As Published on VTDigger, May 4, 2023 : Gish, Duval & Adams: Affordable Heat Act is not the climate action we need May 4, 2023, 7:07 am This commentary is by Chris Gish, Peter Duval and Ashley Adams. Duval lives in Underhill and participated in a Vermont Public Service Board investigation of environmental externalities. Adams, a business owner, lives in Burlington. Gish, a farmworker, lives in Burlington and organizes with Stop VT Biomass. The  Affordadable Heat Act,  S.5, would be a major step back for climate action in Vermont. The core of the bill was developed in closed-door meetings by some of Vermont’s biggest polluters, bypassing grassroots environmental groups and the Climate Council. It heavily favors biofuels that would push Vermont further from its climate goals.  As S.5 has advanced to the governor’s desk — likely to be vetoed and returned to the Legislature for further debate and a veto override attempt — more than 30 organizations and 230 individua...

  November 8, 2022 Election Results:  Governor Scott, congratulations on another victory.  Voters, thank you for voting and casting 4714 votes for me and the campaign that emphasizes an Earth perspective on issues. Voting is just the beginning. With hybrid meetings and online meeting packets, it is easier than ever to find an issue, research it, and track it through the political process.  Let me know, through the Take Action or Contact page, what issues interest you.

This is not that bold. And it is not Uber. It's more just looking at the facts and realizing it's way past time to act. Here are some facts: Vermonters drove many kilometers solo in their cars. Vermonters spent a lot of money on their cars. Vermonters spent many hours in traffic delays...solo in their cars. Vermont cars spend most of their time just taking up space and idly depreciating. Vermont has many lane kilometers (lane miles) of Interstate, Limited Access, State Highway; and, Class 1-4 Town Highway, which are empty most of the time. While we have been driving, other people around the world have been living lightly and more economically. We have a lot of catching up to do, and we can't if we are still driving cars. The goal for everyone -- in every measure -- is zero. Zero fatalities. Zero impact. Zero emissions. Zero combustion. If there is a bold idea here, it is the realization that zero combustion means eliminating all internal combustion engine vehicles from Verm...

TL;DR: The insurmountable problem with electric cars is that they are cars. Phil Scott got a new truck. Brenda Siegel wants it too, and also wants everyone else to get an electric car. The F150 Lightning is a fine pickup truck, I'm sure. But will the planet survive 8 going on 10 billion people cruising around in electric vehicles? Clearly, no. Phil and Brenda just don't get it. It doesn't matter how green a car is. It could have zero embodied emissions from production and zero emission during its operating life. It could be free of mining, shipping, and casualty costs. It's the fact that it's an automobile with tires , one that takes up space and infrastructure, in a garage or rolling down a road -- fundamentally incompatible with a living planet.  Roads themselves are sufficiently damaging to make everything else associated with them unacceptably unsustainable. Vermont's rural road system is the worst of the worst. Vermont has 30% more lane miles per capita...

TL;DR: Parent or child stipends and paid family leave appear to be effective ways to ensure infants and toddlers get a good start. 'Fund the child, not the child care center' may be the catchphrase. Possible additional efforts include Grade 13, livable minimum wage, a 4-day workweek, and remote work. My campaign has been about changing the debate and uncovering underlying patterns that connect the issues. For every crisis, we must ask, "Is the question well-posed? Is it accurate framing? What are the alternative ways of looking at it? Is it a solution posed as a problem? Does it describe the bottom of the problem, or is there something deeper? What links it to other crises?" A report to the Legislature by Regenstein and Patel recommends creating "a new unit of state government that is focused entirely on early childhood." -- https://legislature.vermont.gov/assets/Legislative-Reports/Vermont-Child-Care-and-Early-Childhood-Education-Systems-Analysis-Final-Repo...

Saturday, I spent a day indoors in the least likely of places, the 2022 Campaign Bootcamp for Vermont Republicans at the Capitol Plaza Hotel in Montpelier. Everything about the Bootcamp was professional and polite, but there wasn't the ooze of money that one might expect in other parts of the country -- and few ties or jackets.  I imagine the Democratic Party had a similar event, and probably with more people. In a hotel conference room, the many PowerPoint-assisted presentations on the mechanics of campaigning provided a refresher on how to ask people to do something: who to ask; how to ask; when to ask; what to ask; where to ask; and when to stop asking. There are clear similarities between the campaign techniques of this workshop and a VPIRG canvass: how to talk with people on the phone and in person. The window for productive canvassing is about 3 hours per day in the late afternoon, and weekdays are best. That's not a lot of time, so it needs to be used wisely. Bottom line...

  If you are the right age, you probably know the tune    My Hero, Zero  from watching Saturday morning cartoons. Zero is important for more than just efficient counting; it's useful for posing well-behaved minimization optimization problems (I welcome any mathematics critique). How could we tell if traffic safety efforts were effective? Try to count "lives saved"? People concerned with traffic safety took a long time to reimagine how to think about measuring safety and setting goals. It started in Sweden, of course. With  Vision Zero , there's an understandable objective, and, whether talking in absolute or relative terms, shrinking is going in the right direction. Just steer toward zero. Trying to control a robot in the real world? Then minimize the error between ideal motion and actual movement -- zero error is best. The same goes with any kind of machine learning, minimize the error. Do this by carefully assessing the problem and transforming it into somethi...