TCI Regional Policy Design Stakeholder Submissions

We need public transportation across the USA if we are serious about climate change. We need electric cars. We need alternatives to fossil fuels!! It will soon be TOO LATE!!

I grew up in the pre-EPA pollution when “smog” was a household word, and saw the visible difference in the air when anti-pollution protections were put into place. Clean air is our most basic need. Please go forward with more protections, and reverse this backward trend into allowing more poisons into our every breath!

This is a tax given a name that tries to hide this tax attempt. A governor only approval is not right, this should be voted on by all ma citizens. Rational citizens would not approve of a income deduction. This tax is just wrong no matter of its made up issue.

I WANT IMMEDIATELY ALL GAS ENGINES IN CARS/TRUCKS TO GET 100 MILES ON A GALLON OF GAS. THAT CAN BE DONE, IT SHOULD BE DONE.IMMEDIATELY RESTORE ALL TEH REGULATIONS THAT REQUIRE MORE MILES ON A GALLON OF GAS. WE CAN DO THIS.

My first observation (as an initiate) is the MOU is only partly a memorandum of understanding. When it comes to the description of the program design, this document appears to be more a memorandum of obfuscation. While it may be necessary to be somewhat broad and unspecific, most everything in the paragraphs containing the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth appearances of the words "BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED," is moderately to utterly incomprehensible. Given that these four paragraphs appear to be the "business end" of the proposal, it seemed important to make sense of them, so I referred to a video on the TCI website:

https://vimeo.com/331091117/defadf2a7f

The video was not particularly effective at translating the language in the aforementioned four paragraphs into meaningful understanding of any intended program design. This is not to say the program design won't work - it is only to say that the video does not explain the program design much better than the MOU itself.

That said, in the video, there is a slide which appears at 7:01, and remains frozen on the screen until 8:57 (a mind-numbing two minutes). It appears this slide is aimed at depicting the intended effect of TCI.

If, as shown in that slide, it takes TCI twenty years to effect a ≈60% reduction in carbon, then TCI is a failure. According to most climate science available today, we don't have twenty years.

I have children and I would like for them to be able to have a healthy future. Anything short of 100% sustainable energy by 2030 at the latest will not enable that to happen.

This is the largest source of global warming emissions and action must be taken to stop it. We need to prioritize clean investments now. I appreciate the bipartisan nature of this project to move us forward. Thanks.

My name is John Cushman and I live in Norwich, Vermont. I’m writing to encourage you to produce a strong Transportation Climate Initiative memorandum of understanding so that our leaders in our state can use it as an effective, affordable and equitable tool to meet our science-based climate goals.

It is in the interest of Vermont’s citizens to reduce our own emissions of carbon dioxide to zero as rapidly as possible, as recommended and explained by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in keeping with the Paris Agreement. Doing so in a regional framework will maintain our state’s role as a leader. Not participating will turn us into a laggard.

Much of these emissions come from transportation, and while all economic sectors must share the commitment to action, the TCI, as a regional plan model thoughtfully on our experiences with electricity in the Northeast, is an economically sound way of doing so.

Not to participate would pose the risk that we Vermonters would pay part of the price of a regional market-based approach to capping pollution and investing the proceeds of allowance auctions.

Putting a price on carbon through a well designed cap-and-invest approach is economically rational because it drives the lowest cost solutions to the front of the line -- kind of like a car pool lane on a highway. Using the proceeds to pay for modern, efficient transportation infrastructure makes the most sense, and can be designed to protect the most vulnerable from unjust impacts.

Our state agencies can make this work.

For example, the Department of Public Health recently reported that we can save the lives of 2,000 Vermonters in the coming 30 years, and save more than $1 billion in health related costs, if in the coming 10 years we build up our fleet of electric vehicles, cut our solo car trips, and double our walking, biking and bus trips from ten years ago. Those are among the goals of our state’s comprehensive energy plan, and the TCI should be structured to help us meet them.

You should keep your ears and your minds open. Don’t focus on the special interest pleadings of the fossil fuel industry and the Koch brothers misinformation network. Remember, fossil energy is not cheap when you stop treating pollution like a freebie!

Instead, listen to real public interest groups! They want to make the TCI work -- to base it on peer reviewed science, to use the power of the marketplace for sound decisions, to build in a just transition for workers and people with less money, and to make Vermont a good neighbor.

And please keep the doors open to citizens. In Norwich we have voted to reverse our town’s carbon footprint. We have voted to incorporate climate action in every aspect of our town planning, including transportation. We have turned out on the street and in local meetings to demand action based on science. It’s the same in towns all over Vermont. Give us the tools!