Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political analyst.
Can little old Vermont do anything meaningful to reduce global warming?
Maybe, but it isn’t easy. To begin with, while little old Vermont is no older (geologically speaking) than the rest of the world, it is very, very little.
Just think of last month’s much-ballyhooed Global Climate Strike. All over the world maybe as many as 6 million people took off from work or school to tell their leaders to stop the world from getting hotter. In Vermont, a few thousand students walked out of their schools and onto the streets.
Say – generously – that it was 5,000 Vermonters. That means Vermont’s participation was less than one-tenth of 1% of the world’s. And Vermont is even a tinier fraction of the world’s land area or population.
Quite a challenge, then, for this infinitesimal sliver to make a meaningful contribution, and so far, it hasn’t figured out how. Consider the climate bills that mostly went nowhere in last year’s legislative session together with a proposal so outlandish that its own advocates probably don’t take it seriously.
The bills were procedural. Set goals. Establish methods. Stop projects that might add greenhouse gas emissions in the future. Possibly all good ideas, but none of them guaranteed to reduce fossil fuel use by a gallon, cubic foot, or ounce.
Contrast the outlandish proposal: ban snowmobiles and all-terrain recreational vehicles.
Get real! The lawmaker who voted for that would lose the next election in at least 90 of the 104 House and 11 of the 13 Senate districts in the state. The ordinary citizen who suggested it in a corner tavern would be risking life and limb.
But think of it not as a serious plan but as a device in a thought experiment. Pass that law and Vermont’s greenhouse gas emissions would decline by perhaps 1,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
A small percentage of the 10 million metric tons the state is emitting. But more than the emissions likely to be saved by the modest weatherization and electric vehicle bills the Legislature passed last year. If there is really a “climate emergency” (as says the Burlington City Council), requiring “immediate solutions” (as says the Global Climate Strike), then how about immediate solutions: forbid single-occupancy auto commutes; outlaw ride-on lawn mowers; ban snowmobiles.
No such legislation has been suggested, much less introduced.
Despite some indications to the contrary, the anti-warming activists have some sense of what is politically achievable.
That’s important because being right about the science is not enough to get bills passed. A certain amount of political shrewdness is needed and not always evident.
The climate change protesters seem, for instance, not to have figured out that they have won the basic argument. Something like three-quarters of the American people now acknowledge that global warming is real and is caused (or at least aggravated) by fossil fuel emissions.
Yes, the remaining dissidents are well-organized, well-financed, and include the president of the United States. But reality has overtaken them. Global warming denial has all the intellectual respectability of evolution denial, and does more damage. Most Americans have tuned it out.
So maybe the climate warriors needn’t keep putting out press releases assailing “oil company billionaires” with the same trite prose they have been using for years. Not that oil companies and some billionaires (others helped finance the climate strike) don’t deserve criticism. But the political challenge facing the climate movement is more nuanced than it was a year or two ago. Its leaders might consider switching to plain English.
As is true of all political movements, there are disagreements within this one, both globally and locally. Some climate warriors wonder whether they should reconsider their opposition to nuclear power, which creates electricity without emitting greenhouse gasses.
In Vermont, some want to ignore emissions caused by electricity consumption and concentrate on auto and heating fuel use which produce more than 70% of the state’s emissions. Others disagree.
And like all political movements, this one has to deal with the impolitic remarks of its leaders. When Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who captivated many (and annoyed some) assailed her elders for talking about “fairy tales of eternal economic growth,” she inspired supporters but provided ammunition to their opponents.
People like economic growth. Just because most Americans believe that something should be done about global warming doesn‘t mean they’re going to approve every proposed remedy. They do not, for instance, approve of a carbon tax and they are not going to approve slower (much less no) economic growth.
Happily, they don’t have to. Whatever Thunberg may have meant, there’s precious little economic evidence showing that people have to stop getting richer in order to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions.
But they may have to make other adjustments. Complaints from the political right that cutting emissions will mean the end of meat-eating need not be taken seriously. But science does indicate that over the next few decades America’s agricultural system has to cut back on its emissions, meaning it likely has to cut back on producing meat, milk, and perhaps eggs.
So while no one need cut out hamburgers today, everyone’s great-grandchildren are probably going to be eating fewer of them.
One question for the climate campaigners, then, is just how candid they should be here. Candor is preferable; would-be deceivers usually get caught deceiving and thereby lose support. But it is possible to be both candid and astute.
Meanwhile, Vermont climate activists have an attainable goal: passage of bills (H.462, S.173) to transform emission reduction goals into requirements. The argument that this would be effective is a strong one: it works. In the states that have passed such laws, emissions have gone down, while they have gone up in Vermont, and the decline has not imposed any perceptible fiscal burden on those states.
Convincing Vermont’s lawmakers and the voters who choose them that this is a good idea shouldn’t be too hard. Let’s see if the climate campaigners can do it. They might start by using plain English.
