This commentary is by Jim Stiles of St. Albans, a volunteer working with the Energy Action Network’s Weatherization at Scale Coalition subgroup, which is focusing on technical approaches for meeting Vermont’s weatherization goals.
How do we get to Vermont’s best future? The to-do list for achieving this goal is long. Social justice, equality and better health care are all near the top.
However, it is safe to say that if we don’t rise to climate-related challenges, Vermont’s future does not look very good.
Now that the much-anticipated Vermont Climate Action Plan has been released, the process of working with it begins. Fortunately, it’s a good plan. The Vermont Climate Council deserves credit for putting it together on a very tight timeline. It also deserves credit for listening during the public feedback process. The plan is better for it.
Despite its many merits, the plan is imperfect. Many of the problems are small and simple to fix. For example, the climate assessment section provides good, detailed information about things such as the frequency of cold snaps. Unfortunately, it does not address the intensities of those cold snaps, which would help farmers and others in planning their responses to them.
A larger problem with the climate assessment is the fact that it was provided very late in the process of assembling the plan, which means that it could not inform the other work that went into the plan. In the future, an updated assessment should be completed well before the core work of crafting an updated plan is complete.
Small problems like these can be found throughout the document, but should be of no great concern. Every plan, no matter how good, can always be improved. Of greater concern to me is a different kind of issue. It appears that the Vermont Climate Council did a very good job with issues that centralized authorities can effectively address. However, it did less well on issues that require leadership from around the state. This is especially a problem for climate adaptation, which will be mostly local in nature.
In my view, the single most important goal of climate adaptation is to transform every community and every neighborhood throughout Vermont into climate havens — places that will help protect residents from the worst impacts of climate change. To do this, communities across Vermont must figure out how to meet the needs of their residents efficiently and effectively.
One particular perspective — addressing the needs of newborn children, both now and throughout their lives — brings the greatest clarity to what we must do. Since today’s children will have to cope with increasingly severe climate change challenges throughout their lives, it is the job of responsible adults in every community to start to figure out what taking care of their children and giving them good futures means, given the unique challenges their communities face.
This may sound like a tall order. Fortunately, our answers don’t need to be perfect. But we do need to get to work.
Many communities will not solve these big problems without help from the state. However, local leadership will be essential. Fortunately, we have examples to look to from local energy committees. Some local energy committees have tackled especially tough energy and climate issues. Most years, most committees don’t, but all energy committees solve some problems every year. As the most creative and committed energy committees solve tough problems, they create precedents that can then be adapted by other communities.
We should adopt this process for use with climate adaptation. Given how little we understand about adapting to climate change, turning local attention to climate adaptation can help everyone figure out what success in climate change adaptation will look like. Communities’ creative problem-solving can play a large role in creating a great future.
COP26’s failures have made it even clearer that the chances of avoiding very significant climate change are all but nonexistent. We are going to have to live with climate change as its impacts worsen.
To succeed, it is no longer good enough to focus on solving individual problems, which the Climate Action Plan often does. Rather, communities, led by caring, committed people, must undertake the complex transformation required to preserve prosperity in the face of climate adversity. No single community, state agency, or other organization is going to crack this transformation puzzle, but encouraging innovation at every level and sharing our successes, as well as our failures, is a big part of creating good plans.
For starters, making communities highly walkable makes them resilient and efficient. Improving the layout of communities can help house people, especially seniors and others with mobility challenges, close to the services and amenities they need, which is a win for everyone.
Another example is local, soil-healthy agriculture, which can grow better food and deliver it fresh to communities with minimal transportation requirements. The list of opportunities for benefiting from a good climate adaptation process is long.
Just as recent decades have transformed Vermont and our planet, Vermont’s transformation will continue in coming decades. If we are smart about it and work hard, the results can be mostly good. Creating systemic, community-focused climate solutions that help create enduring, sustainable prosperity for everyone will make Vermont better.
