As the Vermont Climate Council gears up to make a new set of recommendations, timing poses a challenge

January 15, 2025

Electric vehicle — An electric vehicle recharges on Main Street in Burlington. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger

Members of the Vermont Climate Council are preparing to release this summer their second plan, which is set to contain a suite of recommended actions that state officials and lawmakers could take to fight climate change.

But, in a meeting on Monday, climate councilors acknowledged that the timing of their report is swirling around other forthcoming, and potentially conflicting, conversations about climate action.

State lawmakers established the 23-member council in 2020 when they enacted the Global Warming Solutions Act, a law that made Vermont’s long-standing goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions legally binding. The council was charged with determining how Vermont should reach the law’s deadlines in 2025, 2030 and 2050.

In a mammoth effort, members released the first Climate Action Plan in December 2021, early enough for lawmakers to consider the recommendations during the 2021 legislative session.

This time, the councilors’ deadline, July 1, comes shortly after the conclusion of this year’s legislative session, which began last week. That means that lawmakers won’t be able to consider most of the council’s recommendations until next January — though the Legislature is expected to hear about one of the larger proposals expected from the council, a cap-and-invest program for the transportation sector, in February.

The July deadline stretches the timeline for new policies to take effect, likely until 2026 or 2027. That gives the state even less time to reduce emissions enough to meet a significant 2030 deadline, which most experts already agree will be the hardest for the state to hit.

Meanwhile, the Legislature is slated to have broad conversations about climate policy this session. On Thursday, lawmakers are scheduled to hear a comprehensive report on the impacts of implementing a clean heat standard, one of the top recommendations of the 2020 Climate Action Plan. The proposal is quickly losing political momentum in the Statehouse.

Jane Lazorchak, director of the state’s Climate Action Office, which supports the implementation of the Global Warming Solutions Act, said in an interview that she’s “not naive to all of this playing out while recommendations from the initial plan, changes to the (Global Warming Solutions Act), all of that are being contemplated in the Legislature.” But she’s hopeful that the recommendations will be stronger, and have more of a consensus, because councilors have more experience compiling a plan this time.

The council’s five subcommittees, composed of subject matter experts, have been working for months to compile hundreds of recommendations to deliver to the Climate Council, which plans to deliberate further on the suggestions in the coming months.

Recommendations range from developing climate adaptation training for farmers to what’s likely to be one of the largest recommendations from the council: joining a regional cap-and-invest program for transportation. While such a proposal — the Transportation Climate Initiative Program — failed among a coalition of eastern states in 2021, Vermont could join a program that is already operating in California and Quebec, or it could propose joining with New York, which is currently developing such a program.

Last spring, lawmakers required the state to study a cap-and-invest program for the transportation sector when they passed last year’s transportation bill, and the results are set to be presented to the Legislature in February.

Such a policy would establish a cap on the amount of emissions that could come from cars, trucks, buses and other vehicles, and the cap would decline over time. Rights to emit carbon, based on the cap, would be sold or distributed as “allowances,” which entities could then buy and sell to each other.

Reactions to the policy at Monday’s meeting included apprehension from some councilors who compared the policy to the proposed clean heat standard. But the proposal — which is still being vetted in a study that is not yet complete — differs from the clean heat standard in a key way: Councilors are mulling a suggestion from subcommittees that Vermont join a program that other states have already created, rather than going it alone.

Councilors submitted comments to the policy proposals in a survey before the meeting, and David Plumb, who serves as a moderator for the climate council, presented some anonymous comments to other council members.

Both the cap-and-invest programs are “complicated and expensive, particularly if designed to achieve 2030 – and may be untenable absent an ability to join with other states, namely NY,” one councilor wrote. “I am increasingly concerned that absent a hard conversation about the (greenhouse gas) reduction requirement in the (Global Warming Solutions Act) – these policies will all be unacceptable to the broad public because of their cost.”

“The recommendation around cap and invest cannot be blind to cost/affordability concerns,” another councilor wrote.

Jared Duval, a council member who also leads the nonprofit Energy Action Network, which analyzes emissions data, pushed back on the idea that the policy could be expensive.

“You can dedicate a portion of the revenue received to be direct rebates to folks based on income, so that you hold low- and middle-income folks harmless, and that the folks who are paying for the incentives to help achieve the emissions reduction progress — especially the incentives for lower- and middle-income folks — are upper-income folks,” Duval said during the Monday meeting.

To codify the recommendations, the council plans to meet every two weeks instead of quarterly from January until March, when it plans to have its first draft ready to review.