2023-2024 Legislative Session:
The Vermont General Assembly’s Climate Solutions Caucus (CSC) is the largest issue-focused, non-partisan caucus in the 180-member Vermont body prioritizing key climate solutions with majorities in both chambers. The CSC 2024 priorities include:
Improve Community Resilience
- Adopt a suite of policies to reduce the risk of flood damage (S.213, H.29, 30, 723)
- Develop a Climate Resilience and Mitigation Fund (S.145/H.105)
- Expand the Municipal Planning & Resilience Grants Program (H.568)
- Secure sustainable funding and maximize federal funds for climate mitigation and resilience (H.586)
- Advancing thermal energy networks (H.669)
Hold Fossil Fuel Companies Accountable
- Establish a longer-term funding solution for needed community resilience investments premised upon ensuring the largest fossil fuel companies in the world help pay for the damages their products have caused (S.259, H.809).
Modernize the Renewable Energy Standard
- Advance the legislative working group’s recommendations to increase requirements for new in-state and regional renewable energy in our utilities’ portfolios.
Reform Act 250
- Better incorporate climate impacts in Act 250, and ensure a modernized program encourages smart growth development, reduces duplicative permitting and protects working lands and resilience-enhancing natural areas.
Invest in Climate-Friendly Transportation Solutions
- Reduce emissions, build resilience, and develop clean, affordable, and accessible transportation infrastructure for the 21st century, including forward-looking policies and sustainable funding strategies to reduce pollution (H.693)
Other Policies of Interest
- Addressing non-compliance with state energy codes
- Requiring state-owned buildings to install clean heating systems when replacing systems
- Ensuring low-income Vermonters can afford electricity
- Divesting state pension funds from fossil fuels
- Kickstarting energy storage
- Ensuring coordination and support for growing the Climate Workforce
- Prohibiting the sale, distribution, and use of neonicotinoid pesticides
- Supporting farming practices that perform beneficial ecosystem services and build soil health
- Assessing and addressing the effect of climate change on the health of the population of Vermont