Dear Governor, Let’s plan for the future. Sincerely, Rep. Roberts
April 28, .2023
Dear friends,
It's here. The "toxic rhetoric" of our politics that we all complain about has arrived in Montpelier, and my inbox.
The House and Senate passed a bill, S.5 - The Affordable Heat Act, with my support (see “Yes” to a Clean Heat future).
One of the reasons the bill had my support is that it does not change anything for Vermonters without action by the Vermont Legislature in 2025 or later.
S.5 asks the Public Utility Commission (PUC) to write a set of rules.
S.5 specifically prohibits the Commission to enact those rules. It says that they can only be enacted by the General Assembly, a.k.a. the Legislature.
It says "The Commission shall not file the final proposed rules with the Secretary of State until specific authorization is enacted by the General Assembly to do so."
It says this right under "Final Rules."
The PUC will write the Clean Heat Standard and send it to the Legislature in 2025. The Legislature can then:
do nothing;
pass a bill to make the Clean Heat Standard law;
or do something else, like rewrite it.
In the course of undertaking such an act, the House and Senate would bring a bill through the usual process, including committee work and floor debate. The Governor would have to sign it.
Governor Scott previously asked the Legislature to put in such a "checkback" provision into the Clean Heat Standard. We did, and now he still won't sign.
Why not? He's calling the choices above "confusing," "misleading," and "irresponsible."
I don't really how how to respond to that. The Governor's statement doesn't say whether he himself finds S.5 confusing. He puts that criticism in the mouths of other people, vaguely, without naming any specifics that the Legislature could fix about the bill.
Without any substance to go on, I can only guess at what Scott finds confusing. Here's what I see.
S.5 has legalese, yes. But I don't see the confusion. It's very specific. "The Commission shall not."
S.5 has its complexities, yes. I'm concerned it will become too complex to be effective.
But let's not be confused about some basic facts.
Planet Earth has 52 years of natural gas left, assuming optimistic extraction rates and current consumption levels. Oil? 47 years left.
I don't say this out of doom and gloom. We've all heard these warnings before, and the end isn't here yet.
I say this because I’m concerned that Vermont’s fourth-term Governor has made no move to plan for how to heat our houses when the fossil fuels run out.
How will we know they are running out?
One thing is that the price will go up and up and up.
Another thing is that we will compromise our environmental practices to try to compensate, as we have already done with fracking poisoning our drinking water and razing Alberta's forests for tar sands.
We’ll need more than heat pumps to save us, of course. They're not yet a drop-in replacement for oil furnaces. Weatherization will help but you still need an energy source. What will it be? Biofuels? Solar?
We don't know.
The reasons we don't know are:
The future is evolving fast.
These are hard questions.
And we don't have a plan.
Let's make a plan. That's what S.5 would do. It would develop a framework to move Vermont forward.
Once the plan is written, the Legislature and the Governor in 2025, or anytime thereafter, can evaluate that plan and decide whether or not to put it or some part of it into place.
***
As expected, I got some correspondence critical of my S.5 vote.
One resident who wrote the other day to tell me, "You libtards are a waste of space."
Dang. Doing my best to cast my vote for today's Vermonters and future generations wasn't enough for them.
But I didn't feel too bad, especially since they softened it by adding, "Democratics are cancer and so are you."
Fact check -- true. I am a Cancer, on the cusp of Leo.
However, the majority of email I received was positive. One Whitingham resident with whom I had spoken with at the town hall meeting wrote, "After reading your very thorough reasoning for voting for S.5, the Affordable Heat Act, I am smiling and feeling positive about our future. I wish life could be different and we could all go on as we always have, but there are too many warnings. We all have to do our part in saving our Earth and our democracy. This is a good time to really begin this journey in Vermont."
As I stated earlier, this was a hard vote, with imperfect choices. Even with as much work as the Legislature did on S.5, everyone has something about it they would change.
That's why writing it as a two-year study seems like a good idea -- and not at all confusing.
"Irresponsible"? If we can foresee such a drastic change in energy use in our children's lifetimes and we're not planning for it -- I could call that being irresponsible. I hope Phil Scott will change his mind before using his veto pen.
Happy spring!
Warm regards,
Rep. Tristan Roberts