OK,  This is it. The 345^th Vermont News Guy post.

And the last.

It’s been just a few weeks short of two years. It’s been fun. It’s time to stop while it’s still fun. A good rule is to quit doing what you like while you still like it.

My thanks to all readers. My special thanks to regular readers. My specialer (yes, I know that’s not a word) thanks to subscribers and comment writers, and my specialest (ditto) thanks to the two or three of you who appointed yourselves occasional editors, correcting typographical and other errors.

Everybody needs an editor.

Speaking of which, one last short correction. The last post said details on the connection between wind power entrepreneurs and environmental organizations could be found in last Wednesday’s entry. It was actually in the post of Monday, November 15.

A harsher editor would have insisted that this site not shut down until its proprietor dealt with some of the things he said he’d deal with – the persistence of poverty, for instance, or the truth no one will discuss about the importance of campaign money. (It fools the American people, who are more foolable than one is supposed to admit).

Sorry, time just ran out. But you know what? The News Guy is no more. I (dropping the droll, remote, third person act here) survive. In one platform or another, I may still be heard from in Vermont journalism. Stay tuned.

A note to my Facebook “friends,” the quotation marks needed here for those of you who are not my actual friends, in the pre-Facebook definition, for the simple reason that we have never met:

I’m going to unfriend you. Don’t take it personally.

Come to think of it, I may drop Facebook entirely. I hate Facebook. On it, my “friends,” some of whom I’ve never met, keep telling me they’ve just had a cup of tea. Or wasn’t the sunset beautiful?

As Rhett Butler once said, “frankly my dear…”

I hate Twitter, too. I have nothing worthwhile to say that can be said in 140 clicks.

Neither do you.

So enough. Assez. Basta. Gornish.

As it happens, though, events have conspired to render it useful, if not irresistible, to provide one more analysis of a current Vermont squabble – the recent suggestion by Attorney General Bill Sorrell to levy a tax on sugared soft drinks, a suggestion widely reviled as an assertion of “The Nanny State.”

It certainly is.

But what isn’t?

Almost nothing, despite the general inclination to ignore that fact.

Or, more accurately, to deny that fact. Americans like to call governmental intrusion they don’t like “The Nanny State.” Governmental intrusion they do like (highways, state universities, airports) they call…something else.

In this case, the connection is direct. Too many people, especially too many kids and most especially too many poor kids drink too much sugared soda for several reasons. One is their own foolishness; nobody holds their mouths open and pours Coca-Cola down their gullets.

But another reason is The Nanny State. Markets work. Products that cost less will be consumed more, especially by low-income people. Sugared sodas are cheap. In fact, they are cheaper (in “real,” meaning inflation-adjusted, terms) than they were in the early 1970s.

That’s when President Richard M. Nixon and his Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, turned farm policy on its head, transforming it from a system that subsidized farmers to one that subsidized production of crops, mostly corn.

Plant it “fence row to fence row,” Butz told the farmers. Effectively (the details are a little more complicated) the Government (The Nanny State) said to farmers: “what you can’t sell, we’ll buy”.

The result? Lots of corn.

The result of that (remember, markets work)? Cheap corn. Meaning, also, cheap high fructose corn syrup, the sweetener now used in most sodas, which explains why they cost so little.

Whether public policy, or The Nanny State as it is sometimes known, ought to be used here to offset the negative consequences of earlier public policy, or The Nanny State as it is sometimes known, is one of those many questions on which reasonable people can disagree.

But don’t take seriously the guys who kvetch than Sorrell’s proposal is an example of The Nanny State. Not, at least, if they drive their cars on the public roads, eat food inspected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or fly in planes which do not bump into one another in the air. It’s all Nanny State all the time.

Stay loose. Don’t take any wooden nickels. Write if you get work. Never try to fill an inside straight. Throw strikes.

First, to give credit where it’s due, the photo of work at the Sheffield wind power project site in last Wednesday’s post was taken by Steve Butcher from a plane flown by Peter Boynton. Both live in the Mad River Valley and oppose plans for a wind power project along Northfield Ridge. The photo was not intended to, could not have, and did not reveal any improper activity going on at the site.

Next, the sentence in Friday’s post that read, “electricity consumption nationwide is equivalent to about 450 GW annually,” should have replaced “annually” with “on average,” or “equivalent to the output of 450 GW running continuously.”

For the record, the guy in the photo on the right side of Friday’s post was John Donne

Finally, some clarifications on the earlier posts, starting wtih clearing up some confusion toward the bottom of Friday’s post, Latish in the evening, after dinner out, the News Guy got some new information thanks to the cooperative folks at ISO New England.

Perhaps because it was late, perhaps because the dinner included a drink (OK, two drinks, if you insist) the information was at first misinterpreted as a dissent of sorts from the findings of a U.S. Government agency that Vermont’s capacity to create electricity from wind was quite small.

Those who read that post after about 9 AM when the misinterpretation was corrected can skip this paragraph. For earlier readers, there is no discrepancy. Both ISO New England (the area’s Regional Transmission Organization, based in Holyoke, Massachusetts) and the U.S. Energy Department’s National Renewal Energy Laboratory (NREL) conclude that Vermont’s wind power potential is less than a gigawatt.

This can get confusing, and blame for some of the confusion rests right here, because electricity capacity is sometimes expressed in megawatts or gigawatts and sometimes in megawatt hours or gigawatt hours. (See above clarification about the difference between “annually” and “on average.”).

The comment on last Friday’s post (scroll down) by Hilton Dier is factually accurate. Friday’s post concluded, based on U.S.Energy Department assessments, that Vermont’s wind power potential was tiny in relation to the nation’s energy consumption, too tiny to make a dent in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

That’s true.

Dier points out that if Vermont fully exploited its wind potential (a most unlikely prospect), it could effectively provide all its power from wind.

That’s probably true, too.

How can they both be true? Because Vermont, according to the Energy Department, uses but two tenths of one percent of all the electricity consumed in the country.

That’s not enough to save much, if any, fossil fuel burning, especially without some disincentive for burning those fossil fuels (see below).

Now, this alone does not prove that wind power should not be developed. There are all kinds of reasons for supporting more wind power in Vermont. Some people approve any addition to the power supply by any means. They may be right.

(Or not. A case can be made that New England, where the population is stable and per-person electricity consumption is declining,  needs no more power generating plants at all, at least for a while. But that’s a separate discussion.)

But the point of these last few posts, which should have been obvious to the functionally literate, is that if your case for supporting wind power in Vermont was that it might help reduce fossil fuel use and thereby ease global warming, you ain’t got much of a case.

The wind power that could potentially produced on land (the offshore potential is greater) by the entire east coast (which effectively includes Vermont, its lack of actual coastline notwithstanding) is not likely prevent the burning of a single ton of coal, barrel of oil, or cubic foot of natural gas.

At least not if NREL’s assessment is correct.

Especially considering that without that carbon tax or cap and trade regimen, adding new generating power to the system will probably mean only that Americans will use more power, not that they will substitute the clean for the dirty. The coal will still be in the ground waiting to be mined, sold, and burned. Absent some disincentive to mine, sell, and burn it, that’s what is likely to happen.

