Bill obliterated in four hours of critical testimony; passes committees anyway.

by Rob Roper

Democrats are in full retreat from the Clean Heat Standard law (Act 18) they passed in 2023. The carbon credit (aka carbon tax) on home heating fuels was and is a policy and political disaster. Vermonters want to see it repealed. Privately, a meaningful chunk of Democrats want to see it repealed. But there is a radical element in the party base as well as in the party’s elected leadership not to mention their donor class that is emotionally and financially invested in this thing and have no intention of letting it die – not without a last stand.

This last stand is S.65 – An act relating to energy efficiency utility jurisdiction, a bill sponsored by three of the senate’s most radical climate alarmists, Senators Alison Clarkson (D-Windsor), Becca White (D-Windsor), and Energy & Natural Resources chair Anne Watson (D-Washington). What S.65 is supposed to do is take the Clean Heat Standard repeal – which is highly popular with the normies – and hitch it to some garbage legislation that is not quite as bad as the CHS, but certainly not good, and with the potential to get worse.

That garbage legislation, to get a bit more technical, would allow the energy efficiency charge that shows up on your electric bill – about $50 million per year – to be used by Efficiency Vermont for greenhouse gas emission reduction projects, not just (or mostly) electric efficiency – which is what ratepayers were promised the money will be used for.

Now, it’s important for the reader to know that political darling Efficiency Vermont was supposed to be raking in big bucks by now as the Default Delivery Agent under the Clean Heat Standard. With that little piece of crony socialism falling apart, S.65 looks like it’s meant to be a both a consolation prize and a back door method for keeping the Clean Heat Standard policies alive, just under a different banner, and shifting the tax from fossil heating fuels to electricity bills.

Louis Porter of Washington Electric (as well as a former reporter and former Fish & Wildlife Commissioner, so not this dude’s first rodeo) later explained how the money game Efficiency Vermont is playing with S.65 is likely to develop. “I’ll also say that the bill proposes a level funded budget, but I’ve been observing and a participant in government for twenty years. This is how programs increase their revenue and increase their spending…. You take on another problem, and then you come back and say, we need more money to do the work…. If you’re asking an organization to take on more work, they’re either gonna do less of what they’re doing now or they’re gonna need more support and funding to do that [new task].”

Finance Committee Chair, Ann Cummings (D-Washington) agreed that that’s what’s going on, “I think we need to deal with that possible, if not probable, reality…. Yeah. That is quite possible.”

Okay. Now that we’ve established the grift going on here, is this a good policy anyway? Nooooo. No, it is not.

The Senate Finance Committee was treated to a conga-line/firing squad of testimony that shredded the bill for over four hours with comments like that of Louis Porter, “I would be hard pressed to think of a less productive policy than to increase fees or have fees on electricity, be collected and then partial of those returned as incentives to encourage people to change to electricity.”

And Ken Nolan, VPPSA, “Taxing electricity, which is effectively what the energy efficiency charge is,…to incentivize people to use electricity is a regressive approach, and it’s not something we would encourage.”

And similar comments from Ed McNamara of the PUC, TJ Poor of the Department of Public Service, Bill Driscoll of Associated Industries of Vermont, Andrea Cohen of Vermont Electric, and more, all touching on how it was unfair for electric ratepayers to foot higher bills to fund fossil fuel efficiency projects, how the bill would put the electric utilities into costly and inefficient competition with Efficiency Vermont instead of working in partnership, it “undermines the foundation of efficiency work,” and the upward cost pressures it will put on electric utilities will threaten the long-term viability of the grid, which needs investment.

Senators on the committee admitted that they didn’t understand this legislation, it was being rushed, and it didn’t need to be passed this year. In any sane world this barrage of damning evidence that the bill just plain sucks in every way, shape, and form would certainly kill it. But this is not a sane world; this is the Vermont State House, and the orders from on high in Democrat leadership are to pass this crappy bill no matter what.

So, Senator Ruth Hardy (D-Addison) was sent off to “fix” it. She did not. In her own words, “I also just wanted to make really clear that this amendment that I brought to the committee, first of all, I did it at the request of the majority leader [Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale (D-Chittenden SE)] and I did it based on what I was hearing from senators around the table and your concerns. I never ever presented this as something that was a compromise between the people in this room who were not happy with the bill yesterday. I never presented it that way. It was never intended to be that way. I did not have time, and I did not have charge to do that…. This is not to be presented as a sort of compromise, but rather a, hey, here’s some things that might address some of the concerns I heard from senators who are the people who get to vote on it. I never tried to meet everybody’s needs.”

Least of all the needs of Vermont’s electric ratepayers! But despite the fixer of the bill’s admission that her fix doesn’t fix it and wasn’t really meant to fix it in the first place (“I did not have charge [from the majority leader] to do that”), it passed out of committee anyway on a 5-2 vote.

And that, dear voters, illustrates pretty clearly just how many hoots your elected representatives in the majority party give about you – or even give about passing good sensible policies.

I hope senate Republicans will find a way to bring another clean repeal of the Clean Heat Standard to the floor. This non-compromise “compromise” is a joke, and a bad one at that.

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