Attorney General Neronha speaks to Climate Action Rhode Island

"There is hope, but we can't exercise that hope, see that hope, or feel that hope unless we push our state government to be a lot more serious about meeting our Act on Climate goals."

Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha addressed members of Climate Action Rhode Island at their annual picnic on Sunday afternoon. Minutes before the Attorney General stepped up to the microphone, news dropped that President Joe Biden was halting his re-election efforts and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.

Denise Taliaferro, Politics Team Lead at Climate Action Rhode Island, introduced Attorney General Neronha. The transcription has been edited for clarity.

Denise Taliaferro: As you all may know, Attorney General Peter Neronha has fought long and hard against corruption and holding power accountable, dating back to his time as United States Attorney. Fortunately for us, this also includes holding polluters accountable and protecting Rhode Island's natural resources for all of us to enjoy. For example, the Attorney General's office was recently instrumental in shutting down a known polluter, Rhode Island Recycled Metals.

Throughout his term, General Neronha and his administration have taken action to address climate change in Rhode Island. In 2018, Rhode Island brought a climate damage and deception lawsuit, which is still pending, against 21 major fossil fuel companies - and was the first in the country to do so. The Attorney General has used his voice to call out the state government when it could do more. He's held them accountable to make sure they try to meet our Act on Climate goals. He's advocated for sensible and equitable funding of the Executive Climate Change Coordinating Council [EC4] and has spoken out when the Department of Transportation failed to adequately address and implement our carbon reduction plans [which are] necessary to get us where we need to be. So with that, we are very, very pleased to have such an important ally join us here today.

Peter Neronha: There are times when people tell me I don't smile enough in my official capacity, and that's because as Attorney General and as United States Attorney, I was often and continue to be the bearer of bad news. I don't want to focus entirely on the bad news because there is hope out there. There's hope because, as I'm sure all of by now, we're going to have a new presidential candidate. That's great, and I know that's a good thing for the country. That's good news.

There is hope, but we can't exercise that hope, see that hope, or feel that hope unless we push our state government to be a lot more serious about meeting our Act on Climate goals. What worries me the most is that this issue is, in a sense, hard scientifically - it involves major movement in the heating, electric, and transportation sectors - and the things we need to move to are simple at a very high level but complicated a few levels down.

What does that mean? It means that we can be gaslit by our state government and we can lose focus as residents. When we see through the gaslighting, it can lead to a lack of hope. What do I mean by gaslighting? I'm going to give you two or three examples.

One. I've been speaking out about how we have not been doing enough for some time in written comments to the EC4, which this group knows about so I won't tell you what that is. We have been on the record explaining exactly why our [climate change] planning is not enough, why it's too vague, and what we can and should do to make it better. Despite that, or maybe because of it, we hear things like this, for example.

Rhode Island Governor Daniel McKee's office put out a press release that said something to the effect of we're 11th in the country in terms of meeting our climate goals according to the National Resources Defense Council, and they attached a study.

That sounds great, right? 11 out of 50 sounds great, right? We're getting there, right? And getting there as we know is critically important. But if you went and read the study as I and my team did, what you find is that 30 of the 50 states aren't playing. [In the study] you get points for having goals and you get zero points if you have no goals. So right out of the chute, you could be 18 points behind simply by not having goals. What we are is 11 out of 20 - and that's pretty mediocre. We shouldn't be telling the public we're doing great when where we are is mediocre, we're better than some and we're worse than some. To me, that's not the standard. The standard should always be to lead and to be excellent.

There have been other instances of gaslighting the public. One thing Massachusetts did that I thought was impressive is that sometime in the last six months to a year they gave themselves an environmental scorecard. The government put out a scorecard about how the government was doing in meeting its Act on Climate goals. I didn't analyze it for accuracy, but the scorecard had some reliability for me because the state gave itself some good grades in some areas and some not-so-good grades in areas like heat pump takeup among Massachusetts residents.

I thought to myself, wouldn't it be great if Rhode Island had a scorecard? Does anybody know if we have a scorecard? Have you seen that scorecard? No - because it doesn't exist. So I asked my office to do it and we expect to issue it sometime in September when people are paying attention because we all know that if we do it in August, no one's going to pay attention and we need people to pay attention.

