The Green Police State 
By John McClaughry

On March 19, 2008, Gov. Douglas signed a bipartisan bill to have the Public Service Department spend millions more of our tax dollars to explain to Vermonters that they can save money by practicing energy conservation. With that, one might have thought that the VPIRG-inspired global warming craze had spent its force. Unfortunately one would have been wrong.

The Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee, a hotbed of anti-global warming enthusiasm, has disgorged another bill on the subject. The bill (S.350), initially authored by Senate President pro tem Peter Shumlin, aka the senator from VPIRG, has been shrunken down from its original scope. It nonetheless lays the groundwork for program upon program that, when implemented, will assure Vermont's place at the head of the honor roll of global warming warriors.

As introduced, the bill would have created a climate supergovernment - the "climate cooperative" - to "coordinate statewide activities on climate change and all related energy activities." The supergovernment 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 extremely liberal committee backed off that grand idea for now. As the bill now stands, in place of the supergovernment appears a new "Vermont Resource Trust". Ordinarily a trust holds funds or land interests. This "trust" has no such function. It is apparently to be a taxpayer-funded advocacy group charged with promoting the VPIRG green agenda to the 2009 legislature.

Also gone from the current bill is the tax on SUVs, vans and pickups for not being sufficiently energy efficient, and the Act 250 amendments to make sure nobody develops anything in an inappropriate location. But there is still plenty to worry about in this bill.

Are you ready to compute and register with the state your carbon dioxide emissions? Get ready, because a key feature of the bill requires just that. By January the Agency of Natural Resources is directed to develop rules for emission reporting and verification applicable to every farm, small business, factory, hospital, school, vehicle owner and Grandpa who burns a brush pile after the first snow.

The agency rules will "monitor and eventually enforce compliance with this program." This ominous provision will give thousands of Vermonters their first experience with the coming Green police state.

The bill as reported also created a new "cap and trade" program, stating that "it is crucial to manage Vermont's consumption of fossil fuels for transportation, residential and commercial heating, and industrial processes, so as to maximize the state's contribution to lowering carbon emissions."

Under a cap-and-trade program, the government first establishes, by a rule that no legislator votes on, "a set of annual carbon budgets for emissions associated with transportation, space heating, and industrial processes." Then it distributes "right-to-emit" tickets to every fossil fuel user in the state, by auction, current emission levels, or possibly political influence.

If an emitter overproduces the evil substance, it must pay cash to obtain excess tickets held by those emitters operating under their cap.

This is not just something for electric generating companies to worry about, as under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. This is something that every single farm, small business, factory, hospital, school, and vehicle owner will have to cope with.

Of course the initial rules may apply only to major fossil fuel users, and let off Grandpa and his brush pile. But with the planet (supposedly) facing Al Gore's heat death, how can hyper-Green Vermont for long ignore reckless carbon dioxide production of any sort?

Under pressure from nervous senators, Sen. Ginny Lyons, offered a last-minute amendment to delete her own cap-and-trade section. In it place she offered new language directing the natural resources and transportation agencies and the public service department to adopt rules to do most anything needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This is obviously an attempt to smuggle the Shumlin-Lyons cap-and-trade program back into the bill by hiding it in bureaucratic language.

The bill also contains a host of mandates on state agencies to report next year on how they propose to force an extreme Green makeover on the state. This includes, for example, finding ways to keep homeowners' garbage out of landfills and forcing motorists off the roads and into commuter trains (as if we learned nothing from Howard Dean's failed $28 million Champlain Flyer experiment.)

It's about time Vermonters woke up to the astonishing breadth, depth, and cost of the Shumlin-VPIRG grand Green plan for our state. If fully carried out, the prescription contained in the initial and current versions of S.350 will leave the state a politically correct arcadia for affluent Greenies who want to feel good about themselves. The rest of us will have to move on, if we can.
 

John McClaughry is President of the Ethan Allen Institute