Editor’s note: This commentary is by Shayne Spence, a 26-year-old Republican campaign operative and former staffer for the Ethan Allen Institute, where he focused on education, energy, and labor issues. He lives in Johnson.
As a young progressive Republican, my party’s lack of a position on climate and energy issues has long been a major concern of mine. After a long time considering the science on all sides of this important issue, it is clear to me that our climate is changing, and that human activity has exacerbated certain natural trends to increase global temperatures. These increases have contributed to more extreme weather, leading to higher amounts of damage and displacement of many in our own country and others. This impacts many other aspects of our society, from immigration to the degradation of our infrastructure, and Republicans have long failed to offer any solutions on this incredibly important front. I want to be clear — I am a Republican who will push for big changes to protect our planet for future generations. However, the same lazy thinking of the past is not going to solve our climate crisis.
This outdated thinking is on display with the recent batch of “climate solutions” being proposed and pushed on us by the Democratic supermajority. As always, one of the ideas being put forward is a carbon tax, which would hit low-income Vermonters at the gas pump and in their home heating bill. This proposal has been beaten back time after time, so now, in an effort to defer responsibility for this highway robbery, the supermajority is seeking to implement this through a back door, by having Vermont join an interstate compact called the Transportation and Climate Initiative, or TCI. Adopting the TCI would allow our legislators — and the big-money special interests that have funded their campaigns and the TCI — to accomplish their goal of setting an arbitrary price on carbon emissions, all while giving them a brand new source of other people’s money to pay some of those big money special interests back.
However, one bill, the Vermont Global Warming Solutions Act, goes even further along this path. The special interests who have bought our supermajority are now pushing to have their competition criminalized in Vermont, by imposing a ban on all new fossil fuel infrastructure. This push ignores, of course, the undeniable fact that liquefied natural gas (LNG) availability is the single largest factor in our nation’s recent reductions in carbon emission growth. (It turns out, using energy sources we can generate here in the U.S. leads to fewer emissions from transportation. Who knew?) By banning new LNG infrastructure, the Legislature would cut Vermont’s carbon mitigation efforts off at the knees, as those folks who rely on LNG would be forced to switch to other, dirtier methods of keeping the lights and heat on. Just because the Legislature has the ability to cut off the supply, does not mean demand will disappear along with it. An Economics 101 course teaches first-year college students about supply and demand, so why our Legislature is ignoring that immutable economic principle is beyond me.
It is this ignorance that is at the heart of the intellectual laziness being demonstrated by our Democratic supermajority. If you conveniently look past these economic laws, it is easy to imagine why you might think that simply creating new taxes or implementing a ban would be the solution to all our climate woes. The issue is, history tells us that is not the case. We need only look to Europe for the data on this issue, and the data does not look good for those who support a carbon tax.
In a VTDigger op-ed from November of 2017, Skyler Bailey notes, “The German carbon tax took full effect in 2003, and is claimed to have caused a 7.5 percent decrease in per capita greenhouse gas emissions in the 10 years after its implementation. Belying that achievement is the fact that Germany experienced a 21.2 percent decrease during the decade prior to the implementation of the tax. The same pattern holds true for other “success” stories. The emissions of the United Kingdom, Ireland and France decreased faster before the implementation of their carbon taxes than after. Norway and Iceland saw no noticeable change following the implementation of their carbon pricing initiatives, and Latvia and Estonia have had rising emissions since the passage of carbon taxes.”
In the same piece, Bailey points out that other European nations without a carbon tax have actually had greater success in reducing their carbon emissions. From the op-ed: “The Netherlands began pricing carbon in 1990, and during the following 23 years, per capita emissions decreased by 15.9 percent. This would be quite the achievement were it not for the fact that neighboring Belgium never passed a carbon tax, and during the same period saw emissions decrease 32.9 percent. Slovenia instituted a carbon tax in 1996 and saw a 2.3 percent decrease in emissions in the following 17 years. Slovakia had no tax and saw a 20.6 percent decrease during that time. Since 1990, European countries without carbon taxes have seen per capita greenhouse gas emissions decrease 37.5 percent faster than those countries with carbon taxes. And since 2005, non-carbon taxing countries’ emissions have fallen almost twice as fast. Looking only at the numbers, carbon taxes appear to cut a country’s ability to decrease emissions in half.”
So it is clear to anybody willing to look at the data that a carbon tax is not an effective method of reducing carbon emissions. Not to mention, given that Vermont’s emissions are already very low relative to our neighboring states, such a policy would have much less to gain from implementation here than it would in, say, New York. But to truly put Vermont’s low emissions in context, we must compare our total emissions to the amount of carbon we are able to sequester as a state, due to our forests and farmland. According to our state Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation, Vermont’s forests sequester nearly 500 million metric tons of CO2, and an additional 700 million metric tons are sequestered underground and in Vermont’s soil. This, compared to Vermont’s approximately 9 million metric tons of annual CO2 emissions, make Vermont a net carbon sink, and it isn’t even close. In which case, the question must be, why do Vermonters deserve to be punished with a carbon tax for the emissions of other states? Other countries have already demonstrated for us that a carbon tax would be an ineffective way of solving the problem, so why not try to solve it the Vermont way?
In this case, “the Vermont way” means leaning into something we already do very well, which is sequestering carbon in our forests and farmland. Over the next decade, California plans to spend $2.2 billion on carbon sequestration credits, paying others to undo the damage done by California’s obscene emission output. While Vermont is a carbon sink, California emits much more carbon than its forests can sequester, and California law requires large polluters to pay others to offset their carbon output. I propose that we set up a state authority to be a liaison between California’s sequestration markets and the farmers, rural land trusts, and municipal governments who have the ability to engage with that market, and direct some of that $2.2 billion to Vermonters. In a time when Vermont’s farmers are struggling with low milk prices and a trade war that impacts their bottom line, we could literally be paying them to plant trees, not to mention the sequestration potential available in newly-legal hemp crops. And we could be doing this, helping our farmers and helping the environment, without asking for a single penny more from Vermont taxpayers.
It’s this type of creative thinking, whether in the public policy arena or in the technology sector, that is going to help us solve the very real issues we face with climate change. Whether it is finding ways to mitigate our carbon emissions, developing new energy generation and storage methods, or making footprint reduction more affordable for low-income folks who rely on fossil fuels in their daily lives, there is a lot of work we must do to face this challenge. However, the same antiquated ways of dealing with issues (which got us here in the first place) are not going to move us forward. It is going to take new ways of thinking, and quite possibly some fresh blood and new perspectives in our Legislature to come up with solutions that will actually work. One thing is clear to this Republican — we must come up with those solutions soon, or it will be too late for us to prevent many of the most catastrophic impacts of climate change. I look forward to the discussion of this issue coming up in this legislative session and I hope the Legislature is willing to take a new approach, otherwise I fear nothing will get done, yet again.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Shayne Spence: Climate crisis needs innovative approach.
