RI General Assembly session produced mixed results on the environment

McKee's effort to slash green energy funding rebuffed

By Rob Smith / ecoRI News staff

No more pencils, no more books, no more speaker’s dirty looks: lawmakers last week bid farewell to Smith Hill for the year Thursday night, when this year’s legislative session concluded.

It was a roller-coaster ride for environmental advocates, who spent most of the session playing defense. Gov. Dan McKee had proposed rolling back the renewable energy standard and slashing solar financing programs and energy efficiency initiatives as part of an affordability agenda to reduce electric and gas bills by any means necessary.

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McKee wasn’t the only politician in New England proposing cuts to such programs. Lawmakers in the Massachusetts House passed a bill in February cutting $1 billion from their energy efficiency programs, more commonly known as Mass Save.

But ultimately, in the version of the Rhode Island budget signed into law by McKee on June 12, most of Rhode Island’s climate programs will remain intact. The only changes will be to virtual net metering, which will introduce a voluntary opt-in rate, and reduce the total cap of future solar projects eligible for the program to just 175 megawatts.

Environmental advocates also notched another set of small wins in the budget: the director of the state Department of Transportation was removed as chair of the board of directors for the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority, and lawmakers allocated the embattled transit agency with enough funds to close its deficit.

Here’s some of what else lived, died or stalled:

First the big news: building decarbonization lives, from a certain point of view.

Previous sessions saw lawmakers attempt to pass a single bill that would require buildings in Rhode Island to track, benchmark, and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. That single bill always died in committee, so this year advocates tried a more traditional tack, the tried-and-true General Assembly two-step.

They spun off the more unpopular elements of building benchmarking — the emission mandates — from the main bill that pushes large buildings owners to start tracking emissions. Advocates acknowledged just starting a benchmarking program for all buildings in the state would require years of lead time to draw up regulations and spur adoption.

The two-step worked, and lawmakers passed H7813/S2260 in concurrence Thursday night. Starting in 2028, property owners with buildings larger than 50,000 square feet will have to track and report their emissions for the previous year. Buildings larger than 25,000 square feet start tracking in 2030.

Arch of grift

Trump gave the NO-BID contract to his own personal pool guy and this is what we got...

Here's the guy who got the contract:

The scent of supper

Can mosquitoes learn to love DEET?

Laine Bergeson

When it comes to keeping mosquitos from biting, DEET has long been considered the gold standard. Sprayed on before hikes and picnics and while traveling to mosquito-dense corners of the globe, the world’s most widely used insect repellent comes with the expectation that its smell will send mosquitoes zipping off in the opposite direction. 

But research published yesterday in the Journal of Experimental Biology suggests that mosquitoes may learn to associate the smell of DEET with dinner—and start gravitating toward it instead of away from it. The findings challenge long-held assumptions about how DEET works and what mosquitoes may be capable of learning.

Training changed how mosquitoes react to DEET

For the study, researchers from the University of Tours in France and Virginia Tech examined whether female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, the species that spreads dengue, Zika, yellow fever, and chikungunya, could learn to associate DEET with a food reward. 

The team used a form of Pavlovian conditioning in which mosquitoes feed on warm blood through an artificial membrane. Twenty seconds into their meal, the researchers released DEET into the feeding enclosure—a process they repeated three more times before exposing the mosquitos to DEET but no food reward. 

When the trained mosquitos caught a whiff of DEET alone, more than 60% of them tried to feed again, displaying what researchers termed a “biting attempt response” (BAR). That’s compared with roughly 20% of untrained mosquitoes who performed BAR when exposed to DEET alone.

In another experiment, mosquitoes were given a choice between two human hands. One hand was treated with DEET, and one was untreated. All of the untrained mosquitoes avoided the DEET-treated hand. Trained mosquitoes, however, were significantly more likely to orient toward the treated hand.

McKee signs charter school moratorium bills, reversing his career-long commitment

Gov flip-flops on what used to be his signature issue

By Alexander Castro, Rhode Island Current

Photo by Alexander Castro/Rhode Island Current

Gov. Dan McKee signed into law Thursday a three-year moratorium on new charter schools in the Ocean State, embracing a pause on the local growth of an educational model with which he has long been associated.

“The circumstances have changed,” McKee told reporters Thursday.

Back in 2021, McKee suggested he’d veto a similar, albeit unsuccessful, piece of legislation. Part of the bedrock in the governor’s political brand had been his push for the creation of mayoral academies — a special kind of public charter school — during his time as the mayor of Cumberland in the late 2000s.

The governor had received the moratorium bill on his desk Tuesday and under the state constitution, still had until Tuesday, June 23, to sign or veto the bill. McKee strode out the Providence County Courthouse Thursday to explain to reporters why he had signed the charter school ban bill with five days to spare.

