More than 2 years ago I looked like a nutcase predicting that electricity prices will rise significantly when the contracts with Hydro Quebec (HQ) and Vermont Yankee (VY) expire, whether VY is closed down or not. Now we are starting to see what the new deal(s) will look like. The offer from VY was for an increase in price of more than 40% to start with, followed with an upwardly adjustable price later. Below is a letter I sent last week to the BFP in response to their report on the HQ deal that was outlined in talks that included Vermont's governor visiting Quebec to help it along.

As I predicted here a while back, the volume of passengers passing through the Burlington airport has declined in 2009. The BFP reports that:

"In January, 50,490 people flew from Vermont's largest airport, a 5.5 percent decline from January 2009 -- and the weakest January tally since 2004. The decline marked the 10th consecutive month of sagging year-over-year results at Burlington International."

A day after listening to Obama's cliches, vague talk about what ails us, and his hard clasping onto our tired old misdirected values and nonsolutions, I was rather surprised to read what the French president Sarkozy said in the opening address of the G20 World Economic Forum at Davos. This is after all the gathering of the world's top capitalists and globalizers. Moreover, in the French political scene, Sarkozy is the "right winger" whose election was a sore point with leftists there, to the point of strikes and riots. And yet, he apparently has both the brains, and the political breathing room, to make statements that Obama would not dare to utter. The annotated excerpts below will demonstrate the kind of re-thinking that the Western world desperately needs, but that the American Empire is least able to contemplate. I am not bringing Sarkozy up as the best thinker and talker on these issues, but rather as an anti-hero who is drawn into, and able, to bring up these issues that are forbidden by Obama's puppetmasters. Sarkozy also threw in the obligatory nice words about capitalism, globalization, finance, and the G20 institution, and he lied about what happened in Copenhagen, but that didn't stop him from clearly stating his main points.

Yes, in the world of tomorrow, we must again reckon with citizens, with the demands of morality, the demands of responsibility, the demands of dignity for citizens. We must see this not as yet another problem, but as part of the solution; not as an additional difficulty, but as something healthy and virtuous, that may, perhaps, allow us to feel happier with what we are, happier with what we accomplish.

The article quoted below, originally posted on opednews.com, strikes me as a forceful expose' of how and why the federal situation is badly broken. It also shows why, as Vermont chooses (or is forced) to "go it alone", we should abandon the assumption that keeping the state "business friendly", in the sense of give-aways to out-of-state corporations, will result in any benefits to us here.

The Path Not Taken
By Siegfried Othmer

Historian Kevin Mattson just wrote a book about the famous speech by President Jimmy Carter given on July 15, 1979, "the speech that should have changed the country." It was a time of yet another gasoline crisis, a time of high interest rates and of raging inflation, in an atmosphere of uncertainty about where the country was going, or needed to be going. Many of things Carter said at the time ring true today, and other things remind us of opportunities missed, and yet to be taken up.

Enough with the nickels and dimes, let's go the whole hog: make it a $10,000 annual fee on taxpayers filing as single, and $20,000 for married filing jointly. That'll pay off the national debt within a decade or so, assuming no more bankster bailouts.

But seriously, per-head taxes with no regard for income have caused riots and revolutions through history. Small versions of such fees are just as unfair as large ones. But that's what we keep getting hit with here in Vermont. Higher auto registration fees, fees on telephone services, etc etc. Recently I've read that a $1 "per meter" fee is to be attached to the monthly electric bill, to fund reduced rates for some people (low income seniors). I am not sure whether that has passed or is just proposed. But it sure is nutty. If you're going to reduce rates for some, fund it by raising RATES for others, not a "poll tax".

The thinking about debt ("credit"), savings, and investment has become so distorted that one must deconstruct statements carefully to realize how absurd they are. One blatant example is the recent talk about funding the future decommissioning of nuclear plants around the country by waiting (decades) for investments of the funds to gain in value.

In a recent posting Dan Weintraub explained why the "Stimulus" cannot succeed:

Most consumers and businesses are deeply in debt. ... And so what happens to that money? That money disappears. It does not circulate. It has no velocity (in economic lexicon). It is simply used by banks and other lending agencies to pay down their own debt...

The aim of the Stimulus is the restoration of "growth", which is assumed to be a good thing if it were achievable. It is useful to delve a little deeper into the meaning of this "growth".

My previous posting focussed on the energy aspects of the proposed parking garage and "green roof" expansion at the Burlington Airport. This posting comments on the future of the airline business in a world of contracting economies and resources.

After posting about energy contrasts between different alternative energy projects, the sequel immediately presented itself: Burlington wants to build a "green roof", with solar panels, wind turbines, and a greenspace over the airport parking garage. The numbers in the BFP report need a closer look. There are reasons to doubt their veracity, but even if they are correct, it is a lame attempt to greenwash an extremely climate-unfriendly activity.

This morning on VPR they had two back to back reports on alternative energy initiatives. One was about a direct-to-the-grid solar installation to be erected by CVPS near Rutland. The other described a private initiative to build a wood-chip fired generating plant near Springfield. The unspoken implication was that they are somehow comparable. But it is important to "do the numbers".