Vermont Tiger

Grounds for Appeal?

can the legislature be stopped before it violates the Constitution again?

 by Geoffrey Norman

The deadline is just a few days off and Attorney General William Sorrell is still pondering his decision and getting advice from a Washington law firm.  He paid the same firm (Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans and Figel) $50,000 to help him prepare the case against Vermont Yankee, which he lost and was given 30 days to appeal.  Time runs out February 21^st.

If Mr. Sorrell does appeal to the Second Circuit and loses, again, he could go all in and try to convince five justices of the U.S. Supreme Court that Act 78 as passed by the Vermont legislature does not, in fact, violate the U.S. Constitution.

Mr. Sorrel may be getting understandably weary of trying to defend the Vermont legislature in federal court where he keeps losing and paying for the privilege.  He lost a campaign finance case in 2006 and a data mining case last year.  The state, as loser in both cases, paid the winner’s legal fees, which came to more than $7 million.  Now, Yankee’s owners want $4.6 million.  The courts may rule that this is too much.  But if the Attorney General does appeal and loses again, the final bill might be much higher.

So we are talking about real money, here.  Mr. Sorrell could be forgiven for deciding that it might just be time to fold his hand.

Seriously?

an idea whose time, we pray, will never come

Politics by Emerson Lynn

Oh. My. God.   

Our troubles are over. The answer to poor financial returns has been discovered. And all this time the answer has been before us, startlingly obvious, just waiting for a couple of state senators with enough pluck to make it work.   

The answer?   

The state needs to start buying private companies. Good ones. And the state [that’s all of us] should be allowed to buy controlling interest of these companies at bargain rates. The returns [guaranteed and always high] would flow to us.   

Forever.

Follow us and take notes.

The Energy Perplex

When the price of oil (and gasoline) is "too high" (admittedly, an imprecise measurement), Senator Sanders thunders about the "speculators," and we can expect to hear him preaching from this text pretty soon now as the people who study these things say that gasoline will hit $4 a gallon this summer.

When oil prices decline, we do not hear an explanation from Senator Sanders.  Could the speculators have stayed up too late, drinking Veuve Clicquot and now they are sleeping in?  

Of course we never hear about oil prices being too low.  That, of course, would be a logical impossibility. 

Or would it?

The Other Part of the Yankee Decision

on the Commerce Clause

by John McClaughry
 
On January 20 Federal District Judge J. Garvan Murtha ruled that federal law preempts the state from regulating the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant over safety concerns.

Well down in the media reports, it was mentioned that the judge also found that the interstate commerce clause of the U.S Constitution precludes the state from conditioning Vermont Yankee’s continued operation on Entergy offering below market power prices to Vermont’s utilities. What the news accounts did not do was explain how Judge Murtha reached that second conclusion. It’s not a pretty story.

Beginning on page 91 of the court’s 102 page decision, the Judge quoted verbatim a February 9, 2009 letter to Entergy from then-Senate leader Peter Shumlin and House Speaker Shap Smith. The two lawmakers stated that “It was our expectation that a power purchase agreement would be reached between the negotiating parties no later than December, 2008 and in advance of the legislature convening for the 2009 session.”

California Here We Come?

let’s hope not
 
a letter to the editor 
 
We all know the saying “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”  History can be as close as yesterday. New Englanders have historically observed the mistakes of others and chosen to not repeat them. The question is why is that changing now?
 
The State of Vermont has set a goal of 90% renewable power by 2050, similar to a goal California set a few years back. Get rid of the nukes, replace it with renewables, transition to electric cars, etc.
 
So how well is California meeting their lofty green goal?
 
In comments filed with the California Energy Commission, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., Southern California Edison Co. and San Diego Gas & Electric Co. said the scale of requirements driven by the state's environmental policies could have severe consequences for their customers, electric system reliability and the state's economy. PG&E said, "We should ensure that our efforts to transition to an ever-cleaner energy supply do not saddle customers with ever-higher costs for decades to come." When you close nuclear plants, cost, brownouts and carbon go up.
 
With things not going so well in California, why is Vermont heading down this same path, closing nuclear plants and demanding renewables at any cost? If California were a country, it would have the sixth largest economy in the world, and their state is broke! How does Montpelier expect us to pay for all this new greenness?
 
