Vermont’s Green Credit Con: Clean State, Dirty Books

When cap-and-trade first rolled onto the national stage in the late 2000s, it was sold as a bold, market-based climate solution. The idea sounded simple: set a limit on carbon emissions, let companies trade “rights to emit,” and let economics push carbon downward.

In practice? It went over like a turd in the punchbowl.

Voters hated it.
Industry hated it.
Even environmental groups turned on it.

Not because they were anti-environment, but because they saw the truth: the system didn’t reduce real carbon emissions — it only reshuffled paperwork. Trading permits didn’t stop smokestacks. It just put a price on the smoke.

So cap-and-trade faded as a brand. But the mechanism never died.
It evolved into a family of markets with greener-sounding names: Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), carbon credits, offsets, clean-heat credits, and “net-zero” trading. Different labels, same guts.

And here’s the consistent reality across all of them:

**These systems don’t reduce actual carbon emissions.

They just move carbon claims around while Vermonters pay the bill.**

Vermont is Exhibit A.

RECs: The Clean Electricity Vermont Generates, Sold Off as Someone Else’s Climate Victory

A Renewable Energy Certificate (REC) is not energy.
It’s a certificate that lets the owner claim the environmental benefit of one megawatt-hour of renewable power.

If Vermont produces clean hydro or solar but sells the RECs out of state, here’s what happens:

Massachusetts or Connecticut get to claim they used that renewable energy.
Vermont is forced — legally, not physically — to pretend it used dirtier grid electricity.
Vermont’s reported carbon emissions go up even though nothing changed in reality.
Those inflated numbers justify new climate mandates.
Vermonters’ electric bills go up again.

Physically, Vermont is one of the cleanest grids in the country.
On paper? We look dirtier because we sold away the right to say we’re clean.

RECs don’t reduce carbon.
They transfer carbon credit from the producer to the buyer.

A paperwork swap — not a climate solution.

Carbon Credits and Offsets: Accounting Without Atmospheric Change

Carbon credits and offsets operate on the same principle:

A company keeps emitting carbon.
It buys a credit from someone claiming to reduce or avoid emissions somewhere else.
The company gets to declare “net-zero.”
The underlying emissions? Still there.
The climate impact? Virtually unchanged.

Most offsets don’t deliver what they promise.
Some never deliver anything at all.
But the market thrives because the system isn’t designed to reduce emissions — it’s designed to create tradable environmental commodities.

And every commodity market produces middlemen who profit handsomely:
brokers, consultants, verifiers, auditors, NGOs, and utilities.

Everyone makes money except the ratepayer.

Clean Heat Credits: Assigning Carbon Responsibility to the Wrong People

This brings us to Vermont’s proposed Clean Heat Standard — essentially cap-and-trade for your furnace.

The CHS would have required heating fuel dealers to:

weatherize homes,
install heat pumps,
or buy clean-heat credits to cover the carbon emitted when their customers burn the fuel.

Here’s the key point policymakers won’t say:

🍁 Make a One-Time Contribution — Stand Up for Accountability in Vermont 🍁

Fuel dealers do not emit carbon. Their customers do.

A fuel dealer is a logistics provider.
They buy fuel, store fuel, and deliver fuel.
They don’t burn it. They don’t create the carbon emissions.

Assigning carbon responsibility to them is convenient for regulators — you can’t realistically regulate 150,000 individual homeowners — but it’s completely disconnected from physical reality.

It’s like blaming UPS for the carbon footprint of whatever you buy on Amazon.

And because dealers can’t absorb these mandated costs, they do the only thing they can do:

They pass the costs to consumers.

Higher heating bills.
Higher delivery fees.
Higher compliance charges.

All for a credit market that doesn’t reduce carbon emissions.

The Pattern: Carbon Responsibility Gets Shifted, but Carbon Doesn’t Go Down

Across RECs, offsets, carbon credits, and clean-heat credits, the pattern is identical:

1. Carbon emissions stay the same.
Nothing in these markets requires actual physical carbon reduction.

2. The “right to claim” reductions gets shuffled around.
Someone buys a certificate, someone else loses the claim.

3. Middlemen profit.
Traders, NGOs, utilities, consultants, auditors, regulators.

4. Policymakers get talking points.
“Progress,” “ambition,” “climate leadership.”

5. The consumer pays the bill.
Higher electric rates.
Higher fuel prices.
New fees, new mandates, new regulations.

6. The state creates laws to fix a problem that doesn’t exist here.
Vermont is already one of the cleanest states in the country — especially in electricity.

But because RECs make us look dirty on paper, we build policy on a fictional carbon footprint.

Vermont’s Actual Reality: We’re Far Greener Than the Books Say

If Vermont stopped selling RECs and counted its clean electricity honestly:

Our electric-sector carbon emissions would collapse to almost zero.
We would be one of the greenest states in America both physically and on paper.
Many of the state’s aggressive climate mandates would dissolve overnight because the numbers they’re built on would vanish.

Instead, Vermont sells the environmental value to other states, inherits dirtier numbers, and then enacts expensive policies to “fix” those inflated numbers.

It’s climate accounting theater.

The Truth Vermonters Deserve

RECs, carbon credits, offsets, and clean-heat credits don’t reduce real carbon emissions.
They don’t clean Vermont’s air.
They don’t fix climate change.

They shift carbon responsibility to entities that didn’t create it
and shift financial responsibility to people who can’t escape it.

What they do produce are: