Dan McKee’s climate sabotage

The opposite of leadership

By Christian Roselund

Rhode Island Governor Daniel McKee has an exceedingly bad record on climate issues, spanning many years, multiple sectors, and countless destructive actions. In fact, it’s hard to think of a Democratic governor in this country in recent memory who has been worse - though New York’s Kathy Hochul seems to have ambitions in this regard as well.

The McKee Administration’s attempt to delay the targets in Rhode Island’s Renewable Energy Standard (RES) by decades in the most recent budget process was perhaps the clearest and most public demonstration of McKee’s willingness to sabotage climate action in the Ocean State. 

But this cynical delay of decarbonization in the electricity sector comes as the culmination of years of weakening, delaying, and otherwise undermining climate action. This includes actions that were never fully connected to climate, such as defunding public transit.

As an activist and organizer who has worked in multiple sectors that intersect with the climate crisis in this state, I have had a front-row seat to just how bad Dan McKee has consistently been on this issue. 

The following is a list of the four major areas and actions that are particularly damning for McKee’s climate record. Please note that this is not a comprehensive list, but rather the biggest-ticket items and areas that I personally participated in.

Enabling Peter Alviti until the Bitter End

Among the people who have objectively done the most to keep carbon emissions high in Rhode Island, McKee has strong competition from former RIDOT (Rhode Island Department of Transportation) Director Peter Alviti.

Transportation is Rhode Island’s largest sector for carbon emissions, at 37% of total emissions in 2023. As such, it has an outsized role in decarbonization, and getting transportation policies right is essential to meet climate targets.

Peter Alviti’s 11-year leadership of RIDOT was a formidable obstacle to making any progress in this regard. Alviti’s intense opposition to non-car infrastructure, his personal dictatorship at RIDOT, his lust for more power, and his willingness to raid money dedicated to active transportation were all legendary.

While in office, Alviti managed to secure hundreds of millions in federal funds to widen urban highways, delayed and defunded bike infrastructure projects, avoided compliance with mandates to plan for carbon reduction, shut active mobility and transit activists out of all but token participation, and generally obfuscated the process of transportation planning and decision-making. This was all accomplished with a heavy dose of gaslighting.

This was not for lack of planning for other alternatives. During Alviti’s tenure, advocates and state staff were kept busy creating a Transit Master Plan and Statewide Bicycle Mobility Plan, only for those two plans to gather dust while lanes were added to I-95, the 6/10 boulevard proposal was rejected, and the Cranston Canyon was widened.

Each time Alviti delayed an active mobility project and/or used funds earmarked for active mobility to pay for highway expansions, it represented a lost opportunity to reduce vehicle miles traveled and, thus, carbon emissions. And every highway expansion baked in car-centric infrastructure.

Alviti was not created by McKee, but enabled by him. Former Governor Gina Raimondo first appointed the highway-expanding septuagenarian and most uncivil engineer. Alviti also had a very strong ally in the Rhode Island Senate in the form of former Senate President Dominic Ruggerio. As McKee took over as governor when Raimondo was appointed Commerce Secretary, he inherited Alviti and the political machinery supporting him.

But in a trend that shows up again and again, McKee showed zero leadership in terms of reforming what he had been given and demanded zero accountability from Alviti. In 2023, McKee appointed Alviti for another four years. Only after years of the Washington Bridge fiasco did McKee finally decide Alviti was too much of an election liability and let him go in February 2026. By then, the damage had been done.

The Climate Action Plan that Wasn’t

Peter Alviti’s complete lack of accountability under Governor McKee is an essential starting point for the administration’s next great climate failure.

Dan McKee signed the Act on Climate in 2021, committing Rhode Island to specific economy-wide emissions reduction targets for 2030, 2040, and 2050. However, his administration has gone out of its way to avoid any serious plan to comply with any of these targets, particularly the law’s 2030 target to decarbonize 45% versus 2009 levels.

On one hand, this makes sense. Both McKee and Alviti clearly were opposed to climate action getting in the way of business as usual. And if you make a plan to meet targets, you might actually have to do it. So the strategy appears to be not planning at all.

