For years, as Gov. Phil Scott opposed most of the major climate policies sponsored by Democratic lawmakers, those lawmakers said the governor should present a plan of his own.
This year, in a Statehouse padded with enough Republicans to require Democrats to negotiate across the aisle, Scott is pitching such a plan. His administration recently released a white paper outlining the proposal, and on Wednesday afternoon, the bill, H.289, which aligns with the white paper, was introduced in the House.
“We agree on the need to reduce emissions,” Scott said when announcing the proposal at a Jan. 30 press conference. “But we need to be realistic about what we can do and make sure we’re on a timeline that makes sense, and doesn’t harm Vermonters financially as a result.”
But early reactions to the white paper, which has circulated among lawmakers, environmental groups and lobbyists, indicate that many of the governor’s proposals are not likely to gain support from Democrats.
Members of area environmental organizations, including the Conservation Law Foundation and the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, or VPIRG, have called the proposal a “rollback” on climate policy.
And in a statehouse rally on Tuesday, before the bill had even hit the desks of legislators, climate activists were already calling Scott’s proposed climate omnibus an “ominous” bill.
There, members of the climate advocacy group Third Act linked arms with college students from the University of Vermont student chapter of VPIRG to stand against his proposal.
“The idea that Gov. Scott and the Legislature are considering pulling back Vermont’s clean energy and climate legislation is, to be very blunt, insane and immoral,” Dan Quinlan, 66, a Third Act activist from Burlington, said at the press conference.
Changes to the Global Warming Solutions Act
Scott has long opposed Vermont’s landmark climate law, the Global Warming Solutions Act, which sets deadlines to reduce climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, 2030 and 2050. Lawmakers overrode his veto of the bill in 2020.
Environmentalists, lawmakers and state officials agree that the state currently does not have a plan in place to reduce emissions at a pace that would satisfy the 2030 deadline, and the window to move such a policy forward has become increasingly difficult as the deadline approaches.
A specific measure within the law, called a legal ‘cause of action,’ allows citizens to sue the Agency of Natural Resources if the state isn’t on track to meet its deadlines. The Conservation Law Foundation has already filed a lawsuit challenging the Agency of Natural Resources’ projection that it will meet the 2025 deadline.
The new bill, based on Scott’s proposal and sponsored by Rep. Pattie McCoy, R- Poultney, the House Minority leader, and other House Republicans, would nix the measure that opens the state to citizen lawsuits.
Julie Moore, secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources, who spoke about the governor’s proposal at the Jan. 30 press conference, said the existing measure “slows progress, creates regulatory uncertainty and delays work on the ground.” Meanwhile, climate action advocates have long seen the legal cause of action as a necessary framework to hold the state accountable for emissions reductions.
“The Legislature’s directive and lawsuits against the government are routinely defended by the Vermont Attorney General’s Office,” said Jennifer Rushlow, a senior staff attorney at the Conservation Law Foundation. “These citizen suits are not requiring additional resources in the Attorney General’s Office, as I understand it.”
In addition, the bill would switch the method Vermont uses to count its emissions from a gross framework — which is intended to represent the total human-caused emissions produced in the state — to a net accounting system.
A net accounting system would add to the equation the amount of carbon sequestered in the state through existing carbon sinks, such as forests.
The proposal would require Vermont to reach “net zero” by 2035.
Rushlow said switching the accounting framework “is a great example of trying to put a gloss on climate measures that is really not warranted,” and because many of Vermont’s forests are privately owned and increasingly impacted by climate change, the carbon sinks are “not something that’s entirely reliable.”
Next, the proposal would change the authority, scope and makeup of Vermont’s Climate Council, a 23-member body created by the Global Warming Solutions Act that is charged with creating a statewide plan to reduce emissions. The body published its first plan in 2021, and an updated plan is due in July.
The current law gives the executive branch eight seats on the council, while the Legislature appoints 15. Scott’s proposal would shrink the council to 19 members and give the executive branch 10 seats — a majority. It would also remove the council’s authority to direct the Agency of Natural Resources to make rules by making it advisory.
“We believe there are significant opportunities to better align the work of the council with that of state agencies and make it more sustainable for the volunteer members who have repeatedly expressed concerns about their capacity to fulfill the current mandate,” Moore said in January.
On the other hand, Ben Edgerly Walsh, a lobbyist for VPIRG who works on climate policy, said if the Scott administration is concerned about the council’s broad mandate, “they should propose ways to focus its work, not ways to strip its authority.”
The final proposal related to the Global Warming Solutions Act is a “Climate Action Management Plan,” which the Agency of Natural Resources would publish in Dec. 2026. It would outline “an aggressive-yet- achievable timeline for emissions reductions,” the white paper says, along with evaluating “what is feasible, how much it will cost” and proposing “a long-term funding strategy that maximizes the use of current resources in an effort to avoid new rates, taxes or fees on Vermonters.”
In an interview, Moore said the plan is a necessary supplement to the Climate Action Plan, which is less focused on implementing the strategies it recommends and does not thoroughly consider cost.
But Walsh said the government doesn’t need another plan.
“The idea that the brilliant solution to this is, ‘let’s sit on our hands for 18 months while we roll back climate actions we’ve already taken and plan for another round’ is just preposterous,” he said.
Other changes
Scott’s other proposals in the bill range widely from changes to the state’s electricity portfolio to switching up the way weatherization efforts are funded.
One proposal would sweep millions of dollars from the Electrical Efficiency Charge, which Vermonters pay on their electric bills, for use solely for weatherization. Those funds are currently also used for rebates and incentives that make buildings, appliances and equipment more efficient, which lowers energy costs.
It would also take a portion of the income that Vermont receives from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative — a regional cap and trade program that limits emissions coming from power plants — and redirect it from weatherization toward electric vehicle incentives.
Peter Walke, managing director of Efficiency Vermont, an organization that helps homes and businesses weatherize and become more energy efficient, said in a statement that the proposal “simply moves existing funding around from one energy affordability priority to another” and called it “unserious.”
“To help Vermonters affordably transition to less expensive and cleaner heating, cooling, and transportation options takes a sustained commitment. The Governor’s proposal doesn’t do that,” he said.
While the organization’s programs “benefited from significant federal dollars in recent years,” he said, “we were all told that it was a bridge” to a steadier funding source.
“Vermonters made clear that they want serious solutions to the challenges we face,” he said. “Kicking the can further down the road just makes it that much more unaffordable to solve in the future.”
Rushlow said the proposal was like “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
“This isn’t an additional investment,” she said. “It’s redirecting a third of the state’s total energy efficiency budget and taking it away from programs that reduce greenhouse gas emissions like heat pump programs for residents, commercial lighting programs that drive down costs for businesses, rebates for Vermonters.”
Scott also proposed rebranding the Renewable Energy Standard, a law that requires electric utilities to purchase increasing amounts of their portfolios from renewable sources, to the Clean Energy Standard. The new standard would incorporate nuclear energy.
“Nuclear is carbon free, but Vermont utilities are still required to purchase Renewable Energy Credits (‘RECs’) for this generation creating an additional cost for ratepayers for no additional emissions reduction benefit,” the governor’s white paper states.
Sen. Anne Watson, D/P-Washington, who chairs the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee, said she wonders whether Vermonters “would go for that.”
“We had a long process around closing Vermont Yankee, and I think there is some pretty deep sentiment in Vermont that they’re not interested in nuclear power,” she said, referring to the shuttered nuclear plant in southern Vermont.
In an interview on Feb. 13, Moore said that, so far this session, she has “appreciated more space for dialogue” than there’s been in the last several years, and “a recognition that there’s a need for some compromise in this space.”
Watson said she wants to give the proposal a “fair shake,” but that the measures outlined in the proposal “are not the scale necessary to take us where we need to go in terms of our climate reduction requirements.”
