Perilli: Resilient RI Act: The Best Law You’ve Never Heard Of
Wednesday, July 09, 2014
Rhode Island just avoided a stormy kiss from Hurricane Arthur. Worse weather is surely coming, as the proven effects of human-driven climate change intensify weather patterns. And as a low-lying coastal state, the only person we’ll have to argue with when all is said and done is Davy Jones.
Luckily, though, Rhode Island might be prepared for the worst.
An incredibly important bill addressing the issue of climate change passed under the radar at the very end of this year’s General Assembly session. Amid the clamor over municipal minimum wages and Newport Grand, no one really noticed the Resilient RI Act slide its way through the House and the Senate, but it’s one of the most important pieces of legislation passed this year. Can it save us from imminent climate disaster?
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Resilient RI began with a group of dissatisfied activists at Brown University– that eternal home of socially conscious dissidents– who wanted their institution to do more about climate change. Brown President Christina Paxson responded by offering to fund the Resilient RI project, and so the legislative effort began.
We often hear the word “grassroots” tossed around as campaign jargon, but this time it truly fits. Everyone from student activists all the way up to House Committee on Environment and Natural Resources Chairman Arthur Handy (D-District 18, Cranston) had a stake in the bill. Crucially, the bill survived the House leadership shakeup in March, during which Chairman Handy supported Speaker Mattiello and held onto his chairmanship.
The bill, now a law, aims to establish targets for Rhode Island to adapt to climate change. It is at once complacent and ambitious. While the bill itself is just a framework, its ultimate goal is to make an 80 percent cut in Rhode Island’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. This balance between pleasing environmental activists and placing only a light burden on a crowded budget guaranteed its passage.
Into the Storm
However, this complacency leaves many challenges ahead. The long and short of the matter is that climate change will cost us money, no matter what we do. Whether we spend the money on mitigating climate change rather than cleaning up after it is entirely our choice.
How much money in future budgets will be set aside actually to battle the effects of climate change, like erecting storm barriers or hiring lawyers to enforce regulations? How much money will be given to the DEM, Rhode Island’s new climate change authority under the Act, to do its job as the Ocean State’s last defense against the forces of nature?
There is a curious but common fate for some bills at the State House I like to call “death by committee.” Without the money or political support for change to truly happen, some issues are assigned to study committees which do not have the power or time to produce effective results. The end result is that the issue dies and has to wait another year.
A section of the Resilient RI Act establishes a coordinating council within the DEM which will study climate science, analyze Rhode Island’s current mitigation plans, and make recommendations to the General Assembly. At first glance, this looks curiously like a death sentence. In theory, the General Assembly could never act on the council’s recommendations, or eliminate the council before it had a chance to act.
It is only the severity of the issue at hand and the confident goals of the Act that redeem it. Whatever the council and the General Assembly do, they must do something. The worst thing to do would be to let climate change just roll over our state, which would cost more in money and lives than even the faintest protective measure. The Resilient RI Act is a good bill, and the House and Senate moved passage, but it is far from the last thing we must do on the issue. We’ve got to put our money where our mouth is, and take some serious precautions against our changing climate.
Staying on Target
The final factors which will redeem or doom our climate change efforts will be the goals we set. Will they be sufficient, or too low?
Environmentalist Bill McKibben, a global authority on the climate issue, wrote an excellent and terrifying piece in Rolling Stone two years ago. Using math simple enough to scribble on an envelope, he argued that the targets we have set to reduce climate change have been insufficient, and that we are almost certainly doomed. I might not share his strident alarmism, but I respect his arithmetic, and he has a point: We have aimed too low for too long.
What will ultimately judge Resilient RI’s success or failure will be the targets it hits. It aims for 80 percent emission cuts, but can that figure remain once more money is involved? Will 80 percent even be enough? The consequences of failure are stark: large parts of Rhode Island could potentially disappear off the map within the century. Seriously. Resilient RI is a good start, but we must follow it up with more concrete steps to address climate change, or else consign ourselves to a watery grave.
John Perilli is a native of Cumberland, RI and a rising senior at Brown University who consults for state and local Democratic candidates. The opinions presented in this piece do not represent the opinions of any organizations John Perilli is affiliated with.
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