“I haven’t backed off, like, say, ‘Oh, let’s put charters out of business.’ I haven’t said that,” McKee told reporters after an unrelated afternoon appearance at a Law Day essay contest award ceremony for high schoolers at Rhode Island Supreme Court. “I said, ‘Let’s support the charters.’ And I’ve done that more than once.”

BREAKING NEWS from Ted Nesi, WPRI:
NO endorsement for McKee from RI Democratic
Party. Highly unusual for an incumbent.

But much has changed in the five years since McKee took office, he told reporters.

“I’m a public school advocate, and I will use any tool in the box to help us reach the potential for our students that live in the state of Rhode Island,” McKee said after he signed the two companion bills Thursday. “So that’s no different, but today there are some circumstances that we need to address.”

Those circumstances include enrollment declines in public schools — about 10,000 students in all, in the time he’s been governor, McKee said — and a pressing need to reassess how the state funds education via a formula for determining state aid to local school districts.

Trump finds new way to hurt immigrants and their families

The ICE-ification of Financial Regulation: steal their savings, especially the money they planned to send to their families at home

by Philip Mattera, director of the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First for the Dirt Diggers Digest

For more than half a century following the passage of the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, financial institutions have been required to monitor certain customer transactions to thwart money laundering. The USA PATRIOT Act, passed in response to the 9/11 attacks, created additional rules designed to thwart terrorist financing.

Now the Trump Administration is starting to enlist banks in a more questionable form of information gathering involving the immigration status of their customers. For months, there have been reports that the administration is planning to require banks to determine whether customers are U.S. citizens.

That has not yet happened, but a recent executive order from the White House takes a step in that direction by advising banks to “be attentive to the credit risks posed by the extension of mortgage and auto loans, credit cards, and other consumer credit to the inadmissible and removable alien population.”  The order calls on the Treasury Department and financial regulators such as the Fed and the FDIC to develop changes to the Bank Secrecy Act to address this supposed risk.

This sounds like a prelude to more explicit rules that would bar banks from doing business with undocumented immigrants.

A masterclass in incompetence at home and abroad

Stupid at all levels in all things great or small

Sabrina Haake 

My neighbors’ mail. Note the date.

Last week my neighbors brought me an envelope with a “MAGA priorities survey” enclosed. A solicitation for money disguised as a survey, it opened with a four-page cover letter from Trump.

The survey drills down on ‘Biden’s sky-high mortgage rates,’ and ‘reckless spending binge’ even though we’re now 1.5 years into Trump 2.0. 

It blames Biden for ‘today’s affordability squeeze,’ despite Trump’s economically unhinged tariffs and $94 billion war in Iran. Trump, who still thinks exporters pay tariffs, single handedly turbo-charged the price of energy, and tanked consumer confidence at the same time, all while demanding that Americans disbelieve their lyin’ eyes.

Trump’s cover letter begins, “Dear America First Patriot, I put THREE LIVE POSTAGE STAMPS (all caps) on the enclosed Rush Return Envelope because I had to get your immediate attention… And because I need you to respond to me right away!” Four pages later, Trump urges True Patriots to make a True Patriotic donation of $2,026…. Or even just $47, by rushing back the MAGA survey using the enclosed TRIPLE-STAMPED Rush Return Envelope TODAY. (Combining all caps with bold, a triple-dog-dare-you maneuver that conveys urgency.)

The kicker is that the “triple stamped rush envelope” was the pre-marked, pre-paid, “No postage necessary if mailed in the United States” kind. Adding extra postage stamps to a prepaid postage envelope, according to the USPS, means Trump just wasted money (USPS bold, not mine). Trump, in one mailing, spent extra on an agency he accuses of waste, demonstrated his fiscal illiteracy, and declared his donors stupid. Another masterclass in Trump’s trifecta of incompetence.

New plans for the Trump Library

Monday Charlestown Town Council meeting loaded with big issues

 

Policy-packed Town Council Meeting this Monday (June 22) Night. Please consider attending to make your opinions heard. First Up: Public Hearing, Discussion and Potential Action Concerning Proposed Amendments to the Town Charter. ORDINANCES AND RESOLUTIONS: Zoning - Battery Energy Storage Systems and Data Centers. NEW BUSINESS: Discussion and Potential Action Regarding Amending the Ninigret Park Utilization Plan to Incorporate the Comments from the National Program Manager, Federal Lands to Parks, National Park Service. UNFINISHED BUSINESS: Discussion and Potential Action Regarding Ninigret Park Beautification, Presented by the South County Tourism Council Discussion and Potential Action Regarding Public Outreach for the July 7, 2026, Public Hearing and the August 4, 2026, Referendum Regarding the Charlestown Elementary School (From May 20 and June 8, 2026) Charlestown Town Hall, Council Chambers 4540 South County Trail, Charlestown RI 02813 June 22, 2026 at 7:00 p.m. Charlestown Residents United | PO Box 412 | Charlestown, RI 02813 US

Coal pollution is cutting solar power output, study finds

Will Trump look for ways to use coal to kill wind turbines?

