On Tuesday, as the federal government continued its unprecedented attack on clean energy and climate funding, Vermont’s Climate Council published its 2025 Climate Action Plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote resiliency in the state.

The plan is a requirement set by the 2020 Global Warming Solutions Act to publish a new framework every four years for tackling the climate crisis. The 2025 plan could guide legislative action on helping Vermonters, especially those with low or moderate incomes, adopt more efficient and less polluting sources of home heat and transportation, the two highest-emitting sectors in the state.

Other priorities included mitigating future climate hazards, building a climate-ready workforce, weatherizing an additional 79,000 homes, reducing or sequestering emissions on farmland and finding funding to implement all these ideas.

While Vermont files its second Climate Action Plan to try and meet legally-binding emissions reductions, federal funding programs that made possible climate initiatives in small states like this one are on the chopping block. Now, as the state looks for other sources of revenue and support to achieve its climate goals, the new plan lays out what Vermonters might see prioritized in the coming years. But with reduced political will in the last legislative session to proactively deal with climate change, it remains to be seen whether those plans are fiscally realistic under a governor who prioritizes short-term affordability over long-term resiliency.

“Before focusing too much on a new, shiny thing, we should really be thinking about how we maintain the current pace and level of effort,” said Julie Moore, Agency of Natural Resources secretary and a member of the Climate Council who voted for the plan. “Maintaining our current pace is far from certain in this moment.”

The state’s initial Climate Action Plan preceded devastating floods that wrecked homes and businesses along Vermont’s river valleys in 2023 and 2024. As the atmosphere warms, holding more moisture, precipitation in Vermont has become heavier and more frequent, causing deluges that can lead to deadly floods.

Climate change, largely driven by the burning of fossil fuels, has also brought increased high heat days that most homes in Vermont are ill-equipped to handle. Wildland fires have become more common and air quality has diminished in the warmer months as enormous wildfires burn elsewhere, according to the plan.

But even with the tangible effects of climate change in Vermont, state lawmakers’ attempts to significantly reduce emissions along outlines from the 2021 Climate Action Plan have failed to meet state emissions targets. Big proposals like the clean heat standard were shelved during the spring legislative session, and the state likely missed its 2025 emissions-reduction target required by the Global Warming Solutions Act. A court case currently playing out in Montpelier could help determine whether the state missed that target.

Now, as the state looks for more guidance on how to lower its emissions, the federal government could squeeze Vermont further as the Trump administration eviscerates clean energy funding and advances in climate science prioritized under President Biden. The 2025 Climate Action Plan recognized the impact of federal cuts, noting that the work to combat climate change was not about to get easier.

What’s in the plan?

The Global Warming Solutions Act binds the state to lower greenhouse gas emissions by milestones set in state statute: 26% below 2005 emissions levels by 2025, 40% below 1990 levels by 2030, and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.

The Climate Action Plan outlines pathways to reach those goals every four years, through Climate Council planning meetings, technical analysis with consultants, and community input. More than 1,000 Vermonters and Vermont-based organizations participated in creating the plan, including 850 who joined virtual and in-person meetings and 250 who submitted public comments, according to the plan.

But even with four years of planning, Vermont is still behind its legally-binding goals. While the state initially claimed that it reached that first milestone on Jan. 1, 2025, a report by the Energy Action Network, a Vermont-based collective of energy nonprofits, instead found Vermont to have fallen up to 39% short of the emissions reduction required by law.

Moore’s agency reviewed the report and has agreed that the state was unlikely to achieve the 2025 goal, but final datasets to assess emissions won’t be available until 2027.

Previous ambitious reductions programs like the clean heat standard were shelved after a campaign by out-of-state fuel lobbyists along with Gov. Phil Scott’s rejection of the plan as unaffordable. State regulators found costs associated with the program were too high, but some members of the Climate Council disagree with those fiscal priorities.

“When we have a conversation on benefits and costs, we can’t lose sight of the cost of the status quo, which is already too high,” said Jared Duval, one of the 23 state-appointed members of the Climate Council. He quoted numbers from the state tax department that found about $2 billion a year was spent on fossil fuels for transportation and heating in 2024. An economic analysis done for the Climate Action Plan identified a potential $6 billion in costs that could be avoided by 2050 if the state pursued emissions reductions recommendations, Duval said.