The key question here is not whether putting wind towers on Vermont ridge lines would do any good at all. Obviously, it would produce some electricity without polluting the air.

The key question is whether creating this tiny (in the national context) amount of power is worth the damage to the ridge lines.

Especially since, as Lyndon State science professor Ben Luce said, the near future could see a much more meaningful expansion of renewable energy from wind towers off-shore and on the Great Plains and from solar energy.

If that happens, Vermont will have degraded some of its pristine mountain streams, intruded on valuable wildlife habitat, and scarred its high elevation ridges for…well, effectively for nothing.

Granted, some people – seemingly intelligent, knowledgeable, well-meaning people at that – remain bullish about New England wind, raising the possibility that there could be a flaw in NREL’s analysis. This is not likely – the federal scientists have access to the best data all over the country – but let’s play with the idea briefly.

Seth Kaplan, a vice president for policy and climate advocacy at the Conservation Law Foundation, is a real optimist about New England wind power’s potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. His line of reasoning, which appears informed and responsible, is too complicated and not sufficiently central to today’s discussion to require a detailed account here. But he’s confident that eventually wind can produce enough power to create a tipping point, reducing coal production by a greater percentage of power use than the wind produces.

“If 2.5 percent (of all power produced) came from (wind), emissions would drop by 2.5 percent,” he said. But if wind could produce 14 percent of the power, “you’d get a 17 percent CO2 reduction. At 24 percent, a 30 percent reduction.”

Needless to say, those estimates are debatable. But what is important for now is Kaplan’s acknowledgement that they only rise to the level of debatable if Vermont and the rest of the northeast can produce a great deal of wind power, apparently more than the National Renewable Energy Laboratory finds feasible. Could NREL be wrong?

Yes. Before assessing the wind power potential of each state, NREL excludes all the land where,it assumes industrial wind towers could not be built—city centers, lakes, parks. In Vermont the study excludes more than three quarters of the state’s 2,569.6 square kilometers, including, it seems, the Green Mountain National Forest.

But wind towers have not been banned on the GMNF, whose officials are considering whether to allow them in the Searsburg area.  Ponder this possibility, then: the same peaks and ridge lines that George Aiken saved from a federal highway proposal in the 1930s could be covered by 450-foot-high wind towers in the coming decade.

Not, probably, what most Vermonters want. Not, probably, a plus for the state’s tourism economy. But if wind towers are acceptable to the Forest Service, and if people are serious about producing enough wind power to make a difference in global warming, not out of the question.

Ben Luce, who has studied the wind maps, doubts that very much of the GMNF is prime wind power terrain.  In much of the area, he said, building the necessary roads would be prohibitively expensive. Besides, he said, even covering much of the National Forest with wind towers would still produce “a tiny fraction” of the region’s or the nation’s electricity, not enough to reduce greenhouse gases.

Especially considering that Vermont now gets much of its power from Hydro-Quebec and (for a while) Vermont Yankee, neither of which emit GHGs. (Or not much. A more scientifically literate reporter than this one informs that HQ’s flooding and reservoirs emit some carbon dioxide.

The mainstream environmental groups who support more wind power now would probably draw the line at covering the National Forest with wind towers. But here’s the contradiction that confronts them: unless Vermont wind power is developed everywhere it can be produced, it’s not likely to have any impact on greenhouse gas production.

With some justification, the enviros have complained that the earlier posts on this subject did not mention their commitment to “careful siting, scale, and design of wind facilities,” as they make clear in the joint statement they released last week. Jamie Fiedel of the Vermont Natural Resources Council pointed out that his organization had “spent years” on “limiting the impact on bear habitat” from the Searsburg wind project.

No doubt they did and no doubt they are sincere in their desire to limit the harmful impacts of wind projects. But the more they limit, the less productive the wind developments, so their two goals – create more power; protect the ridge lines – seem to be in conflict.

Besides, no matter how much damage is limited, it is indisputable that from an environmental perspective, the best thing to do with these ridges is…nothing. Any development will result in some degree of environmental and ecological degradation. Here we have environmentalists favoring environmental degradation largely because they think it will assuage the greater environmental crisis of global warming.

They seem to be wrong.

And in a bit of political irony, the environmentalists, politically left of center, argue for a policy which grants extraordinary discretion over land use policy to developers. Without comprehensive energy or land use planning, it is developers, whose mission is to make money, not produce power or protect nature, who will decide where the wind towers go.

With, to be sure, approval from the Public Service Board and the Agency of Natural Resources. So far, this has not been a problem.

To be fair, climate change is not the green groups only goal here. In an email, Paul Burns of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG) said he and his colleagues were also motivated by “the retirement of Vermont Yankee,” and the “belief…that we Vermonters bear some responsibility for generating the power we use every day.”

It’s understandable that environmentalists, who have been fighting to shut down Vermont Yankee, feel responsible for making sure something is available to replace the power the nuclear plant now provides. But it seems there is plenty of power in the area. CLF’s pro-wind Seth Kaplan noted that “New England is capacity rich,” right now.

The part about Vermont’s responsibility to produce its own power is understandable, but also subjective and a bit abstract. It also seems to be a thin reed on which to base the environmentalist pro-wind policies.

So here, admittedly as conjecture more than evidence-backed analysis, are two alternative explanations.

First, the environmentalists and some of  the wind developers are associates, even friends. Some of those developers (see last Monday’s post) even sit on the green groups boards and contribute generously.

No, the greenies are not being bought off. But they and the wind developers are in the same tribe. They frequent the same Montpelier restaurants and coffee shops. They share the same liberal politics. To the environmental leaders, the wind developers are “one of us.” They must mean well (and no doubt do; but as George Bernard Shaw noted, “all men mean well”).

The second explanation has to do with that liberalism they share. These environmentalists are liberals, and Vermont liberals at that. Liberals, perhaps especially in Vermont, believe in being personally responsible. They recycle. They try to limit their carbon imprint.

Good things to do. But in the case of recycling, it really only does any good if enough people do it. In Vermont, they do, thanks to the efforts of environmentalists.

But the environmentalists would do it anyway, whether or not it did much good. It would make them feel better.

Maybe that’s  why they want to cover the ridges with wind towers.

….Serves to advance an honest mind,” is how John Donne finished that line back in 1633.

Donne was writing what he called a song, and it was fun. This exercise in how an honest mind should judge the efficacy of wind- generated electricity would be less enjoyable even if the guy putting it together had a tenth of Donne’s talent, which, for the record, he does not. What follows is a slog through fact and data (while trying to avoid conjecture and bias), a whole lot less entertaining than wit and rhyme.

There are several arguments on behalf of developing wind power in Vermont. It would create some jobs. In the spirit of Vermont self-reliance, the energy would be home-grown, even though no one knows where the juice powering his or her appliances really originates.

But the climate change case is the sine qua non of the pro-wind forces, the reason wind power development seems to have (those the polls should be treated with some skepticism) the support of most Vermonters. So there is one central question: will erecting hundreds of wind towers on Vermont’s high ridges mean Vermonters and other Americans will burn less coal, oil, and natural gas, and therefore stop making the world hotter, or at least stop making it hotter as quickly?

