This commentary is by Gus Speth of Strafford, whose most recent book is “They Knew: The U.S. Government’s Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis,” and Bill McKibben of Ripton, founder most recently of Third Act.
When it comes to the climate crisis, there’s almost never any virtue in moving slowly — physics is giving us so little time to meet the challenge that each year that passes makes the job harder.
And so we’ve watched a little ruefully in the last few years as Montpelier has failed to seal the deal on new climate legislation.
But delay, in this case, may have its uses. Because in the larger world, the last few years have seen remarkable developments that undercut some of our old ideas about energy.
Above all, it’s no longer true that renewable energy is more expensive. Sometime in the last few years, the cost of power from the wind and sun passed some invisible line — the cheapest way to make electricity on planet earth is now to point a sheet of glass at the sun. (Depending on how you define it, of course, the cheapest power source on earth is efficiency, which is why a strong focus on weatherization makes so much sense.)
This means that Vermont legislators have a remarkable opportunity: to make the state one of the first places to really recognize that we no longer need to be burning stuff. We’ve got no complaint with your wood stove, or the fire under the evaporator during sugar season, or indeed your newly legal joint: Spark it up!
But we’re reaching the point where burning oil and gas — or indeed industrial-scale “biomass” or “biogas” or other “renewable liquid fuels” — no longer makes as much sense.
Our policy should point to a day, not far away, when Vermont’s homes are warmed by heat pumps, its vehicles powered by chargers, its dinners cooked on magnetic induction cooktops. And when as much of that power as possible comes from within our borders.
At the moment, Vermont’s electric supply is not as green as we sometimes think. We rely heavily on falling water in the north woods of Quebec, which comes at real environmental cost (the flow of entire rivers has been reversed). It will be a major part of our power system for a while yet, but we should be thinking hard about how to produce local electrons, just as we’ve worked hard on producing local calories.
Vermont should stop relying on “renewable energy credits” from faraway places and instead take advantage of ever more efficient technology that lets us produce our own. The state’s Public Service Commission has lately turned down applications for 10-acre solar farms solely on aesthetic grounds — that’s irresponsible, a declaration that someone somewhere else should pay the price of our consumption.
And the state’s plan for heating Vermont homes seems to rely quite a bit on “renewable” fuels — say, gas produced in a landfill in New York. One understands why — among other things, there’s an established network of gas and oil dealers in the state, and the easiest thing to do would be to give them a somewhat cleaner product to sell. And most of us have something in our basement that burns such fuels; affordability over the transition period does matter.
But one problem here is that even “green” gas leaks, and methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. A deeper problem is that continuing to rely on fuels whose price booms and busts makes ever less sense when we can deliver the same product — cozy warmth — more efficiently with heat pumps. You no longer need an open flame in your kitchen to cook dinner, or a spark plug to let you move around.
The Forest Service announced last week that it was converting its vehicle fleet to electric vehicles; if they can do it, the rest of us probably can as well. Especially since the newly passed Inflation Reduction Act offers some serious funding for these kind of transitions — another reason that Montpelier’s delay may have turned out to be oddly helpful.
By some accounts, the Inflation Reduction Act provides every American home with an $8,000 “electric bank account,” but accessing that money requires some real work on the part of our leaders. (One item on the list: If we’re going to electrify, we need more electricians).
The great and dire fact of our moment on earth is that the planet is heating fast; our December rains this year reminded us that, unless we get to work, Vermont may someday have a five-month mud season.
But the great and hopeful fact of our moment is that we’re now easily able to imagine bringing to an end our 700,000-year-old human habit of setting stuff on fire. We can rely instead on the fact the good Lord hung a ball of burning gas 93 million miles up in the sky, and we now know how — cheaply — to take full advantage of that gift.
We can catch those rays on solar panels, and when the sun heats parts of the planet, causing the wind to blow, we can catch those breezes in our wind turbines.
Having waited a good long while to get started, Vermont has a chance to move ahead briskly now, indeed to move directly toward a future that keeps carbon in the ground and money close to home. This biennium could set the course for a future we could really be proud of.
