By Emma Cotton/VTDigger
A short new section to a 22-page bill focused on retargeting energy efficiency goals has given Senate Republicans what they have been seeking — with increasing insistence — for weeks: the end of any mention of a clean heat standard in Vermont law.
“30 V.S.A. chapter 94 is repealed” was the key phrase added to S.65 that helped it advance with a bipartisan 4-1 vote in the Senate Natural Resources Committee Friday.
Before the addition, the bill’s focus was to reorient the goals of Efficiency Vermont toward reducing climate pollution as opposed to its current mandate, lowering electricity demand.
Policy-wise, Sen. Anne Watson, D/P, chair of the committee, said repealing the clean heat standard is “not really a big deal.”
“We’re not moving forward with the clean heat standard at this time,” Watson said in an interview Friday.
The law currently on the books did not actually put a clean heat standard in motion. Rather, it required the state’s Public Utility Commission to flesh out its details and build a policy, like a car that lawmakers could decide to drive out of the parking lot this session.
The goal of the clean heat standard was to reduce carbon emissions that come from heating and cooling buildings in Vermont, which accounts for around 30% of the state’s total greenhouse gas emissions.
But voters had affordability on their minds last November, and they showed it by breaking the Democrat-Progressive supermajority, making any road for the clean heat standard impassable. The car was doomed to remain in the parking lot.
Actually, deconstructing the car — or repealing it — would grant Republicans a political win. Only one of its parts, a fuel dealer registry, remains in the bill.
But it also appears Watson has used the repeal language as leverage to advance S.65.
Sen. Scott Beck, R-Caledonia, the Senate minority leader, sits on the Senate Natural Resources Committee and voted yes Friday.
“I think it is a bit of a compromise,” he said. “And Republicans did very, very well in the November elections, but it doesn’t mean that Vermonters want one side or the other to have their way all the time.”
“This is maybe an example of a little more cooperation,” he said.