Because this is no more a suspense novel than a poem, the answer will come right now: NO.

Or at least the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence says that it will not.

Or at the very best (or worst, depending on one’s sentiments) it will do so infinitesimally.

Obviously, creating any power without producing climate-warming greenhouse gases (GHG) contains the potential for reducing the creation of power from sources that do produce those gases.

For instance, according to First Wind, the company now clearing land for a wind power project in Sheffield, that project will provide 115,000 megawatt hours of power per year. Considering that a typical ton of coal produces 2,000 MWh of power (or so says the National Mining Association) might not those figures mean that exploiting Sheffield’s wind could avoid burning 57,500 tons of carbon-filled coal?

If it did, big deal. More than a billion tons of coal was burned in the U.S. in 2009 (the last year for which figures are available, and lower than the previous year thanks to the recession). This is rounding error territory.

Besides, the Sheffield project would not have any such impact. The 115,000 MWh figure comes from the developer, and is meaningless out of context, as are claims, so often parroted by local news organizations, that a proposed project will provide power to X thousand Vermont homes.

Better to stick to the official, carefully-researched, and presumably un-biased projections of the U.S. Government (which supports more wind power, so any bias would be pro-wind).

According to the National Renewal Energy Laboratory (NREL, part of the U.S. Department of Energy) if all Vermont ridge lines with “suitable wind resource for wind development” (average annual wind speeds of 6.5 meters per second or greater) were in fact developed, they would produce  2,948.7 megawatts, or, to keep it simple, the equivalent of 2.9 gigawatts (GW) of wind capacity (a gigawatt is a billion watts). If all the suitable sites throughout the Northeast were exploited, the total would be 52 GW. (This is for inland areas only; offshore wind power potential is greater).

That sounds like a lot of power, but these are estimates of “gross capacity…not adjusted for losses.” That’s official jargon meaning the estimate assumes the wind would be blowing at about 6.5 m/s all the time. It doesn’t. Sometimes it doesn’t blow at all.

The hard-line anti-wind activists are wrong when they say this means wind power would be worthless and unreliable. No method of generating electricity works at full capacity all day, every day, all year long. Coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants have to shut down for maintenance, repair, and inspection (few of them as often as Vermont Yankee).

It does mean that the actual – as opposed to theoretical – production capacity of wind projects has to be adjusted downward,  70 percent downward according to NREL.

So the Northeast really contributes some 15.6 GW and Vermont less than nine tenths of one GW. And remember: that’s assuming maximum production on all sites, which is unlikely ever to happen.

Electricity consumption nationwide is equivalent to about 450 GW annually.

So Northeast wind would add up to roughly 3.7 percent of the nation’s energy use. Could producing that wind power reduce fossil fuel emissions by 3.7 percent?

No. First of all, not all power is produced by burning fossil fuels. Nuclear, biomass, and other non-polluting (or at least non-greenhouse gas-emitting) sources provide roughly a third of all electrical power. In the Northeast, where Vermont wind power would be used, that power would be more likely to replace (if it replaced anything) electricity made from natural gas – a carbon emission, but with roughly half the carbon of coal, further diminishing whatever savings in GHG might ensue. In addition, most greenhouse gases are not produced by electricity generation. Estimates range from 34 percent (the U.S. Department of Agriculture) to 41 percent (the Energy Department). Either way, the potential GHG savings from infusing a few GWs of eastern wind power into the system appear to be tiny.

Or maybe non-existent. Here we are in the realm of conjecture because no data exist. But it is undoubtedly possible – and perhaps likely – that the result of adding a few more GWs into the system would be that…a few more GWs would be used. Instead of replacing power now generated by fossil fuels, they would supplement them. People – or at least Americans – seem to have an effectively infinite capacity for using electricity, especially these days when so many appliances keep eating the stuff up even when they are turned off. Yes, energy efficiency efforts have been somewhat successful. That doesn’t mean people won’t use more power if the system creates more power.

This might not be the case if the whole country produced a great deal of wind power, say a couple of hundred GWs instead of Vermont’s paltry less-than-one. At some point, the overload could lead to real replacement of fossil fuels by renewables.

Now we come to an important part of the political debate in Vermont. Because (though some of the pro-wind zealots seem to deny this) almost nobody is opposed to developing more wind power where: (a) there is lots of it; and (b) its ecological impact would be acceptable. The “almost” is needed in that previous sentence because there are a few folks –die-hard supporters of nuclear power and/or global warming deniers – who dismiss wind power outright.

But that does not describe most opponents of putting wind towers on Vermont’s ridges. It certainly does not describe Ben Luce, the Lyndon State College science professor who called attention to the NREL analysis when he spoke at the press conference Wednesday held by Vermont wind power opponents.

Describing himself as “a long-time advocate of utility-scale wind development,” Luce said wind power can “make a meaningful contribution to US clean energy generation,” but that Vermont ridges “are not actually major league renewable energy resources,” and that the wind projects will cause “enormous and adverse impacts to Vermont’s fragile wilderness.”

(As noted in an earlier post on this subject, these areas, remote and wild though they may be, are not really “wilderness.”)

Wind power production, Luce said, should take place where there is a lot of wind, and where the ecological impact would be less severe and perhaps more acceptable.

It’s not much of a mystery to see where that would be. Take a look at that map above. In the Great Plains, from Minnesota to Texas, the wind speeds are often more than eight or even nine meters per second. Most of the land is flat. Flat does not mean unimportant. It often does mean that development is less threatening to the land’s ecological integrity.

(Here Luce and his allies can be accused of NIMBYism, supporting change elsewhere but “not in my back yard.” But that’s a separate discussion. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with NIMBYism; it’s the American Way).

But wait a minute. Is there no evidence in official or quasi-official sources pointing the other way, suggesting that Vermont wind power could have a real impact on greenhouse gas emissions?

In official sources, no.

The Energy Department’s Energy Information Agency does predict that “generation from wind power increases from 1.3 percent…to 4.1 percent in 2035.” More than a tripling, but still a tiny percentage of the total. And that’s nationwide. Almost all of that increase is likely to come from…believe it or not, where almost all the “suitable wind resources for wind development” are located – out on the great Plains. Vermont simply does not have enough wind resources to make a difference.

ISO New England, the area’s Regional Transmission Organization, has projected that in New England alone, 12,000 megawatts of wind power could be generated by 2030, 7,500 MW inland, another 4,500 off-shore. That’s comparable to the NREL assessment, and while ISO New England said that development would represent “a major shift” in the region’s resources, it still isn’t much power, hardly enough to reduce GHG emissions.

But Seth Kaplan, the Boston-based wind power expert for the Conservation Law Foundation, said the ISO New England projections reveal the possibility of even more wind power in the Northeast, perhaps enough to allow substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Come back Monday for an examination of whether he and ISO have a good case, and also of whether, if they do, most Vermonters would be happy about it.

That post and this one concern the same subject, and while they can be read in either order, the better option would be to scroll down and read Monday’s first.

