Failure to Act on Climate Goals Increasingly Places Burden on Taxpayers
Costs soar along with temperatures
January 23, 2025
In mid-April 2021, a mere eight months after a Rhode Island Superior Court judge dismissed a climate action lawsuit filed on behalf of a dozen young Rhode Islanders, the state’s Act on Climate bill was signed into law.
The legislation made Rhode Island’s greenhouse gas reduction goals mandatory and enforceable, by allowing residents, nonprofits, and businesses to sue to force the state to comply. (The earlier student-led lawsuit was an attempt to force Rhode Island to get tough on climate change.)
I still find it pathetic that Rhode Island’s elected officials need to be forced to deal with an emergency.
Anyway, if the state doesn’t meet its climate targets, the people of Rhode Island, beginning in 2026, will be able to seek non-monetary action in Rhode Island Superior Court for compliance.
By dismissing the Nature’s Trust Rhode Island lawsuit in August 2020, the judge helped delay urgent action for another six years.
In her decision, Melissa Darigan wrote that, “While this Court should have no reason to dispute the presented findings and issues, and, frankly, shares in Plaintiffs’ concerns for the environmental impacts of human activity, Plaintiffs have nonetheless failed to demonstrate a specific, tangible, and concrete injury suffered as a result of Defendants’ rejection of the proposed rules.
“While climate change is concerning, in the case presently at bar, this Court cannot be used as a ‘forum [to determine] abstract questions,’ even if the questions Plaintiffs raise are grounded in science. As they presently stand, Plaintiffs’ concerns appear better directed to a forum different from this Court.”
It’s always someone else’s worry.
Rhode Island’s biggest problem is that it’s forever stuck behind the curve. Most of our elected officials and many of the people they appoint (see Alviti, Peter) are fine with letting, after their terms expire, others deal with the major problems they couldn’t be bothered to face, or helped create.
There’s no urgency, even as public health deteriorates, floodwaters rise, temperatures increase, severe weather becomes more frequent, and the natural world suffers.
Martina Muller, a plaintiff in the dismissed Nature’s Trust lawsuit, noted after the court’s decision was quietly issued that government continues “pushing the responsibility to someone else.”
“Every day we waste pointing fingers and arguing about whose job it is to do something,” Muller said. “The time window of action is shrinking, and the scale of the response needed to avoid unthinkable climate catastrophe becomes that much bigger.”
Another one of the young plaintiffs, Alex Duryea, was equally frustrated with the court’s decision.
“Nobody is taking responsibility for ensuring that DEM and the state of Rhode Island are protecting my right to a future,” Duryea said. “Do you think I want to be suing DEM? I have schoolwork to focus on, but I’m doing this because I feel like I have no other options at this point. If DEM just took action to protect future generations, what’s the worst that could happen? We’d have a safer, cleaner future.”

Last month in Montana, the state’s top court confirmed that the state Constitution guaranteed a right to a stable climate and invalidated a law barring regulators from considering the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions when permitting new fossil fuel projects.
The Montana Supreme Court upheld a trial court decision in favor of 16 young people (sound familiar?) who said their health and futures were being jeopardized by climate change. Their lawsuit noted state and federal policies are exacerbating the crisis.
The desperate Rhode Island and Montana youth are correct.
A study published last month found government slow on the uptake when it comes to addressing the climate crisis — likely because the donor class doesn’t want the fossil fuel tap touched.
The study makes a compelling case that the “social cost” of carbon emissions — the amount of damage per ton that the government sets for figuring out what kinds of development make sense — has been set far too low for far too long.
Published Dec. 17 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study shows that current estimates for the social cost of carbon fail to adequately represent important ways by which the climate crisis could impact human well-being.
When all costs are adequately included, the social cost of carbon increases to $283 a ton of carbon dioxide emitted — more than double the average published in academic literature. The study’s estimate is also larger than the Environmental Protection Agency’s estimate of $190 per ton of CO2.
“Anthropogenic climate change affects the welfare of people around the world and will continue to do so for centuries into the future,” the study’s authors wrote. “Because these costs are largely not incorporated into energy, land-use, and other economic decisions, climate change has been termed ‘the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen.’”
The climate crisis is costing taxpayers plenty, and the bill will only continue to increase as we fail to decrease fossil fuel burning:
Climate-related weather disasters cost the economy billions every year.
The United States has experienced 400 weather and climate disasters since 1980 when overall damages reached or exceeded $1 billion. The total cost of these events is nearly $3 trillion.
By 2050, 10% of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) could be wiped out annually by climate disasters.
Rising temperatures and extreme heat are projected to decrease worker productivity by $221 billion a year by 2090.
By the end of the century, climate-related weather disasters are projected to cost the United States $500 billion every year — almost double the economic blow America suffered during the Great Recession.
Either we care about each other, future generations, and other life or we don’t. Sadly, it appears we, at least the oligarchs and their minions, have made a choice.
Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.
One of the reasons for inaction is that we have developed an economic development system designed around feeding the rich and draining the planet. We cannot have an economy as usual and stop the catastrophe and no politicians or appointees have the courage to buck the big money interests and how they want the economy ordered. You cannot end poverty without healing ecosystems, You cannot heal ecosystems without ending poverty. We have to tackle climate and economic ineuality at the same time, simultaneously, and with the same projects if we are to make it through the bottle neck.
Greg, while I agree with your conclusions, the question remains, how do we bring economic equality to the poor unless it’s through economic growth, which is the basis of the whole environmental and economic problem? Because driving that is human avarice, which rejects restricting wealth. Can we ever expect a needed paradigm shift without a fundamental shift away from our greed? Real answers are needed.
The old politicians just want to do their time and hand it off to the younger generations. They don’t care. People come and use RI for its resources in the warmer months and leave. Go to Belmont Market in Wakefield, and it’s the walking dead shopping in the store. There are no young people who are here all year round. SO these elder generations just keep sticking with the people they have been voting for 40 years.
I have been advocating that we reduce Light Pollution for a while now, but not until recently did I find
Light pollution disturbs moths even in the dark | ScienceDaily notes, “The experiments were carried out by a group from Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany, in cooperation with researchers from Berlin and Providence (USA). The results have been published in the scientific journal PNAS.”
Street lighting has detrimental impacts on local insect populations | Science Advances, notes “Artificial light at night (ALAN) is an increasingly recognized threat to biodiversity and ecosystem processes (21–23) and has recently been proposed as a driver of insect declines (24, 25)”
…..”we found that the LEDs at our field sites had greater impacts than HPS lamps.”
“The impacts that we observed—on local abundance, development, and feeding behavior—were more pronounced for white LEDs compared to traditional sodium lamps (e.g., HPS lamps, yellow hues). LEDs can be modified more easily than sodium lamps by adjusting their intensity (dimming) and spectral output (custom colors and filters) (38, 63, 64)……. ”
Lighting ordinances | DarkSky International
Light Energy: Our Wasted Resource | Consilience notes, “In 2017, the US wasted approximately 60 billion kilowatt hours (kWh), translating to a loss of more than $6.3 billion and CO2 emissions in excess of 23 billion pounds.”
Addressing the Greenhouse Effect by helping to reduce Light Pollution goes hand in hand. It’s doable, saves everyone $$$ and helps wildlife too! Please consider taking the Pledge and …….. !!!