Americans For Prosperity Comes For Vermont Voters – Part One – CleanTechnica

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Vermont, with its rolling hills, hidden valleys, and rushing mountain streams, is of the most beautiful states in the nation. During a recent visit, I saw a Subaru with a bumper sticker that said, “Practice Civility.” Vermonters tend to be practical folks, with a strong understanding of what’s right, and good, and decent about America.

It was the first state to pass a “polluters pay” law modeled after the federal Superfund law that seeks to force those who damage the environment to bear the cost of cleaning up their mess. Green Mountain Power is actively promoting virtual power plant technology and the state is supportive of community solar.

Vermonters do not shout about their politics from the highest mountain top and are tolerant of those who have different views.. It has a Democratic legislature, a Republican governor, and a Senator who is fiercely independent. The people who live there are not “woke,” but tolerant of those who march to the beat of a different drummer.

Naturally, the Heritage Foundation, the Koch supported organization that gave us Project 2025, cannot stand to see a state that is so respectful of others. Therefore, it has sent its operatives, working under the guise of Americans For Prosperity, into Vermont to teach Vermonters how to hate others, strip people of their access to affordable health care, force women to dedicate their reproductive organs to the glorification of the state, and destroy science and education in all forms.

Bashing Vermont

A joint investigative report by VtDigger and Grist reveals that Americans for Prosperity, a radical right wing organization whose members are known to foam at the mouth over climate science, is now testing its playbook in Vermont.

That campaign is being led by Ross Connolly, the group’s 34-year-old northeast regional director, who calls  Vermont “bizarro-New Hampshire.” A political opportunist from New Hampshire, he says,”I could talk endlessly about all the good things New Hampshire’s doing and all the bad things that Vermont has done.” In July, he wrote that “the state’s progressive majority has chosen to inflate taxes and increase regulations” and “advance their own radical agenda.”

“So many groups on the right, center-right, don’t get involved in the northeast outside of New Hampshire or Pennsylvania,” Connolly said in an interview this month. “If we don’t fight for people in those areas, we’re never going to make any sort of difference.”

Americans for Prosperity claims its mission is helping Vermonters afford to live in the state. But it was founded by two brothers who made their fortune in the oil business and who devoted their lives to attacking climate science. Wealthy people typical have a low regard for ordinary folks trying to make ends meet every day.

Things are not going particularly well for AFP in the Green Mountain State. A rally in Rutland this summer drew just 15 people, half of them politicians hoping to attract attention to their campaigns. In addition to Connolly, AFP has two other operatives in Vermont — Rachel Burgin, who lives in Georgia, and Lauren Schley, whose LinkedIn page says she works for Americans for Prosperity out of Washington, D.C.

Vermont residents who are actively working to spread the gospel according to AFP? Zero, so far as anyone can tell.

Heat Pumps Are The Enemy

One thing that sticks in the craw of Americans For Prosperity is a Vermont initiative to promote heat pumps for residences and business. That program has been highly successful in Maine, where propane and oil companies engaged in a campaign of distortions and half truths in an attempt to kill the initiative. They failed, and today the demand for heat pumps in Maine is growing every year.

If AFP was truly interested in helping Vermonters afford to heat their homes in the winter, they would back the heat pump initiative simply because those devices are two to three times more efficient than propane and oil furnaces. In essence, they give more heat per dollar than propane or oil heat, which means they lower the cost of staying warm dramatically. But that cuts into the profits of propane and oil companies. By its actions, AFP shows it doesn’t care a flying fig about people; it only cares about preserving fossil fuel company profits.

State Senator Anne Watson says groups like Americans for Prosperity opposed the energy transition because it undercut the profits of its oil tycoon founders. “Vermonters need to be savvy about that, and recognize when outside influence is coming in to try and affect our policies and our elections.”

“Vermont was considering this first-of-its-kind clean heat standard that would hold fossil fuel companies to a standard of actually reducing carbon emissions in a way that the electric utility sector has had to do for decades,” said Elena Mihaly, vice president for the Vermont chapter of the Conservation Law Foundation, a clean energy advocacy group based in New England. “They were trying to nip it in the bud here in Vermont before it got out.”

