- Vermont needs to become more energy and food independent using our local natural resources, and we should aim to produce 75% of our own food, power and heat energy by 2020.
- This will create tens of thousands of jobs and keep billions of dollars in the local VT economy each year.
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Vermont needs a transition plan that will assure the business community that their energy prices will be predictable in the short term. But we will have to accept some increasing energy costs related to Peak Oil and other market pressures. The more we can insulate ourselves from the Peak Oil factors with local renewable energy, the stronger Vermont’s economic foundation will be in the future.
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Land and the environment is best “conserved” by being put to productive, sustainable use. A major myth of mainstream "environmentalism" is that we should lock away land and prevent it from being used in order to "save it." Instead, we must integrate with our natural resources, put our landscape to work and use our land and resources sustainably. We need to stop locking away our resources in misconstrued “conservation” programs. The Center for Whole Communities in Fayston is a national leader in training community leaders for sustainability, and they have many programs and published works that make this point beautifully.
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Act 250 needs to be reformed to reflect our current economic development needs while removing bureaucratic barriers to sustainable and appropriate land use based on local control and needs.
- The State should make available low interest loans to any home, business or institution that has a good location for solar, wind, efficient biomass or micro-hydro-power, and attach the loan-payments to the annual land-value property tax payments, with an interest rate of less than 5%.
- A similar program should be put in place to finance local food processing and distribution centers and viallage-markets and by encouraging local diversified food production.
- We need to help our dairy farmers transition to diversified and sustainable agriculture. Federally subsidized monocrops like milk are a dead-end market. So let's help our farmers make this transition by creating a Vermont market for diversified agricultural products.
- VT has the strongest organic farming and local food movements in the country, DESPITE state and federal policies that create obstacles for progress. We need to align our policy with our real values.
- VT Yankee needs to be shut down and fully decommissioned to remove this dangerous liability from our State. The ISONE Grid, which all VT utilities buy power from, currently has 14,000 megawatts of excess capacity. VT Yankee is offering VT around 200 megawatts of capacity, which we can easily replace on the open market or from Hydro Quebec.
- There will be no economic loss or significant power price increase from shutting VT Yankee down. The price and terms they have offered for their renewal application would be a very bad deal for Vermont. They are offering half the power available to Vermont as is available today (we’ll have to replace half of that power, let’s just replace all of it), a 45% price increase, and no commitment to fully fund the decommissioning fund = No Thanks Entergy. We’ll put those 200 Vermonters who used to work at VT Yankee, along with thousands of other people, to work installing solar panels, operating biomass/biogas plants, harvesting biomass, and weatherizing homes.
- Biomass gasification and biogas generation offer tremendous potential to meet all of Vermonter’s heat-fuel needs while adding more than $700 million to the local Vermont economy. Solar and wind can meet 40% of our power needs by 2020. In-state hydropower and biomass could meet more than 30% of our power needs by 2020. We can not only cover most of our own energy needs with renewable energy, but we can do it at a lower cost than we’d be paying for fossil fuels and nuclear energy. By shifting our energy economy to local renewables we’ll create thousands of green-collar jobs, incredibly strong local economies, high-value export products and services, while preserving and enhancing our tourism economy.
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