By BRIAN P. D. HANNON/ecoRI News staff
Sue AnderBois compares Rhode Island’s Act on Climate legislation to an annual New Year’s resolution to get healthier, but with the addition of a realistic path to achieving the lofty goal rather than a vague commitment that may fade over time as ambitions and daily reality meet.
The 2021 Act on Climate
(AOC) bill signed by Gov. Dan McKee in April may still be the legislative
version of an aspirational declaration, and there are varying levels of belief
in whether the Ocean State will stick to its new environmental fitness routine,
but legislators and activists focused on the global climate crisis agree Rhode
Island has taken what is likely the biggest step toward shaping up the state.
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| Charlestown's Rep. Blake "Flip" Filippi wasn't interviewed for this article. Here's what he said about the Climate Act when it was passed, Note that he uses false assumptions, like he usually does to justify his opposition. - Will Collette |
The AOC is “the foundation, and sets
the goal, for how we address climate change and then other climate and energy
policies are how we get there,” said AnderBois, the climate and energy program
manager for The Nature Conservancy in Rhode Island.
AnderBois, who spoke to ecoRI News before announcing her candidacy for Providence City Council, said the mandatory goals — including benchmarks to be met by 2030, 2040 and then 2050 — provide interim milestones that are easier to envision, and therefore more likely to be achieved, rather than simply telling the public, “By 2050 we have to be carbon neutral or net zero; good luck.”
AnderBois was joined by others who
stressed the AOC is not a panacea, and those who hope to see its goals come to
fruition also need to seek out other methods to achieve a healthier overall
climate, including energy efficiency policies, appliance efficiency standards
and a 100 percent renewable energy standard.
“While we’re waiting for the plan, we know there are some things we can do right now, like clean up our electricity system, invest heavily in energy efficiency,” she said. “There are a lot of things we know to do right now, and there are a lot great policy solutions that we can do while the plan is being made.”
AnderBois cited the Transportation
Emissions and Mobile (TEAM) Community Act (S0872 and H6310) as one of the
pieces of legislation pushing forward goals laid out in the AOC. The bill,
which did not pass the General Assembly after being stopped in the House
Finance Committee, would have established a cap-and-invest program to reduce
transportation emissions 26 percent by 2032 in an effort to execute the
regional Transportation & Climate Initiative
(TCI).
Rep. Terri Cortvriend, D-Portsmouth,
the House sponsor of the TEAM act, said the state needs to address carbon
emissions from both the heating and transportation sectors, with heating likely
to take more time.
“I do not think a plan in and of
itself will produce tangible results,” she said. “It will be the state’s
commitment to its successful implementation that will produce results.”
Cortvriend said she does not think
the AOC will negatively impact Rhode Island businesses, a vocal concern among
the bill’s opponents. Instead, she foresees “tremendous economic growth
opportunities in the clean energy sector,” although the successful
implementation of the climate goals requires the continued effort of those who
carried it to fruition.
Capital resiliency
According to the website of the Center for Climate and
Energy Solutions, a Virginia-based nonpartisan policy organization promoting
renewable energy and the reduction of carbon emissions, “Climate resilience is
the ability to anticipate, prepare for, and respond to hazardous events,
trends, or disturbances related to climate.” It notes improving resilience
involves assessing new and alternative climate-related risks and taking steps
to respond.
Paul Tencher, a senior advisor to
the Providence Resilience Partnership, said in
Rhode Island the AOC provides an opportunity for engagement from government,
businesses, institutions and consumers to “show concrete examples of how
actions under the initiative can reduce emissions and make our state more
economically resilient.”
Tencher said his organization’s goal
is to help produce greater climate resiliency for Rhode Island’s capital. The
partnership issued a report in February
claiming about 7,000 small businesses in Providence are vulnerable to flooding resulting
from the changing environment.
“Resiliency is not just about
protecting property and communities. It is about preparing our capital city for
the effects of climate change in a way that creates forward-looking economic
opportunity,” Tencher wrote in an email to ecoRI News, adding that there needs
to be advocacy for federal investments to help launch resiliency efforts.
Becoming more resilient and reducing
emissions “must be accomplished on parallel tracks” as Providence faces storm
surge, sea-level rise and extreme rain events among the climate challenges
Tencher said could increase to “unmanageable levels” over the next two decades.
“Rhode Islanders need to see the
economic benefits of climate action as soon as possible to build momentum for
decades to come,” Tencher said, noting his organization aims to engage the
community to develop a list of priority infrastructure projects with the help
of scientists, engineers, planners, philanthropists, academics and business
professionals advocating for resiliency investments.
“Our elected officials and advocates
have staked an important claim by passing the Act on Climate,” he said. “There
is still more work to do and this step will ensure climate change action will
continue to be front and center.”
Meg Kerr, former senior policy
director for the Audubon Society of Rhode Island, said AOC’s passage
involved implementing amendments to the Resilient Rhode Island Act by
tightening targets and making them mandatory.
“We are seeing the development of
offshore wind, on-shore solar. We need to pay attention to siting of solar,
maximizing opportunities to build solar in already-developed areas,” Kerr said.
“And we need to make sure that offshore wind has the least impact as possible
on wildlife. But we have to move ahead with these projects in order to stave off
the worst impacts of climate change.”
The AOC includes a provision
enabling lawsuits to be filed when citizens or organizations believe the state
is not upholding its responsibilities under the legislation. The possibility of
legal action was one of the major opposition arguments in the run-up to the
law’s passage, but supporters note the lawsuits can only be used to call out
state agencies and require they implement the law as written rather than to
reap punitive awards.
In short, the AOC can’t be used to
make money at the expense of taxpayers. Still, advocates remain aware of the
lawsuit threat as a possible strategy for opponents to tar new bills proposed
to meet the AOC’s goals.
“I hope we don’t see any lawsuits. I
think having that language in the bill demonstrates that we are serious about
the law and it can’t be ignored due to lack of staff and resources,” said Kerr,
noting state agencies suffer from short staffing and a lack of resources, but
those deficiencies should not deter a rapid transition to renewable energy that
also demands government transparency.
“We need to hold government
accountable to the requirements of the law. And metrics and tracking are
clearly required,” said Kerr, joining other activists in stressing that work
remains to achieve the law’s directives. “As environmental advocates, we need
to push government and we also need to help government in order to be
successful. We all need to step up to address climate change — the existential
crisis of our lifetimes.”
AnderBois noted Massachusetts has a
similar lawsuit provision in its own climate legislation, which she noted has
only resulted in one lawsuit in the past 13 years.
“They were behind, got sued, caught
right back up,” she said, comparing the lawsuit provision to a home fire extinguisher
that will hopefully never be used, but “if your kitchen’s on fire, you’re going
to be glad you have that.”
Step in right direction
However, not everyone who backs the AOC is wholly supportive of its methodology
or implementation.
“I don’t think it’s the best
framework, but it’s better than nothing,” said Sen. Samuel Bell, D-Providence,
one of the more progressive voices within the Democratic caucus.
Bell said the AOC addresses Rhode
Island’s “complicitness in climate change” but is still not more than an
“incremental step forward” in mitigating the manmade environmental crisis.
“It does help push us along in the
right direction,” Bell said of the new law, but added he would prefer the state
adopt the national Green New Deal plan pushed by progressive members of
Congress, including the legislation’s sponsor and most prominent advocate, Rep.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
The Green New Deal resolution
is a pledge to simultaneously address the climate crisis and improve the
economic and social well-being of low- and middle-class workers. The
justice-oriented resolution sets several goals, including powering the country
with 100 percent renewable energy by 2030.
Bell lists several priorities he
believes Rhode Island officials should purse, including establishing more state
parks, removing polluting facilities from low-income neighborhoods, uprooting
the highway from urban neighborhoods, regulating the natural-gas industry and
levying fines when leaks are discovered, electrifying the state transportation
system and the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority, mass generation of
renewable energy, housing weatherization and overall pollution reduction.
Bell said he understands any of
these steps are complicated and will require funding, but Rhode Island needs to
take action to address its “shameful legacy” of pollution.
“Sometimes that is going to involve
making business interests uncomfortable,” he said, adding that capitalism is
not the only prospective speed bump in the adoption of AOC’s stated goals.
Environmental regulations are already under the purview of what he perceives as
a conservative bureaucracy left by former Gov. Gina Raimondo, a Democrat who
departed the state earlier this year to become the Biden administration’s
commerce secretary.
Act on Climate is implicit in the
Rhode Island Constitution, but the state Supreme Court has not enforced those
provisions in its rulings, Bell said, calling the court an “anti-climate” body
with power over laws impacting the environment.
“It’s not a typical blue-state
court,” Bell said, arguing this will continue to be a problem for the state in
enacting climate measures.
Greg Gerritt, the longtime
administrator of the Environment Council of Rhode
Island (ECRI), agreed that the AOC is “probably not the best bill in
the world,” but is a successful tool toward achieving the state’s current
goals.
“It gives us clear targets that are
mandatory. It makes a very strong case that we need to pay attention to
environmental justice and community justice and frontline communities as we do
this. That it’s going to need to be a holistic kind of thing. Climate justice
is critical if we’re going to deal with climate,” Gerritt said, quipping that
“50 million more things” could have been added to the law, but it nonetheless
remains “adequate” for the next few years.
“Is it big enough to meet the whole
problem? No. We’re going to have to come back and get an improvement in this in
a few years,” he said. “And the group I work with, they’re ready to come back
next year, and the year after, and the year after and keep seeking those
improvements. You never get what you want, ever, and you never get it early in
the process. You know, it took us seven years to get this one.”
Gerritt said lawsuit clauses written
into bills are “a normal thing” and rarely used, noting that the Massachusetts
lawsuit filed by the Conservation Law Foundation was simply a matter of using
the courts to ensure the state enacted aspects of a measure passed by its
lawmakers.
“The judge will say, ‘The law says
this. Do what’s in the law,’” said Gerritt, noting that any Rhode Island
lawsuit would follow a similar path. “It’s a pain in the butt to have to do it
in court. We shouldn’t need to sue the state. The state should be doing all of
this on its own. But when they don’t, we remind them.”
Gerritt stressed residents,
especially those most affected by problems addressed in the legislation, need
to remain involved in the implementation of programs and bills stemming from
the AOC.
“Our low-income and communities of
color are the ones who bear the brunt. They need to be part of the solution,
and front and center on that solution,” he said, pointing to energy efficiency,
climate resilience, protections for low-income communities and “the idea that
we shall never build any more fossil-fuel facilities” as areas that should
remain a focus of activists and legislators hoping to achieve singular and
overarching goals.
“I think all those things are
equally important and will all be worked on. And they will all be worked on
separately and together,” he said. “Some of them will be one group carrying
most of the load. Others, there will be a whole convergence of people and there
will be more power towards that. But they all need to be worked on.”
The overall public sentiment in this
moment is a call for quick and decisive action, according to Gerritt. He
claimed this sentiment has been embraced by nearly everyone who is not paid to
say otherwise, such as lobbyists for oil and gas companies and other industrial
concerns deriving profit from environmental exploitation.
“Everybody knows we gotta make this
transformation, and we need to make the transformation based on justice,”
Gerritt said. “That’s just the reality.”
Binding targets
For the Green Energy Consumers Alliance, an ECRI
member organization, the AOC was the organization’s primary legislative focus
as the General Assembly returned to work following a year when most bills
unrelated to battling the COVID-19 outbreak were set aside.
After the law’s passage in the
spring, the alliance set three major policy goals, which met with mixed success
during the rest of the General Assembly’s 2021 session. They included pushing
for 100 percent renewable electricity by 2030 and extending and strengthening
energy efficiency programs.
The AOC produces an opportunity for
activists and state agencies to align on environmental initiatives and
formulation of plans to achieve the law’s goals, said Priscilla De La Cruz, who
recently relinquished her role as the consumer alliance’s Rhode Island director
to replace Kerr as senior policy director for the Audubon Society of
Rhode Island.
Kai Salem, a policy advocate for the
Rhode Island/Massachusetts organization, said the strongest aspect of the AOC
are the binding targets committing the state to action in five-year intervals.
“We’re going from having no
governmental accountability to do anything on the climate crisis to a situation
where we can be confident that the government will act on the climate crisis,
and that if they don’t we can keep them accountable to doing so. That is a
complete game changer,” Salem said.
The other significant aspect of the
law is outlining a planning process for activists and other supporters, she
said.
“The way to do climate action the
best is to plan for it,” Salem said. “The legislation requires a planning
process that is inclusive and ensures that we include frontline communities or
workers who may need to be involved in a just transition. I am really looking
forward to that planning process starting because that is now the key to making
sure that we act on climate. Not just do it, but do it in the best way
possible.”
Salem noted that an area lacking in
the AOC is the absence of funding specifications for full-time positions
focused on implementing the law’s various targets.
“We are strongly urging the governor
and the administration to make those hires,” Salem said. “We would like to see
a director-level environmental justice position at DEM [Department of
Environmental Management], for example, and someone in the governor’s office
who is coordinating all of this work.”
Including specific positions would
have been difficult to include in the original bill, De La Cruz said, but that
is the request they are now making to the governor.
“Resources are needed and
coordination is needed at an administrative level,” she said.
De La Cruz, who is the ECRI
president, echoed the sentiment of other environmental activists, including
Gerritt, who said the AOC is not going to produce an immediate path to solving
all of Rhode Island’s climate and environmental troubles.
“No bill is perfect,” she said. “I
feel like the Act on Climate sets out to do what it’s intended to do, giving
the state the tools it needs to do a good planning process and prepare the
state to achieve those targets.”
Following the exhausting pandemic
year of 2020, and the ongoing health and social issues resulting from COVID-19,
AnderBois said she understands there can be a lag in the energy required to
continue bringing about environment and climate advancements.
“I think it’s also easy to not
realize how urgent the climate crisis is. We are just emerging from this
terrible crisis of COVID-19 and people are burned out,” she said. “People are
ready for some good news.”
In addition to focusing on
individual issues and initiatives, there still needs to be an overall desire
among activists and the community at large for continued action and results,
even in the celebratory glow of Rhode Island’s largest and most progressive
piece of environmental legislation.
“I hope people don’t think that just
because Act on Climate passed means we’re done,” AnderBois said. “We are not
done. That was just the foundation, there’s a lot more to do.”
