A throwaway line during a presentation on Vermont’s Climate Change agenda, how much it costs and how much money we’ll have for it in the future, stole the show this week. The Agency of Natural Resources (ANR) was giving an overview of the OVER HALF A BILLION DOLLARS a year Vermonters spend on climate change programs – where the money comes from and where the money goes – when Rep. Dara Torre (D-Moretown) asked a good question about fuel tax revenues.
She noticed that a chart projecting into the future the amount of money we expect to raise from the excise tax on fossil heating fuels remained steady. This surprised her as the tax is set at two cents per gallon, which means that if the amount we expect to raise isn’t going down the amount of oil, propane, kerosene, etc. being burned to heat our homes isn’t expected to go down either – despite spending OVER HALF A BILLION DOLLARS a year on climate change programs, most of which is supposed to be reducing our dependence on fossil fuels via electrification.
Melissa Bailey, Director of the State Office of Energy, responded to Torre’s question with a stop-the-presses admission, “We’re not seeing a huge impact on fuel sales right now due to electrification. We can talk more about electrification and heat pumps. The department is undertaking a study of heat pump usage right now, and it’s really showing that folks are not offsetting the portion of their heating fuel that we would anticipate.” But the presses did not stop. Nor did this revelation spark any curious discussion amongst the lawmakers. They just moved along. Nothing to see here!
But this is – or should be – a big deal. A bright red waving flag.
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Getting people to install cold climate heat pumps and water heaters – by taking millions of dollars from other Vermonters to subsidize purchase and installation of these things — is arguably the number one policy prescription by our legislature to cut fossil fuel use in the home heating sector. This illustrates clearly that it isn’t working.
ANR shared another chart showing that since 2014 Vermonters have subsidized roughly 2000 weatherization projects alone to the tune of $4,000 to $12,000 apiece. With federal funds we are now spending nearly $50 million a year on weatherization. And it isn’t working lower our fossil fuel use in the home heating sector either.
In fact, Bailey said somewhat ironically the only thing that might lead less burning of fossil heating fuels is global warming itself, “A warmer winter means we sell less heating fuel, and the tax revenue would go down correspondingly.” Given all the snow we’ve got this April, this sounds like a pretty solid plan to me.
But in all seriousness, this was a key moment missed (or intentionally ignored) because the reason behind ANR’s presentation was in hopes of replacing lost federal funding for programs such as weatherization and electric vehicle subsidies with state-funded revenue sources. The follow up question to Torre’s question should have been, “If all the money we’ve spent on these programs has not done anything to reduce fossil fuel use in the home heating sector, and if that is the objective of the programs, why should we continue to fund them at all?
The problem is that the majority party has bought into the notions that A) an energy transition away from fossil fuels to electricity “is happening” (it’s not), and B) they have the power make it happen through legislation (they can’t, and if it were “happening” for real they wouldn’t need to do anything to make it happen anyway. Boneheads!)
To counter this fallacy, I’ll refer folks to this excellent article by Mark Mills, We’ll Never Have an Energy Transition. “Indeed,” he writes, “the facts show that no energy transition of any kind has ever occurred in history (with one minor exception, which we’ll get to).”
Humanity has used the same six primary energy sources for millennia. In reductionist terms, these are: grains, animal fats, wood, water, wind, and fossil fuels. The world today uses more of all of these categories than ever before.
Of course, we have seen reductions in the share of energy supplied by these sources, but that’s not what the transitionists mean….
[T]he world obviously uses far more coal, oil, and natural gas than at any time in history. Indeed, the world today uses more of every kind of energy deployed since the dawn of civilization (with the notable exceptions of whale oil).
There’s never been an energy transition.
Indeed, another chart in ANR’s presentation showed over the same period fossil fuel heating demand remained constant electricity demand rising. So, it would appear all our spending here is accomplishing is increasing electricity use, and, since no energy source is without its drawbacks and impacts, increasing pollution, not reducing it. And paying big time for the privilege.
