In Nature Conservancy magazine’s winter issue I read a boxed feature labelled “July 2021 was the Hottest Month Ever Recorded on Earth”. I dug online into the meaning of that statement for about an hour.

If you saw what happened in the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races, you know that left-of-center politicians nationwide, and especially on the East Coast, are panicking about a similar voter backlash washing them out of office a year from now. Glen Youngkin, now governor-elect of Virginia, and Jack Ciattarelli, who barely missed knocking out New Jersey governor Phil Murphy, capitalized on what a lot of voters see as a tone deafness on the part of Democrats who are pushing highly ideological policies at the expense of their constituents.

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.

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.

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.

For a while now, we have been reporting and commenting on how utterly unrealistic, economically irrational, logistically impossible, and downright nutty the policy prescriptions being kicked around by the Vermont Climate Council are. Turns out members of the Council and its subcommittees aren’t totally oblivious to this fact either. They are fully aware that they are setting up the elected legislators who ultimately support their recommendations for a political suicide mission.

            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. 

As the Vermont Climate Council readies its plans to dramatically reduce Vermont’s greenhouse gas emissions, they embarked on a series of public engagement events to field questions from curious citizens. Here are some we all might consider asking.

Here’s an outstanding example of how your government, in this case the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,  puts out deliberately misleading or false news about the terrors of climate change, and how Associated Press inflated it into a scare headline.