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The Public Utilities Commission is soliciting comments on the Clean Heat Standard. Here is the one I submitted. If you want to submit one too, see the email address at the end of this post.
To whom it may concern:
Advocates for the Clean Heat Standard are insisting that the program will only add a few cents to the price of fossil home heating fuels (oil, kerosene, propane, fossil natural gas), that the law, Act 18, is “only a study,” and, if implemented, it will help low-income Vermonters by lowering their heating bills. All of these claims are observably, demonstrably, and obviously false.
Cost. We already have a 2 cent excise tax on the 200 million or so gallons of fossil heating fuel Vermonters burn every year. It raises between $4 and $5 million. So, a 7 to 10 cent fee/tax/surcharge/credit assessment (whatever you want to call it) will raise at most $20 million per year.
According to a taxpayer funded analysis done by The Cadmus Group for the Climate Council that informed the Climate Action Plan, in order to meet just the 2030 targets of the Global Warming Solutions Act for the thermal sector (home heating, hot water, cooking), Vermonters will have to, among other things, weatherize 120,000 homes, install 177,107 heat pumps, 136,558 heat pump water heaters, 14,992 advanced wood heating systems, and switch 21,086 homes to using biofuels before the end of the decade. $20 million per year over four years ($80 million) will not come close to covering the cost of this scope of activity. In fact, the recent NV5 potential study indicates the cost to meet the 2030 goals will be more like $3.3 billion, and $9.7 billion overall. Even if non-program revenue sources cover some of that number, 7-10 cents per gallon will not make up the difference.
Given the complexity, logistical requirements, and bureaucracy necessary to set up and oversee the kind of Clean Heat credit market envisioned by Act 18, it is not unreasonable to assume that the cost just to administer the program would be in excess of $20 million per year. So, no, a few pennies per gallon is not a remotely reasonable estimate of total costs.
Act 18 is not just a study. The Global Warming Solutions Act is law, and mandates that Vermonters lower our greenhouse gas emissions to 26% below 2005 levels by 2025, 40% below 1990 levels by 2030 and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. Those dates and targets are not negotiable. Act 18 “established” the Clean Heat Standard to meet those goals for just the thermal sector. The scope of the work necessary is defined. The target dates for greenhouse gas reductions are set. The Clean Heat Standard “is established” as the mechanism to meet those goals on that timeline.
While some advocates are insisting that a scaled down version of the Clean Heat Standard with fewer costs could be implemented, that is only true if the greenhouse gas reduction targets for other sectors, such as transportation and/or agriculture, are simultaneously increased. And it is worth noting that the legislature has not to this point even contemplated a greenhouse gas reduction plan for either of those sectors, and when they do, those plans are likely to be as unrealistic and cost prohibitive as the Clean Heat Standard.
The Clean Heat Standard is regressive and will not help the poor. Advocates insist that this is a program that will help lower-income Vermonters do what wealthier Vermonters are already doing: switch to heat pumps, etc. in order to move away from fossil heating fuels. But the money that will pay for these transitions via the Clean Heat Standard comes from people buying and burning fossil heating fuels. If the wealthy have already made the switch, the wealthy will not be paying for the program. Who does that leave footing the bill? Low- and moderate-income households that continue to use fossil fuels out of necessity.
Over seventy percent of Vermont households heat with fossil fuels. The types of housing that much of our low- and moderate-income population live in are some of the most challenging and expensive to transition to new non-fossil technologies. As such, it will take longer for them to make these transitions, and while they are waiting, they will be stuck paying higher and higher prices for the fuel they need to survive winter. This problem will be exacerbated by the fact that Vermont does not have anything close to the labor force necessary to do this work on the GWSA mandated timeline.
Recommendations. The PUC has discovered in its research over the past year that the Clean Heat Standard “does not make sense for Vermont” due to the cost, the complexity, potential for fraud, logistical/labor constraints, and the regressive nature of the program.
While the alternative recommendation floated by the PUC to replace the Clean Heat Standard with an “efficiency charge” – a straightforward tax on home heating fuels – would reduce the administrative costs of meeting the GWSA mandates for the thermal sector ghg reductions, it would not affect the direct cost to complete the overall scope of work. It does not address the logistical/labor issues barring successful completion of the work on the mandated timeline. It does not address the regressive nature of increasing the cost of home heating fuels that an overwhelming percentage of Vermonters rely on.
Therefore, the only sensible recommendation for the PUC to make to the legislature is to not move forward with a Clean Heat Standard in 2025, to repeal Act 18, and to amend the Global Warming Solutions Act to reflect realistic goals on logistically achievable timelines and on a scale that Vermonters can afford.
The PUC is soliciting public comments on the Clean Heat Standard until FRIDAY, November 1, 2024. If you don’t want this horrible policy to move forward, flood the inbox before the deadline. Comments should be sent to the PUC via email: puc.clerk@vermont.gov.
Share Behind the Lines: Rob Roper on Vermont Politics
- 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.
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Categories: Commentary, Energy, State Government
Promoted by the same goofballs who think increasing property taxes 25 percent in one year is a good idea. The more expensive it becomes to live here, the more certain demographic catastrophe and economic decline are certainties.
Buying more fire wood for next year. Waiting for the comments.
They’re coming for you next, brother!
Rob’s caution is not exaggerated hyperbole. ‘They’ are, literally, coming for all constitutional conservatives. Consider this October 24th editorial in the NYT. ‘There Are Four Anti-Trump Pathways We Failed to Take. There Is a Fifth.’
Two Harvard professors (Harvard, of course), Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, penned this “bat guano insane NYT op-ed” – as described by Mollie Hemmingway of The Federalist. In it, Levitsky and Ziblatt list the strategies to be used when bad actors “used their elected offices to undermine fair competition, making it nearly impossible to remove them from office democratically”.
Of course, by bad actors they mean Donald Trump. And no, it doesn’t escape me that the authoritarianism Levitsky and Ziblatt red flag is actually sponsored by the same administration Levitsky and Ziblatt support. How about that. More ‘projection’. Who could have guessed?
The ‘fifth anti-Trump pathway’ is this: ‘societal mobilization’… in which ‘society’s most prominent voices must publicly and forcefully repudiate them.’ ‘Forcefully’, mind you. These are not officials elected by ‘we the people’. These are ‘prominent’ voices. ‘The U.S. establishment is sleepwalking toward a crisis’… ‘time is running out’… ‘What are they waiting for?’
Hopefully, they’re waiting for Tuesday, November 5th.
Vermont’s progressives are like a cancer, they will kill you and the state financially, don’t let it happen vote these feckless fools out, before they waste every dime in taxes you pay………. they’re suppose to work for you not lobbyist and there agenda !!
Wake up people
Message to Rob Roper. They come for me the fire will not be coming from the wood. The Vermont corporation is bankrupt.
Being “green” is a luxury that comes at a cost. When the government uses violence to force an increase in costs, the overall effects will cause less opportunities to “be green”.
Every cost increase they artificially create causes us to change our order of priorities, and the “be green” priority will go to a lower order, causing us to “spend” in greater quantity in areas that will pollute the most. The demand for higher pollution will show up in the marketplace as a response to the violent government’s malinvestment.
These government violence enforced malinvestments have an infinite future compounding effect, whereas there will be premature allocation of resources sending market signals to various favored industries (politician’s friends), causing an over investment in a given industry, and when that money runs out, it will create a bust, thereby promoting the potential for massive waste and failure in the future. These effects are infinitely disruptive, and create a great deal of pollution, and lack of resources to stop pollution, than there otherwise would be if government didn’t use violent force to steal your money and give it to their friends in the first place.
This legislation has nothing to do with being green. The government is the biggest cause for pollution and waste than anything else that has ever existed on our planet. If they actually cared about burning fuels, they wouldn’t have implemented several other bills, for example, the gun purchase illegal 72hour waiting period which will cost more than a million gallons of excess fuel consumption in the next 10 years, not including the increase in wear and tear, or other externalities.
They want you dead, desperate, and dependent. We get what we deserve.
These beautiful thinkers P?D’s in Montpelier obviously know nothing about economics and the “Law of Diminishing Returns”. Keep taxing when this mentality keeps increasing taxes, people will seek other means to live or move out. Yankee ingenuity needed to survive. In VT the pendulum has swung so far out of proportion of reality the the chain has broken and the ball has left the fulcrum point, gravity takes over. Perhaps then the D&P’s have to live within their means and get educated.
You can put the affordable heat standard to a permanent death by voting 11 Senators who will sustain the Governor’s third veto on this terrible idea.
