VT Digger recently published an op-ed by a local left-wing environmental lawyer. You wouldn’t know it unless you went looking, but Joslyn L. Wilschek is a Utilities and Environmental lawyer with a law office in Montpelier, and her op-ed is about (drumroll) the environment. It is also blinkered.
Related: John Lee Pettimore: “We Will Destroy the Earth in the Name of “Green Energy”
Wilschek sees the recent flooding as an opportunity to promote cleaner lakes and rivers in Vermont by ditching fossil fuels for some of that net-zero electric grid stuff about which the progs are so hopped up. They’ve got these mandates Vermonters didn’t want but that their Democrat legislature passed anyway.
Getting fossil fuels out of flood zones and replaced by cleaner sources is critical as Vermont rebuilds. The Clean Heat Standard that the Vermont Legislature just passed strives to help Vermont businesses and homes get off dirty fossil fuel heating sources.
The inundation of these fossil fuel-based heating systems provides an opportunity to upgrade to cleaner sources as we rebuild, while also reducing the carbon pollution that contributed to the climate chaos that caused so much damage.
She’s not wrong about the potential for pollution during a flood. Vermont got smacked hard, and everything everywhere creates some risk, including everything you’d do your best to keep away from pets or babies. From cleaning and laundry supplies to your soon-to-be-ruined septic system, major flooding has costs and consequences for people and the local environment. But she chose to focus on her obvious disdain for fossil fuels and the false promise of the people’s glorious Clean Heat Standard.
The one that will off-shore American jobs, US dollars, and – to her point – the environmental pollution that is destroying entire ecosystems and the people who rely on them.
Mostly, brown people, by the way, if anyone thinks that might be racist.
Related: WIRED Magazine Exposes the Social and Environmental Costs of the “Green” Agenda
The Clean Heat standard mandates a switch to all-electric, but there’s nothing clean about any of that.
Many of the raw materials needed are raped from the ground in large open mines that use slave or low-income labor. This happens in third-world countries with no public health or work protections or environmental regulations. Much of the material fabrication or manufacturing is done by human rights violators like China, the world’s number one polluter, and emitter. An enemy nation that is not only being enriched by the Left’s misbegotten obsession with net zero, it has used that money to expand its fossil fuel production and consumption, complete with the rise in emissions these progressives insist we must reduce.
By which they mean you.
Vermonters will pay dearly with rising prices, decreased reliability, lost jobs, and lower living standards, all to ruin someone else’s air and water. A form of Climate and emissions colonialism that harms children and takes “indigenous” lives and livelihoods. That irreparably pollutes waterways, killing fish and wildlife while making long swaths of land unworkable and unlivable.
But since none of that pollution or destruction can be seen from a law office in Montpelier, it is okay to pretend Vermont’s Clean Heat Standard is doing something good instead of wrecking the planet in someone else’s backyard.