No one knows where this unusual election cycle will take us, but Bernie Sanders, candidate for president, has been gaining in the polls even as he was flattered with a pot shot by the front runner

Never one to bask in what might prove temporary glory, Bernie is wasting no time in getting the important messages out there while he commands the spotlight as Hilary Clinton’s chief competitor for the Democratic nomination.  

Today, that message focussed on campaign funding in the wake of Citizens United, agreeing with former president Jimmy Carter who has called it

“unlimited political bribery…a complete subversion of our political system, as a payoff to major contributors who want, and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election is over.”

Sanders has promised that, when Congress reconvenes in September, he will introduce legislation that would create a system of public funding for election campaigns so that the focus of such campaigns can return to issues and policies rather than the distortions that result from competition for special interest dollars.

Just one family, the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, plan to invest some of their fossil-fuel fortune and, along with other wealthy donors, bankroll a $900 million political operation this election cycle. That’s more than either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party will each spend on the 2016 campaigns, Sanders noted.

Since Koch money has bought and paid for much of our sitting Congress, the measure is unlikely to pass this time; but sooner or later, American voters will throw off the yoke of corporate agenda control and demand meaningful change with no little urgency.  

We’d better hope it will be sooner because the longer it is postponed the more dreadful the potential consequences for civil society.

The argument has to be made that public funding of elections will more than pay for itself in taxpayer savings, when elections become uncoupled from boondoggle projects and subsidies for things like the sugar and corn industries.  

Economy driving innovation will soar when legislators shake off the grip of the powerful fossil fuel lobby and end preferential treatment of the nuclear energy industry.

With such an unencumbered Congress, infrastructure projects that will benefit the entire country and employ millions will replace the few projects that currently get funded (even over-funded) only because special interests are pulling the strings.

It’s got to happen before very long if this nation is going to survive well into the twenty-first century without being torn apart by the powerful pull of grave social inequities.

Revolution is only glorious in hindsight when the flag wavers and reenactors get hold of it.  

I understand that it is far less pleasant to live through.

There is an important struggle over responsible land use playing out in Randolph, where a significant tract of prime agricultural soil is at risk of permanent loss in the name of what some might maintain is “just progress.”

The Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) and the Vermont Natural Resources Council (VNRC) who are partnering with Preservation Trust of Vermont in challenging the oversized development at Exit 4 in Randolph, have asked the District 3 Act 250 Commission to dismiss the project application because it is so egregiously non-conforming.

Brian Shupe, Executive Director of the VNRC commented on what is at stake in Randolph:

“This sprawling project is an enormous waste of agricultural soils…if (it) gets approved, in this location no farmland in Vermont is safe.”

Two of the principle reasons why Act 250 was drafted by the Legislature were  to preserve valuable working landscapes for future generations and to stop the spread of highway-centric sprawl that undermines the character of Vermont. This, the framers believed, is fundamental to our quality of life and longterm viability.

Apparently hoping to slide past the well-established standards of Act 250, developer Sam Sammis courted the State’s favor by promising to build a brand-new Visitors Center to replace one that is currently closed and in need of maintenance.

The proposal of a privately owned and operated Visitors Center at the location was first revealed in 2012.   At the time, it was described by Mr. Sammis as a “win-win” public/private partnership involving a 5,000-sq. ft. visitor center with

“…a 40,000-sq.ft. facility showcasing Vermont products, all at no taxpayer expense.”

The Shumlin administration jumped right on board with the proposal, but many in the environmental community were immediately concerned with the scale and location of the project, while others were concerned that the partnership might have unanticipated consequences impacting public control of an interstate exit.

Mr. Sammis’ vision has grown substantially since the original announcement.  The overall scale of the project has mushroomed to well-over a million square-feet, including a hotel, some private homes and light industry; all closely clustered around Exit 4 and consuming irreplaceable quality farmland.

To permit this project would mean essentially gutting Act 250 and abandoning the principles that have for so long made Vermont stand-out as a beacon of beauty and environmental responsibility above all and any other state.

Mr. Sammis may think of it as a “win-win” for the state, but I rather doubt that. I think that overlooks what visitors are actually looking for when they come to Vermont.

