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?…