To the Editor,
I have sat through and participated in many Rhode Island planning adventures, over the last 27 years, and I believe I am not alone in saying most of the plans miss the boat and sit on shelves. They underestimate the obstacles and exaggerate the potential of business as usual with a modern face. And especially these days, as climate catastrophes kick into overdrive RI appears to live in the past and pretend that things will work out, instead of being quite clear about the nature of the heavy lift, the forces specifically arrayed against what we are going to have to do, and how we are going to have to do the right thing despite what the lobbyists for fossil fuels, plastics, and convenience stores say.
Rhode island always touts innovation and the private sector innovation economy, but the most resistant to getting ready for the future and for the climate catastrophe are members of the business community who have a lot invested in the old ways and are not ready to acknowledge their impact in the coming disasters. They are an albatross around our collective necks preventing action while there is time to change course.
And it is not just climate that we pay lip service to and where we refuse to do the heavy lift. Everything about economic development, redevelopment in our cities, our infrastructure planning and our transportation systems have to not only start with climate, but simultaneously must start with equity and justice. The nature of the threats in America means that we have to be clearer about the role of environmental protection in keeping the economy running despite what the rich people say, and the importance of community seats at the table when it comes to infrastructure. Say what you will, but we can not look at transportation without all the rest of this factored in if we want to have a useful plan.
I have read enough plans to know the platitudes that they offer to equity and justice and how the language is left vague so the powerful have a way to weasel out of pulling their weight and doing the right thing. Economies work better when they are more equal, and they do not need to run on overconsumption to keep the populace happy. RI planners have yet to acknowledge that reality, while refusing to divulge their growth targets and what they are based on. The data is pretty clear, any time RI insists it will grow more than 80% of the national average for GDP growth rate for 2 or 3 years, it is based on fantasy, as there is no three year period in my experience in which this happened and only low income countries and places with natural resource based economies can have high growth rate economies for more than a few quarters. We would be better off looking for a steady state of prosperity based on limited consumption and a much more equitable distribution of resources. Something to really think hard about in a world in which 6 of the 9 planetary boundaries that have been studied have already been exceeded.
I think we need to pay attention as RI has a track record of continuing to expect economic growth higher than what we usually experience, with no reason to believe the fundamentals (and I do not mean low taxes on the rich) would put the RI growth rate up with the poor countries of the world, or with the places that pollute everything. What would an understanding of the reasons RI will always have relatively low on a global scale economic growth rates mean for transportation planning? We need to be explicit.
RI planners still assume the ever widening equity gap will continue and that it is sustainable, despite how hugely unequal societies always fall into recessions, and often fracture, when the ecosystems they depend upon can no longer provide food and the community rises up after severe abuse or the storms get worse, Hunger causes people to migrate and governments to fall. When we are told we can end welfare, we forget what hungry people will do if their kids are hungry.
The current work was described as updating the 2040 transportation plan but simply adjusting the last plan is going to still leave us totally unprepared to meet the challenges we shall face by 2050 or to suggest things at the scale that is needed to solve our problems and end the rolling catastrophe. Extinctions are rampant, populations, human and non-human, are on the move, Hurricanes are stronger, sea levels are rising faster, and every day another new way to melt Antarctica faster shows up in the journals. Is the RI economy and transportation system going to support us or crash if we underestimate what it will take to meet the challenges of the 25 years between now and 2050? I fear the perspective going into this plan will not match the scale of our challenges so I am challenging all of the people working on this to rise up and meet the challenge of a hothouse world with growing violence and inequality and the need for systemic change to right the ship.
I know it is a transportation plan, but we also have regularly seen, the biggest influence on all RI plans is the economy, and if the climate and inequity driven economic struggles and opportunities are not factored in, how are we going to know how to invest our diminished capital in a way that really serves out communities and helps heal the climate and ecosystems. And yes the road to both economic prosperity and good transportation policy must incorporate actual ecological healing, not just slowing down the disaster as well as moving our communities towards equity rather than perpetuating inequality.
I know it is a transportation plan, and is based on assumptions about economic growth, but economic growth slows dramatically when the population is stagnant or shrinking, even if the per capita numbers are growing. Here is a quote from a UN leader about the need to reduce consumption rather than focus on growth in the western world. We need to both lower expectations for growth and turn that into conservation on resources across the board.