Remember the days of our childhood road trips?  Dad or Mom would actually stop in a small town we’d never visited before. While they gassed-up the station wagon, we “took advantage of the facilities,” then strolled down the block to buy ice-cream or soda; or maybe we picnicked in the park.  We saw a lot of America that way and had no need of commercial “visitors centers.”

Maybe we weren’t in such a hurry to be someplace else back then.

I kind of think the appeal of Vermont for tourists is that, even now, its largely rural environment; its lack of billboards and clutter, links us to a cultural memory that other places have left far behind.

The framers of Act 250 recognized that therein lies an intangible commodity that must be protected and preserved for the benefit of Vermonters in generations to come.

I’ve got to agree with Seven Days’ Paul Heinz when he cries foul over the governor’s highly selective concern about conflicts of interests.

Without weighing in specifically on the appointment of Alyssa Schuren as commissioner of the Dept. of Environmental Conservation (because I do think her record of recusals demonstrates her ability to avoid conflicts of interest), raising questions about such an appointment is entirely legitimate.  

That it was the chair of the GOP who raised the question is not surprising, but the knee-jerk reaction by Shumlin who attacked it as ‘sexist’ was uncalled for.

The fact is that the Republicans are only too happy to let the door swing between regulators and lobbying interests because the advantage usually favors their own partisans.  Since the possibility in this appointment exists for environmental advantage rather than business advantage, it was perhaps inevitable that it would be met with Republican indignation.

The governor takes a dim view of former administration EB-5 overseer Brent Raymond taking the up-exit to work for Mount Snow, but Alex MacLean barely exhaled before signing on with Jay Peak after she took her leave as the governor’s assistant.  While she wasn’t a commissioner, there is no doubt that she enjoyed the privilege of great influence in her administration job.  Quid pro quo, either before or after the fact, is equally damaging to public confidence in government integrity.

The weeds surrounding the EB-5 boondoggle are deep and full of helping hands.  The interests being furthered in those weeds belong less in the political arena than they do in the financial purgatory of business as usual, where who you know or whom you are related to can be leveraged to tremendous economic advantage.

That is one of the disadvantages to our intimate little state.  There are many advantages to being small, but like incest, conflicts of interest have greater opportunity to flourish in very small communities.

I will be very interested when the dust clears in the Northeast Kingdom to see whom the real winners (and losers?) are in that particular skirmish.  That is, assuming that we get a truly independent assessment of the scoreboard.

We like to think that those with whom we generally agree politically are above suspicion; but when our preferred party has, overwhelmingly, the upper hand, that is exactly when we should be most interested in establishing strict ethical guidelines with meaningful consequences; precisely because we do hold the high ground.

As we grapple in Franklin County with the consequences of not having established consequences for truly bad behavior by a public official we see only too well the cost of indulging in the smug notion that “we don’t have that problem in Vermont.”  

If it’s a problem elsewhere in the U.S., you can bet it’s already here.

This week, perennial chameleon Bruce Lisman has posed the rhetorical question: should he run for Governor?

Since he asked, I’m happy to share my own two-cents worth.

Yes, Mr. Lisman, please do.

You’ve been playing a pretty mean Republican dog whistle for years now while coyly refusing to step onto the recital stage.

Like all the honchos who tanked Wall Street and sent our collective retirement savings into the toilet, you somehow managed to leave the party with a buttload of equity.

Lil’ ol’ Vermont, with its anemic Republican party, must have seemed the ideal place to play-out your whale-in-a-wading-pool fantasy of political anointing.  

So away to the Green Mountains you flew; where you passed the time offering plenty of ‘non-partisan’ criticism of Democratic leadership, coupled with just the right amount of anti-tax rhetoric.  You offered precious little in the way of actual…you know…policy solutions?  Why commit when you didn’t have to?

You waited for what I suppose you expected to be a groundswell of well-heeled support to elevate you into the running for statewide office.  When none appeared to be forthcoming, and Peter Shumlin cleared the way for a wide open horse race, you thought you should nudge things along a little by popping the question yourself.

Good for you, Bruce; finally you choked out the ‘ask’ we have all been expecting for years.  For someone who claims to champion ‘transparency’ you have certainly maintained an opaque agenda for a mighty long spell.

