Gov. McKee, Statehouse MAGAs At War With Renewable Energy
April 2, 2026
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An illegal war started by a Monster caused the price of gasoline and other fossil fuels to explode. The human-caused climate crisis, fueled by the burning of said fossil fuels, is both frying and flooding great swaths of the planet and changing the ocean’s chemical composition.
But have no fear, Gov. Dan McKee and MAGA asshats are here.
To address this dual-threat emergency — war and the climate crisis, not gasoline prices — the underwater governor and the MAGA faction within the General Assembly believe blowing up Rhode Island’s support for renewable energy and retreating on the state’s climate initiatives are solutions.
Elections certainly do have consequences. We’ll be paying for them for generations.
House Minority Leader Rep. Michael Chippendale, MAGA-Foster, recently introduced a package of legislation designed to eliminate many of the state-mandated charges on utility bills that fund renewable energy and climate programs. He denied the legislation was meant to end renewable energy programs in Rhode Island, but it would essentially do just that.
His five irresponsible bills would: require all changes to the Renewable Energy Growth Program be approved by the General Assembly, instead of the Public Utilities Commission (the corporate-friendly PUC apparently isn’t corporate enough) or just eliminate the program altogether; terminate the energy efficiency charge, which funds the program that allows Rhode Island Energy to offer rebates, free weatherization services, and other initiatives that help ratepayers use less energy; end the net metering program used to finance solar arrays and prohibit any state subsidies for consumer heat pump purchases; and place a five-year moratorium on the Renewable Energy Growth and energy efficiency program charges.
This shortsighted “leader” with orange-glazed lips embraces fossil fuels and sits on the fence with fingers in his ears when it comes climate action. Don’t call him a climate denier, though. He says the term is a “political slur crafted by the radical left to shame anyone who questions whether the current policy approach to renewable energy is sound, practical, or affordable.”
“We acknowledge that climate change is occurring. Where we differ is in what we believe is causing it, and — more importantly — what solutions are realistic without bankrupting the people of Rhode Island,” Chippendale wrote last year.
Too late; many lurking about the Statehouse are already bankrupt.
Our relentless burning of fossil fuels for two and a half centuries isn’t connected to global heating. MAGAs know more than climate scientists. Their alternative facts trump common sense and junior-high science. Chippendale’s solution to the emergency is to trash renewable energy and call nuclear power “clean.” I propose Rhode Island build a nuclear reactor on Johnson Road in Foster and dump the facility’s radioactive waste in Chippendale’s backyard.
The blame-it-on-volcanoes-climate-denier is a mouthpiece for carbon-based rule. He’s hardly alone.
Like fellow nonprogressive Democrat McKee, West Warwick Rep. Patricia Serpa welcomes ignorance. She favors the withdrawals recommended by the governor and introduced by the House minority leader, saying it may not be a popular opinion but it is a practical one. It’s not. She’s more concerned about Rhode Island Energy profits than what low-wealth families pay for electricity. She fails to either understand or care that war and the climate crisis burden the people she pretends to be concerned about more than highly paid utility executives.
“Rhode Island Energy is a for-profit business. It’s not a charity that exists for the benefit of distributing energy at little or no cost,” Serpa spewed during a recent House Corporation Committee hearing. “We can’t control everything. … They have products to buy, they have gas lines to pay for, they have employees to pay for.”
They also have exorbitant profits to rake in.
The charges collected monthly on residents’ bills for renewable energy and climate programs aren’t the reason electricity costs are high.
Profit margins of investor-owned utilities, such as Rhode Island Energy, increased last year, according to a recent analysis by the Energy and Policy Institute. Investor-owned utilities kept as profit an average of 14.6 cents of every dollar they collected from customers in 2025, up from 12.8 cents from 2021 to 2024.
In 2024, the average authorized return on equity for regulated U.S. utilities was 9.7%, while the average of 34 major investment firms’ long-term equity return forecasts for the broad U.S. market was 6.7%.
Even the highest individual forecast (8.3%) was lower than the average authorized utility return on equity — a striking gap, because utilities, with their regulated monopoly status and predictable earnings, are lower-risk investments than the market as a whole, so their cost of equity should be below the market average, not above it.
Despite its central role in the utility business model, the share of electricity revenue that utilities retain as profit is rarely analyzed or even discussed when higher electric and gas rates are requested.
