Here in the Green Mountain State, we take pride in our status as the lowest greenhouse gas emitting state in the union. We have no coal plants here, very little manufacturing, and besides what we get from Vermont Yankee, we import most of our electricity from Hydro Quebec. The penalty of our energy use is therefore felt elsewhere, not here.

Before we get to feeling too righteous, we should consider the fact that we depend upon imports for just about everything we do, and that Vermonters drive as much as do residents of Texas or California. Transportation accounts for forty-six percent of our greenhouse gases (while at the national level, it accounts for 29 percent), and is the largest source of C02 emissions, which is the most prevalent (accounting for eighty-five percent of all greenhouse gases) and most persistent of greenhouse gases (it can remain in the atmosphere for as long as a thousand years). If Vermont wants to reduce its contribution of greenhouse gasses, then the most effective way to do so would be to reduce our reliance on our automobiles.

I see very little movement in this direction, although there is an urgent economic imperative to do so. Governor Douglas is worried about young people leaving the state. Even without high gas prices, Americans will not be able to afford their automobile habit for long. I foresee that Vermont’s youth are going to leave the state in droves. According to AAA estimates for 2009, the cost of owning and operating a personal automobile is about $9,000 a year. In an economy that is only going to get worse, what 20 year old can afford to spend half or more of her income just to get to work and back?

While this emergency stares us in the face, the Vermont legislature and the Douglas administration wring their hands over our “crumbling infrastructure” and otherwise, engage in fantasies about a future in which we’ll all be driving electric cars. Why is it that the electric car is always just over the horizon, like a desert mirage, but never seems to get any closer? Electric vehicles will not solve any of the problems associated with our car dependency; they will be more expensive than conventional cars, and most of us will not be able to afford them. Without a non-polluting source of electricity, electric vehicles will not help the climate problem, and may even make it worse.   

While the Governor’s Commission on Climate Change and the Department of Public Service announce that they have set “goals” for greenhouse gas reductions, an unsuspecting public may assume that if you are going to announce that you have set goals, then you have thought about how those goals might actually be reached. We should make no such assumptions. Vermont is falling far short of its goal to reduce its greenhouse emissions by twenty-five percent by the year 2012. Emissions are on the increase. We should not be surprised.  We are doubling our transmission capacity to prepare for an imagined increase in electric use, planning for airport and highway expansions, and expanding broadband internet access, which will inevitably lead to more energy use, and we are driving more and more with every passing year. Read the State’s twenty-year energy plan and you will be challenged to find anything in it that looks like a “transition” to an energy future that is less dependent on fossil fuels.

It is dangerous for us to have faith in the cap and trade programs that are in the works regionally, nationally, and internationally. Vermont’s Congressional representative, Peter Welch, helped to author the new energy bill, which would establish a cap and trade program similar to the European Trading scheme that has been so utterly ineffective in reducing greenhouse pollution. Do his constituents support him in this? Vermonters should not have faith that market-based mechanisms will solve the problem. While it is claimed that the bill “sets limits” on carbon emissions, this is simply not true, because it allows for companies to “offset’’ their emissions by purchasing pollution allowances. In other words, it establishes an Enron-style creative accounting system in which carbon pollution is balanced out with so-called carbon sinks.

How is it possible to reduce carbon emissions without reducing carbon emissions? Well here’s how: by investing in a genetic modification technology that reduces flatulence in cows, or in a tree plantation in Brazil, a company can theoretically “neutralize” its carbon emissions and avoid any requirements to limit its pollution. At eleven dollars a ton, the carbon price set by the legislation, it can buy its way to catastrophic climate change at a bargain.  The new bill would allow for two billion metric tons of carbon to be offset – that is roughly the equivalent of all the carbon that is emitted annually by the nation’s utility plants. Moreover, emissions reductions requirements are pushed back to the year 2030 – at which point, so much carbon will have accumulated in the atmosphere that catastrophic climate change will be guaranteed.

More locally, Vermont is one of ten northeastern states participating in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), an overly complicated, mandatory cap and trade program intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning power plants. The RGGI is an improvement over the European model, or the House plan, in that pollution allowances are auctioned rather than given away to the biggest polluters. But the goals of the initiative are weak: a ten percent reduction in emissions between 2015 and 2020. To meet those targets, participants are allowed to purchase offsets to meet 50% of their emission reductions. So far, Vermont has used the proceeds for selling its pollution credits to support the Public Service Department’s all-fuels program, which promotes the use of ethanol and other climate-destroying biofuels.

Such an approach could, perhaps, do some good if the money that was raised was put towards public transit systems or renewable energy technologies. But the House plan, which Obama wholeheartedly supports, would put virtually all the funds into coal sequestration technology, which has already been proven to be expensive (which is why the profit-driven coal industry won’t use it), and impractical on the enormous scale that would be required. No further demonstration projects are needed. Moreover, what sense does it make to invest fifty years of R&D and 6o billion dollars into a non-renewable energy resource, which could very well be past peak before the coal companies would be required to put the technology to use?

Vermont, on the other hand is investing its funds – not for public transit, which would be genuinely useful – but toward alternative fuels that would allow Vermonters to keep driving their automobiles. It is, however, a fantasy to imagine that we will be able to continue to depend upon the personal automobile for almost all of our transportation needs into the distant future.