It’s no good feigning demure neutrality.  Once you throw your hat in the ring, the questions will be persistent and straight to the point.  

We on the left relish the prospect of plucking away the layers of obfuscation, like so many artichoke leaves, to get to the meat of the matter.

Let the games begin.

We remark on the efficacy of his stewardship in the Auditor’s Office, over and over again, here on GMD, but it must certainly be gratifying for Doug Hoffer  to receive high marks from the National State Auditors Association’s External Peer Review Team.

As is most fitting to the rigorous standards one expects from such a body, state auditor’s offices are subjected to this review once every three years.

This being the second review of our state auditor’s office conducted since it transitioned to doing performance reviews, it is the first that surveyed work entirely done under Auditor Hoffer’s supervision.

The review assesses staff’s familiarity with Generally Accepted Government Auditing Standards; looks at the office’s Professional Standards Manual to ensure that it reflects those aforementioned Standards; and takes a look at some audits performed by the office over the previous three years in order to determine how well those Federal and State Standards have been applied.

For this review period the audits sampled were those that looked at Correctional Health Care (October 2014), the Sex Offender Registry (July 2014), the Liquor Control System (November, 2014), and the State Energy Plan (March, 2015).

Says Hoffer:

“I am proud of the quality of work this office produces” Auditor Hoffer said. “I have an extremely talented team who deserve credit for the high marks on this latest peer review, and I have no doubt that we will continue to maintain this rating following the highest professional standards as we work to hold government accountable.”

What’s this we hear about the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce getting preferential treatment over other regional development associations in the form of a $100,000. grant earmarked for the purpose of sweet-talking Quebec businesses in what are described as “outreach efforts?”

The appropriation started out as a $500,000 fund for marketing Vermont as a good place to do business. That amount shrank to $200,000 during conference committee, and the Quebec outreach proposals appeared in the waning hours of the session as a $100,000 appropriation. The money comes from the Vermont Enterprise Fund, which was originally intended as a cash incentive for the IBM sale to GlobalFoundries but was never used for that purpose.

So, in other words, a slush fund created to groom private economic interests from abroad appears to have been opportunistically hijacked by the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce before the rest of the boys were even given a peek under the hood.

What surprises me is that this comes as any kind of a surprise to  Tim Smith of the Franklin County Industrial Development Authority.  

Mr. Smith objects to what he correctly sees as an unfair advantage negotiated by the LCRCC, and a lack of transparency in the process.

All I can say is welcome to my world, Mr. Smith.  

In the broader world of politics, the Chamber is not known for playing fair.

And while we are on the subject of local Chambers of Commerce, why are we still allowing them so much unfettered influence on the business of business in Vermont?

The answer is probably that they have become so insidious in small town America that we hardly notice they are here.  

Most Vermonters completely overlook their connection to the soulless Mother Ship of Greed: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a powerful global economic player which just this past week was excoriated by the New York times for engaging in an organized effort to combat  anti-smoking efforts around the world.

Already infamous for their efforts to discredit Climate Change science, the Chamber is also the champion of the tobacco industry as it faces off against expanding health education that is making it more and more difficult to ply this killer trade even in third world countries.

Three years ago, Ukraine filed an international legal challenge against Australia, over Australia’s right to enact antismoking laws on its own soil…Taras Kachka…argued that several “fantastic tobacco companies” had bought up Soviet-era factories and modernized them, and now they were exporting tobacco to many other countries. It was in Ukraine’s national interest, he said, to support investors in the country, even though they do not sell tobacco to Australia.

Mr. Kachka was not a tobacco lobbyist or farmer or factory owner. He was the head of a Ukrainian affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, America’s largest trade group.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce derives its power from the sheer number of small local and regional affiliates that unify under its name.  It is their passivity with regards to the Chamber’s overarching agenda of  anti-Climate science and pro-smoking that allows it to continue against the forces of both education and common sense.

When the state awards funds to even a minor agency of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, it becomes complicit with their appalling agenda.

Until local and regional Chambers rise up and conspicuously disassociate themselves from the Mother Ship, they will get no quarter from me.

What’s this we hear about the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce getting preferential treatment over other regional development associations in the form of a $100,000. grant earmarked for the purpose of sweet-talking Quebec businesses in what are described as “outreach efforts?”