Anyone even casually involved in the state’s planning process could see it was off the rails for years. The first interim plan in 2022 - which should have started our state on a path to meet the looming 2030 target - was defined by an absence of specific, actionable, near-term commitments, and mostly was a plan to do more planning. The formal excuse was that the 2025 plan would be the real deal and that stakeholders would have to wait.

But the planning that went into the 2025 Climate Action Strategy - particularly by RIDOT - was no better. One central problem was RIDOT’s intransigence under Peter Alviti. This included no real initiative to take new actions to meet emission reductions. Rather, stakeholders received bland statements that the transportation targets would be met, accompanied by projections allegedly supported by data that was not made public.

This was one of many deficiencies that other researchers and I documented in RIDOT’s contribution. These included an attempt to re-cast RIDOT’s car-centric planning choices as emissions reductions and an undercounting of the potential contributions of mass transit and active mobility that relied on circular logic. This was among countless other methodological deficiencies and logical fallacies.

Given that transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases in Rhode Island, this lack of action or even serious plans in the transportation sector was damning for overall targets. But what was perhaps even more damning is the example this set. With RIDOT refusing to take the Climate Action Strategy seriously and no accountability with the McKee Administration, why should other agencies go out of their way to come up with actionable commitments?

So in the end, what the Rhode Island Executive Climate Change Coordinating Committee (RIEC4) produced by the late-2025 deadline was a menu of options. If the state chose a combination of these options, it could theoretically meet some of the targets. Or not. It was not a plan, and it was certainly not a commitment by the state to meet legally mandated emissions reduction targets. It should be no surprise that the state’s major climate organizations panned the plan.

As the leads for drafting this non-plan, RIEC4 Chair Terry Gray and Rhode Island Office of Energy Resources (OER) Acting Commissioner Chris Kearns should have to own this failure for the rest of their careers. But any accountability will have to come from outside the administration. McKee provided no visible oversight. Were Gray and Kearns doing what their boss wanted by committing to as little as possible that would require action from the state actually to reduce emissions? Or were they acting on their own volition, in the absence of direction from the governor?

Gutting RIPTA

McKee’s irresponsibility in terms of emissions in our largest sector - transportation - does not stop with enabling Alviti and a deeply regressive RIDOT. When it comes to funding for mass transit, our aging governor and former oil delivery company co-owner is more clearly culpable for actively setting back the state’s progress.

There were many reasons why transit advocates opposed McKee’s slashing of the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority’s (RIPTA) budget in 2025. It was harmful to vulnerable populations and stranded passengers dependent on the bus, and it was disastrous in terms of attracting and retaining employers that want their workers to have access to high-quality public transit - including Hasbro.

But what has rarely been discussed is the relationship between this choice and transportation emissions. Buses have lower per-passenger emissions than personal automobiles, and cutting funding means fewer buses on fewer routes. This, in turn, means many bus passengers were forced to use other means to meet their needs, including automobile travel. And buses running with fewer passengers are less efficient at reducing emissions than full buses.

Overall, given the slow fleet turnover of internal combustion engine cars and the lethargic roll-out and market adoption of electric vehicles in the United States, reducing the miles traveled by personal automobiles through active mobility and mass transit is one of our only means to significantly reduce transport emissions. Any governor taking Rhode Island’s climate commitments seriously would rely heavily on mass transit.

McKee is not that governor.

Attempts to Destroy the RES

After getting away with a non-plan to meet Act on Climate targets and crippling the state’s bus system, McKee was clearly on a roll coming into 2026. Why stop there? Why not destroy Rhode Island’s signature policy to actually make progress on emissions?

The 2021 Act on Climate set targets and timelines, but is not self-executing. To do that, we need other policies. Chief among these, in 2022 Rhode Island passed what is now the nation’s third-most aggressive renewable energy standard (RES), which mandates that we source 100% of our electricity from non-emitting sources by 2033.

So in early 2026, McKee’s fiscal year 2027 proposed budget laid out a plan to push the compliance date for the 100% RES back to 2050, to include nuclear and hydropower as qualifying resources, to allow for existing resources to make up a larger part of the total, and to reduce the alternative compliance payments that the utility has to make if it doesn’t purchase renewable energy. Together, these represented a wholesale gutting of the RES.

