A key component of the Climate Action Plan just put forward by the Vermont Climate Council is a thing they’re calling “The Clean Heat Standard.” This is a convoluted scheme that is in practice a stealth tax on home heating oil, propane, natural gas, and kerosene that will drive up the costs of those products for consumers.

Imagine you have a mortgage. When you close on your house, the bank gives you a schedule of payments that you’ll have to make each month to pay down the principal and interest. After 15, or 20, or 30 years of fixed payments, the mortgage will be paid off.

When the Vermont House of Representatives returns in January, one of the first orders of business they will take up is a constitutional amendment called Proposal 5 (aka Article 22). Proposal 5 is being sold as a statewide protection for women’s rights guaranteed under Roe v. Wade. This isn’t an accurate portrayal of what Proposal 5 would do. In fact, Proposal 5 is a legal mess that no one on either side of the abortion debate should be okay with.

Since 2014 the climate change activists have created four public policy plans to achieve their objectives. Plan A – the carbon tax - bit the dust in 2018. Plan B –TCI – has just followed it into oblivion. Plan C is the Vermont Climate Council’s Climate Action Plan, avoiding a visible carbon tax (except for resuscitating TCI). When that fails, there’s Plan D: send the Conservation Law Foundation into court to sue the State for not shackling Vermonters with Plan C fast enough.

The airwaves are awash with frenzied reports about the terrors of the imminent climate crisis. Could we calm down a minute and get a grip on the subject?

In his recent commentary, Secretary of State Jim Condos decried election disinformation’s potential to create distrust in our electoral process. Despite touting the “gold standard voter-marked paper ballot we use in Vermont,” Condos has done much to encourage such distrust in our electoral process while dismissing the importance of a free press in supporting free elections.

The 2022 legislative session will decide how to redistrict Vermont’s House and Senate. The best way to hold legislators accountable is to put them into single-member districts, where the voters can vote incumbents up or down. Failing that, separating the two positions within a two-member district would achieve much of the same end.

In the spring of 2011, then Governor Peter Shumlin signed into law the bill that was supposed to set Vermont off leading the nation to a single payer healthcare system. The activists rejoiced, the politicians puffed their chests, the bean counters got to work. Then, in December 2014 the three-year adventure in denying reality came to an end. Shumlin was forced to admit the whole scheme was too expensive, too disruptive, and simply wouldn’t work. So, never mind! A similar scent of impending failure is beginning to seep out from the (virtual) chambers of the Vermont Climate Council.

New departures in sex education and union-promoted Critical Race Theory in the public schools are raising the temperature of parents and school board. Objecting parents should have the option they have at the college level: parent-empowered K-12 school choice.

            Here’s a tale of two savvy young men from Vermont who hit the jackpot by selling their startup company to a larger one for $40 million.