Extreme Green Makeover 
By John McClaughry

Terrified by the supposed horrors of global warming, Vermont's Green legions are geared up to make 2008 the year of the state's Extreme Green Makeover.

That momentous event was to have been set in motion last year, but it suddenly expired with Gov. Jim Douglas's veto of Sen. Peter Shumlin's bill to lay a $25 million tax bill on the state's leading generator of clean electricity to fund a new state entity to go about persuading Vermonters to stop wasting money on heating fuels.

In July the Democratic-controlled House sustained the veto by 13 votes. That caused the ambitious Senator from VPIRG to declare that he would be back in the 2008 session with an even stronger bill. Now it's 2008, and he's back as promised.

Earlier this month the House Natural Resources and Energy Committee, ably chaired by the greenish but realistic Rep. Robert Dostis, brought out its version of an earlier Senate-passed energy conservation bill (S.209). The bill recites the Senate's global disaster mantra that "global climate change is threatening our environment and perhaps ultimately our existence". It then sets forth forty-seven sections of policy changes, including the creation of a non-monopoly energy efficiency program to meet the goals of the vetoed bill.

The bill expands the carbon cap and trade system under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. This is a multistate program where electric ratepayers of the other states will send money to Vermont to reward us for having such a green electrical energy system.

The bill also sets in motion the process for increasing the gross receipts tax on heating fuels, and creating a state public power authority. But all in all, the House version was restrained enough to pass that body on a 136-2 vote.

The Senate has in waiting the new bill Sen. Shumlin promised last July, S.350. Modestly titled the "energy independence and economic prosperity" act, the bill incorporates the entire radical agenda put forth by VPIRG.

The central feature of the Shumlin-VPIRG wish list is the creation of what can only be described as an energy super-government, the "climate collaborative", to "coordinate statewide activities on climate change and all related energy activities."

This unprecedented public corporate body would be controlled by nine "stakeholders" jointly chosen by governor and legislature. It would consist of one public official, two higher education representatives, two "business" representatives (presumably from the Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility lobby), one from "conservation interests" (presumably VPIRG), one from low-income interests, one from "sustainable rural development" (presumably Rural Vermont), and one from Efficiency Vermont. Notably not included: taxpayers.

This super government would supervise a bewildering array of task forces and working groups to produce a host of reports advocating new regulations, controls, mandates, plans, rules, standards, taxes, and subsidies. The bill envisions or imposes:

• strict "smart growth" land use control strategies,
• greenhouse gas emission inventories,
• aggressive implementation of Act 200's planning mandates,
• new Act 250 rules to impose "carbon neutrality" on developments,
• mandates for the protection of "dead and dying wildlife trees",
• doubling (heavily subsidized) passenger rail traffic by 2028,
• getting all single-occupancy vehicles off the highways,
• steeply increased vehicle sales and use taxes and registration fees on low-mpg vehicles,
• energy efficiency standards that must be met before homeowners could sell their houses, and
• biofueled bus tours to visit biofuel producing farms.

This proposal emerged from a lobby group (VPIRG) that strenuously insists that all scientific questions about climate change have been settled, no dissent can be deemed credible, the planet is racing toward Al Gore's heat death, and only desperate wide-ranging big-government "solutions" will be considered!

And how will all this be paid for? In addition to the various taxes levied, the collaborative would create a working group to come up with ways for funding greenhouse gas reduction efforts. The collaborative itself, a veritable Manhattan Project of Green Social Engineering, would apparently be funded through the inexhaustible General Fund.

The far more reasonable House-passed bill contains numerous useful provisions, such as expansion of net metering, passthrough of federal tax incentives, and relaxation of some government-created barriers to energy enterprises. It also has some questionable inclusions, but it has strong bipartisan support, including that of Gov. Douglas.

If Sen. Shumlin and his VPIRG allies now try to load up the House-passed bill with selections from their sweeping Senate bill - especially the unaccountable global warming super government - it may well stimulate a backlash among a lot of average Vermonters. It certainly should.
 

John McClaughry is President of the Ethan Allen Institute