University of Oxford

Trump's 2-for-1 obsession: promote coal, kill green energy

New research led by the University of Oxford and University College London (UCL) has revealed that pollution from coal-fired power plants is significantly reducing the energy output of solar photovoltaic (solar PV) installations, particularly where these are expanding side by side. The findings have been published today in Nature Sustainability.

The new study mapped and assessed more than 140,000 solar PV installations worldwide using satellite data.

By combining this with atmospheric data on air pollution, the researchers calculated how much sunlight is lost and how this reduces electricity generation. They found that aerosols - tiny particles suspended in the air - reduced global solar electricity output by 5.8% in 2023. This is equivalent to 111 terawatt-hours (TWh) of lost energy – the amount generated by 18 medium-sized coal-fired power plants. 

Crucially, these losses represent a significant and often overlooked constraint on the clean energy transition. 

MAHA’s Treatments for Autism: Camel’s Milk, Stem Cell Injections — And Spelling Therapy

Kennedy turning health science inside out

By Arthur Allen

Elizabeth Bonker is a silent woman with a loud mission. She wants government agencies to cover the costs of training people with autism in a form of communication called assisted spelling. One problem: Leading professional organizations don’t believe it works.

“All nonspeakers above the age of 5 should be given the opportunity,” typed Bonker, who is 28 and cannot talk. Her mother, Virginia Breen, held a wireless keyboard for her. They sat on a hotel patio before an April 27 meeting with a senior aide to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“We are misunderstood and underestimated,” Bonker typed, occasionally humming or lightly groaning as she considered where to place a slender forefinger on the keyboard.

Assisted spelling is used to help nonverbal people communicate by pointing to letters on boards or using keyboards with physical help from another person.

Supporters say assisted spelling has improved the lives of thousands of people with autism, such as Bonker, and they have powerful allies. Kennedy appointed Bonker and another autistic “speller,” as they call themselves, to a 20-member autism panel made up largely of parents with children whose autism they attribute to vaccinations.

At the reconfigured panel’s first public session on April 28, three other members said their nonspeaking adult children were learning to communicate through spelling. The panel issued a resolution with language from Bonker stating that “robust” communications programs are essential for autistic people. Bonker has urged the Department of Health and Human Services to support training in assisted spelling for those who want it.

But leading professional groups for autism science, as well as those representing psychologists and speech pathologists, point to research showing that these methods — premised on the idea that people with autism have the normal range of cognitive powers but are imprisoned in malfunctioning bodies — are flawed or fraudulent.

Trump issues rules for sick people on Medicaid

"Throw down your crutches and go pick cotton"

By Sam Whitehead

The Trump administration has issued final rules on how states should ensure that millions of Medicaid enrollees prove they’re working or completing other activities, such as job training, volunteering, or being enrolled in an educational program.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services released the rules on June 1. That deadline was set last year in the GOP tax-and-spending law known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which established a work requirement for certain people enrolled in Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program for people with low incomes or disabilities.

Medicaid agencies are scrambling to rework IT systems and make sure they have staff to effectively enforce the rules, while also keeping enrollees from losing coverage for administrative reasons, such as difficulty navigating state eligibility portals.

The newly announced regulations offer a clearer picture of what roughly 18.5 million Medicaid enrollees will have to do to prove they qualify for benefits.

Jim Torres, who helps people enroll in health coverage at the Samuel U. Rodgers Health Center in Kansas City, Missouri, said a “very small percentage” of his clients have heard of the changes coming to Medicaid.

Sen. Victoria Gu gives her review on the recently ended General Assembly session

Highlights from a productive session 

By Victoria Gu

Dear Friends and Neighbors,  We’ve finished another legislative session! After many nights of long committee hearings, bill sponsors and committee chairs work on their bill edits, and June is when bills can be approved for votes in committee and then gain final passage in the House & Senate.  New Leadership: In the past month the RI House of Representatives also elevated Majority Leader Blazejewski to the position of House Speaker and Majority Whip Katie Kazarian to the position of House Whip. Congratulations to them and the outgoing Speaker Joseph Shekarchi for their years of service.