Here's one thing [our scorecard] will address - We know that there are three principal contributors to greenhouse gases - transportation, heating, and electric generation. Those are the three major contributors to the greenhouse gases that are causing climate change. My team has a slide deck that's not public yet - you'll see it eventually, but it's a work in progress because we want to make sure that it will tell the story in a way that Rhode Islanders can all understand - but if you look at that slide deck as it exists right now, one of the things it talks about is how we get electric vehicle take-up among Rhode Island residents. It says how many electric vehicle charging stations we need across the state. It says we need something like 34,000 individual chargers in people's homes; about 15,000 shared chargers, which I assume are for people who might be living in shared spaces like condominiums, rental apartments, and such where they could share a charger; between 1000 and 1500 of the smart/fast chargers; and a smaller subset of some of the others. We know we need a lot more chargers.

What's our plan to get there if this is what we know we need? My team is pulling the numbers from somewhere, but does the state government know those numbers? Are they broadly public? Do we know how we're doing in reaching those goals? Here's what we do know. Recently, there was a ribbon cutting for fast chargers and does anyone know how many chargers we're involved in that ribbon cutting?

Steve Ahlquist holds up four fingers.

Peter Neronha: Steve's right. Four. Now four doesn't come anywhere near any of those numbers that I just gave you. It doesn't come anywhere near 1500. That's the low end. It's great, I mean, there's a lot of ribbon cuttings and the federal delegation is working hard to get the money into Rhode Island that we can use to advance our climate goals, but let's be clear about what we accomplished on that day. We put in four charges.

It's great that we got four on the board, but what's our plan to get the rest on the board? How fast are they coming? Are they going to be in places where people will use them? I like the Office of Energy Resources. They came in and presented to us and they're doing what they can with the money they've been given to do the job, but it's not enough money.

When the government gaslights us in this way, we think it's great! We got four chargers! That must mean something! We're cutting ribbons! But it's not enough to get us where we need to be and unless we're serious about what it is we need to do to get where we need to be and have a plan to do it - it's not good enough.

I reread the letter that we submitted to EC4 in January 2022 about their interim plan for hitting our Act on Climate goals and boy, it's a tough read. It's a tough read for somebody like me who is not schooled in the science of it - but my team is. What I love about that document... is that it is clear where goals are missed and where efforts aren't enough. Some of it's pretty straightforward, like, we already have the Transit Master Plan, right?

Yet we're cutting the budget for the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority [RIPTA]. We know we need public transportation to expand for us to meet our goals. It's baked into the plans we have to date -and yet we're cutting, RIPTA and not expanding it. Where's the public conversation around that? You can't find it. Until our government becomes honest with us, we can't get to where we need to be.

I told you it was going to be dark and gloomy. But that's why you're so important and why I need to speak out. People don't like it when I speak out. My colleagues in government don't always like it, but I am who I am and it is what I do. I don't have patience for a lack of leadership and a lack of substance. I just don't. There is so much opportunity in an office like mine to drive change if you're willing to do it and think about your powers expansively. If we did that across government as a whole, we could get there on these issues that I've just scratched the surface of.

What we need is leadership and we need leadership that can attract great leaders as well. Where I see hope is here - if you look at my office, when we got there, we were doing very little environmental enforcement. We're doing a lot now. When the Blackstone River had raw sewage going into it, we went to court to stop it. We have been litigating the scrap pile [in the Port] for a decade, and finally, we have a different judge and we got the judge to at least temporarily shut it down.

I hope that as we continue to press that will happen. We went to court to make sure that every agency in the state of Rhode Island, including the DPUC, takes the Act on Climate into account when they're making decisions like overseeing the sale of our only public utility - if you remember that case, which many of you may not. What got under my skin was what the DPUC said in evaluating who our new utility owner is going to be. They said you only have to worry about two things. Do they know how to deliver electricity and are they in the black? They said nothing about their ability to meet environmental goals and said nothing about Act on Climate. And when we went to court, Judge Stern agreed with us that every state agency has to take the Act on Climate into account in their decision-making.

