MiroWeinberger.com

An unpopular mayor, Weinberger won his third and fourth terms with a minority of Burlington votes. Realizing he could not win a fifth term under Burlington’s new ranked choice ballot system, Weinberger chose not to run again, and is instead considering a run for Vermont governor.

Weinberger’s tenure as mayor has been plagued with scandal, cover-up, misdirection, and propaganda. He covered-up several police scandals involving excessive use of force and the two, yes two, police chief’s using fake Twitter accounts to harass Burlington residents.

Under Weinberger, Burlington scrapped its Climate Action Plan and replaced it with it “Net Zero Energy Road Map.” While most of the world defines “net zero” as, “a target of completely negating the amount of greenhouse gases produced by human activity, to be achieved by reducing emissions and implementing methods of absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,” Weinberger and his General Manager of the Burlington Electric Department defines net zero “as reducing and eventually eliminating fossil fuel use from the heating and ground transportation sectors.” Together they have pushed projects that actually increase greenhouse gases and the use of the wood-fired McNeil generating plant, the largest CO2 polluter in Vermont. Their “district energy” plan calls on replacing the gas boilers at UVMMC hospital that produce 13,000 tons of CO2/year with a system producing upwards of 32,000 tons of CO2/year through increased wood combustion at McNeil. They claim that trees grow back, which is true, and thus the plan is carbon-neutral, an idea that has been thoroughly debunked in the scientific community. The project involves Vermont Gas Systems, now called VGS, which will buy the “clean heat credits” the project creates so that VGS can burn more gas elsewhere. Thus not only does it increase UVMMC’s CO2 pollution by 19,000 tons annually, it also allows VGS to keep burning gas elsewhere, but now under the guise of “clean heat.”