With this column I am concluding my biweekly commentaries for the Ethan Allen Institute, that stretch back to 1993.  

Campaign for Vermont finally asked Vermonters directly the question our elected representatives have been avoiding for years in regard to their Global Warming Solutions Act (GWSA) fantasies: How much are you willing to pay to support the law’s greenhouse gas reduction mandates? Vermonters’ overwhelming answer: not a #*&% thing!

The 2024 Vermont legislature will convene a month from now and its members will have to laser focus on the shocking increase projected for education spending.

As the 2024 legislative session approaches, it’s a good time to comprehend the breadth, depth, and likely costs of the multiyear campaign to make Vermont the world’s splendid example of bold action to defeat the menace of climate change.

Thirty years ago I spent four days in the small Baltic nation of Estonia, attending a liberty conference. In the Soviet era (1940-1991) communist apparatchiks appointed in Moscow ruled the three Baltic countries as sham Soviet “republics”. The enterprising Estonians were shackled, and by 1946 more than one-quarter of the population had been deported to a Siberian Gulag, or executed, or had fled the country.

Two new reports on Vermont’s Renewable Energy Standard, one by the Department of Public Service and Sustainable Energy Advantage and the other by an organization called Brattle, confirm what we’ve been pointing out for a long time – Vermont’s so called green energy mandates are all cost and no benefit for the Vermonters who get stuck paying the bills. And those costs are huge.

Last week the Vermont Departments of Health and Disabilities, Aging and Independent Living (DAIL) released a comprehensive document, produced by a wide range of state officials, nonprofit organization employees, and volunteers. It’s titled Age Strong VT: Our Road Map for an Age Friendly State. (Read it at www.healthyvermont.gov/agestrongvt).

Earlier this month Seven Days ran a remarkable story titled, Too Many Vermont Kids Struggle to Read. What Went Wrong — and Can Educators Reverse a Yearslong Slide in Literacy? It’s long. 5000 words, but very much worth the time. The piece details how for over two decades our public schools have been using unscientific, non-evidence-based teaching methods born of ultra-Left-wing, touchy-feely ideology resulting in a generation of insufficiently literate Vermonters.

On December 17, 2014, following a surprisingly narrow reelection victory, Gov. Peter Shumlin announced that he was abandoning his long-pursued legislative priority, enactment of the nation’s first single payer health care system. That date became an historic marker in Vermont’s modern political history.

Of all the problems facing today’s America, the most seemingly intractable is the intertwined issue of the physically and mentally sick and homeless, family breakdown , drug and alcohol addiction, street violence, retail theft, gang warfare, random shootings, protest riots, unmanageable students in classrooms, and similar afflictions.