That principle helped us with the Sea 3 expansion of liquid propane gas in the Port of Providence because the siting board took that into account in requiring the full, as opposed to the truncated, review process. My point is that you can take an office and turn it into a player in this space if you attract the right people and help drive the work forward. We can do that in Rhode Island, but we've got to hold our state officials to account. We've got to call out the gaslighting when we see it. We have to remind them that these goals are achievable if we have the will to do it.

It's not easy. No one's going to tell you that it's easy to convince Rhode Islanders to go to electric vehicles, particularly when it's so confusing about the incentives to do it. No one's going to tell you it's easy to put more solar panels on top of a home, but if you can do it on a 1790s house, you ought to be able to do it on virtually every other building in the state of Rhode Island.

No one's going to tell you it's easy, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to do it. What leaders do is they pull, poke, prod, and push until the people who work for them do the necessary work. And guess what? If you're a leader who pushes and pokes and prods on issues like this, what you learn is you'll find the people who you don't need to push and prod and poke. They come to work every day excited to do it. You won't hear the name Sarah Rice very often. You won't hear the name Nick Vaz very often. You won't hear the name Allison Carney very often, but they are the leaders in the office who are pushing this work forward.

I'll end on this. We have two functions.

In the environmental space, we are a regulator with less power because we need a court to agree with us. When it comes to healthcare, we can simply impose our will, if you will because we are the regulator and we can stop or approve transactions and that tends to be the end of it. We are a litigator in the environmental space and a regulator in the healthcare space, but we can also serve the function of a policy shop and that is what the environmental scorecard is an example of. The same is true in the healthcare space. I don't think we have better thinkers when it comes to climate, environment, or healthcare in the Rhode Island government. I'm proud of them and their work.

Question: The environmental community came together around the decarbonization bill that didn't pass. What passed was nothing like the original bill. Do you have any thoughts about that?

Peter Neronha: I think we would all agree that decision-making is highly concentrated in our state legislature. I have a very good relationship with both the Senate President and the Speaker. I'll be candid. As you know, my relationship with the governor is not very good at all, but with the Speaker and the Senate President, it is quite good. Having said that, it is, as I've said before, effectively a benevolent dictatorship. I say benevolent because, under Speaker Nicholas Mattiello, I think it was malevolent.

The problem with concentrating power that way is that issues often don't make it to the decision-making point until very late in the session when there's a ton going on and anyone, including the Speaker or the Senate President, cannot take a step back even for a short amount of time to reflect. So opportunities are lost. On housing, if we're going to build a lot of new buildings, they should be heat pump-ready. That's a way to get heat pump takeup in the buildings that we hope to build. This is relatively simple stuff. It's a lot easier than trying to convince somebody with a brand-new oil furnace to put mini splits in their home. You can do it, but if we're waiting for the economics of oil to be much more expensive, that's not very reliable and that may take a long time. So opportunity missed.

I'll give you another one. I'm worried about the healthcare space. I'll be very short about this although it deserves time. 40% of Rhode Island children are on Medicaid. Most if not all dentists don't take Medicaid. Dentists have been asking the General Assembly for more money because they feel, like most everyone in healthcare, that they are not reimbursed at a high enough level to be competitive with other states bringing new dentists in. There's a shortage of dentists in Rhode Island. I don't have the specifics, but I was told that there is money in the budget for dentists. If money was given to dentists, one thing that could have been a condition of that was taking a certain number of Medicaid patients per practice, which is done in Massachusetts. So opportunity missed, opportunity lost.

I think that one of the fundamental weaknesses in the way government runs in Rhode Island is that the thinking is so rushed sometimes and that the people who are in a position to bring common sense amendments to bills, get missed.

There's also a big disconnect between government and people in the field. By that, I mean in any field. My wife is a physician so I hear about healthcare a lot at home, but I'm always amazed at the disconnect between leaders of healthcare systems and the boots on the ground. The providers - doctors, nurses, technicians, anyone who works hard every day in healthcare - there's such a disconnect between them and the people who run systems. The closer we get to making policy for people in the field, the better our policy is, and I see very little of that.

