Originally published on Vermont Digger in March 2016
Balance is a desirable objective, whether it’s within one’s personal life or under the Golden Dome in Montpelier. Balance in the public sphere is an awfully difficult thing to achieve, but achieve it we must, especially in the context of further becoming the kinds of stewards of our state and our planet that climate change requires. We are and will be faced with a multitude of challenges and addressing these challenges will strain our resources far more than they already do today. In short, we need to develop laser-like focus on what our priorities should be and develop some basic outline on how to organize them.
This commentary offers a basic framework which I hope will aid our leaders in thinking about and structuring each initiative we undertake for the sake of assessing whether there is balance across the policies we adopt. While other “frameworks” exist, the ones I have seen are just too complicated for our citizen-legislators to use in their decision making (but this should not stop agencies from getting into the nitty-gritty). The risk of not being focused is that we may spend too much time, energy and money on one thing and less on others. I think we also need to start letting go of imaging perfect outcomes and realize that being practical is our best hope. At end of the day, there is only so much we can do with limited resources. This is not a “glass half empty” approach, but rather a clear-eyed way at addressing our future needs. We can be hopeful and realistic at the same time.
In the context of climate change, our environmental priorities should fall into three different buckets: mitigation, adaptation, and fixing existing problems.
Surely, some initiatives we undertake will not fit neatly into one box or the other, but that should not be a reason to avoid having some kind of framework. For example, establishing stream buffer requirements would fall into both the mitigation box and the fixing problems box. That is completely OK and in fact may be beneficial in that such initiatives would represent maximization of resources.
I cannot claim to be completely knowledgeable about all the current environmental policies and initiatives underway in Vermont, but I can speak to those issues that have consumed the most oxygen in Montpelier. Over the past few years, renewable energy has dominated public discourse because within that particular topic there has been a great deal of imbalance. There is now hope for greater balance with S.230 having been voted out of the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy. On the other end of the spectrum, the next hottest topic seems to be the cleanup of Lake Champlain. There is no doubt about the importance of fixing that problem and I applaud individuals such as James Ehlers of Lake Champlain International and Chris Kilian of the Conservation Law Foundation and their respective teams who have worked tirelessly for years to bring that issue to the fore. Notably absent from our public conversations, however, is much in the way on adaptation (Google searches for “mitigation” produces far more results than “adaptation” when searching vermont.gov or sites under state.vt.us).
Perhaps adaptation does not raise the public’s temperature (pardon the pun), but for whatever reason, it is a glaring omission. I would argue that aside from fixing the biggest of the problems, adaptation ranks at the top. Why? While mitigation is important, especially in terms of changing behaviors and adopting new practices, the reality is that we are not going to put a huge dent in the trajectory we are on. Certainly, that is not an argument to abandon mitigation efforts, as some might have it, but we should also be realistic and conscientious. We should not put the bulk of our focus on mitigation, as we do today.
Putting more attention on adaptation is important chiefly because doing so should allow us to better plan for contingencies (such as events like Irene), but even more importantly will facilitate transitioning our economy to one that will sustain us well into the future. For example, while we may not like to ponder the future of the ski industry, this winter has provided ample food for thought. For perhaps the first time in its 71-year history, the Stowe Derby is canceled due to lack of snow. The ski industry will likely become economically unviable before the snow is gone. We really need to figure out what will replace that part of our economic engine and doing so is as much an adaptation issue as it is an economic development issue. Indeed, tourism is such a huge part of our economy, but climate change may throw off a lot of activities that used to fall neatly into the calendar, e.g., fall foliage, wedding season, etc. For reference, see Vermont’s Gross State Product by Industry on page 5 of the Vermont Department of Labor’s 2015 Economic-Demographic Profile.
This winter also serves as a reminder to both the state and local governments that the weather will become increasingly variable and increasingly unpredictable. This translates into a completely different mindset on how to approach typical government operations such as road maintenance (road maintenance is as much an environmental issue as it is purely operational). Town highway budgets, for example, have traditionally been broken down into winter and summer maintenance. The edges of that paradigm are becoming increasingly blurred. Because of that, it is harder to figure out how much material will be needed in a given year and when it should be purchased. The severity of weather events can also result in instant budget spikes. These kinds of challenges are very much related to adaptation – how we budget and spend are in fact becoming adaptation problems that will need to be addressed because climate change really is the underlying cause.
I hope this commentary will serve as a way for our leaders to think more clearly about how changes in policies and practices fit within a broader climate change framework and how we can achieve balance in a world of increasingly constrained resources. I also hope that we begin to achieve that balance by placing greater emphasis on adaptation while moving ahead with initiatives on the other ends of the spectrum.