Al Blakley
Brattleboro, VT

The VY Vendetta

hating on Yankee

Last weekend, on Vermont This Week, Stewart Ledbettter and the journalists on his panel spent most of the show talking about Vermont Yankee and what will happen now that a federal judge has ruled in the plant's favor and against the state's efforts to close it down.  On Sunday, the Freeps published a long, detailed article by Terri Hallenbeck covering the same topic.  That factory in Vernon has become, it seems, an obsession with Vermonters for whom politics and policy are central to life as we know it.

Most of the rest of the people in Vermont, one suspects, have heard enough and figure that it is time to move on.  The state had its day in court.  The judge heard the evidence and took, certainly, enough time to consider each side's case before issuing a ruling that was remarkably-clear cut as those things go. 

So, time to move on, right?

Well, not so fast there.

The Energy Plan ...

has a few drawbacks

by Howard Shaffer

For serious open-minded Environmentalists, there's a lot to dislike about Vermont's new Comprehensive Energy Plan.

The plan admits somewhat shamefacedly that, despite good intentions, Vermont won’t have enough renewable power anytime soon, so difficult decisions must be made. So, basically, the plan is saying: out with Vermont Yankee, in with burning more natural gas and coal. 

Only to the most zealous anti-nuclear ideologue does this decision make environmental sense. The historical record of fossil-fuel power generation is replete with emissions-related fatalities. In a press release last July, the U.S. EPA states that cross-border air pollution costs 32,000 early deaths, 1.5 million non-fatal heart attacks, 1.8 million lost work days and $280 billion in medical costs every year. That’s one reason Congress chose nuclear power to replace coal. By contrast Vermont Yankee, and indeed the entire U.S. nuclear power generating industry, has zero emissions and has never had a radiation-related fatality.

That Yankee Case: Two Views:

A wise lawyer once advised:  If you have the law, hammer the law. If you have the facts, hammer the facts. If you have neither the law nor the facts, hammer the table."  None of that seemed to work in the recent case of Entergy vs the State of Vermont. 

Attorney General William Sorrell has his view of why the judge ruled the way he did.. 

In an op-ed published in the Saint Albans Messenger last week, Emerson Lynn expressed another.

 

Legal Bills

it gets expensive arguing your case in federal court ... especially when you lose
 
by John McClaughry
 
Franklin County Republican Senator Randy Brock, who is challenging Gov. Shumlin this fall, offered this comment after the state was blown out of court in the Entergy case: “We seem to be spending a huge amount of money over and over again in defending laws that don’t conform to federal requirements.”

It’s worth looking more closely at the three recent examples.

In 1997 the legislature, led by Senate President Peter Shumlin, passed a draconian campaign finance restriction bill (Act 64). Shumlin voted yes.

The case against it went to the U.S. Supreme Court which, after a comically embarrassing courtroom performance by attorney general William Sorrell, tossed it out as an unconstitutional restriction on speech under the First Amendment. The state’s legal costs were estimated at $1.5 million.

POTUS on Energy

not all bad ... but not all good, either.  especially on what government has done, left undone, and cannot do

by Tom Evslin

President Obama recognized the importance of natural gas and the new, disruptive technologies which have made at least 100 years of this fuel available to us; that's the good news from the State of the Union Address. The bad news is that the President appears to have learned a lot of wrong lessons about the proper role of government in innovation and appears poised to take a lot of wrong-headed actions. Here's that section of the speech as reported in The New York Times with annotations by them (NYT) and by me (TE).

POTUS: And nowhere is the promise of innovation greater than in American-made energy. Over the last three years, we've opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration, and tonight, I'm directing my administration to open more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources. (Applause.)

NYT: An administration official declined to explain exactly what this potentially huge expansion of offshore activity meant, except to say that the Interior Department would be announcing new lease sales in the coming weeks. Those sales will not include areas the administration has already ruled off-limits, including most areas off Florida and along the Atlantic Coast, the official said, so it is not clear how the president reaches his target.
     John M. Broder

POTUS: Right now -- right now -- American oil production is the highest that it's been in eight years. That's right -- eight years. Not only that -- last year, we relied less on foreign oil than in any of the past 16 years. (Applause.)

TE: That is good news but obviously most of the increase in domestic production comes from actions taken before the present administration was in charge. Also a recession-related decrease in demand cut into imports. But still good news.

POTUS: But with only 2 percent of the world's oil reserves, oil isn't enough. This country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy. (Applause.)

A strategy that's cleaner, cheaper, and full of new jobs. We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years. (Applause.)

And my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy. Experts believe this will support more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade. And I'm requiring all companies that drill for gas on public lands to disclose the chemicals they use. (Applause.)