It’s been almost five years since Rhode Island passed the ambitious Act on Climate, a seminal piece of legislation setting mandatory incremental goals to bring the state’s carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. But today, the prospect of reaching those goals looks bleak. The state’s public transit system is in shambles, the governor is cutting renewable energy funding and the electrification of vehicles and buildings lags behind our targets. If climate policy is war, Rhode Island is surrendering.
One of the loudest alarm bells signaling the state’s failing climate agenda came with the long-awaited strategy report released in December by the Executive Climate Change Coordinating Council, the state government committee in charge of decarbonization. It is a profoundly dishonest document. In the face of the Trump administration’s hostility to state climate policy, the committee refuses to adapt. Instead, they downplay and obfuscate the federal government’s threat. The result is deceptively banal sentences like “federal transportation policies have also shifted in ways that affect Rhode Island’s climate goals,” a bit like saying the sledgehammer shifted in ways that affected the watermelon’s structural integrity.
Against overwhelming evidence, the report insists that current policies are enough to reach our 2030 emissions target, a reduction of 45% below 1990 levels. But according to the state’s own data, to reach that target annual heat pump sales will need to increase to almost five times their current number by 2030, and electric vehicle sales must increase 16 times in the same period. Perhaps this could happen under extraordinary circumstances, but the current circumstances for heat pump and electric vehicle uptake are less than ideal. President Trump revoked state regulations requiring automakers to sell clean cars. Those regulations are currently in legal limbo, and as long as they are, they are unenforceable. Consumer prices for both electric vehicles and heat pumps are being driven up by Trump’s tariffs on imported materials, and the elimination of tax credits under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Under these circumstances, how can we expect electric vehicle sales to increase sixteenfold in just four years?
My point isn’t that we shouldn’t be ambitious, but that we find ourselves in this impossible situation only because we’ve let ourselves fall so far behind. What the report obscures is how organized opposition from vested interests has prevented Rhode Island from making progress on decarbonization for years — years before Trump took office. I recently dug into 20 years of environmental policy history in Rhode Island with Brown’s Climate and Development Lab, which researches obstruction of climate policy. We found that many of the policies that the Executive Climate Change Coordinating Council’s report is calling for now, such as all-electric new construction, heat pump mandates and electric vehicle infrastructure, had been pushed for before. But they died in committee in past years after being opposed by lobbyists, especially from Rhode Island Energy, as well as real estate and business associations.
Recent remarks from Speaker of the House Joseph Shekarchi (D-Warwick) show that organized opposition remains rampant: “We are being bombarded: receiving several hundred emails a day from the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity (saying) get rid of all of the conservation programs and get rid of all of the renewable energy programs.” The state report presents no acknowledgement of the opposition, let alone a political strategy for countering or negotiating with them. In such grim conditions, why will today’s efforts be any different than yesterday’s?
Climate policy opponents seem to be getting their wishes lately. Recently, Gov. Dan McKee proposed a 2026 budget that will drastically cut state funding for renewable energy projects in the name of affordability. Previously, Rhode Island had a renewable energy standard that mandated a switch to fully renewable energy by 2033, but the proposed budget would push back the deadline for fully renewable energy by 17 years. These cuts may indeed save Rhode Island residents money in the short term, but keeping the grid on fossil fuels — which have higher and more volatile prices than renewables — will only keep energy costs high in the coming years. Considering McKee is up for reelection in November, it’s unsurprising that he would trade future costs for short-term political gains.
Given the uncertainty around electric vehicles, investing in public transit seems like an obvious alternative, but the report gives it only a cursory mention and no policy strategy. This is especially egregious given that Rhode Island Public Transit Authority, the statewide bus system, could use attention now more than ever — it is currently in a death spiral of falling ridership and budget cuts. The governor’s proposed 2026 budget plugs RIPTA’s deficit, but won’t restore the service cuts. A persistent problem with RIPTA is that it is funded primarily by the state gas tax, which creates a negative feedback loop: the more people switch from personal vehicles to the bus, the less money RIPTA gets. In this way, it feels like it was designed to be forever inferior to private transportation.
None of this was inevitable. In Trump’s first administration, the federal government cut back climate policy just as they are now, and state governments across the country stepped up and worked together to build the American clean energy economy. Today, our leaders in the Rhode Island State House are letting it all go to waste.
Evan Tao ’27 can be reached at evan_tao@brown.edu. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
