Vermont has just done something hailed by Climateers as groundbreaking and memorialized by The Week with the headline: ‘Vermont becomes first state to make fossil fuel companies pay for climate change.’
Really?
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. They haven’t done anything but pass a bill (S.259). They have no idea how they will execute it, or if they can, what it will look like, and how much … you get the idea. And in the interest of helping bring this closer to the planet Earth they claim to be saving, I think what The Week meant was that they are the first state to say they are going to try to do it.
Do What? If you are familiar with Vermont, you’ve got a handy string of unflattering references and colorful metaphors suggesting the political/bureaucratic equivalent of erectile dysfunction. If you know anything about Vermont’s Clean Heat Standard (for example), you are probably giggling and pointing or shaking your head. While Vermont has the votes to pass any climate legislation it can imagine (as much science fiction as climate change itself), it increasingly lacks any ability to craft language or rules its government can make work.
They say they are going to “make fossil fuel companies pay for climate change,” but is that what their legislation will do?
The Vegas odds are low, which might be why Vermont – despite all the other blue states with their significantly larger number of left-wing lunatics – managed to pass it before anyone else.
Is it the result of an advanced case of progressive mental illness? An insular, self-absorbed obsession with the lie that the carbon dioxide emitted by Western “democracies” is going to despoil the planet (while the greater emissions from India, Africa, Asia, and especially China will not). Napolean Syndrome? Or is it simply the innate leftist hunger to redistribute other people’s earnings as they see fit, even when it harms the people in whose interest they claim to act?
How about all of the above?
Another Climate Laundromat
The problem begins with the Vermont legislature having more elected Democrats in it than (at which) you can shake a Mann-Made hockey stick. It has veto-proof majorities in both chambers. The state’s governor, Phil Scott, is a token Republican and a chief executive with a soap box but not much else. He’s also alleged to be the most popular governor in the country but has anyone considered that the two things (impotence and popularity) might be connected?
Mr. Scott allowed S.259 to become law (the thing that will “make” fossil fuel companies pay for climate change) without his signature, in part because he couldn’t stop it and, in part, because he is himself, is a little bit Hopey-climate-change.
From The Week.
[Gov. Phil] Scott did not seem too keen on the idea of the bill, seemingly brushing it off as too difficult a task. However, in a note to Vermont’s Senate secretary, he wrote that he “[understands] the desire to seek funding to mitigate the effects of climate change that has hurt our state in so many ways,” especially given that Vermont dealt with deadly, climate-caused flooding last year.
Translation: Tax and spend Democrats are so incapable of managing the taxpayer’s wages that it must find scapegoats to help pad a treasury it can’t fill despite the endless parade of new and higher taxes, and Phil is willing to let them trip over this cluster of (you know what’s) because he likes other people’s money too.
If it doesn’t work, he didn’t sign it, and he can always say he couldn’t stop it.
You Can’t Help Loving Other People’s Money
For the record, all flooding is climate-related, as is its absence. Rained out weddings, glorious beach days. Weather. Climate. In the case of Vermont, Its ‘Climate’ has a long history of major floods. Vermont also has a history of building things where it has flooded before for as long as people have been living in Vermont. I wonder if the fossil fuel company lawyers could do something with that when the Green (as in, we need a mountain of someone else’s money) State figures out how much to put at the bottom of the bill they plan to send them.
This is a state that spends thrice as much on education to crank out kids barely half as bright. That same state can’t possibly fix anything (certainly not the weather), no matter how much or whom they charge. Not that this is about that. This is a fishing expedition—legalized robbery. And by claiming the pockets to be picked are Big Oil, they make you think one thing when, in fact, the truth is something else.
S.259 will allow Vermont to “bill fossil fuel companies retroactively for the costs of addressing, avoiding and adapting to the damages that the emissions from their products have caused” between 1995 and 2024, said Heatmap News. But this is a multistep process. First, the Vermont treasurer must assess the total cost of these emissions to determine how much the state is owed.
Don’t you dare say Ex Post Facto or mention Bills of Attainder (both unconstitutional) because Vermont’s legislators love what they love (by which I mean your money). S.259, the “Climate Superfund Act,” launders money to fill the state’s coffers by charging fuel companies for alleged damages caused by alleged climate change (which amounts to whatever the government’s thieves say it is). Oh, look, a storm wrecked some infrastructure that was built where it floods every ten years. Make them Pay!
Climate change is less about climate and more about change. The change in the amount of change in your pocket. The fossil fuel companies won’t be paying for whatever the regulators decide is the cost of “climate change.” That will be borne by every citizen in the state of Vermont, and the Legislature can’t prevent that.
That added cost of doing business in Vermont won’t just trickle down. It will show up in the rising cost of everything that moves in a vehicle fueled by … fuel. All energy costs will spike. Businesses will have to cut staff, pay, and benefits and maybe even close up shop. Even the cost of government will go up.
That Climate Superfund will make everything more expensive (which includes covering the cost of climate change) at a time when, thanks to some Democrats who did something from DC, everything is already more expensive.
What Big Oil Should Do
When I first heard the Vermont State Senate bill passed (and I’ve said this here before), I thought fuel companies should stop doing business in Vermont. The State is, after all, in a huge hurry to get to its all-electric, no-fossil-fuel paradise. Say no today. Don’t wait for the office of charging fossil fuel companies to pay for climate change to send a bill. Give them their green future now. Good and hard, if you take my meaning.
And how long do you think it would take for all hell to break loose? Not long. Sure, Vermonters can drive to New York or Massachusetts to get gasoline—to New Hampshire if they want it and want to save a lot more money—but that’s an impractical solution. The entire economy needs fuel, oil, and gas to run. Without it, the state is at a standstill when the tanks in the ground are empty.
Is that what it will take to get Vermonters to end the madness? To vote for candidates whose primary goal is not to screw them as hard as they can in pursuit of their partisan fantasies?
Maybe. America is in something of the same situation, except that it only takes a few dedicated operatives in a handful of states to screw the entire nation. But that should mean more for activism at the state level.
Fix what you can as soon as possible, and then be vigilant about keeping it that way, especially in Vermont. The path it is on has been spiraling downward for years, and S.259 isn’t going to punish anyone but Vermonters.
| Substack
