The climateers on the Senate Natural Resource and Energy Committee – that would be all five of them, Democrats,  handpicked  – seem to be getting desperate that Vermont is falling behind its completely arbitrary path toward reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 70% by 2050. Already they are thinking up new ways to make Vermonters suffer to make us comply with the 2015 Paris Agreement, that practically zero other countries are complying with.

Senator Mark MacDonald, Democrat of Orange Co, is out front with imaginative ways to stop using gasoline, diesel fuel, natural gas, propane and heating oil.  He suggests reimposing President Carter’s 55 miles per hour speed limit on all of our highways. He says that wouldn’t cost anything, ignoring the costs of extra travel time for people now traveling at 65.

MacDonald also wants to impose a gas guzzler tax on pickup trucks and large SUVs. In climatespeak, designed to keep you from figuring out what you’ll be made to pay for, this is a “vehicle efficiency price adjustment program”. At least MacDonald called it by its recognizable name. Sen. Becca White, Democrat of Windsor Co., announced that she was having a bill drafted for what the climateers call a clean fuels standard.

Confronted with the regressive impact of these proposals, MacDonald came up with this answer: “We don’t do things based on helping poor people. We do things to save the world.”  Let that one sink in.