VTDigger publishes stories about Vermont environmental issues, including water quality, toxic waste, climate change and biodiversity.
Lawmakers on the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee, which is working on the bill, have said they don’t consider her analysis to be a complete picture, or even a helpful model of the projected costs.
In the long run, the clean heat standard is expected to save Vermonters $6.4 billion and reduce climate emissions 34% by 2030. But this week, Secretary Julie Moore sat before lawmakers to highlight the upfront expenses.
A dispute at a meeting earlier this month laid bare a frustration over equity and inclusion on the council, which plays a key role in strategizing the state’s efforts to combat climate change.
As many as 25 to 30 of the state’s 139 organic dairy farms are at risk of going out of business in the first half of 2023 without “swift and substantial intervention,” a NOFA-VT policy director told lawmakers.
“We’re getting buried in our own trash,” said state Rep. Amy Sheldon, D-Middlebury.
Communities statewide are set to start a series of wastewater projects funded by federal Covid-19 relief money.
The new rules bring Vermont in line with federal standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency, but maintain “the status quo,” environmental groups say. They hoped the state would regulate pesticides as a “method of last resort.”
The 3 to 6 inches of snow in the forecast won’t make a huge dent in the state’s 17-inch snow deficit, but more storms are on the horizon, meteorologists predict.
The project, which would rank among the largest solar arrays in the state, is in the beginning of its process with the Public Utility Commission.
McKibben acknowledges that most of his dire predictions about climate change have come true since he first started writing about it three decades ago. And yet he insists “we are actually at a moment of extraordinary opportunity — the convergence of this big mobilization of people around the world.”
