The future of environmental policies championed by Democrats and Progressives is in question after the parties lost their veto-proof supermajority, and unseated a senator who has spearheaded their efforts.
Chris Bray, a longtime Addison County senator who lost his reelection bid to Republican Steve Heffernan in an upset Tuesday, saw warning signs on the campaign trail.
In an interview Wednesday, Bray said he spoke to hundreds of Vermonters in recent months and sensed “a general level of discontent.” It reminded him of Take Back Vermont, the 2000 movement that rose up in response to the legalization of civil unions for same-sex couples.
Vermont Republicans made big strides on Tuesday. They broke the Democratic supermajorities in both the Senate and the House. Republican John Rodgers unseated Progressive/Democratic Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman, and Republican Gov. Phil Scott won another two-year term.
“Vermonters wanted some change,” said Justin Marsh, political director of Vermont Conservation Voters. “And they voted accordingly.” The organization’s political action fund directed hundreds of thousands of dollars toward candidates with a record of supporting climate policies this election.
The GOP’s gains appear to be a response to a message that Scott and Republicans have replayed for months: that decisions made in Montpelier recently have made Vermont unaffordable.
At the heart of that sentiment is, primarily, a complicated conversation about property taxes and school spending.
But tied up in the mix is a topic over which Vermont politicians have been increasingly divided. Many Republicans see Democrats’ and Progressives’ recent climate and environmental proposals as part of Vermont’s affordability problem.
Sen. Randy Brock, R-Franklin, the Senate minority leader, said “there’s definitely a connection” between affordability problems in Vermont and environmental policies. He referred to a 2024 bipartisan policy designed to accelerate housing construction that got “bogged down in the environmental committees.”
Democrats, including Bray, disagree with the notion that climate and environmental policies would cost Vermonters more money. Instead, they believe regulation is an important tool to make transitioning away from fossil fuels more affordable.
But Bray’s loss may show that affordability and environmental policies are linked for Vermonters. Bray — who will lead the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee until the new legislative biennium in January — was the only Senate chair to lose his seat on Tuesday.
As the lead sponsor of a proposal to advance a clean heat standard, a program designed to dramatically reduce climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions from heating and cooling buildings in Vermont, Bray said he felt targeted. Throughout the state, opponents and supporters of the policy spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a number of election campaigns.
Montpelier’s new dynamic presents a challenge for environmental policies that are slated for consideration during the 2025 legislative session.
Some, including the clean heat standard, are part of an effort to comply with the state’s 2020 Global Warming Solutions Act, which requires Vermont to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions in set amounts by 2025, 2030 and 2050.
Brock, who is headed back to the Statehouse in January, said he wants to see climate and environmental policies that he believes will be more effective and affordable than the clean heat standard and other policies Democrats have pitched recently.
Democrats’ lack of a supermajority “may well change some of those priorities,” he said, adding that the new makeup in Montpelier could “wind up creating other priorities that achieve the same end, but achieve them in a different way and in a more affordable way.”
Passing policies that comply with the Global Warming Solutions Act could be tricky for Democrats without a supermajority: Bray noted that environmental bills have “been repeatedly vetoed by the governor,” including the foundational 2020 climate law and the clean heat standard. To override a gubernatorial veto, legislators need to muster a two-thirds majority vote.
Brock said he’s waiting to convene with newly elected lawmakers before outlining specific policy priorities. Asked about the Global Warming Solutions Act and the clean heat standard, he said he wants to see “solutions that don’t impoverish families, that don’t encourage people to leave Vermont because it’s a place that they simply can’t afford to live in.”
Opting out or keeping promises
When they passed the Global Warming Solutions Act four years ago, lawmakers set off a domino effect. The law requires Vermont to establish an array of other policies to meet its emissions deadlines. If lawmakers and state agencies failed to enact such policies, the law enables citizens to sue the state and force its hand — and such lawsuits have already been filed.
The clean heat standard, which has set off its own conversation about affordability, was born out of the Global Warming Solutions Act.
In his conversations with voters, Bray said he frequently heard people “cite the Global Warming Solutions Act as a problem,” partly because it had spurred other policies, such as the clean heat standard.
But it’s “worth remembering,” Bray said, that Vermont lawmakers chose to pass the law, and override Scott’s veto, because the state made a commitment to honor the international Paris Agreement after then-president Donald Trump withdrew from the pact.
The Paris Agreement, which included nearly 200 countries, set emissions limits in an attempt to avoid the most catastrophic consequences of a warming planet. The Global Warming Solutions Act’s deadlines align with the goals of the agreement.
In response to Trump’s decision, and in the absence of federal action, a group of governors around the country decided to take on the Paris Agreement’s commitments. Vermont — and Gov. Phil Scott — was one of them.
“But it’s one thing to make a promise,” Bray said. “It’s another thing, then, to bring forward programs that could reasonably be expected to accomplish the commitment you just made.”
While lawmakers and a variety of environmental groups have pitched policies to reduce Vermont’s emissions, Vermont is not on track to meet its 2030 deadline. If lawmakers don’t pass a policy in the coming session to reduce emissions related to heating buildings — which account for about 30% of Vermont’s total emissions — that deadline will become significantly harder to hit.
Widespread opposition to the clean heat standard among Republicans means the policy faces a tough road to passage, and Bray said Democrats may also now be dissuaded.
“Frankly, because of the election results, I think some people will be reluctant to touch this,” he said.
In recent months, some public officials, including Natural Resources Secretary Julie Moore, have suggested moving the 2030 Global Warming Solutions Act deadline in the upcoming legislative session to avoid a lawsuit. As the deadline nears, the amount of emissions that need to be reduced in the next six years grows, making the measures required to meet the deadline increasingly aggressive.
Bray, who will no longer hold a seat at the table, bristled at the notion that lawmakers could alter the law, or abandon it altogether, as some have suggested.
“To just be super plain and direct, we wrote that law,” he said. “We raise our right hands and swear an oath of office to follow the laws of the state of Vermont as well as the Constitution of the State and the U.S. Constitution. So, I don’t know how any legislator, for instance, can read that law, or any administration can read that law and then decide to opt out.”
While chairs are chosen each biennium by the Senate’s three-person Committee on Committees, Bray said he’s been helping Sen. Anne Watson, D-Washington, prepare to take the helm of the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee. Watson has “a good running start,” Bray said.
“The road is still there for all of this,” Marsh, with Vermont Conservation Voters, said. “It’s just a little steeper now.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Climate policies teeter after Vermont Democrats lose supermajorities.