With the lapse in federal funding, Duval said that in order to reduce emissions, the state would need to return to the polluter-pays principle, where fossil fuel corporations are responsible for paying for climate damages and resiliency efforts. This principle doesn’t only apply to the state’s legal battle with fossil fuel corporations in the climate superfund law, Duval said. It also stands as the rationale behind ambitious programs like the clean heat standard and the cap-and-invest model, which the climate action plan asked the state to research this year.

“The cost of those policies has always been designed to apply to importers of fossil fuels to Vermont,” Duval said. While fuel companies have said those costs will be passed onto customers, Duval said a key difference between the clean heat standard, pursued through the 2021 climate action plan, and the cap-and-invest model, again pushed forward by the 2025 plan, is that cap-and-invest can provide direct payments to Vermonters through rebates, based on their income.

Duval, along with 15 others, voted for the 2025 plan. Two councillors were not present to vote, and five voted against it, including Sarah Clark, the Agency of Administration secretary; Anson Tebbetts, the Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets secretary; Michele Boomhower on behalf of Joe Flynn, the Agency of Transportation secretary; Lindsay Kurrle, Agency of Commerce and Community Development secretary; and Matt Cota, owner of Meadow Hill Consulting and representing the fuel sector. All except for Cota are in Gov. Scott’s administration and report to the governor, who has worked to overturn the legal requirements in the Global Warming Solutions Act.

Others were reluctant with their yes votes. While Moore, secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources,, voted for the plan, she said that decision was mainly a reflection of her appreciation of the work of state government staff. Moore said she continues to have “some real concerns.”

“Specifically, I’m concerned about what it will take to operationalize the plan’s vision,” Moore said. “It’s sort of left up to interpretation.”

The Conservation Law Foundation, which sued the state last year claiming the Agency of Natural Resources failed to properly prepare to meet the 2025 emissions goal, called the 2025 Climate Action Plan “toothless” in a statement on Tuesday.

“The Council has worked hard to come to a consensus and deliver recommendations that include financial incentives to drive down emissions,” said Elena Mihaly, the foundation’s vice president for Vermont. “But it has failed to put in place real, enforceable policies that demand major polluters do their part too.”

The return of cap-and-invest

Much of the council’s attention this last year has been on a cap-and-invest program to reduce climate pollution. Cap-and-invest programs place a declining cap on greenhouse gas emissions, according to the state, while reinvesting the proceeds to climate-friendly projects like energy efficiency and weatherization. In March, Mike Pieciak, Vermont state treasurer, spoke to the council during a special session on cap-and-invest, reminding members that of the billions the state spends on fossil fuels, “over 75% of those dollars flow out of the state.”

But a cap-and-invest model could keep more money in the state and create up to 810 jobs, according to Pieciak, especially if the state were to partner with cap-and-invest initiatives already underway such as the Western Climate Initiative, which includes California, Quebec and Washington, and the cap-and-invest program in New York state. A modified clean heat standard could complement this program, according to the 2025 Climate Action Plan, focusing on the electrification of air and water heating in low- and moderate-income households.

Such a partnership could avoid problems that Vermont encountered while pursuing a clean heat standard, the council’s previous plan to reduce thermal emissions. In a January report, the Public Utility Commission, which studied the clean heat program, told lawmakers that it would likely be too expensive for the state to take on a first-of-its-kind credit market on its own.

But this isn’t the first time cap-and-invest has been studied. Over the last four years, the Legislature asked the agency, under guidance from the 2021 Climate Action Plan, to dig into both the clean heat standard and the cap-and-invest program.

“We’re a little bit taken aback by the price tag associated with each one, along with the administrative complexity,” Moore said. “I’m hopeful that there will be an opportunity for conversation about both what we can do with existing resources.”

Moore said the cap-and-invest program could only work if Vermont joins a multi-state program, and the only one that currently exists – the Western Climate Initiative – has indicated they’re not accepting new members, she said. New York’s plan for cap-and-invest, which could be a better fit as a neighboring state, is not yet operational. Instead, Moore said, the state should focus on more actionable items like continuing to weatherize homes as federal funding disappears.