The Sheffield wind project

So you want to build a whole bunch of wind towers on a Vermont mountaintop to generate electricity?

Not so fast. First you have to comply with a whole bunch of state and federal laws designed to make sure that – among other things – the  roads you build up to and along those ridges, plus the huge platforms on which your towers will sit, don’t pollute the water. All that excavation can cause erosion. Cutting trees along stream banks means less shade, hence warmer water. The law says the water can’t be made more than one degree warmer or otherwise “degraded.”

So what to do?

One obvious technique – the one preferred by most environmentalists – is first to test the streams. Take their temperature. Check for pollutants. Measure acidity and turbidity (suspended sediments in the water). That provides a baseline, a foundation for judging , as the project proceeds, whether the excavation and construction is doing unacceptable damage to the mountain waterways.

“How else to determine degradation?” asked Stephanie Kaplan, the Calais lawyer representing opponents of the wind project now under construction in Sheffield. “The logical thing is to test before and then during and after” to measure the impact, she said.

That’s not the way it’s being done. Instead, First Wind, the developer of the Sheffield project, has committed to perform the work using “Best Management Practices (BMPs). Under this theory, if BMPs are followed, then, ipso facto, the streams are not being polluted.

Huh?

Well, it may sound absurd, but it seems to be legal. The Agency of Natural Resources endorsed the policy. So did Environmental Court Judge Meredith Wright. Though her decision is under appeal, the bulldozers, dynamiters, and chain saws are working on the Sheffield project.

Kaplan is convinced she has a chance to get the State Supreme Court to overturn the Environmental Court decision. She acknowledges that in some cases the statute (10 V.S.A. § 1264) allows for using BMPs. But it also says a project “can not raise the temperature more than one degree Fahrenheit, can not degrade the water, can not change the ph. Water quality  standards have standards. If they are to mean anything there has to be way to determine whether these things are occurring.”

Kaplan and her allies in the outnumbered and (so far) outgunned anti-wind forces in Vermont are both mystified and infuriated by the judge’s decision, by the ANR’s efforts on behalf of wind power, and perhaps most of all by the acquiescence of the state’s mainstream environmental organizations. In the past, those organizations often opposed using BMPs as a substitute for actual stream monitoring. Their silence in this case only reinforced the suspicions of the anti-wind forces that the fix was in against them, that Vermont’s establishment – government officials, politicians, the media, and even most environmentalists were stubbornly locked into their support for more wind power, regardless of the consequences.

“They all love wind, no matter what,” Kaplan said.

(Though apparently not all with the same ardor. The Vermont Public Interest Research Group (VPIRG) and League of Conservation Voters are the most gung ho for wind development. The Vermont Natural Resources Council (VNRC) is more ambivalent.  Its water resources expert, Jon Groveman, also disagrees with Judge Wright’s decision on the BMPs. The Conservation Law Foundation is generally pro-wind but has not taken a position on most of the specific proposed projects in the state)

“I’m a little baffled, myself,” said Annette Smith, the head of Vermonters for a Clean Environment (VCE),  the only green group opposing wind power in Vermont (the other, Energize Vermont, is really a VCE spinoff). Smith said she had spent a lot of time discussing the wind issue with officials of the other environmental groups, and suspects that one reason they are all so pro-wind is that a few of them have some financial connections with wind power companies.

(The subject of Monday’s post [scroll down] which erroneously said that the Conservation Law Foundation did not disclose the names of its contributors. It does list the over-$500 donors on its web site, as can be seen here.

Wind power has obviously created a schism in the green community, one which reached its apex (so far) last week when the mainstreamers rejected an advertisement Kaplan wanted to buy in the program for an environmental conference Saturday on behalf of “citizens working to protect their communities, mountains, wildlife and streams from the environmental destruction caused by industrial wind turbines.”

The language and tone did not “match our community position,” said one environmentalist, in urging that the ad not be published.

Touchy, touchy. But there is ample ill will and possible misunderstanding on both sides of this green civil war. These wind projects are not the first ones in which officials have used Best Management Practices to determine compliance. In fact, similar standards are used in enforcing environmental (and other) regulations all around the country.

Furthermore, these ridges are not wilderness. They have been logged, often more than once. Vermont has never made a decision to protect its privately owned ridge lines from development, however remote and beautiful they may be. Which is another way of saying that the state has made a decision not to protect them, but to allow development on them.

“We haven’t said no to high elevation development in Vermont,” said Chris Kilian of CLF. “In fact, we said yes to ski areas. We have restaurants on the top of our mountains. Vermont made a major strategic decision to open up summits to development.”

Kilian said he is not entirely happy about all this situation, and thinks perhaps high elevation projects should “be analyzed in a different way.”

Another thing Vermont has not done, said Elizabeth Courtney of the VNRC, is implement a statewide energy plan. With one, officials might be able to determine how much additional power generation the state needed and how it should be supplied. Without one, she said, “the developer gets to choose where the project goes, not the people.”

Assuming, of course, that the developer can get approval from the Public Service Board and the Agency of Natural Resources. But that doesn’t seem to be difficult. Even though it isn’t clear that more generating capacity is needed, even if the wind projects rip up the mountains, official Vermont, backed by most of the state’s environmental lobbyists, appears determined to approve wind power.

Because even though they might be a bit hyper-sensitive, Stephanie Kaplan, Annette Smith and their small band of allies are right: the fix is in for wind power in Vermont. Not because anyone (except the wind developers and some landowners) are making money or have been corrupted by donations. But because being pro-wind has simply become the established wisdom. It’s rather like being pro-choice on abortion in some circles. Everybody one knows, all the “right people” are pro-wind.

And it’s easy to see why. The anti-wind forces have been allied with the coal and oil industries or with nuclear power, specifically the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant which Vermont environmentalists have been battling for years.

Or – worse – the anti-wind camp is part of the climate change denial school, the minority (but a very well-financed minority) which defies the scientific consensus that the world is warming because people are burning too much oil and coal. At least after the turbines have been built and installed, wind power produces almost no greenhouse gasses.

Anyone wanting to understand why Vermont environmentalists are so devoted to wind power need only read from the opening paragraph of the recent joint statement they released, where they expressed their “deep concern that society has not moved fast or aggressively enough to address the most urgent environmental crisis in human history: climate change.”

On that, they are as correct as they are sincere. And they are sincere in their conviction that exploiting Vermont’s wind power potential can ease this crisis, can produce enough power to allow the state, the region, the country to burn less coal and oil, thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions. production and easing the impact of global warming.

If they’re right about that, they could have a good case that it’s worth blowing up a few mountains.

But suppose they’re wrong about that. Come back Friday.

Vermont’s environmental community, notably the Vermont Natural Resources Council and VPIRG (Vermont Public Interest Research Group), supported a recently-passed bill providing certain advantages to producers of “sustainable” or “renewable” energy produced by sun, wind, water or biomass (largely a polite way of saying manure).

The green groups endorsed the legislation though they didn’t like the provision including power produced by the massive Hydro-Quebec dams in Canada in the same approved classification as power produced from local renewable energy sources.

