A Real Solution for Climate Change
Rhode Island’s future isn’t bright. Climate change is making New England wetter. The Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University reports that extreme precipitation in the Northeast has grown 60% over the last 60 years and will continue to increase, and at the same time, sea levels are also rising.
What this means for Rhode Island is that the heavy rains that are flooding Rhode Island streets, homes, and businesses, and the water that’s sweeping into neighborhoods and business districts near rivers, the ocean, and Narragansett Bay every time there’s a storm are on track to surge further and flood even more as climate change gets worse.
It also means that tides will soon flood our coastline and low-lying roads like Route 114 in Barrington every day. In the 2022 WPRI article “Rhode Island Homeowners Already Suffering Due to Sea-level Rise,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse notes that almost three miles of Route 114 will regularly disappear underwater by 2035—which is only 10 years away.
As a result, the amount of money we’re spending on cleanup, repairs, and rebuilding our infrastructure to handle the worsening weather will keep going up, and when we add in other costs, like rising insurance premiums, higher mortgage rates, real estate that won’t be able to get insurance or a mortgage, a tax base that shrinks as property becomes unusable and is abandoned, and roads that become unusable and cause economic losses like the losses that the Washington Bridge is causing right now, we will reach a point not too long from now where none of us—not citizens, cities, or the state—will have enough money to keep up, and our economy will break.
Thanks to climate change, we’re on a path of increasing financial pain and eventual economic collapse, and we’re already partway there.
To get ourselves off this path, we need two things. We need more revenue to keep fixing what climate change keeps breaking, and we need to stop climate change from getting worse. Of course, stopping climate change is a worldwide project, and cutting Rhode Island’s emissions alone will have little to no effect on global warming, but if we design an attractive way to power ourselves with renewable energy that other states and countries will want to copy, we can spark the clean energy revolution we need to survive.
Samuel Slater revolutionized the world with his textile mill in 1793, and we can change it, too, because what’s more attractive than making money and having complete control over your energy? The energy business is profitable, and with today’s clean energy technology, Rhode Island can build and run a new, state-of-the-art, statewide, publicly-owned utility that will make us energy independent and rake in the dough.
Right now, we rely on companies outside of Rhode Island to sell and distribute our energy, and we have limited control over how our energy system works and how much we pay. Like the timber industry, energy companies also have a conflict of interest between serving their customers—us—and making a profit for themselves, but if we build a utility that we own, we won’t have a conflict of interest because all of the decisions about our utility will be made by us for us.
So, we’ll get to decide:
And we can do things like:
We’ll also need to look at the bigger picture and consider how to electrify heating, cooling, and transportation which account for most of our emissions. Commuter rail is an excellent way to zero out emissions. Can we build an easy-to-use and reliable system to get us around the state? And how do we help homeowners, businesses, and landlords transition to electric heat and cooling? Some of us can afford the investment, but it will be an extreme hardship for others. We need to make it affordable for everyone.
And we need to protect the businesses and citizens who will suffer economic losses from a transition to clean energy. Some of our neighbors are going to be hurt through no fault of their own, and they deserve a quick recovery. We need to account for everyone and make sure everyone is okay.
And with a good design, we should be able to do most, if not all, of these things. We should be able to keep ourselves afloat and, at the same time, show every country and every region in the world, how to keep themselves afloat, too.
To get a design, we’ll need to hire experts in energy, economic, and legal and regulatory issues, like The Brattle Group and Cadmus. Both have helped states make plans to cut their emissions, and they’re examples of the kinds of firms states hire when they have questions that are too big and complex for state governments to answer.
Ideally, our state government should be working on this, but it’s not. And waiting for an election that’s several years away to get the ball rolling, isn’t a good alternative. So, a group of us have launched two nonprofits to start the project and raise $3 million for a blueprint. Once we have a blueprint, we’ll hit the ground running and do everything we can to get a utility. Our nonprofits are Noble Owl and Generous Crow, and you can learn more and donate at nobleowl.org and generouscrow.org.