Editor’s note: This commentary is by Rep. Curt McCormack, of Burlington, a Democrat who represents the Chittenden 6-3 district in the Vermont House of Representatives.
Greta Thunberg was best known for starting the school climate strike movement. However her refusal to fly in jet planes has really launched her notoriety and her message. Thank you, Greta. Personal actions are effective beyond one’s personal carbon footprint. They elevate the call for climate action. They demonstrate a willingness to do things differently, better. Nothing has a greater impact on policymakers. Since the learning of catastrophic changes to the climate caused by us has not moved most policymakers or most of the public for that matter, we need more, much more actions like Greta’s.
It is often said that individual action is not near enough to keep our climate from spinning out of control. Government action is required. I agree that government action is absolutely required and sorely lacking. But I disagree that individual action is not required or as important. Indeed, it is the only way to make the government act.
We do not use transit or Amtrak only because it is more convenient or to decrease our personal carbon footprint. We use it to save it, to keep it alive and to expand it. It is extremely difficult to convince legislators to put more money into transit or Amtrak when ridership is decreasing. How can we shift priorities to transit, rail, bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure when their ridership numbers are steady at best and automobile/truck miles traveled are on the rise?
With the growing popularity of SUVs; large pickup trucks as passenger cars; engine idling; single occupancy vehicles; air travel (doubling since 2004); ride-on lawn mowers, jet skis, wearing large internal combustion engines on one’s back to blow leaves around, it appears that we do not make any connection between climate change and our activities. This only reaffirms to policymakers that they do not need to do much more than to talk about climate.
Environmentalists and politicians as always, are loath to take on our indulgent consumer culture in the slightest way. So, they seek “drop-in” solutions. We do not have to change anything other than the fuel that drives the economy and lifestyle of the country that emits three times the CO2 per-capita than the global average.
In Vermont, we think that we are somehow different because we do not experience the automobile traffic the big cities and their suburbs do. But we actually drive more than our urban/suburban brethren and we use transit and trains less than they do including when these transportation modes are available to us.
The “drop-in” solution for the automobile, Vermont’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, is electric vehicles (EVs). Yet we are told that EVs must be as convenient as gasoline cars in terms of mileage range and battery charge time. Even this “drop-in” solution is proving to be difficult to bring about. And even if successful, will do nothing to alleviate sprawl development (more likely to encourage it), traffic congestion (more likely to increase traffic) (in Chittenden County already reminiscent of big cities and their suburbs) or the general danger and unpleasantness of towns full of cars instead of people, bicycles and occasional, on-track, electric transit vehicles.
The climate emergency has been compared to World War II. A few months after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the federal government not only banned the manufacturing of new cars, they rationed tires. Soon they would ban the sale of car tires altogether. And they heavily rationed gasoline. We aren’t going to do anything like that to fight the climate emergency, are we?
What we can do, but only with public support, is to incentivize good things (transit, trains, bicycle/pedestrian infrastructure, building efficiency, town centers) and disincentivize bad things (large fossil-fueled cars and trucks, air travel, sprawl). Small incentives without disincentives, lofty state goals without requirements to meet the goals and endless talk has not done the trick. As a matter of fact, we have increased our greenhouse gas emissions by 16% since 1990.
Most importantly, the primary reason to quickly develop a strong, serious program in Vermont is not to reduce our contribution to climate change. It is to demonstrate to the rest of this country and other resistant countries that it can be done. Our relative size makes us more nimble and our ability to turn our wishes into action, more feasible.
PLEASE, allow your state government, demand of your state government to lead us to a future that will not condemn us. Demonstrate to them that you are all-in by using transit and Amtrak, your bicycle — routinely. Consider joining Greta and the majority of Americans (53%) who never fly. Give politicians the right message. Every step of the way holds benefits for those living today as well, with safer, healthier communities, town centers that operate like they used to only this time without the air and noise pollution. The federal government required efficiency to win WW II. Can we, at least, incentivize it to win the climate war?
