We can debate 232 years later whether accepting Vermont into the union was a good idea, but there have been a few positives, Calvin Coolidge being one of them. But recent decades have seen a significant decline as the Democrat Socialists have turned it into a Right-Coast California without the coast.
Related: More of Our Coverage on the Decline and Fall of Vermont
If there’s a stupid left-wing idea, they are all ears, eyes, and your wallet, eager to waste other people’s money in its pursuit without regard to the cost.
Jonathan Lesser’s commentary at VT Digger on the state’s climate plan encapsulates this. To summarize, Vermont’s global emissions are minuscule. China or India erase any alleged ‘reductions’ in the blink of an eye. You could do more for the planet for a lot less if that were the goal by influencing them or any number of third-world countries that need fossil fuels to claw their way out of poverty.
Help them reduce emissions instead of pretending you’ve done it by offshoring yours.
But it is easier to lie to guilty liberals and tell them that kneecapping western prosperity is the answer, and that’s Vermont. Their plan would spend 15 billion, costing Vermonters a Billion (assuming other costs are covered by the DC fiat-money tree). Estimated benefits and savings are as suspect as the need, but the details needed to prove anything, either way, are not available.
One might think that before imposing the Climate Action Plan on Vermonters and asking them to spend over $1 billion of their money, getting answers to these basic questions and allowing the public to independently review the assumptions and conclusions would be reasonable.
Except it’s not. …
The Ethan Allen Institute’s recent open records request to the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources turned up nothing. According to the agency, the data used for all of the modeling and the detailed results were not part of the “deliverables” from the consultants who wrote the action plan. Thus no independent review of the costs and supposed benefits is possible.
The Climate Cult’s Pharisees expect you to take it all on faith that it is necessary, that it will work, and that you’ll barely feel a thing. None of which appears to be the case.
[T]he action plan calls for installing over 96,000 residential heat pumps by 2025 — two years from now — and more than 177,000 by 2030. The action plan claims these installations cost $4,000 “plus or minus about $1,000 depending on the house layout and other particulars.” Where is that number from? Who knows?
A 2021 study by Diversified Energy Specialists in Massachusetts looked at the actual costs of installing residential heat pumps in that state between 2019 and 2021. The median cost for whole-house retrofits was $20,000, four times larger than what the action plan claims.
Like everything related to Climate Cult Dogma, the fairy tale threat is the least of our worries. The solutions do more damage and are incapable of delivering on a lie that Democrats in New Hampshire are eager to embrace.
Sometimes Republican Governor Chris Sununu never met a bag of federal money he didn’t like, but much like the climate threat and the supposed solutions, the money is fake too. What’s real is the damage going “green” will cause to the planet and whoever embraces it. The only thing we’ll pass down to our posterity is generational debt to pay for an elitist money-laundering scheme.
Calvin Coolidge would have never let it happen. Vermont – which can’t print its own money – is ready to put its children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren in hock to the Feds for a ‘solution’ to a non-problem that solves nothing even if the problem were real. Something progressives in both parties on both sides of the Connecticut river will embrace for no other reason than “free money.”
But it’s not just not free and not real; the costs to our economies and quality of life are so significant we might never escape them. Not as a state or a nation.
How about we not do that?
