The Vermont legislature is moving swiftly into its final six weeks. A major issue, as always, is parceling out revenues to cover  the $8.1 billion Fiscal Year 2023 general plus transportation fund budgets. That process is eased this year by the tsunami of Federal dollars rolling into the state, allowing the solons to fund programs and causes that in ordinary times, with normal state revenues, would not make the cut.

Bill McKibben, the climate activist at Middlebury College and the leader of 350.org, now appears to be tiptoeing away from his ardent anti-nuclear views of yesteryear. In a journal article that appeared two weeks ago, McKibben says this:

Governor Gavin Newsom recently ordered the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to ban the sale of gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035. Since the 1990s, sixteen states including Vermont have adopted CARB's more stringent emission standards in place of regulations enacted by the Environmental Protection Agency. Newsom's mandatory transition to zero emission vehicles will therefore have a domino effect in the CARB states, which will be legally bound to outlaw the sale of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. 

Debate over the Clean Heat Standard (CHS) bill (H.715) is now in the Senate Committee for Natural Resources & Energy, where members received their first briefings on the legislation today. The notable difference in the senate discussion compared to the house was the evident pressing by members of the Scott Administration (Ed McNamara, General Counsel, Agency of Natural Resources and TJ Poor, Director of Planning, Department of Public Service) for formalizing the need for another vote by the legislative on the final plan put forward by the Public Utilities Commission before the CHS could be implemented.

Judith Curry, longtime chair of the climate program at Georgia Tech, published an article two weeks ago that’s worth reading. Here’s an excerpt: