It’s not just home heating fuels the supermajority wants to make unaffordable!

This article was originally appeared on Rob Roper’s Substack Page Behind the Lines and was republished here with permission

by Rob Roper

For good reason, there has been a lot of focus on the supermajority’s intention to implement a carbon tax on home heating fuels (oil, propane, kerosene, natural gas) in order to meet the greenhouse gas reduction mandates of their Global Warming Solutions Act. The big vote on the Unaffordable Heat Act is coming up right after the election after all! But home heating and cooking account for less than half of overall greenhouse gas emissions, and an equal if not larger chunk comes from transportation, a.k.a. all you miscreants daring to drive your cars and trucks.

Ergo, a tax/fee/surcharge on gasoline and diesel transportation fuels is also a necessary component of the GWSA, and indeed has been a prime objective for Democrats and Progressives ever since VPIRG floated their plans for a straight-out carbon tax on said fuels over a decade ago. Politically unpopular for obvious reasons, since then the carbon tax pig has been smeared with a variety of shades of lipstick in unsuccessful attempts to fool and/or charm the voters. There was the ESSEX plan in 2018 and the Transportation Climate Initiative in 2020 which both exploded spectacularly on the launch pad.

Undeterred by persistent public opposition, this past session the supermajority inserted into the Transportation Bill this little tidbit, “(6) The CRS reaffirms that, without adoption of additional polices, the portion of GWSA emission reduction requirements for 2030 and 2050 that are attributable to the transportation sector will not be met and states that: ‘Of the additional programs, a cap-and-invest and/or Clean Transportation Standard program are likely the two most promising options to close the gap in projected emissions vs. required emissions levels for the transportation sector. . . .’” So, on October 3^rd, just a couple weeks ago, the road show kicked off trying to sell a “Cap & Invest” scheme to Vermonters that would jack up our cost of driving.

What is a “cap and invest” program? The quickest translation is “tax and spend!” Basically, the legislature will place an artificial cap on the amount of gasoline and diesel fuel that can be burned in Vermont each year regardless of consumer demand, and fuel dealers will have to buy carbon credits or “allowances” for permission to sell that fuel (another de facto tax). The state spends the revenue from selling the credits/allowances on electric busses that don’t work, bike lanes nobody rides on, EV chargers that no one plugs into, etc. The cost of the allowances is passed along to you in the form of higher prices at the pump. If this sounds an awful lot like the Clean Heat Standard only for transportation fuels, yup. As I said, same carbon tax pig different shade of lipstick.

As always, the big question all sane Vermonters want answered is how much is this going to cost us? And, per their perpetual modus operandi, our elected representatives pushing this nonsense really don’t want to tell us and are going to their predictable lengths not to.

For example, in the public participation segment of the October 3 meeting, someone asked, “Are there similar cased studies that showed the price impact to consumers.” The high-priced consultant non-answered, “So, I mean, the exact price impact on consumers depends on what the allowance price ends up being in the market, which is uncertain. California’s allowance price has fluctuated a lot over the past few years. Um, uh, upwards of forty dollars [per ton of carbon], downwards of twenty dollars, kind of everywhere in between. So, by design the allowance price is relatively uncertain, so it’s hard for us to predict exactly what the price would be…” yada, yada, yada, I was born a middle class child….

So, can you give us a ballpark? No? Okay, what exactly have the price impacts been in California since 2013, the example you brought up? Surely there’s a record of that. Crickets. Huh. But thank goodness for internet search engines!

The California-based site “Facts Per Gallon” calculates the cost per gallon impact of their cap and trade program as of November 2023 was 30¢. However, a parallel program called the “Low Carbon Fuel Standard” (the other policy referenced in that and/or T-Bill clip above) added an additional 36¢ per gallon on top of that. And these costs are rising. They estimate that by 2025 the total price per gallon impact on gas/diesel of California’s state policies to meet their ghg reduction mandates – which, by the way, mirror very closely Vermont’s GWSA – will be $1.71.

In fact, one of the potential pathways to this cap and invest strategy for Vermont would be to join the Western Climate Initiative, which manages the allowance markets for California, Washington, and Quebec. I can’t speak to the Canadian province, but do you know what the two states that have the highest gas prices in the US are? (This might be a fun time to hum the Jeopardy theme song.) If you guessed California ($4.65) and Washington ($4.07), you would be right! And it’s not even close. Do we really want to join this club? Our Dem/Prog supermajority does!

So, when you hear discussion of the Clean Heat Standard and its $10 billion unaffordable price tag to stay warm in winter, remember that it ain’t the half of it. Literally. They’re coming for your gasoline and diesel fuel too. And they care so much about what you might think of this the Climate Council has scheduled a public discussion session on the Transportation Carbon Tax on November 7 – two days after the November 5 election. I wonder if that date was chosen with some purpose.  

Rob Roper is a freelance writer with 20 years of experience in Vermont politics including three years service as chair of the Vermont Republican Party and nine years as President of the Ethan Allen Institute, Vermont’s free market think tank.