting the Technical Advisory and Equity Advisory Groups. The results are a disaster! (See: Clean Heat Standard Exploding on the Launch Pad.) And these steps are far less complicated and labor intensive that creating a the rules and regulations for evaluating literally tens of thousands of “Clean Heat Measures”, converting them to “Clean Heat Credits” with a monetary value, and then managing their sales and tracking their ownership in a financial marketplace. Good luck with this. I’m gonna make popcorn.
I expect the Supermajority will find the $875,000 to fund the PUC’s Clean Heat Carbon Tax work going somewhere. Somewhere buried and out of sight. The alternative – firing the three people they just hired to construct the program and disbanding the Technical Advisory and Equity Advisory Groups they just corralled to oversee the process for lack of money – would be too politically embarrassing. It would be the right thing to do, of course. Kill this unaffordable, ill-conceived, incredibly unpopular piece of poo before it wastefully sucks up any more precious resources. But doing the right thing is not what this current crop of lawmakers has ever been about.
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Categories: Commentary, Energy, Environment, Legislation, State Government
i just put another stick of wood in my stove/// screw these as…..s///
Not a problem. The state couldn’t fund the great singleplayer socialized medicine program years ago either, and they’ve recently broached resurrecting that program too. No need to be able to afford things. No need to have taxpayers supporting them. Just pass legislation.
Reminiscent of what Representative Pelosi said regarding “Obama Care”. “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” A little backwards (and self serving) is it not ?
We are a sorry lot…
The outcome of a law that should never been enacted is now dependent
upon hubris alone for funding to continue.
Thanks to Rob Roper for this uncomfortable laugh of the day!
The clean heat standard actually resulted from Vermont legislature Bill H.688, Act No 153: Act to address climate goals, enacted into policy in 2020. This was signed to circumvent the fact that the Trump administration removed America from the Paris Accord, ultimately removing a key component of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
https://legislature.vermont.gov/bill/status/2020/H.688
The United Nations owns the science on climate just as it owned the science relative to COVID-19, EHOCH amounts to the politicization of science ot science (TM), which Vermont followed meticulously.
How much carbon is actually in the atmosphere? According to renouned physicists from Oxford and Princeton and many others .04 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere is carbon. Of that carbon .3 is man-made. In truth, there is nothing Vermont can do to significantly reduce carbon, especially as certain countries are not required to comply with to include China, Egypt and other third-world countries.
There has been far more carbon and much warmer temperatures throughout history and the planet has thrived. The ice cores prove this claim. This has nothing to do with carbon and everything to do with the dangerous economic principle of degrowth. Basically, you reduce the economic status of one county, while improving the economic status of another country via energy policies. So degrowth is being realized via US energy policies, migration and food production. All of these drivers will result in the reduction of quality of life in America, in the name of global equity.
The United Nation, World Bank, UNESCO, World Health Organization and WEF as well as WEF stakeholders are corrupt entities. They build scientific consensus through private public partnerships which censor all conflicting narratives, while they use propaganda slogans like “follow the science, settled science, the new norm, no one’s vaccinated until everyone is vaccinated.”
Your summation hit the nail on the head! Thanks.
Here is the next connection. This article, which I shared in other commentary on VDC. Vermont is listed at the end of the article as receiving funds from the United Nations Foundation through the US Climate Alliance to fund politicians and agency staff in implementing the UN Sustainable agenda. Our governor, Phil Scott, is a member of the US Climate Alliance, and Bill H.688, Act No 153 references the US Climate Alliance. Double check but I believe that is accurate.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/united-nations-foundation-quietly-fueling-climate-policy-funding-staff-dem-states
China abandoned the Paris Climate Accords in July 2023- and will do as they please- and they please to build coal fired powerplants by the hundreds. (A side note is that the overwhelming majority of solar panels are made in China, where coal fired plants provide the heat required to process the silicone wafers that are the solar cells) Both China and Russia are reported to be spending millions to influence US environmental policy.
