The issue missing from this year's campaign trail

It is a month and a day until November's general election and in Vermont, the debate centers around the issue of affordability [again], which is no surprise given this year's huge jump in people's property taxes and health insurance premiums, which have been stacked on top of the economy's lengthy battle with inflation. Taxpayers are looking for a break, or, at the very least, a pause in ever-increasing costs. What they will not accept is any legislative initiative to slap another tax on Vermonters' everyday living expenses.

But that's what's likely to happen and the reason why is not part of most political campaigns. The issue is the Clean Heat Standard, a law passed in 2023 to reduce emissions from the state's thermal sector. The law required the Vermont Public Utility Commission [PUC] to design and implement ways to achieve the desired reductions. The Legislature is required to review those recommendations and vote next year on whether to proceed.

On Tuesday, the PUC released a status report full of red flags. A key paragraph in the report states: "The Clean Heat Standard as currently conceived requires substantial additional costs and regulatory complexity above the funding needed to accomplish Vermont's greenhouse gas emission reduction goals. For example, the Clean Heat Standard would require establishing a credit marketplace managed by what is likely to be a costly credit platform, the potential for fraud and market manipulation, the appointment of new or varied default delivery agents with administrative costs of their own, and the participation and regulatory engagement of hundreds of fuel dealers and other actors — e.g., companies and individuals that install clean heat measures — not currently or historically regulated by the Commission."

The PUC report concludes: "Our work over the past year and a half on the Clean Heat Standard demonstrates that it does not make sense for Vermont, as a lone small state, to develop a clean heat credit market and the associated clean heat credit trading system to register, sell, transfer, and trade credits."

What the PUC says it will do is to search for an alternative and king among them is a "thermal energy benefit charge on the sale of fuel oil, propane and kerosene."

In other words, a carbon tax on home heating fuels.

Legislators are aware of this, after all, they put the law and its requirements in place. When the session convenes in January, how they proceed will be front and center. Which is why the issue should be front and center this campaign season. To meet the emission standards would require a tax to raise billions of dollars. So how much? Who would pay? For how long? How would it be structured to be less regressive? Or would it? What would be the impact on Vermonters already struggling with rising costs?

It is also important to talk about how the Clean Heat Standard coincides with the Global Warming Solutions Act, a law passed in 2020 that creates legally binding emission reduction standards. By 2025 we are required to have emission levels 26 percent below 2005 levels and by 2030, they are to be 80 percent below 1990 levels.

That's going to be virtually impossible without placing undue hardship on Vermonters. What the Legislature is doing is designing policy to meet a deadline when it should be designing policy to achieve the success necessary to reduce emission standards in a timely and affordable manner.

Thus, the thermal reduction standards should be moderated and the 2030 deadline extended.

It's an important issue. Emissions need to be reduced, but the taxpayers can't be bled dry in the process. Being amendable to such change is what builds trust with a skeptical public. In the long term, it also produces better results.

The Public Utility Commission's report comes to us late in the campaign season but the conclusions are central to the debate as to how our emissions can be reduced and at what cost. It should be an issue addressed by all those running for office.

By Emerson Lynn