Bills I Passed

Shoreline Access Disclosure for Oceanfront Property Rentals: The House & Senate passed my bill S-2734A to help make sure renters and short-term rental guests understand Rhode Island’s shoreline access rights. Part of the motivation for this bill came from seeing some short-term rental listings advertise a “private beach,” even though Rhode Island law protects public shoreline access up to 10 feet above the recognizable high tide line. This bill helps make sure visitors and tenants get clear information about those rights before they stay at an oceanfront property.  Food is Medicine: The General Assembly has passed my Food as Medicine bill, which creates a task force to design a Medicaid pilot program that uses medically tailored meals or other nutritional supports  to improve the health of patients with chronic, diet-related conditions.  Food insecurity is strongly linked to many of the most costly preventable chronic diseases, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and obesity, which drive enormous health care spending.  Medicaid accounts for about one-third of our state budget and is growing at an estimated 6% per year. Our budget will have a growing deficit unless we look at evidence-based programs like food as medicine. 60 Days Advance Notice of Home Insurance Non-Renewals: Insurance companies are being a lot more selective about the location and the condition of the houses they insure, declining to cover homes in coastal areas or with older roofs or water heaters. The bill that Rep. Azzinaro and I passed requiring 60 days’ advance notice will help homeowners find alternative insurance coverage and find tradespeople if they need to fix something at their house in order to continue insurance coverage.

Spotlight: Youth Mental Health

988 on Student & Staff Ids: Last week the General Assembly passed a bill Rep Earl Read & I sponsored to put suicide prevention and substance use crisis hotline numbers directly on student and school staff ID cards. At a time when young people are facing growing mental health challenges, we need to promote awareness of resources like 988. The General Assembly also passed a youth crisis response service bill that codifies a successful pilot program into law. The program helps kids in crisis by getting them fast, specialized care with behavioral health clinicians (avoiding unnecessary emergency room visits) and connecting families to ongoing support. Thank you to constituents who wrote to me about the importance of funding 988: This year, the Senate also advanced a separate bill by Senator Melissa Murray to protect the long-term funding of Rhode Island's 988 crisis line and BH Link services. More than 90% of 988 calls are resolved through phone support alone, connecting people with trained counselors before a crisis escalates. The bill stalled in the House, but we hope to pass it next year. More info here

Looking ahead: Vote for the Green Bond this Nov & Op-Ed on Managed Retreat

We got an extra $5 million for climate resiliency in the Green Bond which will be on the ballot in November! Annually, each town can apply for grants from this pool of funding to strengthen their infrastructure. One example: Westerly received funding for a flood wall around a pump station for the wastewater treatment plant.  Managed Retreat: These photos I took in South Kingstown show how shoreline armoring—like rock walls and elevated structures—disrupt the dynamic beach ecosystem and make it harder for people to walk along the beach. As sea levels rise and more coastal property owners build hard structures to protect against erosion, the public part of the beach gets narrower, and in these pictures, it has become impossible to pass along the shoreline. That's why we need to plan ahead before the next major storm. Instead of repeatedly rebuilding in areas that face increasing flood and erosion risks, towns can identify safer places for homes and infrastructure over the long term. Read more about our work to help Rhode Island communities prepare for rising seas and protect public access to our shoreline:  https://www.providencejournal.com/story/opinion/columns/2026/04/18/rhode-islands-managed-retreat-plan-for-rising-seas-opinion/89628806007/

Next rail advocates meeting: June 22nd 6pm @ Westerly Library

Budget Highlights

62-65 year old early retirees will now get the same exemptions from Social Security tax as people 65 and older. Seniors still must have incomes under $107,000 for single filers and $133,750 for married filers in tax year 2025, to qualify. Child Tax Credit - see this press release Rural Health Transformation Grant - RI received over $150 million in the first year of this federal program and will use it to implement innovative programs like Community Paramedicine - see this website for more information. Stay tuned for more healthcare highlights and impacts of HR1 on our healthcare system

Read the full budget press release

Senate Highlights

Labor Protections: We passed many noteworthy bills like S-2921 to give domestic workers the same protections under the Fair Employment Practices Act (FEPA) as other Rhode Island workers. Immigration bills: see this press release and another for protecting constitutional rights Education Funding Formula: only minor changes this year by increasing the “student success factor” - which is an additional amount of funding for each low-income student - from 40% to 43%. We will need to monitor the new Senate commission to study the funding formula, specifically the one suggested by the Blue Ribbon Commission Status of CRMC reform bill: The bill that passed last year required the Governor to appoint members with expertise in coastal matters. There are some new members that the Senate confirmed this year with expertise with civil engineering, coastal wetlands, law, etc. but it remains to be seen whether the political dynamic will change and I still support the overall reform that would restructure CRMC so it’s similar to DEM, with a staff and director making the decisions instead of a politically appointed all-volunteer council. Status of Bottle Deposit & Recycling bills: The bill that passed last year began the first stage which is a needs-assessment to look at our recycling system as a whole. That is still in progress

Attention Job Seekers

The next step