Last week I watched news reports on WCAX and WPTZ, featuring the “Facebook whistleblower” Francis Haugen. She’s the former Facebook employee who copied thousands of pages of internal documents to prove that Facebook designs its products to attract customers, whose fees pay their bills and generate lots of profit for CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Well, duh.

The penultimate Climate Action Plan Virtual Public Engagement Event last Thursday was full of drama, despair and even discussion of rationing to beat climate change.

For a while now, we have been reporting and commenting on how utterly unrealistic, economically irrational, logistically impossible, and downright nutty the policy prescriptions being kicked around by the Vermont Climate Council are. Turns out members of the Council and its subcommittees aren’t totally oblivious to this fact either. They are fully aware that they are setting up the elected legislators who ultimately support their recommendations for a political suicide mission.

In testimony provided to the Pension, Benefits, Design and Funding Task Force on September 9, Paul Cillo, President of the Public Assets Institute, came to testify about the “fiscal issues related to the state’s public employee pension systems.” He suggested that “it’s irresponsible to not raise revenue” to pay for the pension underfunding crisis. According to Cillo, “Many Vermonters at the top, with much greater amounts of discretionary income, still pay less as a percentage of their income in state and local taxes than their lower-income neighbors, according to a 50-state analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy” (a left-leaning think tank).

Here’s an outstanding example of how your government, in this case the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,  puts out deliberately misleading or false news about the terrors of climate change, and how Associated Press inflated it into a scare headline.

At the September 2 meeting of the Cross Sector Mitigation subcommittee of the Climate Council, member Christine Donovan asked hired consultant David Hill a reasonable question, “If we have missed an important pathway [to decarbonization] or have been promoting a pathway that isn’t really a highly effective pathway for the state moving forward will you all be telling us that?”

The expected answer would, of course, be “Of course!” If there was some way to meet the carbon reduction benchmarks mandated in the law then one would expect the person you’re paying good taxpayer money to help find a solution to say so. Not so David Hill.

Citing the Delta variant, Vermont officials have extended universal masking for all K-12 students until early October (after which it applies to the unvaccinated). Though a mandate cannot be enforced absent a state of emergency, psychological and social pressures to ensure student compliance abound.

A few weeks ago, VTDigger reported that “since Irene hit Vermont Aug. 27, 2011, many have warned that climate change would make similar rain and floods more frequent, and the August storm appears to be an example of that.”