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?

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Climate Council will have to choose between a clearly inferior Climate Plan product by the December 1 deadline, or spending more time (and taxpayer dollars) trying to correct the current Climate Plan’s flaws.

The Climate Council’s job is to figure out how to reduce Vermont’s greenhouse gas emissions to mandated levels set out in the Global Warming Solutions Act. Period. That’s all. They are not concerned with the fallout – economic and otherwise – that will occur if we do all the things necessary to meet that goal. This sad fact was on full display during the Cross Sector Mitigation Subcommittee meeting on November 4.

While our progressive element continues to find wonderful things to say about Cuba, its baseball team is rapidly disappearing.

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.

June Tierney of the Vermont Climate Council (also commissioner of the Department of Public Service) made a splash when she called the plan to reduce Vermont’s greenhouse gas emissions a “Mack Truck” getting ready to run down unsuspecting citizens in terms of its immense cost and radical impact on our jobs and lifestyle. At the November 2 meeting of the Council, Tierney doubled down and then some.

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.

Last month, VT Digger reported that “the West Coast fires that have ravaged parts of California, Oregon and Washington this summer have been linked definitively to climate change.”

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.