Recommends hiring a consultant to do its job for them.

by Rob Roper

First question: Why do we even have a Climate Council at this point? Why have we ever had one? All these twenty-three (twenty-two, really, because the corrupt Speaker of the House has refused for over a year to appoint a representative from the Fuel Dealers as required by law) unelected, self-important bloviators do is sit in a circle and spew “woke” jargon at one another for a few hours each month in pointless exercises of mental masturbation. At, I should point out, considerable taxpayer expense.

Just a reminder of what the Climate Council is supposed to do per the Global Warming Solutions Act: “On or before December 1, 2021, adopt the Vermont Climate Action Plan…. The Plan shall set forth the specific initiatives, programs, and strategies that the State shall pursue to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; achieve the State’s reduction requirements…[emphasis added].” They never actually did this.

The “Plan” they produced in December 2021 was not a list of specific recommendations or strategies that, if enacted, would achieve the state’s greenhouse gas reduction requirements. It was/is an a la cart menu of pretty much every climate related boondoggle policy they could think of dropped into an Excel file with no cost analysis, timeline for implementation of programs, etc. Not a plan. It’s like if you hired a team of nutritionists to create a diet for you that would specifically help you lose twenty pounds, lower your cholesterol and your blood sugar levels by the end of the year and they delivered you a copy of the Joy of Cooking. They are unwilling and/or incapable of making a decision.  

Which gets us to the latest farcical chapter in this bureaucratic clown car’s history.

The “Plan” delivered in 2021, for all its 200 plus pages, did not include any viable option for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector. A rather big omission given that cars and trucks are the source of about one third of all greenhouse gas emissions in the state. The Council blames the official implosion of the Transportation Climate Initiative in November 2021 for their failure, but anybody with eyes attached to a functioning brain could have told them that TCI was never a truly viable plan. (See my own op ed from January 2020, nearly two years before the Climate Action Plan was published, heralding the inevitable death of TCI, With TCI Imploding, a Worse Bill Is on the Horizon).

Nevertheless, since December 2021, the Climate Council has had another two full years to come up with an alternative to TCI. And for two full years they had come up with zip, zero, nada recommendations. Lots of jabber. Endless clips of Liz Miller rolling her eyes and lamenting the evaporation of TCI, but no plan. So, big decision, they created a Transportation Task Force to finally tackle the issue, and that task force recently released its long-awaited decision. Drumroll please…. Blast of trumpets….

…. The Transportation Task Force of the Vermont Climate Council’s recommendation regarding a policy plan to replace TCI for the transportation sector of the Climate Action Plan is… to hire an independent consulting firm to come up with a recommendation to replace TCI for the transportation sector of the Climate Action Plan.

Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up. But you will, taxpayer, have to pay for it.

Which gets back to my original question. Why does this useless committee, the government equivalent of an inflamed appendix, exist? If we’re going to hire an independent consultant to actually make the recommendations the Council is paid to make, why can’t the Agency of Natural Resources just do that? Or one of the legislative committees of jurisdiction? Maybe, lawmakers, it’s time — past time — to scrap the Climate Council.

Better yet just scrap the whole Global Warming Solutions Act because Vermonters don’t want and can’t afford ANY plan to levy a carbon tax on gasoline and diesel fuels anyway, which is what any recommendation in this area comes down to.

In fact, what the Climate Council specifically wants this independent consultant to do is look at whether or not Vermont should join New York Cap & Invest, a program that does not yet exist and is probably about as viable as TCI, or The Western Climate Initiative, a non-profit organization that handles the logistics of auctioning off “carbon credits” (aka carbon taxes) for the states of California and Washington as well as a couple of Canadian provinces. It is essentially a West Coast TCI. And, like TCI, most of the original “observer” states willing to consider the concept ultimately declined to participate. The difference being that California, unlike Massachusetts, was big enough to go it alone.

And here’s what Vermonters should be concerned about regarding potential participation in WCI. According to AAA, the state with the most expensive gasoline in the country is Hawaii, because it is way out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The next two most expensive states after that? California and Washington. The two WCI states. By a lot. California’s average gas price today is $4.60 a gallon. Compared to its neighboring states, that’s 69 cents higher than Nevada, 75 cents higher than Oregon, $1.41 higher than Arizona, and $1.52 above the national average. Do Vermonters really want to sign up for that?

If the recent Campaign for Vermont poll is remotely accurate, the answer is not just no, but HELL NO! 71 percent of Vermonters oppose any carbon tax/fee/surcharge on gasoline and diesel, 59 percent strongly oppose it. So, lawmakers, how about you listen to your constituents for a change. Save the taxpayers several hundred thousand dollars and forget about paying extra to study a policy nobody wants, save several million dollars by scrapping the Vermont Climate Council that doesn’t do anything, and save us hundreds of millions by abandoning any thoughts of putting a carbon tax on our motor fuels that we can’t afford.   

Just a suggestion.

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