A reduction in the size of our carbon footprint would be much larger if we invested in public transit than by making changes in fuel efficiency standards, by offering tax breaks for the purchase of hybrid cars, or by shifting our reliance to agrofuels (which have the potential to be an even worse contributor to climate change than petrofuels). We should stop fantasizing about pie- in-the-sky technologies – like hydrogen cars – that will never be viable and instead focus on putting into place technologies that have been around for decades. By switching to public transit, an individual can reduce his daily carbon emissions substantially. A commuter who travels by car emits almost ten times as much CO2 as the traveler in a commuter train or bus. That means that if we were to eliminate personal automobile travel altogether, and put all those commuters on trains and buses, we would reduce our CO2 emissions from transportation by up to ninety percent. 

We did not imagine, when we began to invest our nation’s oil wealth into an automobile culture, involving a vast highway system, a huge automobile industry, and sprawling suburbs, that in the long run, all of this would be enormously expensive, and without the cheap oil that made it possible, it would become simply unsustainable. The system is falling apart. The cost of repairing the nation’s roads is estimated to be $225 billion a year every year from now until 2020 to maintain the existing infrastructure. In Vermont the price tag for the needed road and bridge repairs is estimated to be one billion dollars. Our roads and bridges are collapsing, our auto industry is in bankruptcy, and we are in a collective panic over the “energy crisis” and the desperate need for more fodder to keep it all going. In addition to the nine thousand dollars a year for every American, we will pay billions to repair our roads, billions in industry bailouts, and trillions in foreign wars to secure our oil supplies. For how long can we sustain the titanic expense of driving cars? At some point, we will have to judge that the conveniences of driving cars are far out matched by the problems they create.

Sociologists would call our car-addiction problem a “path-dependency” problem, meaning that we have gone so far down a certain path that it will be difficult to turn around. We have built an economy and a way of life around the automobile. To reduce our car dependence, we will have to restructure our economy and reorganize our communities. In Vermont, we should be looking towards mixed-use neighborhoods, where people live close to where they work and where they shop, which will mean we will need to change our zoning laws, among other things. In the meantime, we will have to begin to transition to a different mode of travel by building on the transit service we already have: we should expand services like the Link, which runs along the heavily traveled route between Burlington and Montpelier, but that presently serves only commuters who work a nine-to-five schedule. We should extend Amtrak service, which presently ends in Rutland, to Burlington and Montreal, and we should implement transit systems modeled on the Addison County Tri-Town shuttle, which operates small buses along “deviated fixed routes” (meaning that passengers can be picked up and dropped off within a mile of fixed routes) in sparsely populated rural areas. Above all, we should be cultivating an agricultural economy that will provide livelihoods for residents of rural communities, without requiring them to commute to minimum wage jobs in distant industrial parks and big box stores, afloat in their giant parking lagoons.

What will it take to make Vermonters less car dependent for just about everything we do? I live in a small town, about one and a half miles from the center of town. While it should be possible to walk the mile and a half into town, I would have to walk on a busy thoroughfare that is devoted exclusively to car traffic and has no accommodation for bicycles or pedestrians. The road here passes through the stunningly beautiful Winooski river valley, with the Green Mountains as a backdrop – a view that once graced the cover of National Geographic magazine – and yet no one in their right mind would walk a mile and a half along Route 2.  That there is no walkable route to town is a disgrace. No public roadway should be devoted exclusively to the automobile – unless there is a corresponding route devoted exclusively to bicycle or pedestrians– but inexcusably, most roads in Vermont and in America are designed for cars without a thought for people who use their feet.   

In the long term, we will have to give up on the idea that we can have our hobby farms and, at the same time, our jobs at IBM; if we wish to be more closely integrated with our communities then we shall have to live in communities that are less spread out. We cannot have a country life and the benefits of urbanism – we shall have to choose between them. In rural areas, we can eliminate the need for residents to commute an hour or more to work in urban centers, like Burlington or Essex Junction, by revitalizing a local ¬¬– and truly rural – economy based on small family farms.

It is evident that we cannot rely on governments or institutions to make the changes that are needed. If we had faith in Obama – who understands the urgency of the climate crisis – that faith has already worn thin. He is a big believer in market fixes and he is a big believer in technological fixes – when it is both the market and technology that have caused the problem in the first place. Vermont can secede from the political structures that are so incapable of real change, and yet we cannot secede from the earth’s climate system and we will, of course, not be immune to the climate disruptions that are already inevitable. We should remind ourselves that every time we fill our gas tanks, whether that fuel is made from corn or from trees or from petroleum, we are taking food from the hungry.  Here in the greenest state in the nation, we should not be too proud of ourselves; we are still monstrous consumers of fossil fuels, and therefore we are contributors to “the defining human tragedy of this century,” according to Oxfam, that is unfolding around the world.   

That is why we must – while cultivating an agrarian economy here at home that functions independently of the global, fossil-fuel based economy– also participate in the grassroots climate justice movement that is underway in preparation for the Copenhagen climate talks scheduled for December 2009, where, as Bill McKibben says, the future of humanity will be decided.  I suspect that this is the way change will come– from the bottom up – because, to borrow a metaphor that is used to explain the inertia of the climate system, it takes a lot more energy to begin to melt a large block of ice, than an equivalent collection of ice cubes. Once the change is set in motion, it will accelerate, until it becomes unstoppable. The change will come from the individuals who start to alter their patterns, who talk to their neighbors and begin to work cooperatively in their communities.