All apologies to Charles Dickens, but it is the worst of times, it is the age of foolishness, it is the epoch of incredulity, it is the season of darkness, it is the summer of despair.

During the past month, three local specters have reinforced this bleak reality in their own special way. But each of their tales share similar traits: selfishness; arrogance; and ignorance.

At at Rhode Island Public Transit Authority board meeting in early August to address the agency’s $10 million budget deficit, The Ghost of Transportation Past referred to the fear being felt by low-wealth individuals, people with disabilities, and senior citizens as “exciting times.”

Peter Alviti, the Rhode Island Department of Transportation director and the RIPTA board chair, couldn’t help himself. He’s giddy that public transit in Rhode Island is clunking toward the breakdown lane. He dreams of more money to widen highways.

Ever since he became RIDOT director in February 2015, ridding Kennedy Plaza of bus riders has been more important than properly funding and supporting public transit.

He shares his disdain of RIPTA riders with The Ghost of Downtown Privilege. Former Providence Mayor Joe Paolino Jr. believes he’s still in charge, because he owns property inherited from his father. His wants are more important than the needs of a single mother trying to get to work on time or the blind bus rider headed to an appointment.

As my colleague Colleen Cronin recently reported, while RIPTA was holding public hearings on yet more proposed service cuts — the most extensive in the agency’s six-decade history — the governor’s office was trying to schedule a meeting with Paolino about spending millions of taxpayer dollars to move the Kennedy Plaza transit hub far from the landlord’s properties, even if it means bus riders are inconvenienced. Paolino wants them hidden from view so he can jack up downtown rents and roam the area without being offended by those who can’t afford his rents now.

When he didn’t get the attention he thinks he deserves, Paolino, in an email, referred to RIPTA as a “joke,” and whined that he wouldn’t attend future meetings about the bus hub. I, for one, hope he keeps his promise.

“this is a joke . please let the governor know that RIPTA is a bigger joke .” Paolino wrote in an email. “i am not interested in going to any more meetings .governor told RIPTA to have a plan B .. they have nothing .. i am not interested in being a part of inaction. thank the governor for his attention and friendship but his administration is failing him on this issue.”

In a phone interview with ecoRI News, Paolino said, “It’s frustrating when meetings are set up, and they keep on being canceled, and I don’t see any end in sight. For six years they’ve been talking about the bus hub. It’s frustrating they can’t get any concrete plans in place.”

He doesn’t care what the plan is, as long as his tenants, and him, can look out their windows and not see RIPTA riders.

The Ghosts of Status Quo are also upset about their views being impacted by something intended to help mitigate the climate crisis — in this case renewable energy instead of public transit. Their tale is the scariest.

The anti-wind crowd, which includes Rhode Island-based Green Oceans, recently sent a letter to Brown University demanding the institution retract research it published that detailed links between the fossil fuel industry and offshore wind opponents.

The D.C.-based law firm, Marzulla Law LLC, representing Green Oceans is no stranger to representing special interests who are against offshore wind, such as a commercial fishing industry trade group.

Marzulla Law’s letter called the Brown research “false and injurious” and threatened to complain to the university’s public and private funders, including the National Science Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.

A MAGA-like bully move, with a side of tattletaling.

Green Oceans has complained that the Brown University research wasn’t peer reviewed, but neither was the white paper it published a few years ago. The 23-page paper is filled with wind dread and 150 citations that are supposed to portend the atrocities offshore renewable energy production will unleash.

The paper goes to great lengths to discredit offshore wind energy. Some of the leaps are impressive.

It claims offshore wind isn’t really green because of, among other things, indirect sources of carbon dioxide produced during the installation of wind turbines, such as cement; plankton destruction; and the overseas mining of rare earth metals.

No energy source is benign. From installation to operation, they all come with consequences — cultural, environmental, and societal. There are legitimate concerns about the development of offshore wind, as there are for all energy production. But renewable energy, especially when sited responsibly, is significantly cleaner than the burning of fossil fuels.

Offshore wind isn’t a panacea and it certainly shouldn’t be erected anywhere and everywhere, but it needs to be part of a renewable/cleaner energy mix.

Incidentally, indirect sources of CO₂ are also emitted when building offshore methane and oil platforms, fossil fuel power plants, and nuclear reactors — the latter of which the anti-wind crowd believes is the solution to the world’s energy demands. The world, including capitalist America, doesn’t necessarily agree. The anti-wind crowd also really likes the idea of small modular reactors.

A nuclear power plant requires a significant amount of concrete, with the quantity varying depending on the design, but generally ranges from 44 tons to 220,000 tons. Nuclear concrete, also known as “heavy” or “heavyweight” concrete, is also about 50% more expensive. A 2022 analysis estimated the cost of nuclear concrete at $527 per cubic meter, compared to $352 per cubic meter for non-nuclear concrete.

For concrete to be nuclear grade, the mixture of water and cement must be more precise so it will not crack as it sets. Additives, such as barite, iron, and magnetite, to make heavy concrete have to be mined and transported. Uranium-235, the only natural isotope of uranium that is fissile, is typically mined in remote locations and the mines usually run on diesel, as does the transport.

I spoke to a lobbyist for the nuclear industry last fall about small modular reactors (SMRs). He noted the technology’s first-of-a-kind costs are beyond what the market is willing to pay, so, like renewables and fossil fuels before that, government will need to adopt supportive policies to scale up their production and use.

