The Public Utility Commission has been charged  with designing and implementing the Clean Heat ^Standard bill passed last session, over Gov. Scott’s veto. This measure is designed to raise the cost of heating oil, natural gas, propane and kerosene , supposedly to defeat the menace of climate change, The PUC wants people to pay a fee to the PUC so the PUC can raise the prices of their heating fuel, which doesn’t sound like a very attractive proposition to me.

So I cooked up a solution: let the people worried about climate change step up and pay the PUC to make that happen.

Here it is:  Add a box on the 2023 Vermont income tax form reading “Choose the following amount to be added to your tax payable (or subtracted from your refund), to be paid to the Public Utility Commission to enable it to design and administer the Clean Heat Standard law to increase the cost of heating oil, propane, natural gas and kerosene,  and thereby reduce Vermont’s carbon dioxide emissions in support of the 2015 Paris Agreement?

The taxpayer is offered a choice of  zero, the default amount, or $50 dollars,     $100 dollars, $250 dollars, and  $500 dollars.

Then at tax time we’ll find out me how appealing an idea the Clean Heat Standard is. My guess would be, not too appealing.  But of course the present legislature will have nothing to do with that idea.