{"id":30963,"date":"2025-07-23T10:09:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T10:09:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/30963\/"},"modified":"2025-07-23T10:09:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T10:09:08","slug":"state-concludes-vermont-is-failing-to-meet-its-carbon-reduction-targets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/30963\/","title":{"rendered":"State concludes Vermont is failing to meet its carbon reduction targets"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ATraffic travels along Pine Street under hazy skies in Burlington on Wednesday, June 4. Photo by Glenn Russell\/VTDigger<\/p>\n

The state has likely failed to reduce pollution from fossil fuels enough to meet its legally-binding emissions reduction goals over the next decade, according to a new report released by the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources on Friday. The same day, a state court judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by a conservation group meant to hold the agency accountable.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The 2020 Global Warming Solutions Act requires Vermont to reduce its carbon emissions to help lessen the dangers of a warming planet. The state has legally-binding goals to lower greenhouse gases by 26% below 2005 levels by Jan. 1, 2025, 40% below 1990 levels by 2030, and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.<\/p>\n

The new agency report is both an estimate of how much carbon, methane, and other greenhouse gases Vermont emits every year since 1990 compared to historic baseline levels in 1990 and 2005, as well as an updated forecast of the state\u2019s progress towards hitting those targets.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2022, the inventory measured 8.25 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gas emissions, or almost one million metric tons above the 2025 goal, and falling only slightly from 2021 levels. The most common sources of emissions are transportation and heating. Both sectors are still largely dependent on fossil fuels like gas and oil, the burning of which are the largest drivers of human-caused climate change.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Conservation\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tby Emma Cotton<\/a>
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tSeptember 24, 2024, 2:59 pmSeptember 24, 2024, 5:30 pm\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

The forecast suggests that by 2026, greenhouse gas emissions will be roughly half a million metric tons, or around 6%, above the level the state was expected to meet the previous year, on January 1, 2025. By 2030, the state would be more than 1.5 million metric tons above the state\u2019s legally binding goal of 5.24 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, overshooting by roughly 29%. Those projections are far from state goals set half a decade ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s surprising the state has not done more given where we need to go,\u201d said Elena Mihaly, vice president for Vermont\u2019s chapter of the Conservation Law Foundation, an advocacy group based in New England that brought the lawsuit against the agency. \u201cWe haven\u2019t seen any big policies adopted to reduce our emissions.\u201d<\/p>\n

The most recent Climate Action Plan<\/a>, also required by the Global Warming Solutions Act and adopted by the state on July 1, outlines ways the state can tackle climate change. But historically, big-swing programs like a regional cap-and-invest model for transportation emissions<\/a> and a wonky reworking of the heating fuels market known as the clean heat standard<\/a>, have failed to materialize.<\/p>\n

While there\u2019s a downward trend in emissions, \u201cit\u2019s not as rapid as we\u2019d like or hope we would\u2019ve seen given the substantial investments over the last several years of state and federal funds in climate action,\u201d said Julie Moore, secretary for the Agency of Natural Resources.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\t\t\tby Auditi Guha<\/a>
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tApril 8, 2024, 6:12 pmApril 8, 2024, 6:12 pm\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

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The inventories are generally three years behind, so the data for the January 1, 2025 emissions target \u2013 which looks at 2024 emissions \u2013 won\u2019t be released until 2027, according to Moore. But the agency agreed that it likely hadn\u2019t reached the 2025 goal after analyzing a report published by the Energy Action Network<\/a>, a Vermont-based energy research organization, which found that the state had fallen up to 39% short of emissions reductions required by law.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Conservation Law Foundation sued the state last year for failing to adequately prepare to meet the 2025 target, but a judge dismissed the suit last week.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Moore said the judge shared her agency\u2019s perspective that it was too early to bring forward a private lawsuit under the Global Warming Solutions Act.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s unfortunate that it required a significant amount of staff time on our end to have our position affirmed,\u201d Moore said, adding that groups like Conservation Law Foundation would be able to sue the state when the 2024 emissions inventory is published two years from now, representing the emissions up until Jan. 1, 2025.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Mihaly, the foundation\u2019s vice president for Vermont, said on Monday that whether the state could be sued before 2024 emissions were released in 2027 was still unsettled. She noted that the judge didn\u2019t make any comment on whether the modeling the agency used was correct or flawed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAlthough the state made some corrections to its climate model as a result of the concerns CLF raised in this lawsuit, this decision means the public can\u2019t legally challenge the Agency\u2019s review,\u201d Mihaly said in a press release. \u201cThis lack of accountability is troubling.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The foundation had not yet decided whether to appeal, according to Mihaly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Vermont\u2019s emissions are the lowest in the nation, far below neighboring, more populous states like New York, which emitted 371.08 million metric tons of carbon in 2022<\/a>, or New Hampshire, which emitted 15.21 million metric tons of carbon in 2021<\/a>. But Vermont remains the highest emitting state per capita in New England, surpassing Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and even New York, according to a 2023 ranking of nationwide emissions<\/a> compiled by the Energy Information Administration, a federal agency that analyzes energy data.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While not all extreme weather events have been attributed by scientists to climate change, the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events, like short bursts heavy precipitation that contributed to the floods hitting Vermont three years in a row on July 10<\/a> have been predicted as the planet warms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Traffic travels along Pine Street under hazy skies in Burlington on Wednesday, June 4. Photo by Glenn Russell\/VTDigger…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30964,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[25995,4253,25996,25997,25998,192,25999,79,26000],"class_list":["post-30963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-climate-action-plan","tag-climate-change","tag-conservation-law-foundation","tag-elena-mihaly","tag-energy-action-network","tag-environment","tag-global-warming-solutions-act","tag-science","tag-vermont-agency-of-natural-resources"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30963\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}