The Office of Nuclear Energy, an agency of the U.S. Department of Energy, has said, “Significant technology development and licensing risks remain in bringing advanced SMR designs to market and government support is required to achieve domestic deployment of SMRs by the late 2020s or early 2030s.”

A 2024 analysis by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis has cast doubt on the role of SMRs in near-term efforts to transition away from fossil fuels. “Small modular reactors still look to be too expensive, too slow to build, and too risky to play a significant role in transitioning from fossil fuels in the coming 10-15 years,” according to the 23-page document.

As for the anti-wind group’s concerns about plankton, the climate crisis, not offshore wind turbines, is the biggest threat, as the burning of fossil fuels is warming, acidifying, and changing the nutrient levels in marine environments. A 2024 study noted plankton may not survive global heating.

“The results are alarming as even with the more conservative climate projections of a 2°C increase, it’s clear plankton cannot adjust quickly enough to match the much faster rate of warming which we’re experiencing now and looks set to continue,” according to the study’s lead author.

A 2020 study found plankton living in the world’s coldest waters surrounding Antarctica are at the highest risk of disappearing. The study noted that as global temperatures rise, it’s unlikely that marine plankton populations will make it without being significantly impacted.

The declining availability of krill due to climate change and the associated acidification of the ocean is a threat to the survival of blue whales. They feed almost exclusively on krill, and some of the biggest individuals can eat up to 6 tons a day. These leviathans, like the endangered North Atlantic right whale, are also threatened by vessel strikes and entanglements in fishing gear.

Mining for rare earth metals, such as dysprosium, neodymium, terbium for wind and uranium, barite, and magnetite for nuclear, is environmentally destructive and frequently socially unjust, but so too is mountaintop removal mining, mining for tar sands, extracting oil from land and sea, and hydraulic fracturing for methane.

The Green Oceans white paper makes the connection that bats killed by offshore wind turbines will allow mosquito populations to rise, thereby increasing the prevalence of mosquito-borne diseases, such as Zika, West Nile, and eastern equine encephalitis. Sounds frightening.

Spinning turbine blades do kill bats, lots of them, but these winged mammals also face many other dangers, including widespread habitat destruction and white-nose syndrome, a fatal fungal disease. (Land-based turbines are considered to have higher overall bat mortality rates than offshore turbines.)

The burning of fossil fuels is also a considerable threat to bats. A 2023 report noted that as extreme weather events, such as wildfires, drought, higher temperatures, and storms, continue to increase in severity and frequency bat populations will be negatively affected. The report projected that the climate crisis will impact as many as 82% of the bat species in North America over the next 15 years, resulting in sharp population declines and the potential to lose some species forever.

Some of the white paper’s claims are absurd:

“Given the health consequences of biodiversity loss, expansive wind farm installations could violate the internationally recognized Human Right to Health.”

The burning of fossil fuels most definitely violates our right to health, and at a far greater intensity, especially for those humans, most of which are low-wealth families and people of color, who live near these polluting facilities and the sites where fossil fuels are unearthed.

“Wind farms can increase water and air temperatures, redistribute humidity, and alter atmospheric flow, thereby modifying local weather patterns and regional climate.”

That is precisely what the burning of fossil fuels is doing, just at a far greater scale and pace.

One of the paper’s handful of alternatives to offshore wind — along with nuclear power and covering 10% of the world’s reservoirs with floating solar cells, which “could replace all of the world’s fossil fuel power plants” — is to immediately convert all U.S. coal power plants to methane. That’s not a solution to the climate crisis. It’s a continuation of the status quo.

The anti-wind crowd also likes the potential of nuclear/hydrogen fusion, but the closest one is nearly 94 million miles away.

Offshore wind opponents like to argue that fossil fuel corporations are often behind offshore wind development and getting rich from it. Fossil fuel corporations are already filthy rich, from extracting methane, oil, and coal from land and sea.

The otherwise vocal anti-wind crowd seldom expresses its concern about the environmental damages that the exploration, extraction, transportation, and burning of fossil fuels cause, even when the Mad King issues an executive order to open protected waters off New England, including the Gulf of Maine, and Alaska to possible fossil fuel drilling.

Offshore wind opponents say little to nothing when the Mad King signs another executive order to sunset rules for all new and existing offshore drilling regulations, including those passed after the Deepwater Horizon explosion. Those rules were designed to prevent similar environmental catastrophes.

BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster poured 134 million gallons of oil into the waters off the Louisiana coast. The explosion killed 11 people. Oil gushed for nearly three months, covering an area on the Gulf of Mexico’s surface the size of 66 Rhode Islands. The spill killed and sickened fish, seabirds, turtles, and whales.

They like to note offshore wind turbines have diesel generators — to jump-start them after being idle or to warm them in really cold weather. Diesel generators are also routinely used on offshore oil and methane rigs and typically run for much longer intervals. The fossil fuel industry also runs diesel generators at remote locations on land.

With energy demand surging — our insatiable appetite for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency is leading the current charge — the immense problem with multiple names (climate change, climate crisis, global heating) can’t simply be solved by turning off our porch lights and not posting on social media (internet servers consume a lot of energy).

Two of the best solutions to this human-made emergency are to better support, fund, and expand public transit and to build responsibly sited renewable energy, on land and at sea. The status quo led us to this point. Relying on future miracles will prove deadly.

Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.