“It’s absolutely important to acknowledge long term savings associated with these practices, but you can’t gloss over the fact that there are real and significant upfront costs,” Moore said. “Figuring out how to pay for this work to generate long-term savings is fundamental, and the climate plan, I feel, doesn’t give enough treatment to that issue.”

Richard Cowart, the former chair of the Public Utility Commission and a member of the Climate Council, said the 2025 plan did a good job marrying provisions that can help communities become more resilient against the impacts of climate change alongside measures to reduce carbon emissions, while also saving the state money.

“The notion that addressing climate change has to be viewed simply as a burden is incorrect,” Cowart said, noting that instead the state’s economy could benefit from doing its part to slow the warming world. “How can we afford to continue to spend $2 billion a year to import fossil fuels that we know that we shouldn’t actually be burning?”

He pointed to Efficiency Vermont as an example of how the state has invested in efficiency, saved money, and provided environmental and health benefits. The 2025 plan builds on that experience, he said, and shows that the state doesn’t require federal money to build important programs like the first-of-its-kind utility launched a quarter century ago.

“We did not need federal money to launch Efficiency Vermont, instead we made our own decision to reduce bills for Vermonters,” Cowart said. “We can and need to do the same thing with respect to our ongoing fossil fuel bills.”

Federal funding cuts

But how the state will pay for myriad programs and strategies the 2025 plan puts forward appears to be the crux of the climate debate in Vermont, as the arguments over affordability continue.

On the federal level, the attack on climate action has never been more brutal. For months, the Trump administration has worked to gut billions of dollars in renewable energy incentives and subsidies for proven initiatives like buying electric vehicles and scaling up charging infrastructure, increasing financial access to heat pumps and solar panels, and supporting big-budget projects like green hydrogen and wind energy.

“The cost of electricity to the people you represent and the folks I represent in Vermont is going up,” said U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., directing the remark toward President Trump.

On Friday, Senate Republicans announced a new axe to clean energy: In the Trump administration’s budget overhaul called the One Big Beautiful Bill, the Senate suggested not only cutting federal funding for renewables but taxing those projects.

The proposal would have penalized solar and wind projects if they sourced materials from countries the Trump administration has a strained relationship with , including China, which dominates the world in clean energy production and materials. The North America’s Building Trades Unions called it “the biggest job-killing bill in the history of this country” and equated it to “terminating more than 1,000 Keystone XL pipeline projects.”

On Tuesday afternoon, the Senate passed the budget reconciliation bill, all but ensuring that Trump’s agenda will go into effect later this summer. But the tax was removed before Vice President J.D. Vance casted the tie-breaking vote as three GOP Senators – Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Sen. Tim Tillis of North Carolina and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine – broke with their party and voted against the bill.

The bill now moves for a vote in the House.

“In Vermont and across the country, this bill will kill jobs, raise energy prices and move us in exactly the wrong direction in the fight against climate change,” U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., told VTDigger in an email on Monday before the vote. “It will keep our country hooked on dirty and expensive fossil fuels by creating enormous new handouts for the very industry that is destroying the planet in pursuit of massive profits.”

Increasing frequency and severity of disasters have also taken the toll in Vermont: Since 1953, out of the 62 federally declared disasters in the state, half have occurred since 2011.

The analysis of these disasters was included in the 2025 plan, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency tool that outlined those disasters was taken down by FEMA on June 30, the day before the report was published. Days earlier, the federal climate website, climate.gov, disappeared.

The web address now redirects users to the climate webpage of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal government’s premier climate science agency currently facing severe staffing and funding cuts. The country’s sixth National Climate Assessment, which provides essential data for state and regional reports like this one, was shelved this spring when scientists were told to stop their work.

With or without federal support, Vermont will begin its third Climate Action Plan in 2028, with a new publication planned for July 1, 2029.

It recently became more difficult to understand what the regional Northeast climate will be like at that time: The fifth National Climate Assessment, which was published in 2023, is no longer available on the federal website.

This story was republished with permission from VtDigger, which offers its reporting at no cost to local news organizations through its Community News Sharing Project. To support this work, please visit vtdigger.org/donate.