Everything that can go wrong in environmental standards, will go wrong.
2023-05-09
Dear friend,
It hasn't been that long since we invented laws.
By most accounts, humans have been around in some form for hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Laws as we know them started were first found in ancient Egypt about 5,000 years ago.
Our laws and our legal system are broken in so many ways. But viewed from the span of history, we haven't had enough time to get them right.
One of the paradoxes of laws is that they exist for people that don't want them.
They tend to make things harder for the people who were already doing the right thing. People doing the wrong thing often find a way to do it anyway.
In the spirit of improving our laws a little bit at a time, I'll take this moment to applaud Phil Scott for signing S.3, An act relating to prohibiting paramilitary training camps.
S.3 prohibits a person from teaching others to use or make firearms or explosives capable of causing injury or death, or teach techniques that could cause injury or death, if the person knows or should know that the activity “is intended to be used in or in furtherance of a civil disorder.”
Commenting on the bill, Scott praised the work of the Legislature in “effectively balancing civil liberty considerations and public safety concerns.”
"Kumbaya" was sung. Then, in a first for Vermont history, Gov. Scott then took back his veto of S.5, the Affordable Heat Act. In a statement, Scott said, "Thank you, Rep. Roberts, for your fact-check of my statements on S.5. I also studied the legal documents studied in the Energy & Environment committee, and I see that my questions about the legality of the check-back have been clearly answered. Since it's true that the Legislature will have to pass a bill to enact the Clean Heat Standard in the future, I see no reason not to sign S.5 and get on developing an off-ramp for heating with fossil fuels."
It's not April 1st, but dad jokes don't take a day off. That last paragraph was a view of an alternate universe.
In fact, Scott's veto last week, an important "check and balance" of our three-pronged government, is going to be checked-and-balanced by the Legislature in the form of an override vote this week.
I voted "Yes" for S.5, but I haven't been shy about poking holes in it over the last several months. (See “Yes” to a Clean Heat future.)
My professional background in the sustainability industry leads me to be wary of any environmental law from the drop. I've seen too many steps toward "environmental progress" lead to regression to be optimistic. (The more familiar you are with a topic, probably the more likely you are to find fault with laws on that topic -- a corollary of the The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.)
For example, some readers will remember when low-flush toilets arrived in the 1990s. Five-gallon-per-flush toilets were retrofit with 1.6-gpf mechanisms. The only problem was that design of the toilet itself wasn’t altered at first. What used to work in one flush took two, three, four, five flushes.
The good news is that humans keep innovating. Our family is happy with our dual-flush, 1.6-gpf toilet.
For example, some readers will remember when low-flush toilets arrived in the 1990s. Five-gallon-per-flush toilets were retrofit with 1.6-gpf mechanisms. The only problem was that design of the toilet itself wasn’t altered at first. What used to work in one flush took two, three, four, five flushes.
The good news is that humans keep innovating. Our family is happy with our dual-flush, 1.6-gpf toilet.
(This is not our toilet.)
But people have long memories, and watching your feces circle the drain again and again while wasting water with a flawed design is the kind of thing that can turn a person toward skepticism about environmental initiatives.
In evaluating the Clean Heat Standard, I'll be applying my years of experience in the green building industry with the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED Rating System, the most successful environmental standard to emerge this century.
By incentivizing buildings to pursue green and healthy strategies, LEED has had a massive beneficial impact in improving the quality of our homes, offices, hospitals, schools, and more. Among other things, LEED has helped move the commercial construction market to increase fresh-air ventilation rates and availability of natural daylight in new construction and renovations. During COVID, measures like this saved lives.
LEED has also incentivized stuff that doesn’t make sense. In early versions, a project could earn a LEED point by installing low-VOC carpeting, and a point for installing bamboo flooring, and another LEED point for installing sustainably sourced wood flooring.
One of the results was a shift in the entire flooring market toward healthier, greener options. Many standard flooring options at Home Depot now meet LEED standards.
Another result of those early LEED requirements was that some projects installed flooring they didn't need, just to earn all those points.
Every incentive for good behavior will always also incentivize the opposite behavior, in some shape or form.
Consider it a corollary to Murphy's Law (“Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”)
To give another example, increasing tipping fees at the landfill could in theory more fully account for costs of disposal. But it can also lead to more backyard burning or roadside dumping as people being people, are always looking for the cheapest alternative to something they aren't intrinsically motivated to do.
Should we throw up our hands and not have any environmental standards?
I don’t see it as a serious option. Environmental laws often have issues, but they have made things better. Gov. Deane Davis, who also signed Act 250 into law (see Acronym bills come HOME), was also the conservative Republican who presided over Vermont’s first Green Up Day on April 18, 1970. Prior to that, roadsides were carpeted with trash in the spring. For regular Vermonters to go out on the first Saturday in May and put it all in the landfill is a step forward.
Republican Gov. Deane Davis (left portrait), outside the Governor's State House office.
Today, the state has one operating landfill that is set to fill up in the next couple of decades. What are we going to do about that? There isn't a plan. We're also depleting nonrenewable resources to make all this stuff. We need to find more and better ways to keep materials in a "circular economy."
How? I don't know. Recycling is hard. Our current redemption center system is imperfect, but it does a lot of good. Can we make it better? I say and voted "Yes" to help pass H.158, An act relating to the beverage container redemption system. The Bottle Bill II won't be perfect but it will help improve our recycling infrastructure and improve the quality of material in our recycling stream, which can in turn lead to stronger markets for recycled feedstocks.
We don't yet have the environmental laws and programs that we need to face and become resilient to the next 30 years of climate change on Earth. I'm certain that we'll look back on S.5 two years from now and decide that it was imperfect. But it will be our next step in building those tools.
I say, let's get on with it.
***
Thank you for your emails, calls, and conversations on Thursday's S.5 veto override vote. (The Senate just voted 20–10 to override.) I wrote this email so you know how I'm thinking of it at this point in the week.
What are your thoughts on the last 5,000 years of history in law?
We're not going to agree on every vote. Some folks reading this let me know regularly how completely they disagree with how I think.
I'd prefer to not disagree with my neighbors on important issues. Seeing as we can't get around that, I feel I owe it to you to share how I'm thinking about things and to demonstrate how I've considered your thoughts.
How am I doing?
And how are you doing? I can't wait to be done up in Montpelier this Friday and get to be home more. Email me if you want to meet up or have a phone call after this week.