by Pat Fannie
To those under the “Golden Dome” – Regarding S5, the “Affordable Heat Bill, I just don’t buy what you are trying to sell.
I was paying $2.42 a gallon for bio-fuel from Bournes on 12/3/20. This year, on 12/23/22, I paid $5.095 a gallon for the same fuel. What happened? It is not because of greedy “big oil”. I believe that 90% of the difference is because during his 2020 campaign, the current occupant of the White House threatened to make fossil fuels unnecessary in ten years.
Tell me truthfully, if your business had been threatened with the assurance that it was going to be phased out, would you continue to sink money into that short term probability? You might as well flush it down the toilet!
Also as another point of reference, I will tell you that on 1/20/21, the day Biden was sworn in, the price of gasoline at the Exxon/Mobile station in Hardwick was $2.30 a gallon. Now it’s $3.44 a gallon down from an intentionally imposed $5.00 a gallon, and I hope I don’t need to remind anybody that diesel is even more expensive, and that “if you got it, a truck brought it”!
In the meantime people of limited resources are collateral damage. As I told Senator McCormack, let this changeover to all electric happen, because it will. It already is happening, and the oil companies that the left demonize can see it as well, and are putting money into that conversion. Have any of you in our legislature reached out to Shell, Exxon/Mobil, or Chevron to solicit their help?, and I mean asked them, not threatened them with consequences like some kind of dungeon master.
I’ll bet you haven’t. Again, don’t push this. All you will do is marginalize more people that are barely making it by now. As far as infrastructural updates that need to be made – is it your position that we are 100% ready to go out of the blocks right now? Really? To convert from fossil fuels to electric HVAC will take a lot more electricity than what our power grid now has to handle. Are you telling me that the current electric power grid can handle it?
How about if we add in the new power that will be needed to charge all the new EVs that you folks are forcing on us? Will Gov. Scott be warning us of future “brown outs” as Newsome has had do in California? Where is all the new power needed to convert from fossil fuel going to come from? Out of state fossil fuel fired plants? Hydro Quebec? Rooftop solar? Those butt ugly wind turbines on “our” ridge lines?
How about the money that will be necessary to convert? Where will that come from – he money trees on the State House lawn? Those “money trees” are in fact taxpayers that you folks are already bleeding dry!
Oh, you propose to levy fees against importers, and other large scale distributors. You don’t suppose that these fees will be passed on to consumers, do you? Of course you know that they will be! But you folks just don’t seem to care.
Where will the wood required to fire the woodstoves, and pellet burning stoves come from? The 50% in 50 years forests? Admit it, you don’t have a clue do you?
I remember in the early 60s when a lot of people were still burning coal. We evolved away from that at a pace that did not bankrupt anybody. All you folks see is your green new world that will be created by sacrificing Vermonters on the altar of the “Green Gods” for the sake of the Chinese and the Indians!
Don’t force it! Let it happen!
The author is a retired State Building Complex security worker and Calais resident.