Obviously, power from Hydro-Quebec is sustainable and renewable. Those rivers up there will keep flowing. And the power they produce does not create an ounce of greenhouse gas, the avoidance of which is the crucial argument for renewable energy in the first place.

But, explained VPIRG Executive Director Paul Burns, to his organization and other environmental groups. “mega-hydro projects were not considered green energy” in the same way as the power produced by wind, sun, or smaller hydro plants. Burns agreed that the Hydro-Quebec power is “renewable in a sense,” But he insisted that the environmental damage caused by building the massive power-generating dams has to be included in the equation.

“You quickly get into a… public policy definition,” he said. “In defining what is a renewable energy project and then defining which projects receive financial benefits. We think there’s a greater rationale to providing those benefits to smaller projects.”

That seems a perfectly consistent and reasonable policy position. If anything, Burns understated his case; those dams caused social as well as environmental damage, disrupting the traditional culture of some 5,000 native Cree. In that context, it makes sense to provide public benefits (in the form of guaranteed higher prices) to smaller wind, solar, and other renewable projects.

As it happens, the more public support those small projects get, the better it is (at least potentially) for, among others: Matthew Rubin, David Blittersdorf, Leigh Seddon, Mark Sinclair, and perhaps Greg Strong.

These people are in or associated with the renewable energy business. The first four are or recently were on VPIRg’s Board of Trustees. Strong, the president of Spring Hill Solutions, LLC, “a clean energy and carbon reduction consulting firm,” is on the Vermont Natural Resource Council’s board.

Neither VPIRG nor the Conservation Law Foundation, another important Vermont environmental group, make public the names of their contributors. VNRC does, in its annual report, reveal the names of all contributors of more than $100. One of them was Greg Strong and his wife, but they were not in the list of the biggest contributors.. Eight of VNRC’s contributors asked to remain anonymous, mostly, according to Executive Director Elizabeth Courtney, because “they don’t want to be solicited.” The one business contributor which asked to remain anonymous was not, she said, a renewable energy firm.

“It is absolutely true that people who have been or are in the renewable energy business have served on VPIRG’s board,” Burns said, agreeing that it was “not an unfair question to ask” whether their financial interests influence VPIRG’s policy positions.

Not surprisingly, he said it did not.

“We have conflict of interest policies,” he said. “Whenever an issue comes up for consideration by the board in which a board member has a financial interest. that board member would recuse him or her self from that vote.”

Merely suggesting that  the leaders of Vermont environmental organizations are in it for the money seems preposterous. Many of them are attorneys who could easily double their incomes by moving to a law firm. One of them, VNRC’s Jon Groveman, said he stays where he is because “it feeds the soul.”  It is easy to make too much of these connections.

As did John McClaughry on the Vermont Tiger web site last month when he cited Dartmouth Professor Robert Hargraves saying that the Conservation Law Foundation, like most Vermont green groups a supporter of wind power and an opponent of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant “has a for-profit consulting subsidiary called Conservation Law Ventures….(which) is providing strategic advice to a company…that is working to build a 720 Megawatt natural gas fired electric plant in New England.”

Except that the subsidiary is really called CLF Ventures, it’s a non-profit, and its association with that gas company ended eight years ago. At any rate, Hargraves said that he was not implying that CLF officials were influenced by the income their subsidiary might have earned from a potential competitor to Vermont Yankee, Instead, he said, he wanted to suggest that “the fossil fuel industry is supporting opposition to nuclear power.”

A plausible if unproven suspicion. But it isn’t likely that coal, oil, and gas companies are secretly supporting wind development. Wind developers are supporting wind development, but they have allies. Some of those allies are environmentalists, who support wind power because it can reduce the climate-changing greenhouse gasses emitted by fossil fuels.

But maybe also for other reasons – political psychological, and – yes – financial.

CLF Ventures, for instance, has a web site on which it lists its clients. But not all former clients, one of which was First Wind, the company developing a wind power facility in Sheffield in the Northeast Kingdom.

Jo Anne Shatkin, the CEO of CLF Ventures, who in an earlier conversation did not reveal the First Wind connection, said when asked, “we were working for First Wind,” in facilitating community meetings in Brimfield, Massachusetts, abut a proposed wind energy development there. “We told the community. We served as a neutral facilitator. Our goal was to facilitate a process where people could understand the issue. We facilitated the meetings that First Wind sponsored.”

And paid for. Shatkin would not say how much.

First Wind also contributed more than $10,000 to the Nature Conservancy chapter in Maine, where the company is putting up wind power facilities.

Chris Kilian, the head of CLF’s Vermont operations, said he had not known that First Wind had been a CLF Ventures client. Kilian said CLF had “very vigorous internal controls” to make sure its subsidiary’s contracts don’t “influence our policy positions.” But he acknowledged that the connection could raise questions.

So while  there is no evidence that Vermont environmentalists are being “bought” by contracts or contributions, there are institutional connections between wind power developers and what might be called the environmentalist establishment. Some of those institutional connections are financial. However honorable the green group officials may be, like the leaders of  all other non-profits, they have to keep raising money if they are to perform their mission. It’s close to impossible to conclude that consciously or not so consciously, their awareness of where this money comes from has no influence on them.

This doesn’t mean their support of wind power has been bought. There are legitimate reasons to support wind power. But it does complicate the situation.

This fact does not solve – but it may help to begin to solve – a political-environmental puzzle in Vermont: why has wind power faced almost no opposition? Or, more precisely, why has it faced nothing but very localized and politically inept opposition?

After all, the wind projects have to go where the wind blows, which in Vermont means remote, high-elevation ridges on land where the ecological balance is delicate. The towers and the roads needed to build and maintain them pose obvious threats to unspoiled, swift-flowing mountain streams and to habitat for bears and maybe even (if they are anywhere) catamounts. If ever there were a recipe for opposition from environmentalists, this would seem to be it.

Yet just last week all the “mainstream” green groups in the state reiterated their support for wind power. That leaves only the not-so-mainstream Vermonters for a Clean Environment to oppose the wind projects in Sheffield, nearby Lowell, and other ridges.

Asked why she thought her group was alone in opposing wind development, Annette Smith of VCE said, “follow the money.”

Come back Wednesday when this site will follow the money – but also more than the money – to try to solve that political-environmental puzzle.

Meanwhile:

Correction of self: For the second time in a couple of months (clearly there is a synapse out of kilter here) the News Guy said “Hartland” last Friday when he meant “Hartford.” Accchhhhhh!

Correction of other: In Sunday’s Burlington Free Press appeared the headline, “Environmentals look ahead with optimism.”  There is no such thing as an “environmental,” much less two or more of them. The word is an adjective. It can not look ahead with anything. Yes, making the headline fit can be a challenge, but that’s no excuse.

OK, it wasn’t really the fates. One problem with one-man-band web sites like this is that we all have personal obligations outweighing our professional duties from time to time.

Yesterday was one of those times.

To be candid (candor always having been one of the goals here), the fact that yesterday was a day (and perhaps one of the last of the year) in which sitting in front of the computer seemed almost a sacrilege played a role.