The appropriation started out as a $500,000 fund for marketing Vermont as a good place to do business. That amount shrank to $200,000 during conference committee, and the Quebec outreach proposals appeared in the waning hours of the session as a $100,000 appropriation. The money comes from the Vermont Enterprise Fund, which was originally intended as a cash incentive for the IBM sale to GlobalFoundries but was never used for that purpose.

So, in other words, a slush fund created to groom private economic interests from abroad appears to have been opportunistically hijacked by the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce before the rest of the boys were even given a peek under the hood.

What surprises me is that this comes as any kind of a surprise to  Tim Smith of the Franklin County Industrial Development Authority.  

Mr. Smith objects to what he correctly sees as an unfair advantage negotiated by the LCRCC, and a lack of transparency in the process.

All I can say is welcome to my world, Mr. Smith.  

In the broader world of politics, the Chamber is not known for playing fair.

And while we are on the subject of local Chambers of Commerce, why are we still allowing them so much unfettered influence on the business of business in Vermont?

The answer is probably that they have become so insidious in small town America that we hardly notice they are here.  

Most Vermonters completely overlook their connection to the soulless Mother Ship of Greed: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a powerful global economic player which just this past week was excoriated by the New York times for engaging in an organized effort to combat  anti-smoking efforts around the world.

Already infamous for their efforts to discredit Climate Change science, the Chamber is also the champion of the tobacco industry as it faces off against expanding health education that is making it more and more difficult to ply this killer trade even in third world countries.

Three years ago, Ukraine filed an international legal challenge against Australia, over Australia’s right to enact antismoking laws on its own soil…Taras Kachka…argued that several “fantastic tobacco companies” had bought up Soviet-era factories and modernized them, and now they were exporting tobacco to many other countries. It was in Ukraine’s national interest, he said, to support investors in the country, even though they do not sell tobacco to Australia.

Mr. Kachka was not a tobacco lobbyist or farmer or factory owner. He was the head of a Ukrainian affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, America’s largest trade group.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce derives its power from the sheer number of small local and regional affiliates that unify under its name.  It is their passivity with regards to the Chamber’s overarching agenda of  anti-Climate science and pro-smoking that allows it to continue against the forces of both education and common sense.

When the state awards funds to even a minor agency of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, it becomes complicit with their appalling agenda.

Until local and regional Chambers rise up and conspicuously disassociate themselves from the Mother Ship, they will get no quarter from me.

What’s this we hear about the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce getting preferential treatment over other regional development associations in the form of a $100,000. grant earmarked for the purpose of sweet-talking Quebec businesses in what are described as “outreach efforts?”

The appropriation started out as a $500,000 fund for marketing Vermont as a good place to do business. That amount shrank to $200,000 during conference committee, and the Quebec outreach proposals appeared in the waning hours of the session as a $100,000 appropriation. The money comes from the Vermont Enterprise Fund, which was originally intended as a cash incentive for the IBM sale to GlobalFoundries but was never used for that purpose.

So, in other words, a slush fund created to groom private economic interests from abroad appears to have been opportunistically hijacked by the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce before the rest of the boys were even given a peek under the hood.

What surprises me is that this comes as any kind of a surprise to  Tim Smith of the Franklin County Industrial Development Authority.  

Mr. Smith objects to what he correctly sees as an unfair advantage negotiated by the LCRCC, and a lack of transparency in the process.

All I can say is welcome to my world, Mr. Smith.  

In the broader world of politics, the Chamber is not known for playing fair.

And while we are on the subject of local Chambers of Commerce, why are we still allowing them so much unfettered influence on the business of business in Vermont?

The answer is probably that they have become so insidious in small town America that we hardly notice they are here.  

Most Vermonters completely overlook their connection to the soulless Mother Ship of Greed: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a powerful global economic player which just this past week was excoriated by the New York times for engaging in an organized effort to combat  anti-smoking efforts around the world.

Already infamous for their efforts to discredit Climate Change science, the Chamber is also the champion of the tobacco industry as it faces off against expanding health education that is making it more and more difficult to ply this killer trade even in third world countries.

