Greg Gerritt: The CRMC effs up again

"The mood turned a bit sour, so they called in the cops. The officer just stood in the back of the room, but this points out the inherent fascism of the CRMC."

[For the full meeting, including transcript and video, see here.]

I went to the Coastal Resource Management Council meeting about upgrading the gas pipeline under the Sakonnet River. There is much discussion in Rhode Island about the future of gas with a long Rhode Island Public Utilities Commission process currently underway, as well as the great urgency with which we must act if we are to meet the requirements of the Act on Climate. We all know the CRMC is a seriously flawed organization subject to massive political manipulation by the rich, but I was amazed by the Council’s unwillingness to consider the implications of the Act on Climate when looking at the project, and that the staff ignored such implications as to how important it is to phase out the use of gas in their analysis. 

Essentially they were treating it simply as a wetland permit issue and the climate be damned, even as more and more folks die every year in climate and heat-related disasters. About seven people testified at the hearing after a dog-and-pony show by the folks from Enbridge saying “We are great and this is all worked out.” Every single person who testified pointed out serious flaws in the logic of excluding climate and the end of gas in thinking about the project’s viability and some reminded the CRMC that Enbridge has a spotty record with multi-million dollar fines for pipeline spills and other disasters. I took a tiny bit of data from Good Jobs First’s violation tracker and some of the speakers cited other data about Enbridge’s record.

I spent some of my time running down the criminality of CRMC and its lousy track record over the years. The people of Rhode Island are ready to get rid of these politically connected clowns as regulators who are people unwilling the face the reality of the climate catastrophe and how their work is implicated. The Act on Climate legislation instructs Rhode Island agencies to include climate in just about every serious decision they make and the deliberate attempt to avoid the elephant in the room made me rather angry so they tried to silence me. By that time I had had enough of the farce and was ready to quit anyway so I sat down. But it did very much remind me of the time CRMC expended considerable energy to shut down speakers from the Southside of Providence trying to stop expansions of oil industry facilities along the Providence River. 

The CRMC discussion following testimony was even worse with Councilmember and blowhard Donald Gomez pontificating about nuclear power and the reiteration of the Council’s unwillingness to allow climate into the discussion. The mood turned a bit sour, so they called in the cops. The officer just stood in the back of the room, but this points out the inherent fascism of the CRMC. The decision also reminds us of how little these folks work for Rhode Island and how much they work for the rich and powerful.

I did attend one of the hearings at the legislature on whether CRMC should be turned into an actual state agency and have professionals with a better understanding of the issues and context to make the decisions on coastal building or leave it to the clowns of the CRMC. At that hearing, very few people defended the CRMC and many were sick of its crap. After going to the hearing last night, it is crystal clear that this dinosaur in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry must go away.