The Vermont Transportation Energy Report: Vermont Clean Cities Coalition
The mission of the Vermont Clean Cities Coalition (VCCC) is to reduce the state’s reliance on fossil fuels for transportation. This annual report provides policy makers with relevant and timely data on the status of fuel consumption, vehicle purchases, transportation expenditures, and travel behavior in Vermont. This information is intended to form the basis of data-driven policy discussions and initiatives.
Driven to Change: The Social Context of Reducing Tailpipe Emissions
Our analysis of focus groups conducted in Chittenden County, Vermont suggests an understanding of vehicle emissions and their effect on human health and the environment is not a good predictor of individual behavior that might reduce emissions output. Instead, those who practiced low-emissions behavior such as walking, biking, carpooling, and riding the bus, indicated other motivations for doing so, including lower costs, health and exercise, ideological opposition to motor vehicles, and public and private incentive programs for using shared or public transportation. Further empirical work is necessary regarding potential social network solutions and the socially stratified limitations to reducing tailpipe emissions.
Aristocratic Century: The sinews of power: political
In his excellent book on the Secretaries of State, Mark Thomson offered ‘the paradox of continuing domination of the aristocracy and the simultaneous insignificance of the House of Lords, per se ’. It is true that, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the supremacy of the House of Commons in financial matters was a wellestablished convention. The claims of the Commons to an undisputed control over money matters, which had been urged before the Civil War, were resumed immediately after the Restoration and a protracted dispute with the House of Lords began. In 1661 the Lords resolved that there were no precedents in history for this new claim by the House of Commons. In 1671, the Commons retorted that taxation ought not to be questioned by the Lords and in 1678 they reiterated that supply was ‘the undoubted and sole right of the Commons’ and ‘ought not to be changed or altered by the House of Lords’. The Lords' attempt in 1692 to assess their own taxes was also abandoned, though they retired under cover of a rather insubstantial smoke-screen that they maintained their power of amendment to be a ‘fundamental, inherent and undoubted right from which their lordships can never depart’. That established, they departed. Geoffrey Holmes quotes a nice example from 1702 when the bishop of Carlisle found himself the only peer answering to a money bill, ‘no other lord in the House regarded what was doing, this being only (pro forma) to preserve a seeming right to dissent from, or amend, any part of a money bill’.