Three years ago, Ukraine filed an international legal challenge against Australia, over Australia’s right to enact antismoking laws on its own soil…Taras Kachka…argued that several “fantastic tobacco companies” had bought up Soviet-era factories and modernized them, and now they were exporting tobacco to many other countries. It was in Ukraine’s national interest, he said, to support investors in the country, even though they do not sell tobacco to Australia.

Mr. Kachka was not a tobacco lobbyist or farmer or factory owner. He was the head of a Ukrainian affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, America’s largest trade group.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce derives its power from the sheer number of small local and regional affiliates that unify under its name.  It is their passivity with regards to the Chamber’s overarching agenda of  anti-Climate science and pro-smoking that allows it to continue against the forces of both education and common sense.

When the state awards funds to even a minor agency of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, it becomes complicit with their appalling agenda.

Until local and regional Chambers rise up and conspicuously disassociate themselves from the Mother Ship, they will get no quarter from me.

Well all the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men finally caught up to David Sweat, so that’s all she wrote.

To those who would not, Republican, Democrat and Progressive, one can only ask WTF?

_______________________________________________________________________________

There are so many things happening right now that not all receive sufficient attention on GMD.

Our model is extremely democratic, so the array of topics reflects the impulse of the moment rather than the gravity of a single subject weighted against many other equally important ones.

A cavalcade diary might be in order, touching on some of the news that fell between the cracks over the past week or so.

The Dannemora prison escapees, or rather the one remaining escapee, continues to make daily appearances in the news, although the expectation that authorities were “within hours” of capturing David Sweat seems to have lost some of its cache, as it has been repeated now for what seems like days on-end.  

I see that digital pop culture has more or less institutionalized the prison break du jour with its own Wikipedia page.  

Not much is being said about the unsustainable nature of America’s current incarceration habits.

It should be little surprise that as we grew the corrections industry to gargantuan size by incarcerating more people than any other country in the world, we also opened the door to the kind of qualitative decline in skilled labor that tends to accompany a “Big Box ” management model.

The details of this escape by truly dangerous criminals from the ‘honor block’ of a famous maximum security prison should lend a lot of credence to the argument that we need to ratchet down our legal system to focus on successfully incarcerating the truly dangerous people under skilled supervision, and stop tossing every petty drug offender in the clink. It may have generated a highly profitable business for the corrections sector, but it’s actually making us less safe for reasons too innumerable to go into here.

Talking about the need for major changes in America’s institutions, that great Agent of Change for 2016, Bernie Sanders is gaining on Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire polls.  I believe the spread is down to eight points now and closing.

Bernie’s secret? Consistent messaging since roughly 1972.  

In an era when Americans are tired and cynical and fully aware that big money controls most political conversation, they like what they’re hearing from Bernie because he says what he truly thinks, not what the latest polling says he should think, or what the deepest pockets say he must think.

Which is not to say that Hillary isn’t authentically progressive in her heart of hearts, but her exceptional talent and intellect was unfortunately appropriated by conventional politics (and a significantly less intelligent and disciplined husband) far too early in her own career to enable her to soar far above the fray as Bernie now can.

Change seems to be in the air in even more traditionally conservative arenas, as the Supremes hit two out of the park last week. That followed recent addresses by Pope Francis that both elevated Climate Responsibility to a moral obligation and gave nuclear energy a thumbs down, referring to it as a “Modern Day Tower of Babel.”

Unfortunately, in Franklin County, Vermont, owing to a lack of leadership by the Vermont Senate Pro Tem,  John Campbell, and the hierarchy of the  Vermont GOP, a necessary change is proving stubbornly difficult to achieve.

Accused sex offender, Norm McAllister, continues to resist calls from his constituents to vacate his senate seat.

Mr. McAllister, as you may recall, has been recorded by the State’s Attorney’s office discussing his grotesque behavior with a couple of his ‘alleged’ victims.  Details of the calls, as partially recounted in the St. Albans Messenger and other sources were extremely graphic and left no doubt in the mind of the reader, that McAllister owned the involuntary nature of the sex acts committed against his accusers, even if he was unwilling to stipulate to their criminal implications.

The recordings also left no doubt that he was in violation of his oath of office, at the very least.  That is why it is incomprehensible to many (probably most) Franklin County residents why he has been allowed to continue claiming his seat in the senate.