We love the ribbon cuttings. We love the moment when the spotlight is on, but we too often shy away from the hard work in government, and that needs to and can change. There are people out there who love the work and you can recruit them and they will build it, but we've got to have the kind of leadership that will make them want to come.

Question: What is the impact of the Chevron decision on our state climate policy?

Peter Neronha: [It affects] deference to or lack of deference to state decision-making, and it's hard to tell because I'm not convinced that our state regulatory decision-making is very good. I don't want deference to the CRMC. I get the broader point and that small point doesn't change the broader one, but if we're asking about Rhode Island, one of the things that concerns me very much is that our state regulatory agencies are not, in certain areas, strong enough.

Take health, for example. The Health Department is strong in managing a pandemic. But when it comes to regulating healthcare transactions it has a way to go. They're just not outfitted in that space.

The CRMC is a disaster. The DPUC is a disaster. I have real concerns about our regulatory decision making so I love the ability to go to court and get a fresh look with the right judge, which can also be a challenge.

Question: As someone who monitors the water locally, I wanted to ask if you're aware of any monitoring taking place around Rhode Island Recycled Metals and is there a chance that punitive damages could be enacted or put into effect to make an example out of them?

Peter Neronha: Rhode Island RecycledMmetals is such a disaster because not only does it have scrap metal fires, but it took a cap off [installed to contain pollution underground] to drag four vessels out of the water and scrap them. There's also stormwater runoff from that site. There are a ton of problems. Our biggest issue is that Judge Michael Silverstein put that site before a special master and effectively enjoined DEM and my office from taking any action against them without the permission of the special master, in fact holding DEM in contempt for doing so. We hope that this fire has pushed Judge Judge Brian Stern, who I have an enormous amount of respect for - he was the judge in the PPL Corporation's purchase of Narraganset Electric litigation - he will finally push this thing into receivership, where a receiver can take control of the property, get it cleaned up, get it remediated, while we take whatever steps we can against the owners of that property. I have some more thoughts about them, but I think I'll hold those for now.

Question: I volunteer my time on the policy team here at Climate Action Rhode Island. What's happened in the last two years is that Potter's net metering bill got passed by the House, but it didn't make it to the Senate floor. This year it passed the Senate, but it didn't make it to the House floor. As someone new to Rhode Island - I moved here in 2019, this is my home state - how are these decisions made? We're trying to get to one hundred percent renewable energy. I'm just very frustrated with the government and how they've moved this forward.

Peter Neronha: I can't give you an explanation about government decision-making that will make you feel better about government. As I said earlier, the path to getting something done is through the Senate President and the Speaker. If you don't have them on board, it doesn't matter. I thought we had a compelling case for getting rid of the CRMC. Keep the professional staff, but get rid of this crazy council that sits on top of them. I talked to the Speaker about it. We thought we had some momentum, Topher a Hamblet from Save the Bay was engaged and we were working hard and I was giving a lot of speeches and we thought we had some momentum.

The Speaker seemed at worst neutral and maybe favorable on CRMC, but the Senate President, from what I understood, was never a big champion of it in part because he has the confirmation authority. But what troubled me, and this is another example of gaslighting, was a fiscal note that came from Governor McKee's administration that said getting rid of the council was going to cost $2 million. And that just makes no sense. It's the first time I've ever heard that getting rid of something in government is going to cost money. I mean, we're just getting rid of the councilors who aren't paid and the fiscal note said we're going to need more staff.

I don't know why you need more staff if you don't have the councilors, maybe they need, in a vacuum, more staff. But that was an apples-and-oranges comparison. Why can't it happen? It's going to cost $2 million - but cost zero- it was a gaslight. That's the kind of thing that happens a fair amount as we've talked about. You have to call it out. I pay a price when I do, but it's okay because I'm in my second term. I probably would've said the same thing in my first term. I like to think I would have - that’s just how I roll. But we can't do it unless you have the support of people like you, and I'm grateful for the work that you're doing. It is inspiring. Thank you so much for having me.