Thanks for your vigilance and input throughout this whole insane process, John. We can postpone or mothball it with 11 senators, but it will take 15 plus the LTG to move legislation to kill it. The vote next year is only on the rules. Even if it fails, all of the other aspects of the law — including the CHS employees — remain in place to keep the process going.
Or….. As has already been documented, we could accomplish the same thing (if you in fact believe it to be a real “goal”) by planting about 100,000 new trees. What could be greener? I betcha all those trees and all that labor could be had for well under $500k. And it could be done year after year after year after…….
So what am I missing here?
You offer a solution to CO2 remediation, that’s not what the ClimateEvangelists™
seek. ClimateChange™, ClimateCrisis™ GlobalWarming™ are about power, control and money. Always has been.
Rob Roper is pushing us to submit a public comment to the PUC, with concise factual language- by FRIDAY, November 1, 2024. If you don’t want this horrible policy to move forward, flood the inbox before the deadline. Comments should be sent to the PUC via email: puc.clerk@vermont.gov.
What’s the hold-up?
My comments are in the PUC inbox.
The P&D’s must be noticing by now the difficulty to schedule work from anyone in the trades over the last four years. Keep up your foolish progressive policies and you’ll soon have to learn how to do it/fix it it ALL by yourselves! Good luck.
There isn’t a good reason to limit CO2 at all.
Best thing for plants.
While you having fun playing with the heat standards, you may want to look at the bond fraud that is taxing your private property. GOVIE will need another SCAM DEMIC federal bailout of this bankrupt state or you are going to get hit with another property tax increase next year to pay off all of this bonding. You can expect more inflation thanks to PICKPOCKETPOWELL and GRAMMY SMELLEN YELLEN. This caused a massive bubble in the housing and automobile markets.
Oh, i forgot to say, when you go to the store and buy a can of soup you are paying the stores property tax with a higher price for that can of soup.
Sooner rather than later, it will become apparent that C02 is NOT a greenhouse gas. If it is can someone show me the scientific evidence. I’m waiting.
The view from 40000 feet above shows that this pursuit (the Climate Change SCAM) is on a fizzle.
Please VOTE and make sure a neighbor who might not DOES.
Vermont needs more R’s in Montpelier.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/green-new-scam-dying-0
“The Public Utility Commission is “independent three-member, quasi-judicial commission that regulates the siting of electric and natural gas infrastructure and supervises the rates, quality of service, and overall financial management of Vermont’s public utilities.”
First question: Independent from who or what? Their website shows as an “official State of Vermont” website. Appears to me they cannot be independent or neutral if they are compensated State employees and employ mulitple lawyers and multiple climate globalist activists. A three member panel with a large staff and large budget to boot. $4,463,875 FY 2024.
Second question: Quasi-judicial – they act as judge and jury to provided “due process to affected parties” So, consumers of Vermont utilities – do you feel like you have due process looking at your utility bills of late? Who do you think they really represent? Look at the bios of the staff and “commissioners” for more details.
Third question: How many boards within a commission does it take to oversee and regulate utilities in a small State with roughly 645,000 residents? (The Commission has established two advisory groups to assist in the creation of the potential Clean Heat Standard – an Equity Advisory Group and a Technical Advisory Group. To promote transparency in all aspects of this work, the Commission will post materials from the two advisory groups…)
GRIFTERS GOTTA GRIFT. The premise of dealing fairly with legislated, connected thieves, in my opinion, is an exercise in futility. They have utilitzed lawfare warfare to make big bank off taxpayers and utility consumers (double, triple dipping into the same pockets.) Above all, there is no “free market” competition of public utilities – we have no choices! Absolute cartel-style shake down = monopolized coercion and conspiracies to commit fraud.
Re: First question: Independent from who or what?
Independent from us, Vermont taxpayers, of course,
That our House Representative Balint, and Senators Welch and Sanders, support these ‘green new deal’ initiatives demonstrates that the PUC represents preferred special interest groups and various other crony capitalists.
More specifically, PUC commissioner, Margaret Cheney, has already been shown to have regulated energy companies that contributed to her husband, Peter Welch’s, political campaigns.
The $40 Million SunCommon/VPIRG deal was another example of VPIRG lobbyists profiting from their legislative cajoling. Did the PUC have any input in approving that deal?
Yes, grifters grift. And yes, establishing ‘free markets’ will solve the conflicts of interest – which is why the legislature, and various other State agencies, NGOs, and subsidized businesses, pay off their enforcers.
‘The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers it can bribe the public with the public’s money’.