Li Junhua, the UN undersecretary general for economic and social affairs, said: “In some countries, the birthrate is now even lower than previously anticipated, and we are also seeing slightly faster declines in some high-fertility regions of the world.”
“The earlier and lower peak is a hopeful sign. This could mean reduced environmental pressures from human impacts due to lower aggregate consumption.” He warned, however, that “slower population growth will not eliminate the need to reduce the average impact attributable to the activities of each individual person”. Remember that last point in your planning.
On planet Earth today, a shrinking population can be a very good thing, reducing greenhouse emissions as well as stresses on the rest of the resource base that supports us. And yet every time one turns around they can hear another RI politician and corporate leader saying RI needs a larger and faster growing population to insure economic growth. We cannot house people now, and the resources directed towards housing, like almost everything in RI, are woefully inadequate for the work we need to do. So we plan for the wrong future.
Maybe before we do a transportation plan, we either need a plan to increase housing sufficient to meet the need, or we should have plans based on a shrinking population and less overall consumption. We do have a choice, but right now we are muddling.
Maybe in the second densest place in the US, and in a place with a severe housing shortage (which completely undermines the planning for economic growth) we need fewer people and less “development” considering that RI is totally incapable of feeding itself and we need to keep all available farm land in production and the landfill is going to fill with no replacement in site in 10 or 15 years. If RI becomes more sustainable and accepts that the population is stagnant or shrinking, it will strongly influence whether or not we can achieve net zero and prosperous communities by 2050. And clearly that will influence whether or not we get the transportation system to moves us strongly into the 21st century prosperity or one that contributes to pollution and decay.
Is the Division of Planning willing to offer us a strong vision of what we need to do and help us understand how hard it will be and what it will take to overcome from delays caused by reactionary dinosaurs?
The climate deniers and neoliberals will try to argue each individual diversion from the dominant paradigm with platitudes and pretend we do not have to shake things up in this crisis, but that no longer holds water, The sea is already rising and Beryl is the new normal. Will you pretend the business as usual you offer will work? Will you toe the imaginary line and banish integrity and imagination? Or offer us something at the scale we need to operate in? Where will the solutions we need at the scale come from especially those that will require a change in the power dynamics of our society? Will our transportation plan help us move towards a just economy, which it must do if we want to have a chance to succeed in the climate catastrophe staring us in the face. Do you have it in you, or will the power brokers continue to constrain what is possible to say in state documents to what makes their political donors more money? Will we pretend that we can do a useful transportation plan without this context?
We need actions at all scales, but cumulatively they must add up to a scale of change unlike we have ever consciously created. Some of these challenges are more difficult in a democracy. No czar or king can make a decree. And the elected officials are way too beholden to the industries causing the problems, both economic and ecological. Are we willing to go all in on mass transit or continue to let the road builders constrain our infrastructure? Will transportation, a relatively easy sector to electrify be diverted from the task or will the state really put us on the right path? Can we design economic development strategies (backed with real money) that really match the infrastructure we want, and the local production that we need? Will our transportation system match our need for walkable neighborhoods and mass transit for everyone? Will bikes rule or just be another dead critter by the side of the road?
We cannot let the past, the auto dominated past, determine the future.
I heard you say with my own ears that the zero emissions mandate by 2050 of Act On Climate is your guide star. There is no glide path. Will this be a report that says what the rulers of RI want and sits on a shelf, one that ignores the climate and economic justice elephants in the room, or one that points out how doing the right thing is the only way forward for RI, makes the case strongly with concrete ways forward, and brings along the community?
If wishy washy is predetermined why should we offer comments? Why should we put in the effort to have it say the right thing, when you are constrained from speaking the truth? What will give us confidence that behind the scenes the oil and plastic companies will not get powerful ears and undermine the planet?
We could do this right, but I sort of doubt we shall. One of the easiest ways to tell if the plan is at scale is how it deals with the airlines and airports. Flying is a luxury for the rich, and the most carbon intensive way to move people and goods. Eliminating flying would be a big step forward, offering us an economy and transportation system focused on the community rather than the desires of the rich. If you do not seriously consider the idea of closing TF Green and for state officials to dramatically reduce their flying, it is going to be a clear demonstration of the lack of will to do the right thing.
Greg Gerritt
Director of research and forest gnome
ProsperityForRI.com
