Blab Lab Podcast

Episode 1: 2023 Environmental Watch List

Share


Subscribe and listen on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcast

This transcript was edited for clarity and length.

Colleen Cronin 

Welcome to the Blab Lab ecoRI News’s resurrected podcasts on all things environmental. I’m Reporter Colleen Cronin. This year we’re rebooting the podcast for the same amazing ecoRI News staff, the same high-quality stories, but a different theme song. Sorry, Frank.

Frank Carini 

That’s all right.

Colleen Cronin 

We’ll get back to that later, twice a month we’ll sit down to talk about the biggest environmental news of the week from the state’s progress towards its renewable energy goals to the latest academic research on climate change and grassroots efforts to live a greener lifestyle. If you have any suggestions for topics or stories, you’d like us to tackle in the podcast, you can send an email to me, my email is [email protected]. This week in our first episode of The Blab Lab, the staff of ecoRI —reporters Frank Carini, Rob Smith, and myself — will be talking about some of the big stories we’re following this year. And Frank, because you are the senior-ist of us being senior reporter…

Frank Carini 

The oldest? Thank you.

Colleen Cronin 

Why don’t you start us off?

Frank Carini 

Well, first, I’m not sure why or I’m a little disappointed we cut the Sanford and Sons theme song intro to begin this, but that’s fine. What was a question again?

Colleen Cronin 

What’s the big story you’re following this year?

Frank Carini 

I think it’s enforcement, environmental enforcement or the regulations that are so loudly applauded when they’re passed in the State House, and we seldom enforce them. And environmental protection in general. There’s started probably the 90s, probably even before that, early 90s, this, this idea. I’m actually working on a story that ties this all together. But this idea that environmental protection/environmental enforcement is some anti-business initiative, when in fact, it’s not. It’s public health, it’s environmental health. If you want a good economy, you have to have good, good environment, especially here in Narragansett Bay is a jewel of the, of our state, our state and our economy. Or so we’re told. And if we’re polluting it, it’s granted it’s not as fluid as it used to be, but just we’re, we’re using and abusing the land that we have in the space that we have in the natural environment. And it’s not good for anybody. I don’t care, whatever business, where you live, it’s just bad.

Colleen Cronin 

So, Frank’s stories are not going to be super cheery. But if you’re a regular reader, you probably already know that. Rob, what are you, what are you going to be following this year?

Rob Smith 

Last week, I attended two planning board meetings in two separate cities, Cranston and Warwick, and they’re both fundamentally about the same thing, which it, well, I mean, it’s true they’re about the same thing, but two separate things, right. So, every year and Frank knows it’s very well. Every year there’s a there’s a big fight in some town in Rhode Island about a big solar farm or something like that, where it’s probably cutting down some woodland or forest or a green space area. Because for solar developers, that is ultimately the cheapest option than doing it on developed land. And there’s a whole other host of reasons for that. The Natick Avenue solar development is back this year. It was a solar development proposed on Natick Ave in Cranston in 2018 2019. Long story short, someone appealed to Superior Court where it got remanded and they’re starting over again. It’ll take up about 22 acres of a 60-acre plot in Cranston and for people who don’t know Rhode Island geography very well. If you live in the metro area of Providence, Warwick, Cranston, North Providence, Pawtucket, there’s not a lot of green space areas left. It’s really overdeveloped. So, these, these solar farms when they get put in, they get incredibly controversial and neighbors hate them because it’s taking away green space, but we don’t really ever think about like if you live out say not in Providence, you don’t take public transit you probably drive, but it’s nice to live near parks. It’s nice to have trees nearby. I personally love trees, but it’s something that flares up every year and the legislature really hasn’t taken action on where solar should go. And no one in state government has really taken initiative to take strong incentives about where it should go instead, the incentives as they are still aligned to go on undeveloped land because it’s cheaper. And no one really cares to do anything about it, to give other incentives, like there’s a there’s a report we cite all the time from like five years ago that says, if we put solar on all the rooftops in Rhode Island, we get X amount of gigawatts of energy, but we just don’t incentivize that.

Frank Carini 

No, you’re right. That’s part of what I’m talking about, too. It’s not environmental enforcement so much, right now, because there’s no rules, but they don’t incentivize. It’s the State House. It’s the Office of Energy Resources. It’s like they don’t encourage or incentivize building solar carports, or, you know, putting these projects in already developed areas that are marred or polluted landfills, brownfields. They left the municipalities have to dry on this, and they’ve had to figure out their own way through this. And we’re, and you say we’re, you know, we’re covering open space and parks, we’re also damaging ecosystem services and stormwater management. And it’s just, we should have, eventually we’ll probably wouldn’t need to declare cut some forest land, but we should have started putting them on rooftops, putting them on landfills, Brownfields. But we didn’t do that, because the developers didn’t want to do that, because it’s harder, more expensive. And we allow the special interest — money — to dictate everything we do.

Rob Smith 

The thing the solar developers would always say, well, it’s this or it’s suburban housing, because we have a we have an affordable housing crisis. As if they’re constructing you know, 1948 single family homes, so the GIs coming back from the war and not the ugliest McMansions you’ve ever seen. You get this a lot. Probably the most big McMansion type developments are. I haven’t done an official survey but from having lived in separate areas across the state, it’s happening not in Warwick, and Cranston, and Providence. It’s happening in Scituate and Coventry…

Frank Carini 

Portsmouth, where I live, it’s all over the place.

