Only 13 percent rate it as a top 3 issue.

by Rob Roper

The Vermont Climate Council – you remember that costly yet useless body of unelected (mostly) nut-jobs established by the Global Warming Solutions Act to come up with plans to tank our economy in a half-assed kamikaze mission to “save the planet” – met on October 5^th to discuss some polling data. It did not, at least from their perspective, go well.

As Marta Churella of MassINC Polling Group delivered the bad news:

Even when we gave them three chances, addressing climate change just falls a lot further down on the priority list than cost of living issues, jobs, healthcare, education, childcare, housing, and protecting natural areas and farmland. Only 13 percent named climate as one of their top three issues, really the lowest of any of the ones that we tested.

Sad trombone slide.

What was the number one issue chosen by the 800 survey respondents? “Lower the cost of living” at 77 percent. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that taxes/fees/surcharges on fossil fuels to fund massive greenhouse gas reduction projects will increase the cost of living for, well, everyone not a hermit living off the grid and foraging for all their food. The GWSA and all its spawn policies are the polar opposite of lowering the cost of living.

Other issues at odds with the climate agenda that are of higher priority are “creating jobs and economic development” at 54 percent. Raising the cost of gasoline and diesel (as we have seen courtesy of the Iran war) via taxes and fees, is an economic drag. Building more housing at 32 percent. A lot of those machines you need to dig foundations, mix cement, etcetera run on you know what: fossil fuels. And protecting natural areas and farmland at 24 percent, presumably from hideous and destructive things like solar fields and industrial wind turbines.

So, it’s not surprising that when asked, “When thinking about the energy that powers your appliances, heats your home, and fuels your vehicle, which of the following is most important. How about second most important?” the number one answer by a landslide was “Keeping energy costs down.” Twice as many, 68 percent, as the 34 percent for minimizing greenhouse gases, which was tied with “reliability.”

But even that 34 percent comes into question because later when asking about whether the state should focus more on adaptation (preparing for the effects of climate change) or mitigation (reducing greenhouse gasses that supposedly, but not really, reduce climate change) only an astonishingly measly 4 percent prioritized greenhouse gas reduction.

Getting back to that whole cost of living issue, more bad news for the Climate Counselors came from MassINC’s Rich Parr,

As you might expect, given the lower priority there wasn’t a ton of appetite for spending more on climate change in this survey. 35 percent wanted to spend less, that’s the plurality. 26 percent wanted to spend more. 17 percent wanted to keep spending levels even.

So, a majority of Vermonters (52 percent) don’t want to spend ANY more money on this wackadoodle agenda, and over one third – the largest chunk of the citizenry — want cuts to what we’re currently spending. That’s, again, twice as many as the people who at least say they want to pour more of our money down this rat hole.

I said in the title of this piece that these results were not a shock because these types of numbers aren’t new. Back in September 2023, for example, the Department of Public Services ran a survey that showed overwhelming majorities of Vermonters wanted state energy policy to focus on – you guessed it – affordability and reliability. And later that year Campaign for Vermont ran a poll and discovered that a 50 percent of Vermonters weren’t willing to pay ANYTHING extra in the form of taxes or fees to fund this climate change agenda, another 15 percent weren’t willing to spend more than $10 a year (that a whopping 83¢ a month), and 23 percent weren’t willing to go over $100 a year.

One last non-shocker item from the MassInc data: the Vermont Climate Agenda screws poor people. We know this and have known this. Lower income Vermonters tend to live in older housing stock that is more reliant on oil or kerosene for heating, and tend to live in rural settings that require more driving, so taxing it hurts them more. And the subsidies offered for rebates on things like heat pumps, electric vehicles, etcetera are really just wealthfare programs that transfer money from poorer folks to those with higher incomes.

As Jackie Pratt of Stowe Electric explained, “When we survey our customers ZERO percent of low-income customers actually intend to use our rebates because they can’t afford to purchase the thing they’re going to get a rebate on.” Which means (duh) low income Vermonters can’t afford to have low-up-front cost options for appliances and vehicles mandated or regulated away. Again, we’ve known this for a long time, it’s just never reflected in the policies that pass because climate activists don’t care. As the former Senator Mark MacDonald famously said about this agenda, “We don’t do things based on helping poor people. We do things based on saving the world,” and if poor people need to be sacrificed on this altar, so be it.

That attitude hasn’t changed. After those 2023 and 2024 polls, what did the legislature do? Listen to the people? Of course not, don’t be silly. The supermajority Democrats passed the Renewable Energy Standard raising the cost of electricity and passed Act 18, the Clean Heat Standard by which they intended to increase the cost of home heating fuels. Then in November 2024 they lost a historic number of house and senate races but, maintaining their majority, still refused to repeal any of these laws, and moved forward with the idea of implementing a Cap & Invest carbon tax on transportation and home heating fuels — which would be disastrous.

Maybe this time, when the legislature comes back in January 2027, depending upon who prevails in the November 2026 elections, they will actually listen to the people and start to jettison this unpopular, unrealistic agenda once and for all. We shall see!