Watson added, “We know Vermonters care about climate change, and they care about affordability. Both of those things are met by advancing renewables and renewable energy sources in the state because the vast majority are cheaper than their fossil fuel counterparts.”

More Money For Oil Billionaires

Americans For Prosperity should really be called Oil Billionaires In Search Of Bigger Profits. It is against federal subsidies for energy programs that could lower energy costs for low income Vermonters. The Green Mountain State was in line to receive $62.5 million under the Solar For All program, but that money was eliminated by the One Big Beautiful Bill earlier this year that took a sledgehammer to federal clean energy initiatives.

“We believe those subsidies should have ended,” Connolly said of Solar for All, but conveniently forgot to add that the massive federal subsidies that coal, oil, and methane companies get. Hypocrisy is rampant on the far right, which welcomes subsidies that favor its supporters but scream bloody murder when someone else — especially poor people — receive any benefit from the government. How these people can face themselves in the mirror every morning is an enduring mystery.

When OBBB passed, AFP held a One Big Beautiful Bash to celebrate the fact that low income American families would now be forced to  buy more expensive oil and propane to heat their homes. That should tell you all you need to know about these grifters. Instead of renewables, Connolly said the region needed more small nuclear reactors, as well as the expansion of natural gas pipelines. He forgot to mention that small nuclear reactor technology does not currently exist at commercial scale and may never do so.

Predictably, AFP is also opposed to the Vermont Climate Superfund Act, which charges oil companies for greenhouse gas emissions between 1995 and 2024. The law applies a “polluter pays” mindset to climate recovery, potentially giving Vermont resources to build back from disasters like recent devastating floods.

“If your concern is climate change, that does absolutely nothing to solve climate change,” Connolly said. “It’s sort of petty type politics where it’s like, we’re going after Big Oil and punishing them. Vermont isn’t going to bankrupt ExxonMobil or any of these companies. You’re just going to drive them out of your state and drive energy costs higher because of it.” Translation: We should  be free to spread our filthy emissions throughout the environment and force others to clean up our mess.

The Kochtocracy

Charles Koch loves to wrap his warped ideas in the flag. The words “American” and “Heritage” figure prominently in the names of several pressure groups he has founded and supports financially. His Heritage Foundation created the hate-filled Project 2025 that the current failed administration is using as a playbook to undo much of the progress made by women and people of color over the past 50 years.

The people of Vermont are free to decide how they want to address the gathering storm of climate change any way they want, but they should be fully informed about the motivations of those who want to influence their thinking.

While in Vermont last week, I had a chance to meet with Jock Gill, a college classmate who lives in Peacham. Jock was directly involved in the installation of a community solar system in his town and he has some thoughts about AFP and its campaign.

When it comes to the constant complaints by fossil fuel companies about subsidies for renewable energy, he counters that the oil depletion allowance, added to the tax code in 1926, “dwarfs any green energy support. Either we should support green energy at the same level or we should cancel the depletion allowance altogether. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Symmetry is key to fairness and justice.”

He went on to say, “A key question is why do the conservative groups want to impose the most expensive energy with the least energy security and weak energy resilience on anyone, much less Vermonters? It has to be made clear that this is not about green energy, but rather about lowest cost energy with the best energy security and resilience that happens to be green and forward looking.”

Lastly, Gill observed that conservatives are “at best transactional tactical thinkers. They are unable, or unwilling, to imagine how energy, education and broadband could work together to create something much greater than the sum of the parts. How do they want to get to the future? What sort of future do they want? Their go-slow approach only results in ever worse climate changes and consequences. What is their strategy for minimizing the risks of climate degradation? Or will they delay until there is no time left for effective action?”

Those are excellent questions, and they are precisely the ones Vermonters should be asking Ross Connolly the next time he deigns to come to the Green Mountain State to advocate for the policies promoted by his paymasters.