In 2022, when the Rhode Island Public Utilities Commission unanimously approved one of the largest electric rate hikes in decades, none from the troika of McKee, Chippendale, and Serpa attended the meeting. No objections prior, only faux concern afterward.
The 47% electric rate hike increased monthly household bills, on average, by nearly $51.
After the historic rate hike was approved, Serpa promised “to ensure that Rhode Islanders are getting the best price possible for their utilities. As Chair of the House Oversight Committee, I, along with Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi, am committed to hold Rhode Island Energy accountable for the promises made when they purchased the utility from National Grid.”
She also promised that if reelected “to make affordable energy a priority in the next legislative session by continuing to closely watch RI Energy and carefully reviewing all legislation that impacts rates.”
Three-plus years later, she defends Rhode Island Energy profiteering and assails programs designed to wean us off fossil fuels and mitigate the climate crisis. Utility CEOs have the right to be paid handsomely, so ratepayers pay more to have their health and environment degraded.
Two years after the PUC jacked up electricity rates, Chippendale found time to chime in, with his usual nonsense and lies.
Electricity costs over the past 12 years have risen 46% for residents and 24% for local businesses, and for that he blames renewable energy and climate initiatives.
“Electric Vehicle sales have stalled and have peaked at 1% across the nation. GM, Ford and Tesla are cancelling plans for new production facilities across North America,” he wrote in a February 2024 essay a high school English teacher would have made him rewrite. “Wind projects across our region are being cancelled due to the ever-rising high cost of the power they are slated to provide — not to mention the negative impacts already observed in early installations with Rhode Island’s wildlife and the ocean’s ecology.”
The five Block Island Wind Farm turbines so ruined the marine ecosystem that anglers pay charter boat captains to take them fishing around the offshore bogeymen.
Ocean ecology is rapidly changing because of anthropogenic climate change, primarily caused by the absorption of 90% of excess planetary heat and roughly 30% of greenhouse gas emissions. These factors are causing a rise in marine water temperatures, acidification, and reduced oxygen, which disrupt food webs, bleach corals, stress shellfish, force species migration, and fundamentally alter marine habitats.
When a fossil fuel power plant was proposed for the woods of Burrillville, Chippendale didn’t express any concern about the impact on Rhode Island wildlife or ecology.
As for the state’s Act on Climate law and renewable energy mandates, he offers this head-shaking assessment:
“It is not good conservation policy to harm our environment with impractical and costly mandates. We need to rewrite the Act Climate or we WILL bankrupt Rhode Islanders by forcing them to electrify every aspect of their lives — at one of the most expensive economic times to do so.”
Was Chippendale in “Idiocracy.”
In my humble opinion, gutting imperfect policy that is designed to address the climate crisis will cause much more harm to the environment, which we share with a decreasing amount of nonhuman life. The natural world isn’t ours. Also, if you don’t believe the policies in place are working well, offer better solutions. Build rather than destroy.
The programs McKee, Chippendale, and Serpa want nuked represent some of the best mechanisms Rhode Island has to take control of its energy future and keep near- and long-term system costs manageable. They aren’t perfect, but that’s largely because special interests and MAGA ignorance have to be appeased.
If you’re concerned the Ocean State is alone in giving up, don’t fret. Let us hold New York’s rapidly warming beer.
Kathy Hochul, the Empire State’s governor, wants to delay the implementation of that state’s 2019 climate law, which calls for gradually decreasing greenhouse gas emissions by certain deadlines.
“We need more time,” Hochul wrote in an opinion piece recently published in The Empire Report. “So much has radically changed since the Climate Act was enacted, necessitating common-sense adjustments.”
Like McKee, Hochul is running for reelection.
Protecting the status quo and putting the breaks on climate initiatives won’t prepare humankind for the future or address the climate emergency. We’re already dangerously behind.
Note: A once-in-a-4,433-year heat wave invaded the western United States last month. The heat wave set or tied March record highs in at least 480 locations, stretching from New Mexico to southern Oregon. California broke the record for the hottest winter day ever recorded in the United States: 109 degrees March 19 in eastern Coachella Valley.
Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.
Is Chippindale’s stupidity a done deal?
How to stop it, if not?
