This commentary is by Dan Jones, a sustainability advocate who lives in Montpelier.
As we head into the final stretch of the political primary season, most of the candidates for our Legislature seem to have a common set of programs they are offering.
I am afraid that the course of events over the next two years will force reconsiderations of much of our basic ways of doing business, for which, I fear, our politician wannabes may be unprepared.
Most people I know are aware that our times are out of joint. Major systems seem to be cracking. Many people I talk to are just plain scared. Their old sources of support and opportunity are crumbling. Their economic prospects are dwindling. Their children have a darker future without promise.
The costs of food, fuel and health care are spiraling out of control. Stories of mass shootings in neighboring states make going to the store frightening. Our climate is changing so fast that our food sources and recreation businesses can’t adapt.
The effects of the climate crisis are growing with more hot weather, stressing us, our crops and threatening the winter sports economy. Our road systems are fracturing and our cars degrade in an endless repetition of mud seasons.
We have a housing crisis made worse by rich climate refugees buying up any available properties at prices that our community members cannot even imagine or afford. We cannot even build new housing in Vermont at prices that the local market can bear. Traditional affordable housing projects will be completely inadequate to the needs.
Without affordable housing and decent prospects, our younger workers find they can no longer afford to live here. Our future demands people with trade skills.
Given that we can no longer avoid the long-ignored but now cascading financial, environmental and political crises, it is my suspicion that many previously elected representatives saw the growing crises. That may have been a good part of the reason why so many have decided to exit the Legislature rather than run again.
At one level, this confluence of challenges leaves lots of opportunity for possibly forming a new, more dynamic Legislature. However, the loss of such institutional knowledge of how to get things done creates a substantial challenge for those who will enter the Capitol next January.
This situation troubles me because I am privileged to have a number of people I consider friends running for the state House and Senate. With the coming session, I fear that they will find themselves shouldering challenges not seen in generations.
The coming times will demand a more imaginative and creative approach to public policy than displayed in decades. Vermont’s next House and Senate session will no longer have the leisure to look at the various proposed measures through the comfortable lens of past policies or subsets of national funding priorities.
The assumed polite niceties of Vermont politics will become a profound drag on the speed demanded by too rapid changes in our total environment.
The witches’ brew of climate crisis, economic contraction, political paralysis and international strife are festering in a way that is hard to analyze and impossible to stop. Demands for economic growth are killing the climate and fattening the elite, while leaving the rest of us trapped. Yet we are not even allowed to imagine an economic system that doesn’t depend on constant growth.
In the emerging crises, I fear the best we are going to be able to do is start figuring out how to adapt to a profoundly changed future. However, none of our candidates are even talking about adaptation. Such a focus seems defeatist to those convinced that magical technologies will save our consumer comforts.
So who will be willing to tell the truth of what is about to be demanded of us all, and in quite short order? I am wondering who, of my candidate friends, thinks they can win election by honestly admitting the end to economic growth and thereby challenging constituents to take on the hard work of creating what comes next.
Are there any candidates, locally or nationally, who will be prepared to deliver the bad news to the electorate that their generous and convenient lifestyle of the past 75 years is ending?
The last president who could successfully ask for sacrifice and common purpose was FDR and it was wartime. Jimmy Carter sealed his doom by proposing we should plan on sacrifice in energy because of the 1970s oil crisis and the first prospects of global heating. His honesty was immediately rewarded by defeat from Ronnie Reagan’s Morning Again in America. Most politicians since then — with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders — have therefore learned that telling hard truths to the public does not bring any rewards.
My friends now running for office in the state’s legislative bodies will have no choice but to deal with this growing nest of interconnected emergencies. Coming events are going to hammer our populace and ramp up a level of collective distress that will make all policy decisions deeply painful.
Our ever-growing list of challenges was all viewable in the past, but asking people to sacrifice to change things was never part of the discussion. For years, those who did get elected quickly learned that the hard compromises of the legislative process make any real change impossible. Even when our legislators feel good about what they accomplished for climate and workers, our Republican governor vetoes the bills.
Yes, Phil Scott is the final hurdle to making any meaningful legislative change. Our state cannot make any climate or economic progress with a governor who, while being a nice guy, demonstrates his values by racing in pollution-spewing cars. He will consider only “market-based policies,” perhaps because his fortune came from never meeting a load of oil-oozing asphalt he didn’t love. Yes, a nice guy, but his are not climate-friendly values.
Without some real leadership backbone in the coming Legislature, the state will flounder in the rising tide of emergencies.
Which leaves me with a final set of questions.
What are my candidate friends going to do, if elected, to honestly address that rapidly growing set of interconnected emergencies?
How are they going to help us all find the resources and support that will allow our community a measure of security and well-being while adapting to a difficult future?
Who will provide Vermont the resilience-focused vision and leadership we need?
