Op/Ed
Climate Matters: Please don’t move the goalposts

MIKE ROY
Late January. By now most of us have already abandoned our New Year’s Resolutions to eat better, drink less, exercise more, be a better friend. Resolutions are hard to keep. It is hard because of inconvenience, ingrained habits, our inability to think about what is best for our future selves.
Earlier this week, the United States withdrew for the second time from the Paris Climate Accord. Vermont has failed to meet the goals of Vermont’s Global Warming Solutions Act, and our governor is now trying to walk back the targets to avoid being sued.
In Addison County, the Climate Economy Action Center’s latest greenhouse gas inventory shows that CO2 emissions in our county have increased by 8% between 2017 and 2022. And the recently completed 2024 inventory of CO2 for Middlebury’s town operations tells the same story: We are moving in the wrong direction. We are not slowing our CO2 emissions nearly fast enough to avoid catastrophe. In fact, we actually aren’t slowing them at all.
Nobody likes to fail. In the face of no meaningful progress, the desire to give up or adjust is understandable. I get why people want to move the goalposts, or remove them altogether. I also know that to do so is a grave mistake. These goals were set for a reason: We need to play our part in the global effort to keep the planet from heating up past 1.5 degrees Celsius. Things will get very, very bad if we don’t. They are already getting pretty bad right now. We face enormous costs to rebuild communities destroyed by ever more powerful and frequent storms and fires, loss of life, food insecurity, climate migration. We all know this. From the wildfires in Los Angeles to the hurricanes battering the Gulf Coast and the recurring flooding in Vermont, the reality of climate change is no longer theoretical — it’s right in front of us. We need to ask: Do we want our children to inherit a world where such disasters are commonplace?
The challenge is this: At every level of community (the town, the county, Vermont, New England, the U.S., the global north, the world) we must start making some very hard and at times expensive choices through investments in the transition to a clean energy economy. In the face of this climate emergency, we need to show more resolve. And this resolve is not going to come from the current federal government.
One version of the adapting-to-climate-change story is optimistic: All of these new ways of heating, cooling and transporting are better, and cheaper, so let’s just do it. No problem. But as we are discovering, the transition is actually quite difficult. The costs of retrofitting old buildings to meet energy efficiency standards are high. The supply chains for green technologies are still developing. There aren’t enough electric vehicle chargers to allay the range anxiety that prevents many from switching to an electric vehicle. It is hard to know which heat pump to buy, or how to pay for it. There are political, economic and cultural barriers that make even the most straightforward improvements feel insurmountable. And there are bad actors in the form of fossil fuel companies that want to slow-walk the transition to avoid stranded assets and ruined balance sheets. Yet, if we want to ensure a livable future, the answer is not to simply accept that we have to go very, very slowly.
We need to stick to our stated goals. We need to get very specific about the steps it will take to wean ourselves off fossil fuels and embrace a clean energy future. The alternative is to sentence our children and future generations to a world that is increasingly uninhabitable. Go ahead and skip going to the gym. Eat that doughnut. Have that second glass of wine. Don’t call your mother. But please, let’s not abandon our resolve to do what needs doing to meet this moment of climate emergency. Call your senator or representative. Write a letter to the editor. Help your employer imagine a clean energy future. Join one of the many local groups trying to do our part where we live. Our future selves will thank us.
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