Because the topic of the planned post is delicate and complicated, more than usual care is required. So one more postponement. It will be here Monday, honest to Betsy (or to whomever one wishes to be honest).

For now, just a couple of updates on previously mentioned matters.

Earlier this week, Windsor Superior Court Judge Katherine Hayes ruled on the case mentioned twice before here (most recently this one) on whether Hartford police had to release records concerning the incident last May in which they pepper-sprayed and handcuffed a man in his own house.

It was what might be called a split decision. The judge ordered the town to turn over the records about what happened after police decided not to charge the man, Wayne Burwell, but not the records about what happened earlier (the pepper-spraying, the hand-cuffing).

There is insufficient legal expertise here to justify commenting on whether the judge ruled according to law. But no expertise is needed to wonder whether Vermont law, or its application or both are consistent with transparent government.

Another recent post (Vermont’s Fine Whine, October 15) noted that the state’s economy was in remarkably good shape, especially considering its rural make-up, and the fact that in today’s economy. “the advantages go to concentration and consolidation.”

Two new and possibly disturbing pieces of evidence to support that conclusion – the possible impending demise of the small-town post office and the small-town drug store.

According to a story  in this week’s Chronicle in Orleans County (not available on its web site), a bill in Congress would allow the Postal Service to shut down small post offices that don’t pay their way.

No closures appear imminent, but according to the article, 30 small-town post offices in Vermont have not replaced postmasters or postmistresses who have retired, died, or quit. The post offices are not vacant, but are being run by an “officer in charge” without the postmaster title.

That’s not proof the Postal Service plans to shut down those facilities. But it is what it would do if shutting them down was the plan.

Meanwhile, the state’s independent pharmacists are circulating petitions urging support of two bills in Congress that would counter the practice by some insurance companies, big pharmacy chains, and pharmacy benefit managers to convince customers to buy their drugs only from the big chains or from on-line services.

The local druggists admit that there is a powerful incentive for consumers to forsake them and buy from the big guys – it’s cheaper. Sometimes a lot cheaper. Sometimes so much cheaper than the local druggists wonder whether some of the prices are so low that the chains are losing money on the drugs just to attract the customers and put the independent pharmacies out of business.

That’s entirely unproven, but it wouldn’t be unprecedented in the history of American business.

The price – and sometimes home delivery – make it quite sensible for people to buy their drugs from the chains and the on-line services. But sometimes a slew of reasonable individual decisions can have a social cost. A small town drug store is often also a coffee bar or café, a social center, a reason for people to come into town where they might visit other stores. Some of these stores could probably hang on without the pharmacy; others won’t, and where a town has neither a drug store nor a post office, how long will it remain a town at all, other than legally?

In a fast-moving world, trying to stay alive in the slow lane isn’t easy.

The plan here is for this site to deal with at least two more substantive matters – each probably requiring two posts – before riding off into the sunset.

The hope was for part one of the first of these to appear today. Alas, the fates (in which the News Guy does not literally believe) have conspired against that. Check back Friday.

Meanwhile, to give you…well, not your money’s worth, because in most cases that would mean giving you nothing, but let’s say something to chew on, herewith some reflections on a national flappette which acquired a Vermont twist thanks to Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Who, as many no doubt already know, became enraged when MSNBC suspended commentator Keith Olbermann after learning that he had contributed to three Democratic congressional candidates.

The suspension, Sanders said in a statement released by his office, could “have a chilling impact on every commentator for MSNBC.”

So it could. Perhaps so it should.

No, not that it should chill commentators from speaking their minds. But maybe it should chill journalists from making political contributions.

Yes, the news world is changing, Keith Olbermann never claimed to be a neutral observer, and one could say he was putting his money where his mouth is. Furthermore, like every American, Olbermann has the constitutional right to make political donations.

But there is no constitutional right to be a political journalist, and there is a distinction between expressing one’s opinions (mouth) and personally participating in a campaign (money).

In 1980, the political world knew that columnist George Will favored Ronald Reagan. What no one knew was that he had helped Reagan prepare for his debate with President Jimmy Carter (using Carter’s debate briefing-book, stolen from the White House). When that news came out in 1983, Will was generally and properly condemned.

The distinction here is that even when a journalist is an avowed partisan, he ought to remain independent. That means not directly participating in anyone’s campaign, either by debate-coaching or money-giving. The honest reporter will criticize the candidate she is going to vote for as readily as the one she will oppose. That’s harder to do when she’s crossed the line from being an observer – even a committed observer – to being a participant.

Besides, in this confusion, somebody should raise a voice in behalf of the old notion – possibly outmoded but also possibly essential in a democratic society – of the journalism of the disinterested observer, the reporter who feels attached to no political party and no ideological faction. Keith Olbermann is not one, and never pretended to be. And he’s more marketable on cable TV for not being one.

But maybe the country still needs reporters who follow the motto of “no cheering in the press box,” a phrase not invented but popularized (it was the title of one of his books) by the late Jerome Holtzman, the  Chicago Tribune’s great baseball writer.

“We watch the game,” Jerome liked to say, speaking around both sides of his ever-present cigar. “We supposedly understand the game better than the average guy. We wear a tag around our neck that gets us on the field for batting practice and into the clubhouse after the game. But we don’t root for either team.”

Still not a bad attitude for a journalist.

Sanders was right when he said that  “talk radio is dominated by right-wing extremists (and) the Republican Party has its own cable network (Fox).”

Where, as he noted, not only the commentators but the company itself (the News Corporation) openly support the Republican Party.

But is the solution here really to bring MSNBC – and by extension the rest of the journalistic world – down to Fox’s level? The problem with Fox News Channel is not that it covers the news from a conservative perspective, which could be useful. It is that with rare exceptions it does not cover the news at all. It does something else altogether – basically anger enhancement, keeping a niche market riled up, often by feeding it misinformation, so that it will come back for more the next day.

The suspicion here is that the world will be no better off – perhaps worse off – if MSNBC merely becomes the left’s mirror image of the same marketing scheme.

Assuming, of course, that it has not already done so.

One more look back at the election before proceeding to matters of greater substance.

Start with this surprising statistic: fewer Vermonters voted last week than in the last mid-term election of 2006.

Sounds peculiar, doesn’t it?. That one was a runaway, with incumbent Republican  Gov. Jim Douglas whomping Democrat Scudder Parker  by 56-to-41 percent.  Then-Congressman Bernie Sanders won the open U.S. Senate seat by an even wider margin. Peter Welch’s victory over Martha Rainville for the House seat Sanders was vacating wasn’t quite as huge. But  53-to-44 percent isn’t exactly close, either. Well before election day, few doubted who the winners would be.

But 262,524 Vermonters went to the polls, roughly 20,000 more than the number turning out for this year’s neck-and-neck race to choose the first new governor in eight years.

This year’s final tally is neither official nor complete. According to the web site of WCAX-TV (Channel 3), which had by far the best vote-counting operation of the night, with 99.9 percent of the vote in, 241,697 votes had been cast for governor. Unlike the official count of 2006, that total does not include write-ins. But write-ins plus that last tenth of a percent are not likely to add more than a few hundred votes to the total.

