{"id":254,"date":"2018-02-01T15:25:23","date_gmt":"2018-02-01T20:25:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/world.350.org\/rhodeisland\/?p=254"},"modified":"2018-02-01T15:35:47","modified_gmt":"2018-02-01T20:35:47","slug":"energize-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.350.org\/rhodeisland\/energize-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"The Case for Urgent Climate Action in Rhode Island"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Carbon Pricing for Rhode Island: Boyan Family at Energize RI press conference\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/iJX2-I7Lgeg?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Hi everyone. My name is Justin Boyan. I live with my family here in Providence. I\u2019m a former NASA research scientist and senior engineer at Google, with a Ph.D. in statistical machine learning. More importantly, I\u2019m a proud dad of two school-aged daughters.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I\u2019m standing here giving a speech, which is not my favorite thing to do, because for anyone who is a scientist or a parent, this moment in history is incredibly scary. If you\u2019re a scientist, you understand the physics of the huge global climate disaster that is just starting to unfold. And if you\u2019re a parent, you look every day into the eyes of the children who will bear the brunt of that disaster. You realize the urgent need for climate action NOW, not just talk and studies and toothless targets for the future. The action we need, this year, is the Energize Act.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Let me introduce my kids. Carmen is a 7th grader at Nathan Bishop. In the summer, she loves to build elaborate sand castles at the beach. She collects shells, seaweed and other treasures and arranges them into cool art displays. She and her sister have also gone to Surf Camp four times, and are getting pretty skilled at catching the waves. The beach is a big part of growing up in Rhode Island, right? But for Carmen\u2019s kids and grandkids, it may not be. If we keep burning gas for energy, blanketing the earth with carbon dioxide and methane, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.crmc.ri.gov\/news\/2017_0222_sealevel.html\">Rhode Island\u2019s sea level is forecast to rise, this century, by 9.2 to 11.5 vertical feet<\/a>.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Every single beach \u2014 from Westerly to Little Compton \u2014 would be permanently submerged. Not just kids\u2019 summer fun would be wiped out, but also tens of thousands of homes and businesses in communities like Newport, Bristol, Barrington, Warren, Warwick, Cranston, and downtown Providence. Storm-surge flooding will get them first, and later, total inundation. If we don\u2019t act now, Carmen and her generation will literally have to abandon our most cherished places. It\u2019s hard to wrap your head around. But it\u2019s physics. We have to deal with it. We need the Energize Act, now.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is Ella, a 9th-grader at Classical. Ella is also outdoorsy. Besides being a surfer, she is a rock-climber, a backpacker, and on the Providence teen cyclocross team. She\u2019s kinda badass. Ella is mostly vegetarian, but has a serious weakness for fresh steamers. Seafood is another great part of our Rhode Island identity. Unfortunately, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">science<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Our oceans are growing not only higher and hotter, but also more acidic, as carbon dioxide dissolves into the water. Oysters, clams, and scallops don\u2019t like that. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.epa.gov\/cira\/climate-action-benefits-shellfish\">They grow more slowly, they get developmental abnormalities, their shells are thinner and more fragile, they die<\/a>.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> If we want Ella and her generation to be able to keep on enjoying fresh local seafood like we do, if we want to save our marine ecosystems, if we want to save our fishing industry: we need the Energize Act, now.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I want to talk about one more kid, my friend Monica\u2019s daughter, Alexandra. Alexandra is three. She suffers from asthma and recently had to be hospitalized. She is one of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.health.ri.gov\/data\/asthma\/\">over 110,000 Rhode Islanders with asthma<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aafa.org\/media\/Asthma-Capitals-Report-2015-Rankings.pdf\">one of the worst rates in the entire country<\/a>.<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Many of those are kids like Alexandra, who live near pollution \u201chotspots\u201d such as I-95 and the Providence industrial waterfront. Air pollution also causes lung cancer, stroke, and heart disease. We don\u2019t need to get our energy this way. We can help every Rhode Islander switch to electric cars, which don\u2019t have tailpipes. We can get 100% of our power from wind and solar with backup battery storage: no more smokestacks. <a href=\"http:\/\/thesolutionsproject.org\/why-clean-energy\/\">It\u2019s totally doable<\/a><\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.juancole.com\/2017\/11\/powered-scotland-renewable.html\">Scotland and Sweden are nearly there already<\/a>. For Alexandra\u2019s health, and all our kids\u2019 health, we need the Energize Act, now.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Some folks say, we understand the science, we know there has to be a nationwide energy transition, but why should little Rhode Island go first? Here\u2019s why. First, as Kevin made clear, because home-grown energy will be a huge win for our economy. We don\u2019t produce fossil fuels here; we send our money out of state to import fuel and burn it. We can keep that money here. Second, because of our kids\u2019 health. Whatever other states do, the quicker we retire our gas cars and our gas power plants, the better we can breathe. And third, because we\u2019re the Ocean State. Climate change is coming for us first. We should be proud, and eager, to go first, to model what other states also need to do in this time of crisis.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Rhode Islanders are ready for action on climate. I know this from my work with Resist Hate RI, an activist group that formed after the 2016 election. We now have over 8000 members across the state. Last month, we took a survey of our members\u2019 priorities. Climate change was at or near the top of almost everyone\u2019s list. A year of hurricanes, floods, fires, and bomb cyclones has woken people up. So enough with the talk, study commissions, and toothless targets. Let\u2019s meet the challenge of climate change head-on, the way science says we must. Let\u2019s protect our kids, and save our state for them. <\/span><b>Let\u2019s pass the Energize Act.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday at the State House, Sen. Calkin and Rep. Regunberg introduced the Energize Rhode Island: Economic and Climate Resilience Act of 2018. CARI Vice-President Justin Boyan, alongside his daughters, was one of the speakers at the press conference launching the bill. Video and text of his remarks are below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":704,"featured_media":257,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/world.350.org\/rhodeisland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/world.350.org\/rhodeisland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/world.350.org\/rhodeisland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/world.350.org\/rhodeisland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/704"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/world.350.org\/rhodeisland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/world.350.org\/rhodeisland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/world.350.org\/rhodeisland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/world.350.org\/rhodeisland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/world.350.org\/rhodeisland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/world.350.org\/rhodeisland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}