By TIM FAULKNER/ecoRI News staff
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| Rhode Island Sierra Club photo |
Both have significant achievements in Rhode Island environmental
initiatives. Payne’s environmental résumé goes back more than a decade, when he
helped write the state's imperfect, yet-improving renewable-energy standard. He
chairs the state distributed generation council, which establishes prices for
the nationally recognized renewable-energy incentive.
Roberts, a professor of environmental studies and sociology at Brown University, is a foremost expert on climate policy and a force behind innovative climate initiatives such as a statewide carbon tax.
Both redirected the fervor from the failed divestment movement at
Brown University into writing the Resilient Rhode Island Act of 2014, which created the Executive Climate Change Coordinating
Council (EC4), a remaking of the stalled state climate committee.
Today, Payne and Roberts are dissatisfied with the EC4’s progress
and its underlying assumptions about climate change. Roberts, in particular, is
dismayed that emission-reduction targets overlook the proposed Burrillville power
plant and new fossil-fuel infrastructure proposed for the state.
Both say they want their new initiative to augment EC4 objectives
and serve as a messenger for public action on its recommendations.
“EC4, it’s needed but it’s not sufficient,” Payne said. “Ours is a
job of argumentation and not of criticism.”
That augmentation will progress through grassroots, local
initiatives guided by their new group, tentatively called the Civic Alliance
for a Cooler Rhode Island.
“If you need action, start in the community and create interstice
actions and expectations for change,” Payne said. “Otherwise the likelihood of
something to occur is small."
Payne noted that Rhode Island’s current pace of installing some
700 solar arrays annually isn't enough to reach the critical mass required for
a wholesale shift away from fossil fuels.
“Do the math and 700 per year doesn’t get you to the innovator
stage in Rhode Island,” Payne said.
The innovator stage is the first stage in the theory of diffusion
of innovation, the bell curve that new technologies typically follow if
widespread use is reached.
Payne, who has a master's degree in community planning and served
as director of the Rhode Island League of Cities and Towns, believes wholesale
adoption of renewable energy must start with grassroots action. Through a
community-driven approach, residents shed their doubts and insecurities about
solar arrays once they see their neighbors installing panels on their roofs.
“Their decision to act is based on what’s going on in the community,”
he said.
Ultimately, Payne said, “We don’t need to say doom and gloom only.
We don’t need to be in denial. We just need to get on with things.”
Roberts’ career has centered on climate change. He recently led a
student group to Marrakech, Morocco, for the 22nd Conference
of the Parties (COP22).
Roberts is keenly aware of the changing dynamics by climate
change. The emission assumptions used for state emission-reduction targets for
the Resilient Rhode Island Act, the legislation that created the EC4, were
changing before the ink dried on the governor’s signature.
“We’re planning for fixed targets that are no longer
scientifically justified,” Roberts said.
To take more aggressive steps in mitigation, Roberts said, “We
need a credible program of doable actions that get us moving in the right
direction, that get us to achieve the more ambitious client reductions that we
need."
The calculus is straightforward. Rhode Island spends $3 billion
annually importing fuel for running cars, generating electricity and heating
buildings. Shifting that money to create local renewable energy, Roberts said,
would bring jobs, cleaner air and resiliency in natural disasters “that
pipelines and power plants don’t get you."
As a goal, the new alliance could also help Gov. Gina Raimondo
meet targets of moving from fourth to first in national rankings for energy
efficiency and solar power.
“We’re here to help her do that,” Roberts said.
Payne wants to follow the same community-led movements that
created local land trusts and historic preservation groups, and couple that
with the transformative power of consumer demand, which in a few years
dramatically increased the market share of products such as organic food and
craft beer.
“Systems respond to what people want,” Payne said.
Rhode Island sits in the middle of one of the most wealthy and
progressive regions of the world. But with 400 miles of coastline, it's also
one of the most susceptible areas to flooding and erosion. Thus, Payne and
Roberts say initiatives such as multi-model transportation, solar energy and
electric vehicles not only create jobs and save money, they make the state more
resilient to a changing climate.
Coastal inundation is one of five factors that make Rhode Island
suited for an energy transformation, Roberts said. The others: Rhode Island is
small and adaptable with an effectual state government; lacks a fossil-fuel
sector that would suffer from a shift to local energy, only new jobs to create;
doesn’t have an influential lobby of climate deniers; a large Catholic
population is more supportive than other states for taking on climate change, a
mindset helped by Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment.
The new committee of 15-20 members has a working name of the Civic
Alliance for a Cooler Rhode Island. Monthly meetings begin in December. Two
briefing papers will be released when the project officially launches on Earth
Day 2017.
Payne said Rhode Island is perfectly suited to advance large-scale
changes. The state is basically a single metro area governed by the General
Assembly, which gives it the ability to pass transformative laws and
initiatives.
“Depending upon which road it takes, tiny Rhode Island could be a
leader of a new energy age for the U.S., or a middling actor locked into fossil
fuel infrastructure for decades,” Roberts wrote in an essay about Rhode Island facing a choice between a future
of renewable energy or fossil fuels.
And there is urgency.
“Things are happening with climate change much faster than
scientists predicted 10 years ago,” Roberts recently told ecoRI News. “We need
a credible program of doable actions that get us moving in the right direction,
that get us to achieve the more ambition climate reductions that we need.”
Anyone interested in joining or learning more about the Civic
Alliance for a Cooler Rhode Island can email J. Timmons Roberts at j_timmons_roberts@brown.edu