Bernie Sanders is both more polarizing and more fun than most politicians, which might have boosted turnout. And until the last week or so, the Welch-Rainville race seemed kind of close. But neither of those factors, nor the two combined, seem sufficient to explain why turnout was higher for those romps than for this year’s nail-biter. The question deserves further examination.

But first a digression. It is high time that Vermont politicians and Vermont news organizations – both print and on-air – stopped bragging about the state having voter turnout rates in the 70-to-75 percent range. That may be the percentage of registered voters who came to the polls last Tuesday. But the standard measurement for voter turnout is the percentage of eligible voters, meaning citizens who are at least 18 years old.

Thus in 2,000, the year of the last Census, there were 461, 248 Vermonters who were over 18. But about 10,000 were non-citizens or otherwise ineligible to vote (though this state does not disenfranchise inmates or ex-convicts). That left 451,982 Vermonters eligible to vote, of whom 63.1 percent did cast ballots in that close presidential election.

Last year, according to the latest Census Bureau estimates, there were 671,760 people in the state, of whom 20.3 percent, or 136,213, were under 18. That left 535,547 Vermonters of voting age.

The 2000 count is from the “actual enumeration,” as the Constitution requires, while the 2009 statistics are a Census Bureau estimate The estimate, as it turns out, might be more accurate but it did not count non-citizens. Considering the immigration of the last several years, there are probably many more non-citizens in the state than there were in 2000.

But just for the purposes of discussion, assume there were twice as many. That would leave roughly 516,000 eligible voters in the state, making this year’s turnout about 47 percent. That’s still higher than most states, but not that impressive.

OK, let’s return to the question of why this year’s turnout was relatively low. Obviously, we are in the realm of conjecture here (even more than in the process of comparing not-totally-comparable statistics), but here are two theories: Early voting, which increases every year and seems to depress turnout in more places than not; or “negative” ads.

The quotation marks are there because, while acknowledging that this is the widely used term for dishonest, trivial, misleading political commercials, what is really deplorable about these commercials is that they are dishonest, trivial, and misleading. There is nothing at all wrong with a candidate being “negative” about his or her opponent as long as the negative message is true and relevant.

‘True,’ in this case, means what it means. ‘Relevant’ means that the commercial be about an actual policy position of the candidate – or in some cases, a blatant act of personal dishonor – not a distorted interpretation of some long-ago vote to refer a bill to committee, or the revelation that the candidate once went to dinner with an unlikable fellow.

This year’s campaign in Vermont had plenty of false and irrelevant ads (though no one seems to have sunk quite as far as the dinner-date theme), and plenty of analysis that the tone of the advertising hurt Republican candidate Brian Dubie, whose ads were criticized even by some Republicans.

It may have hurt him because it undercut his major political strength – his image as a nice fellow. But it also may have been one factor holding down the turnout.

The political scientists disagree here, with some pooh-poohing the assertion that many voters are so turned off by nasty campaigns that they decide to stay home. But in some campaigns, the most contentious mud-slinging has been followed by the most meager turnouts, and if the cause and effect is not provable, neither can it be ruled out.

If that happened here this year, Dubie might not have done any better had he chosen a different strategy. The people who stay home out of disgust with the tone of campaigns tend to be middle-of-the-road voters, and in most of the country, more middle-of-the-roaders vote Democratic, if they vote. If that’s true here, Dubie might have lost by a larger margin had he run a higher-toned campaign.

And in conclusion, a brief word about the national results.

A big Republican victory. A meaningful Republican victory, the significance of which should not be minimized.

Or maximized. Here is what politicians learn every time their party wins big.

No, scratch that. Here is what politicians fail to learn every time their party wins big.

The winning big does not mean the people agree with you.

At best, it means that on that day, those voters who voted (in the off-year, always less than half the eligible electorate and about two-thirds of those who will vote next time) agreed with you marginally (or perhaps minimally) more than they agreed with the other party.

More likely, all it means, especially when the out-of-power party wins big, is that the voters are dissatisfied, and that voting for you, you being “the other guys” was the only way they could express that dissatisfaction.

If you fool yourself into thinking it means any more than this, you’ll be….just like all who went before you.

First, the announcement:  A final decision will not be made for another week or so, but this web site is probably in its final days.

The election is over, the year is coming to an end, and so, most likely, is the News Guy.

It has been fun. It may have done some good. But with the election over, the year coming to an end, perhaps it is time to go.

A few weeks ago, the proprietor of this site woke up and found himself 70. No problem. There is but one alternative to getting older, and as long as most systems are functioning adequately, getting older is the preferred option.

But it is a reminder that if one is going to do something different, one had best get to it. Being the News Guy isn’t all that different from previous activities.

It isn’t much less time-and-effort consuming, either, and at least in the old days, the time and effort was compensated for with…compensation. At best, this web site breaks even. Happily, under the present circumstances, profit is not necessary. But neither is expending all that time and effort, enhancing the appeal of either (a) spending the time and effort at something potentially remunerative; or (b) not spending the time and effort at all.

Because a few interesting subjects have been put on hold during the election campaign, the News Guy will continue for another couple of weeks. But that’s probably it.

Now to the analysis. Last Friday’s post (The Big Day Dawneth) pointed out that the “downside” of Brian Dubie being governor would have been the constant (and worse! Incorrect) repetition of the mantra about Vermont’s economy being in such bad shape.

But there would have been an upside to a Dubie governorship, too, and one that might have transcended Vermont. That’s because Dubie – his anti-abortion stance and some attacks from the hard-line left to the contrary notwithstanding – is a politician of the center-right.

For instance, he was one of the few candidates in either party, anywhere this year to praise the new health care law. No Tea Partier, he campaigned for tax cuts and budget restraint, but not for decimating or dismantling government. According to office-holders in both parties, he has sometimes shown more flexibility than Gov. Jim Douglas in negotiating with lawmakers and officials.

Some critics argue that political expediency forced Dubie to try to come across as more moderate than he really is, that if he were not running in (sort of) left-leaning Vermont, he would have shown his true, farther-right, colors.

Maybe, but it makes no difference. He was running in Vermont. Had he won, he would have been governor of Vermont, and whatever private agenda he might have had, his would have been a center-right governorship, which is by no means the worst kind of governorship to have.

Especially now, where the center-right is endangered in Vermont and all but extinct elsewhere. The most prominent center-right office-holder in the country, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, is leaving office in a few weeks. With a few exceptions, the Republicans of the impending 112^th Congress can not be described as center-right politicians.

In Vermont, it is not clear whether leading Republicans have quite grasped what the Dubie defeat means for their party. Political fortunes are (in the words of a great poet) “constantly fickle,” so the GOP could rebound quickly. But it’s hard to see how. The party holds fewer than a third of the seats in the Houses, barely over a third in the Senate, and could not find credible candidates to run for either the U.S. Senate or Congress.

‘Credible,’ in this context, means ‘center-right’, the only kind of Republican who can win statewide elections in Vermont. The fact that no center-right Republican made any effort to take on Sen. Patrick Leahy or Rep. Peter Welch – even knowingly playing the sacrificial lamb role to build up some party cred for a winnable race in the future – speaks volumes about the poor prospects for the GOP in the state.