Rob Smith 

Still, a lot of all those big developments are going out in more rural areas for many of the same reasons we’re putting solar farms in. But when you attend these meetings, and residents say, “Well, we don’t want that. We want to keep the forest or the meadow or this green space,” whatever it might be, they always, they always say, “Well, it’s just going to be housing if I can’t have this.” It’s a false choice, right? So, like, neither is really going to be the best what people want. And for some reason, there’s no, there’s no incentive to conserve land unless it’s already owned by the state, which is a — we’re going on a tangent here, because I’m thinking this out as I’m saying it — but like this really like the state does conserve land. But unless the state takes an interest in conserving land, it probably will not be conserved. Your Local Land Trust probably is run by a bunch of volunteers, senior citizens, I’ve met many of them. They’re wonderful people, but they have no money. And frequently land conservation is not something that gets passed on municipal bond level, or, you know, the state has bond money that it’s bonded out. And it’s going to give to towns where you have to get matching grants and your town may or may not have money for schools, let alone a new park. I can’t think of any time that’s opened a new park recently.

Frank Carini 

Land use is the most important, in my opinion, is the most important environmental issue Rhode Island faces, and many areas face. Especially in the northeast, when there’s not you know, we’re not Wyoming. There’s not tons of open space. It’s huge, and everything ties to it, everything. And we do not manage our land very well, our space very well in Rhode Island, and it’s going to lead to a bunch of future headaches for generations to come. And that’s, that’s the biggest problem in my mind. Yeah, the climate crisis, but that plays into that, too. We’re not going to have the wetlands to protect us from storm surge and sea level rise. And it’s the whole problem is land use management, and we’re bad at it.

Colleen Cronin 

My story, my topic that I’m thinking about a lot this year is transportation. I think as much as it sounds different from what you guys are talking about. I think it fits into a lot of the themes. I feel like right now, they’re really, the state is really pushing electric vehicles, which some people would say is the best thing, other people would say also still contributes to pollution and we need to focus more on public transportation. But I think that something that you guys are saying is, you know, there’s these “easy solutions” are these things that the state says, or the federal government says are “easy solutions” that aren’t. They have caveats, like the solar fields and farms and like the state legislation that doesn’t actually end up playing out in on a municipal level. I’ve been doing this a lot less than you guys or for a much shorter amount of time.

Frank Carini 

Again, calling me old.

Colleen Cronin 

But I think that I, when I first started, I had someone tell me like there aren’t easy answers and when someone offers you solution, especially with climate issues, you should be very skeptical of it. And I was like, oh, no, no, no, there’s probably so many great things we can do. And I think that there are great things, but I think listening to you guys talk, maybe you guys know better the solutions and some of these people who are putting those ideas out there.

Frank Carini 

There’s no easy solution. Well, the transportation issue is huge, too. Because if we’re going to make our Act on Climate mandates, there’s no way we do it without addressing transportation sector, which I’m seeing EVs aren’t the answer. Yeah, they’re part of a minor tiny part of the solution we should be going there, but we need to build our transportation sector. We need their support RIPTA. We need to build streetcars do we bring in you know, trains, you know, not a subway, but you know what I mean? Like more things that used to be around until the car culture became embraced by everybody and all these things were broken down. So, it’s not just buses, we could bring back streetcars or trolleys or, but that’s one way we’re going to do it. We can’t just say, Oh, we’re going to have all the cars we have on the road, now we’re going to become electric, we’ll be fine. That’s not going to do anything.

Colleen Cronin  

I think that’s interesting you talk about trains, because I don’t know a lot about this, but when I was working on a story in Charlestown earlier this year, people were talking about a fight against expanding, I think Amtrak or just a train station down southern Rhode Island, because they were afraid of losing open space. And so, I think I’m agree with you, Frank, that a lot of these issues are not conflicting. But I think that the interests that lie out there are frequently making them sound like they conflict and pitting people against each other.

Frank Carini 

I mean that’s what it is. I mean buses are the first thing we have to deal with in supporting and better funding RIPTA, but then there’s other things beyond that. It isn’t just buses; we can think outside that and think longer term. But yeah, people don’t want that because they don’t want bike paths because somebody’s going to come rob their house, which I never understood. I’ve heard that in meetings in Rhode Island, meetings in Massachusetts. And so, I’ve been I’ve been a journalist for 32 years, I’ve heard that numerous times. It’s mind boggling. I know people think they’re going to break in, put all your stuff on their inner backpack and pedal away. I don’t know. It’s just because people don’t want strangers in their community, whatever that means. It’s just anything. So, you can even build a bike path. You know, busses, you know, some towns, or I guess only a few Little Compton being one of them. They didn’t want the buses. Buses used to go there, and they don’t want him anymore.

Colleen Cronin 

Oh, on that note. Thank you guys, for sharing what you’re going to work on this year. If you’re listening, if you’re a reader… It’s not all going to be cheery, but it’ll be good work. So that’s exciting. Thank you guys for listening. Although these are only some of the topics we’re thinking about this year, it’s just a small fraction of what we’ll be doing in 2023. If you have any thoughts from what we talked about, if anything sparked an idea, or there are other things that you want us to cover this year, or other things you want us to cover in the podcast, you can always reach out, you can send an email to me, [email protected]. You can take a look at our show notes for a transcript of the podcast and any links to stories we mentioned or we’ll fact check as well with any fact checks that we have for this episode. Before we go, we’d also like to thank Roger Williams University and Professor Bernardo Motta for lending us the recording studio we are in.

*And a special thank you to Vanessa Carlton for allowing us to use her song “Willow” as our theme song.

Categories

Join the Discussion

View Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Your support keeps our reporters on the environmental beat.

Reader support is at the core of our nonprofit news model. Together, we can keep the environment in the headlines.

cookie

We use cookies to improve your experience and deliver personalized content. View Cookie Settings