By Guy Page

On Labor Day yesterday, my bride and I played in-state tourists. We ventured into the deep, dark heart of the Northeast Kingdom AKA Essex County. For years I’ve known their legislators, written dozens of police and accident reports from there, covered their farming and their elections and their politics but always from afar. So I thought it’s time I see Essex County in person. 

My wife was a good sport and together we went through towns like West Charleston. We stopped at Pensioner’s Pond, a kayaker favorite. Then I traveled down memory lane….as a college hitchhiker I spent a night sleeping in the barn at the Frog Run Commune and got woken up by the crowing roosters who didn’t seem to realize it wasn’t dawn yet. Yesterday we found out the barn is still there but the commune isn’t. There’s not much up there except beautiful lakes and hills and trees. 

We stopped for lunch in Island Pond at the Yellow Deli and I’m thinking, ‘Yellow Deli, Yellow Deli, how do I know that name?’ And as soon as I walk in I realize it’s the restaurant and bakery run by the Kingdom Community Church, which early listeners of Chronicle Conversations and VDC readers will remember as the church raided by the Vermont State Police in 1984 due to suspected child abuse which proved unfounded. 

They make a great Reuben! And the dark roast Yerba Mate tea was terrific and grown and processed in one of their communities in Brazil. We recommend the restaurant. Found out too why they call the place Island Pond – because there’s a big old island located right in the middle of the local pond, named, no surprise, Island Pond. Then it was on to Norton where we drove Rte. 114 paralling for miles long, skinny Norton Pond. We took a selfie in front of the town’s 45th Parallel sign – half way between the equator and the North Pole. 

Then we passed through Averill (nothing to report there except a sign saying Quimby territory, which must be where Representative Beth Quimby and the long line of public servant Quimbys hail from). We finished the outward bound part of our eight hour round trip in the town of Canaan, where legend has it you can stand with one foot in Vermont, one foot in Canada and spit into New Hampshire. You can’t actually get to that place by car, but the map assures me it exists in the tiny Canaan village of Beecher Falls. 

And if this long story has a point other than What I Did On My Labor Day Vacation it’s this – at the town’s four corners stands a concrete monument to well-intentioned energy planning that time and technology passed by almost as soon as it was built. I’m talking about the town horse trough, a four foot by four foot concrete box that now serves as an attractive planter for flowers and small American flags. No doubt it also keeps drivers from cutting the corner too close and leaving tire tires on the small but scenic Fletcher Park with its fountain, trees and modern sculptures. 

But here’s the thing – a plaque on the side says it was donated by the Village Improvement Society  in 1903. So for five years you can bet that trough did wonderful service for the horses and the people who rode or drove them on their way into town, stopping at the local store.

And then… the beginning of the end. The first Ford Model Ts were sold in the USA in 1908. This marked the beginning of mass production for an affordable automobile, with over 15 million units sold by the end of its production in 1927.

So I’m thinking that in just a couple decades, no one really needed that watering trough anymore. When, exactly, I don’t know. No doubt the Canaan Historical Society with its beautiful Greek Revival building on the opposite corner of Fletcher Park could tell me. But the fact that mums and Old Glory have taken the place of H20 tells us what we need to know. 

Which brings us to the Green New Deal. A recent blogpost by the Energy Bad Boys notes that it’s been more than seven years since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez brought the Green New Deal to Congress, with its vision of moving America toward a power grid built around wind, solar and other carbon-free sources. The Vermont Legislature bought in wholeheartedly with its Global Warming Solutions Act. 

But something has changed since then: America suddenly needs a lot more electricity.

For years, U.S. power demand was fairly flat. Now data centers, artificial intelligence, new factories and the push to electrify cars and heating are creating forecasts for major growth in electricity use.

And that changes the math.

Wind and solar can produce large amounts of electricity, but they don’t produce it whenever customers need it. Meanwhile, grid watchdogs have warned about reliability risks as older coal and other power plants retire.

Now comes the next challenge: adding enough generation not merely to replace retiring plants, but to meet a surge in new demand.

That is putting natural gas — and potentially nuclear power — back at the center of the discussion. A new Global Energy Monitor report points to a major expansion of planned natural-gas generation as utilities prepare for that growth.

The irony is hard to miss.

The Green New Deal was built for an era when the central question was how to replace existing fossil-fuel generation with renewable energy.

The emerging question is much different: How do we produce vastly more electricity, around the clock, without making power less reliable or far more expensive?

Data centers and AI may be doing what years of political debate could not. They are forcing America to confront the difference between the power grid we might like to have — and the power grid an electricity-hungry economy actually requires.

Here’s my point: the Green New Deal and Vermont’s Global Warming Solutions Act are the modern parallel of the 1903 Canaan Vermont Horse Watering Trough. Just across the street is a big old gas station doing brisk business, at least by Canaan’s standards. The free market has made its choice – and it’s not the Green New Deal.