Perhaps the biden clan might know more about that…
And Ms. Stone reminds us how important- but minuscule the amount of CO2 in earth’s atmosphere really is- If the atmosphere was represented by 100 blocks, 1 meter square- there would be:
78 blocks of Nitrogen
21 blocks of Oxygen
1 block of everything else- and inside that one, one meter- block would be a hundred blocks….
of which 4 of those would be all CO2 in the atmosphere… 4 Cubic Centimeters- and of those 4 cubic centimeters of CO2, made made CO2 is less than 3-1/4 millimeters. That’s less than a teaspoon- .654, exactly.
And to think this example started with a cube larger than two football fields…to yield less than a teaspoon of vile dirty man-made carbon dioxide. And let us not lose sight of the fact that plants require CO2 for photosynthesis- and we require plants to live. Somebody is being snookered…
And they are building those coal plants and have been to the tune of one per week. But its OK. They’re fellow Communists who get to imprison and even murder those who oppose them. Yay! People like Taylor Small, Becca Balint and all their fellow travelers are chomping at the bit.
Two years ago in late fall my old furnace quit. Fortunately my fuel dealer was located in my town and they quickly installed a new furnace and new oil tank. Being retired I thought I would never have to worry about heating my house again. That was until the Clean Heat Standard passed. The first casualty was that my local fuel dealer has already gone out of the fuel business because they don’t want to deal with all the red tape required. The price of fuel oil is already high but next year it will be unaffordable for many retirees. I actually sent an email to the bills sponsor before it passed explaining how this would effect retirees but as usual it fell on deaf ears.
Fuel delivery from NH is already cheaper than Vermont dealers. If this continues it will only get worse to the point Vermont dealers will go out of business due to price differenced alone. I don’t see how VT could do anything about it as that would run afoul of interstate commerce laws.
One can buy ORD in N.H. and fill your own tank. #2 fuel oil has red dye. ORD does not have red dye and has road a tax. N.H. a stone throws away. Truck, 55 gal. drums and a hand crank pump. Our option B is a Fischer woodstove currently on casters. Stove is pipe cut to length, fitted, screwed together ready to go just in case things get squirrely…..and it will.
The suituation under the “Golden Dumb” is what you can expect when a bunch of over educated peabrains (or are they peebrains?) are elected by an electorate dominated by socially over reactive idiots. The chickens of the invasion from the south of the late 60s and 70s have come here to roost, and brought the politics of their formative years with them. Vermont for Vermonters hey Pat Finnie ? Yea Claude, in a perfect world, in a perfect world.
wow/// the key board thumpers are awake this morning///
The worst part of this scenario that we are tied to, is the total of the costs down to the end user have not been outlined….. simply because the cart is before the horse. I have discussed this with the folks at PUC, and they are as fraustrated as anyone else. The Legislature, in it’s “wisdom” failed to deliniate the cost factor. This whole can of worms needs to be repealed or the crazies will own more of our being than they do now. It is not looking good right now, and I do not see or hear of a massive turnaround in political standing in the Puzzle Palace. That is really what needs to happen first.
Hi Jim,
Curious about your conversations with the PUC folks. However, I have no sympathy for their frustration. They testified MANY MANY times when this bill was being crafted and never once had the cojones to speak truth to power about how unworkable the bill was or about how unprepared they were to do this job. You could tell by their demeanor that they knew it was a disaster in the making, but go along to get along!
Ill advised items most always turn into bigger problems when it was known to begin with that Vermonters just will not buy a pig in a poke. ESPECIALLY, when the State of Vermont is marketing hogwash.
Rob Roper, with your sense of humor and irony, please confirm Tom Evslin calculations and published claim from 2020 that Vermont already is carbon neutral. https://vtdigger.org/2020/02/24/tom-evslin-vermont-is-already-carbon-neutral/
this dog and pony united nations agenda has been operating for the last forty years/// big names involved in this/// no secrete///
Still crickets from Sibilia I see. Hmmm.
January 2019: “Millennials and Gen Z and all these folks that come after us are looking up, and we’re like, ‘The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change, and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?’ ” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Four years later, the party of stooges, “how are we going to pay for all of this?” Laughing out loud!