I'm fighting to protect what I love about Vermont for generations to come, and I know most Vermonters want the same thing. Photo: EcoPhotography.
When you hear “extreme weather,” what do you think of?
If you’re a Vermonter like me, maybe it’s increasingly frequent floods submerging basements. Or a favorite restaurant going out of business because rebuilding from the Great Flood of 2023 was just too expensive. Or heat waves that make your brain too hot to think straight.
For me personally, I can’t help but think about my kids. I WANT them to have cherished memories of Vermont’s idyllic seasonal landscapes. But will they? Or will it be winters of brown slush, springs marked by floods, and summers of clogged air from wildfires?
That’s why I spoke to two Vermont Climate Council Subcommittees today.
A changing world, a shifting Vermont – this is all part of our story now.
For our own sake, Vermont must be a part of global efforts to reduce carbon pollution fueling extreme weather. In fact, we have a state law that tasks our decision-makers with passing policies to cut that pollution. A law that ensures we won’t get left behind as the rest of the world upgrades to modern, clean technologies that are better for us and the planet.
But the law doesn’t mean much if our government doesn’t implement it.
According to that law, by now, the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources should have taken stock of whether it’s doing enough to reduce carbon pollution in the state. Instead, it relied on thumb-on-the-scale accounting to say the state is “generally on track” to meet the pollution limits laid out in our state law.
So, CLF hired our own expert to calculate how the state is actually doing. Our expert found that the state’s prediction of 2024 pollution levels is off by approximately 300,000 metric tons of climate-damaging pollution – the same as driving about 785 million miles during the year. Right now, we’re flying a plane on a crash course toward a mountain, with the pilots telling us we’ll clear it no problem.
It’s alarming that the Agency has spent the last year telling everyone that we’re on track.
Adopting policies to curb carbon emissions is hard work. But we can’t afford to waste time putting our feet up because the Agency claims we don’t need to do that hard work. Vermonters deserve the most accurate forecast of the future, even if that’s a daunting view from the cockpit. Because we can roll up our sleeves and work together when that view is, frankly, scary. I’ve seen us do just that when neighbors and communities came together to help each other survive the devastation of Tropical Storm Irene or the flooding in 2023 and 2024.
We can’t allow Vermont leaders to cut corners. Not when those corners mean sacrificing our way of life and opportunities for future Vermonters.