Chippendale is an idiot as is McKee. For all the talk of skyrocketing RI electricity rates, RI rates have fgone up almst exactly the national average in the alst 5 years. about 46%. Most of the cost of electricity is hifghly po0lluting natural gas, methane, and if we kept building wind farms, the cost of elecxtricity would go down as wind poereed and solar powsered electricty are ALREADY cheaper than gas powered electricity. And that does not mention reducing the costs of claimte disasters and diseases from breathing dirty air. In other words iot is not even penny wise and pound foolish to encourage gas fired electricity, it is just plain stupid and expensive. I testified last night on the Republican effort to roll back the gas tax to save $9 million for consumers each year. It would put 60 cents a month in the pocket of the average RI driver and speed up the destruction of the planet. Thankfully the leadership of the Senate Finance Committee saw through the stuidity of that one. Same thing with getting rid of the renewable energy standard chartges on the lec tirc bill. You might save $5 a month now, but 2 years down the road you will be paying $10 more per month And remeber the only thing that will bring dowen electric rates is more solar and wind generated electricity and battery storage systems. Which is what the idiot Republicans want to eliminate to pay off the criminals who bribed trump with $1 billion of his election campaign. Then add in the cost of bombing Iran to the oil bill and how that will hurt farmers and everyone who eats by cutting off the fertilizer farmers need for planting this spring. The whole anti green approach is a criminal scam to kill you and boil the planet and it costs more than doing the right thing. This is what happens when we elect idiots who are unwilling to learn.
Thank you, Frank, for writing this article. I agree with Greg. I could add my opinions as well about humanity destroying not only the planet, but ITSELF, but I want to know WHO is getting money from the fossil fuel industry. I feel sick to my stomach. I wish that humanity would wake up. Today, I believe that humanity’s greed and stupidity will continue. What will our future generations think about what is going on today? What will they think about their parents, grandparents, and great grandparents concerning what they did to stop the stupidity? What will history say? Only time will tell.
The General Assembly needs to pass the legislation enabling consumers to install plug-in solar (also called “balcony solar”), which a number of states have passed or soon will. It allows use of relatively inexpensive solar panels that can be plugged into a regular outlet to feed power directly to the home. This won’t fix everything, of course, but it has the potential to help some folks a fair amount.
Frank, thank you for this excellent article and for putting those in their place who are trying to sabotage the much needed legislation for Rhode Islanders to not only do what they should to address the ever-growing climate crisis but to also truly reduce electric rates for both the near term and the long term (20-year contracts at a rate of less than 10 cents per kilowatt hour – it’s a no brainer- at least for some) not to mention to give those numerous other beings with which we share this planet a chance to survive into the future.
If electricity costs have risen 46% for residents and 24% for local businesses in the last 12 years, how much are the CEO’s salaries up in the same time frame? Just curious.
Spot on Frank. Thanks!
No person or wildlife will escape climate change. Renewable energy is being installed around the globe big time. Why? It’s low cost, readily available and clean. Is the rest of the world wrong. Nope.
We really need to replace McKee. Fortunately he is doing very poorly in recent primary polls. Maybe that’s why he’s mad that he’s being primaried?
Agree, but I wish there was actually someone worthy of support. The current field is pathetic.
As I stated before it is not the programs it is how we fund them. I dispute your claim Frank that these programs do little to impact energy costs to consumers. These fees can account for half of a households utility costs per month. Time to stop complaining and time to start offering solutions. How we currently fund these programs acts as a regressive tax. The burden for these programs falls on lower income households that may not be financially able to take advantage of them.
Jim, I agree with you. In addition the burden falls on our senior residents who if they elect to install solar panels on their homes would never accumulate the needed years to break even on the cost of the system. No one talks about the senior citizens who have worked a lifetime to accumulate retirement savings and planned effectively for their golden years. Now those same citizens are being forced to pay for green energy programs via their electric and gas bills. If they have gas cooking stoves, gas heating systems, gas clothes dryers and ICE vehicles. They are facing the daunting prospect of having to use their retirement savings to pay for appliances and heating systems they do not need. Should they need a new vehicle after 2030, they are looking at the prospect of having to purchase an electric vehicle due to state laws and then having to update their electrical systems in order to charge the vehicle at home. None of these expenses were ever on the horizon on a senior citizen’s thoughts as they planned and saved for their personal retirement. These expenses take funds away from their ability to pay ever increasing property taxes, medical care, groceries, and a whole host of expenses that continue throughout life.