Yes, there are Lt. Gov-elect Phil Scott and re-elected Auditor Tom Salmon. But Salmon has, so far, painted himself farther right as he apparently prepares to challenge Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2012, an uphill battle to say the least. Scott is center-right, and right now seems to be the Vermont Republican Party’s best hope.

But it isn’t easy being lieutenant governor when the top guy is from the other party. It will not be in Gov. Peter Shumlin’s interest to give Scott much opportunity to look good, and the lite gov really has no official duties.

Well, presiding over the Senate, but with the Senate 20-8 Democratic, the presiding of a Republican will be largely ceremonial.

Had Dubie won, he might have helped revive the moderate wing of the Vermont GOP. He might also have been one of only a handful of Republican center-right governors in America (there are a few Democrats who fit that description), along with Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Terry Branstad of Iowa.

And the country needs center-right office-holders. For at least two reasons, even liberals ought to be glad that center-right politicians survive, and sometimes win. First, even when they are wrong, center-right officials keep the center-left from getting carried away with itself, as it is wont to do. Second, center-right politicians are not always wrong.  Because there are so many genuine needs, governments do have an incentive to keep spending money, sometimes more than is wise. Here moderate conservatives, wary of spending but not hostile to government, help restrain excesses.

Alas, other excesses on the right have all but obliterated moderate conservatism. Explaining how and why is beyond the scope of this post, but two examples should encapsulate the problem. Nationally, the conservative mainstream refuses to accept two facts: (1) cutting taxes means governments will have less (not more; less) money to spend; (2) the world is getting warmer, in part because of human activity. A political movement that willfully blinds itself to reason can accomplish nothing more than winning some elections. Winning elections is indeed one purpose of a political movement, and an important one. But so is rational governing.

Those are two Kool-Aid cocktails Brian Dubie did not drink.

Actually, Vermont may have a center-right governor next year – Peter Shumlin. Either winner would have faced the same immediate dilemma: expected revenues next year will be some $110 million lower than anticipated revenue. Though not as ideologically – even viscerally – hostile to higher taxes as Dubie, Shumlin doesn’t want to raise taxes either. It would be bad politics, and bad economic policy (though not as bad as laying off more state workers).

Like a center-right politician, Shumlin is going to propose budget cuts, possibly deep cuts, possibly deeper than many Democratic legislators can accept. The next session could be a tough one for Democrats. Maybe Vermont Republicans will enjoy themselves after all.

The Governor-Elect

NOTE: The last two days being essentially a blended blur, consider this an update on the post published this morning (scroll down) which itself was an update of the post published last midnight (scroll down farther).

Tomorrow, a Friday post as usual, which will be either the last or the next-to-last look at the election and its consequences.

So what will governmental/political life be like in Vermont with Peter Shumlin occupying the second floor corner office of the Capitol?

Different.

But maybe not all that different.

To understand how different, let’s start by assessing the Jim Douglas years, now coming to an end:

On the asset side: Eight years without scandal, and pretty much without turbulence. Douglas is not a rabble-rouser. Oh, he toyed with riling up the folks after that controversial sentencing of a sex offender, and then the awful murder of that young girl in Randolph. But he never felt comfortable doing it. Douglas is an even-keel kind of guy, a desirable quality in a governor. He kept the books balanced and the credit rating high. Unlike some current and recent governors of both parties, in states ranging from New York to Alaska, he did not embarrass his constituents.

On the debit side: For purposes of this discussion, we will glide over that little problem of coming down on the wrong side of the civil rights issue of the decade. Fortunately for Douglas, the Legislature overrode his veto of the marriage law. Otherwise, that’s how the world would have remembered him; this way, the veto will be only a footnote.

But that’s a one-of-a-kind issue, which does not help illustrate how things will be different under Shumlin. More to the point, under Douglas, Vermont spun its wheels for eight years. It isn’t that the governor did anything wrong; it’s that he didn’t do much.

Not the worst choice. Perhaps a governor who doesn’t try to do enough is better than one who tries to do too much. Meanwhile, though, opportunities are squandered, potentially productive paths never trod. Prudence is a virtue that can be overdone.

Judging from his campaign, Shumlin will be a far more adventuresome governor. He won’t just seize opportunities; he’ll try to create them, to explore new paths and try new plans in health care, energy, economic development, and more.

There is risk here, of course; politicians who plunge down paths never before trod are often forced to beat a hasty retreat with a face full of gorses. Shumlin is not a fool and probably knows this, but for now the point is not to assess the wisdom of his attitude, but simply to note it. For better and/or for worse, state government in Vermont will be more daring than it has been.

On most matters, of course, the new governor can only be as daring as the Legislature will allow. The big difference here will be that the new Governor is a Democrat, the party that will continue to dominate both houses of the Legislature.

Already Wednesday there were expressions of joy from Democrats and gloom from Republicans that the new governor could get the Legislature to accept whatever he proposed.

Maybe for a few weeks. The Legislature as a body has its own interests, ambitions, and fears. So do each of its members. Not a Republican, not a wise guy commentator, but a senior Democrat in the Legislature noted yesterday that at some point his branch of government would “begin to fight with the Governor.” It will almost surely happen, because it almost always does.

At that point, the otherwise irrelevant Republicans in the House and Senate might get some attention. Though a few races remain too close to call, the outlook as of Wednesday morning is that there might be two more Republicans in the House and one more in the Senate than there are now.

That will make the GOP delegation slightly more numerous but also more insignificant. For the last two years, the Republicans in the House comprised the nucleus of a possible veto-sustaining one third plus one. There weren’t quite 50 of them, but almost, and there was always the chance that they could attract an independent or even a maverick Democrat to uphold a Douglas veto.

On two celebrated occasions last year, they couldn’t manage that (though on one of them – the aforementioned marriage bill, several Republicans supported the override), but the possibility lent the GOP House minority a bit of oomph.

No longer. Even if Shumlin and the Democratic leaders of the Legislature have their differences, veto threats, much less actual vetoes, are most unlikely. Still, there will be enough Republicans (at least 48 in the House, seven or eight in the Senate) to engage in some deal-making under certain circumstances.

The weakness of the Republican Party in Vermont – in sharp contrast to its resurgence in so much of the country on Tuesday – deserves a closer look. Had Dubie won, his governorship might have offered some choice and opportunity to Republicans elsewhere. Not that Dubie was likely to be a presidential contender, but the election of a moderate Republican, even from a small state, might have provided a bit of ballast to an increasingly monochromatic party.

Tune in tomorrow for that closer look. But before leaving today, one more note:

Among the Democrats re-elected Tuesday was freshman Rep. Robert South of St. Johnsbury. Last year, when South voted to support the marriage bill override, the conventional wisdom in the Northeast Kingdom predicted he’d pay for the vote on election day.

He didn’t. In fact, the number of lawmakers defeated because they voted for same sex marriage, which was barely mentioned on the campaign trail, appears to be exactly zero. At least in this state, that argument is over.