vtdigger.org · Elizabeth Gribkoff · September 4, 2026
Climate change: Vermont will not meet its 2028 emissions goals. Now what? - VTDigger
# Climate change: Vermont will not meet its 2028 emissions goals. Now what?
by Elizabeth Gribkoff October 2, 2019, 8:18 pm October 21, 2024, 9:25 pm
The McNeil Generating Station in Burlington. Photo by Glenn Russell
Vermont’s goals for cutting greenhouse gas emissions were ambitious from the start.
In 2007, the Legislature passed a law that called for a 25% reduction in emissions below 1990 levels by 2012, 50% below by 2028 and 75% below by 2050.
Just over a decade later, Democratic lawmakers and one of the governor’s top environmental officials concede the near-term goal will not be met.
“We’re going to not meet that 50% by 2028,” Peter Walke, the deputy secretary of the state Agency of Natural Resources, put it flatly in a recent interview.
Emissions have increased in recent years, with the most recent data from 2015 showing emissions 16% higher than 1990 levels. And there are indications that emissions have only continued to rise since then.
House Speaker Mitzi Johnson, D-South Hero, and Rep. Sarah Copeland Hanzas, D-Bradford, vice chair of the climate solutions caucus, also said Vermont could not realistically halve its emissions in the next decade.
“In order to have met that goal, we needed to have been keeping closer track of it all along the way,” said Johnson.
This article is the last in a series covering the impact of climate change on Vermont. Read about hotter, wilder weather, the potential impact of ‘climigration,’ and the new pest problems farmers are facing.
#### What happened?
Initially, the state focused on greening up the electric sector through energy efficiency and renewability standards for utilities. Vermont also participates in RGGI, a regional cap and trade program to reduce emissions from electricity.
Those efforts have been successful, to some degree. Greenhouse gas emissions from electricity are slightly below what they were in 1990, according to the state’s latest inventory.
But similar progress has not been made in transportation or heating, which now account for almost 70% of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, emissions from transportation, the single biggest contributor, are now 28% higher than they were in 1990.
In a rural state with long winters, lowering emissions from heating and transportation has proven difficult. While some Vermonters have switched over to electric vehicles, 97% of vehicles are still gasoline and diesel powered, according to the state’s 2017 Vermont Transportation Energy Profile. And overall vehicle miles traveled in Vermont, which is above the national average, has been rising in recent years.
Vermont has among the oldest housing stock in the nation. While progress has been made in weatherizing homes to lower heating costs, the state is falling far below its goal of improving 80,000 homes by 2020. The state Department of Public Service said in its 2019 annual energy report that it would take an “immediate and unprecedented ramp up” to meet that target.
“We have not sustained effort and resources into it and until we do that … we’re not going to even be making progress, we’ll continue to fall behind,” Copeland Hanzas said of the state’s emissions goals.
Leaders in the Senate and House say their strategy is changing.
“We’re in the process of making a pretty serious conceptual shift to focus much more on transportation and the emissions from buildings,” said Senate President Tim Ashe, D/P-Chittenden, who placed himself on the Senate Transportation Committee this session.
“And so we might think about things differently today than we did when those particular goals were made in terms of timing and strategies,” he added.
While the 2028 goals may be out of reach, state leaders, including Gov. Phil Scott, are optimistic that Vermont can drastically reduce emissions by mid-century, citing technological advances and existing policies that will reap future reductions.
“I believe we can attain our goal by 2050 but it’s not linear,” Scott said in a recent interview.
Gov. Phil Scott discusses the state’s climate policies during an interview in Montpelier on Sept. 27. Photo by Mike Dougherty/VTDigger
#### Now what?
Next year, the climate solutions caucus will push for a bill known as the “Global Warming Solutions Act,” which would align Vermont’s goals with those of the Paris Agreement and require state agencies to adopt rules to reduce emissions. The long-term goal for Vermont would be net-zero emissions by 2050.
Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts and New York have enacted similar laws.
“Both of these are pretty aggressive, pretty ambitious targets given that we’ve been falling behind,” Copeland-Hanzas said. “But we need something to demand that the Scott administration put more than just a handful of resources toward meeting these goals.”
Right now, the state tracks its past emissions mostly by aggregating federal and state environmental data. However, it does not track overall emissions reductions expected from public investments, new policies or actions from other players, like utilities or weatherization companies.
Walke said he thinks tracking expected progress is “important,” but said the state’s resources are better spent on policy development and action, such as home weatherization and promoting electric vehicles.
An electric vehicle recharges on Main Street in Burlington. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
Even meeting the emissions reductions goals in the Paris Agreement would require drastic actions. Vermont would need 90,000 electric vehicles on the road by 2025, according to an Energy Action Network analysis; the state had 2,985 registered as of last January.
A version of the Global Warming Solutions Act introduced in the House last year did not make it to the floor. It’s likely that bill will see more play next year as Johnson said she is willing to support it in 2020. She said Rep. Tim Briglin, D-Thetford, chair of the House energy committee, has been looking at “ways to hold us and the governor accountable to those emissions goals.”
Johnson added that she wants lawmakers to focus their energy on emissions-reducing actions, not “quibbling over the specifics of the target.”
Ashe, however, said the other states that have passed the Global Warming Solutions Act have yet to see whether it has had the intended effect of reducing emissions — or simply set in motion “multi-year bureaucratic processes.”
“I’m open-minded to it,” he added of the proposal, but “it is less important to me than actually coming up with strategies that we know will work now.”
The governor also expressed concerns with that approach, saying he prefers carrots over sticks. “Trying to use a regulatory method and punishment as a means to drive change typically doesn’t work that well,” he said.
From left, Sens. Dick Sears and Brian Campion of Bennington, Attorney General TJ Donovan, Agency of Natural Resources Deputy Secretary Peter Walke, and Gov. Phil Scott. Photo by Mike Dougherty/VTDigger
Walke said he feels the focus should be on how the state could help people transition off fossil fuels, not on regulations that could lead to additional burdens for low-income Vermonters. He added that while it seems that a similar approach has effectively spurred lake cleanup, there were years of litigation and other challenges to get there.
“So to assume that you can create that same jump in the climate change world just by saying ‘go regulate climate change out of existence,’ which essentially is what it says, is going to lead to us going fast to go slow because we’re going to have litigation all over the place,” he said of the Global Warming Solutions Act.
Both Johnson and the governor declined to cite specific policy proposals they would endorse next year beyond continuing work from last session to promote weatherization, electric vehicles and charging stations.
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