Fed-up with the lack of leadership, several Franklin County ‘civilians’ have taken it upon themselves to begin a petition on Facebook and on paper, asking Mr. McAllister to voluntarily resign.

I am one of the people who is collecting signatures on paper in support of the petition, and on Saturday alone, I personally collected close to 100 signatures without breaking a sweat.

I might add that those are all signatures of Franklin County adults, and I had to refuse a number of people from Quebec and Chittenden county whom I encountered who would have dearly loved to sign, too.

Well, that’s all I’ve got for the moment… stay tuned for updates.

I am posting Brian Shupe’s excellent op-ed on GMD in its entirety, for the benefit of our readers.  No one could have made the case more eloquently.  Brian Shupe is the Executive Director of the Vermont Natural Resource Council.

Most Vermonters are aware that the state recently enacted ambitious legislation aimed at cleaning up Lake Champlain and other lakes and rivers. At the same time, many state leaders are talking about putting a price on carbon-based fuels to account for the true cost of these increasingly dangerous energy sources.

Despite this good news, we’ve got a problem. Just across Lake Champlain, in New York, poorly-regulated oil trains rumble along old rail lines and bridges just yards from the shore, posing a serious threat to the lake and the communities that surround it.

Recently, representatives from the National Wildlife Federation, Vermont Natural Resources Council, the Adirondack Council, the Sierra Club, and the Lake Champlain Committee, stood on the banks of Lake Champlain in Port Kent, New York, just yards from a Canadian Pacific railway line, and issued a sharp warning: a spill or explosion along Lake Champlain could be a major environmental disaster and an unprecedented tragedy for area residents.

Currently, trains of the black tankers – so called DOT-111 cars – carry tens of millions of gallons of crude oil from places like North Dakota along this line, just across the lake from Burlington, to Albany. Much of that oil is highly volatile Bakken crude. Bakken crude was what caught fire in July of 2013 when a train derailed and exploded in southern Quebec, killing 47 people and gutting downtown Lac Megantic (pop. 5,900) just a few miles from the Maine border.

So far this year, there have been train accidents and associated crude oil fires and spills in West Virginia, Illinois, North Dakota and two in Ontario.

 

The domestic oil boom in the U.S. and Canada has got trains running like never before across the continent. According to the Association of American Railroads, between 2008 and 2013 the number of carloads of crude oil shipped rose more than 40-fold, from about 9,500 carloads to 407,761 carloads. In the first half of 2014, railroads moved 229,798 carloads of oil.

As should be expected, the increase in rail transport has lead to an increase in accidents. In 2013, more crude oil (1.15 million gallons) was spilled from train accidents than was spilled in all of the years between 1975 and 2012 (800,000 gallons) combined.

So far this year, there have been train accidents and associated crude oil fires and spills in West Virginia, Illinois, North Dakota and two in Ontario.

Now, a Massachusetts-based firm, Global Partners, has proposed adding a heating and pumping facility to an oil storage and transfer plant it runs in Albany so that the plant could heat Canadian tar sands oil – that nasty, climate-busting stuff that comes from Alberta and really should stay in the ground – so it could be more easily shipped.

The plan would clear the way for the same train line to carry this heavy oil that is strip mined from vast stretches of boreal forests into the market. Mining and then burning this oil is pumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, so much so that former NASA climatologist James Hansen said that if Alberta’s tar sands oil is extracted and burned, it will be “game over for the planet.”

Some argue that slowing oil-by-rail shipments will increase the pressure for pipelines, like the Keystone XL Pipeline, or the use of the Portland Montreal Pipeline that runs across the Northeast Kingdom. That notion is based on the false assumption that we have no choice but to double down on dirty fuel, digging it up and hauling it around in ever-greater quantities. For the sake of the climate, clean water, and the safety of our communities, we’ve simply got to phase out our addiction to fossil fuels. Throttling back – not up – is the only option.

Specifically in terms of shipping oil by rail, NWF has called for an immediate moratorium on shipments until safety can be guaranteed. VNRC agrees. Given the progress we are making on cleaning up Lake Champlain – and the growing urgency to deal with climate change – allowing this threat to remain, indeed grow, makes no sense.