Editor’s note: David Moats, an author and journalist who lives in Salisbury, is a regular columnist for VTDigger. He is editorial page editor emeritus of the Rutland Herald, where he won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials on Vermont’s civil union law.
Gov. Phil Scott hit all the right notes to achieve the kind of feel-good State of the State address that is his specialty. He described the challenges facing the state with optimism, not gloom. He singled out heroes from the community and veterans of World War II, saying they are what makes us strong. He criticized polarization and partisanship.
But not everybody was feeling good. Early in his speech 16 protesters interrupted with chants warning of “climate collapse” and its dire consequences. Because Scott is good-natured and understands the importance of hearing from everyone, he let the protesters go on. A legislative recess lasting 20 minutes was needed to let them repeat their chants several times before police officers finally led them away. Legislators applauded Scott’s forbearance, and their own.
If legislators and onlookers were annoyed by the interruption, they didn’t show it. Instead they smiled and showed that they too could be good-natured. They too understood the obligations of the First Amendment. Scott eventually had to act, allowing police to remove the protesters, because part of being non-polarized is to allow both sides a hearing. And the protesters were not in a listening mood.
Scott’s speech, when he got to it, showed the same pragmatic, non-ideological predilections that have always characterized his politics. He emphasized that in addressing our challenges, including climate change, he will not heap new burdens on taxpayers, who are already overburdened. The obvious reading of that position is: no carbon tax. He outlined several ambitious goals, notably universal after-school programming for kids. He didn’t say how he would pay for it.
He also alluded to a new plan to attack local government. It is a plan, not yet spelled out in detail, to eliminate district environmental commissions, which administer Act 250. It has become received wisdom among some Republicans and Democrats that centralizing government saves money, which was behind the attack on local schools now under way. Streamlining Act 250 has long been the battle cry of Republicans who want to free business of burdensome environmental controls, but it’s not clear why eliminating local participation in the Act 250 process will help anyone.
Scott views the day’s challenges through the lens of what he calls a “demographic crisis” — the aging of the population, the dwindling of the labor force, and the economic disparities among the regions of the state. This crisis is all too real, but there is another lens through which the day’s challenges can be viewed: the economic inequality that robs state government of the capacity for addressing the state’s needs because preferential treatment goes to the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
Scott’s brand of political forbearance extends not just to young protesters who fear for the planet’s future. It extends to Democrats, whose ambitious plans to address climate change or economic inequality tend to get the same kind of genial brush-off he gave the protesters on Thursday. Scott and his supporters, therefore, can indulge the same self-congratulatory smiles toward the Democrats as they did toward the protesters because, after all, they are uniquely in possession of common sense.
But who is to say the protesters themselves do not have common sense far exceeding that of anyone else? How is it common sense to look at the inferno of Australia during this southern summer and do anything but mount a global, and local, campaign exceeding anything short of a war footing? “We are on a straight course to starvation,” the protesters shouted. “Climate change destroys the economy,” they chanted. “Everyone must tell the truth.” They noted the climate refugees who are already here among us, working on our farms, and they called out for “migrant justice.”
The interruption of normal business by means of peaceful protest is not just an instance of youthful radicalism. It is an essential tactic and will become more prevalent in the near future. It extends to the campaign for divestment of oil stocks and the resistance to new fossil fuel infrastructure and development. Everyone will have to get used to continuing political unrest because the climate crisis is not going away.
There were ironies in what the protesters were saying. “We demand a people’s assembly,” they said, shouting their demands at the Vermont General Assembly, which is as close to a people’s assembly as most constituencies are likely to achieve. The Legislature includes recalcitrant conservatives who would prefer doing nothing about climate change, but a true “people’s assembly” will never be an assembly of like-minded people. That’s because the people are not like-minded, as much as we would like everyone to see the need right now for radical climate action.
The nature of the challenge ahead — not just for the General Assembly of Vermont, but for all of humanity — can be seen today in Australia. Even as the continent experiences historic wildfires, consuming vast tracts of land, destroying communities, killing millions of animals, disrupting civilized life, the conservative government is seeking to avoid responsibility or to take climate change seriously. There are coal interests to be considered, after all.
It is clear that saving the planet will require a vast, global fight, with civil resistance far exceeding the interruption caused by 16 protesters in Montpelier. The economic powers that profit off of fossil fuels have made it clear over the decades that they will sacrifice the planet for the sake of their profits.
People were feeling good in Montpelier on Thursday in part because they have a governor who is the opposite of the president of the United States. Scott is respectful, modest and conscientious. But those qualities alone will not be enough in the era of Australian wildfires, Parisian heat waves, rising seas and floods like those of Irene, Sandy, and the unending parade of storms that batter the eastern United States every year. As the protesters insisted: “There is a climate crisis right now.” Were people really listening?
