Repealing the Clean Heat Standard
Regressive taxes on the poor must stop!
As Rob Roper recently explained on his Substack:
….sometimes unpopular policies are necessary and politicians should fight for them. This is not the case with the Clean Heat Standard. In December, following the election, the Public Utilities Commission, the entity charged with standing up the law, issued a report stating that the Clean Heat Standard was, and they put it in politically polite terms, “Not well suited for Vermont.” The reasons they cited were that it was too expensive, too complicated, ripe for fraud, and would have a regressive, negative financial impact on lower income Vermonters. In other words, it just plain stinks. They urged the legislature not to move forward with it.
Yet, Vermont’s Democrats love the fantasy of this failed effort more than they love their constituents — especially low-income Vermonters, many of whom struggle to make ends meet. Retirees must tighten their belts while disconnected Progressives keep putting the regressive screws to them. As Rob points out, the Clean Heat Standard has nothing to salvage and will never work. It has made money for those salaried to study it — on the Vermont taxpayer dime — but that is all it will ever achieve. It is a bunch of climate cult hot air:
Vermont taxpayers have spent over $2 million on studies of the Clean Heat Standard. Thousands of Vermonters rose up in opposition to it when you were passing it. You ignored them. The voters gave you a beating over it. The PUC says it won’t work. Even Democrats are on the record saying that the key component of the law, the carbon “credit” tax scheme won’t go forward due to continued public opposition, and the elements of the law that are in effect today have major structural flaws.
The major legislative structural flaw is that bully Dems don’t care who they hurt in their virtue-signaling zeal to “save the world” (with Greta Thunberg) at the expense of the livelihoods and dreams of native Vermonters.
Please join your fellow Vermonters next Wednesday, March 12, at noon in the Cedar Creek Room at the Vermont State House to protest the travesty of this scandalous failure of legislation, and the greater prideful scandal that our Democrat legislators refuse to concede that they have blundered in its creation. The Clean Heat Standard was DOA and it must be repealed in the face of economic realities and the fact that it is patently regressive — a trademark of Vermont “progressives.”
Please spread the word!!
Vermont seems to be a microcosm of self-proclaimed 'liberal' jurisdictions, who impose unscientific policies that hurt their constituents motivated by 'moral superiority.' Vermont still needs to join the club of jurisdictions where doing so leads to electoral loss. One may hope that the initial bewilderment after the result leads to at least some swallowing the bitter pill that they in fact do not have any moral superiority.
We'll be there.