It is unlikely that this plan came from McKee himself. Our state’s main electric and gas utility, Rhode Island Energy (a subsidiary of Pennsylvania’s PPL), has been doing its shareholders and oil and gas buddies a favor for years by blaming high electricity prices on the state’s renewable energy and energy efficiency policies.

And there are certainly those within the McKee Administration who went out of their way to try to ram through an effective dismantling of the RES. The face of this effort was again OER Acting Administrator Kearns, who may be seeking a ticket to pass through the same revolving door that led former Rhode Island Energy Commissioner Nick Ucci to work as a lobbyist for our utility.

Kearns was not alone. Linda George, the head of the Department of Public Utilities and Carriers (DPUC), was also an active participant, as was McKee advisor Reilly Connaughton.

The Administration’s argument centered on the claim that state-mandated purchases of renewable energy are driving high utility prices. This ignores many inconvenient facts of our electricity system, such as the much higher cost of wholesale power purchases, the relationship between gas prices and electricity prices, and the price-suppression effect of wind and solar on the wholesale market.

The McKee Administration’s arguments were so thin and relied so heavily on utility projections of future costs with opaque assumptions that legislators openly questioned them in hearings. This was particularly notable when State Representative Teresa Tanzi took the state to task for not having numbers as well supported and as clear as those that we in Climate Action Rhode Island (CARI) presented.

In the end, the state legislature could not be so easily fooled, and we got away with only minor changes to the RES - some of which could turn out to be beneficial in terms of the durability of the policy. But what CARI and other climate advocates lost was a session where we had to play defense, defending the progress we had made instead of moving the state forward on policies to cost-effectively reduce emissions and transition to a more efficient, cleaner energy system.

Who Is Calling the Shots?

There are many other examples, such as McKee’s June 2026 veto of two bills that would set the state on a path to decarbonizing the building sector.

Unlike these vetoes, many of the cynical actions taken by the McKee Admin don’t necessarily show our governor in a leading role, but rather as a passive enabler of those around him. In this way, McKee could have plausible deniability. He could claim that after all, he wasn’t the person doing these things, and that the blame should go to staff and directors inherited from Raimondo and rogue elements in his administration.

We may never be clear how much McKee has personally directed certain decisions. Has he been merely a puppet of powerful interests, including our utility? And who was pulling the strings?

But this is precisely the problem with Dan McKee. It does not take ill will to do damage; without a strong, progressive vision, malignant and self-interested forces can use the state administration as a willing channel to set back climate progress.

More than anything, this profound lack of responsibility on climate matters epitomizes Dan McKee as governor. It has been the opposite of leadership.

Will Helena Foulkes be Better?

We have no basis to judge Foulkes by a track record in political office and must rely instead on her stated positions. These have been thoughtful and show a sophisticated understanding of the issues at stake. Foulkes has particularly shown vision on transportation and electricity. And while advocates for transit and climate have been shut out in the McKee Administration, Foulkes has gone out of her way to engage with and listen to these constituencies.

When Climate Action Rhode Island endorsed Foulkes, the choice was easy. Not only did the McKee Administration not respond to our endorsement survey, but Dan McKee’s record is so bad that it is hard to imagine a challenger in the Democratic Primary whom we wouldn’t have preferred. What we got with Foulkes is a clear vision for moving the state forward with progressive, well-articulated policies.

We can only hope that when Foulkes is governor, she also clears away the remaining rot and regressive elements in the state government that McKee inherited from Raimondo and emboldened by his lack of leadership. In a state where faith in government is chronically and understandably low, the state government is overdue for new leadership that shows that we can do things - like meet our Act on Climate targets instead of making excuses.

The bar was admittedly so low that measuring from where McKee is may not be the right choice. Instead, we are looking forward to Foulkes setting a new standard for a credible, responsible administration that takes our state’s commitments to combating the climate crisis and to future generations seriously.

BIO: Christian Roselund is a member of Climate Action Rhode Island’s Leadership Team and was the lead author of CARI’s comments on the 2025 Rhode Island Climate Action Strategy. He is a former board member of the Rhode Island Bicycle Coalition.