Last week’s article entitled “Lawmakers take up rising seas” provided an interesting contrast to other recent articles, including those regarding permits for new condo projects on the makai side of Alii Drive.
The article concerned a bill to establish a plan to protect our shorelines from rising sea levels, following upon a 2017 report predicting that significant areas of all islands in Hawaii will be subjected to flooding by mid-century. On the Big Island, this includes the village of Puako, the Hualalai Resort area at Kaupulehu, and the all-important Alii Drive in Kailua-Kona. The Hawaii County Planning Department has also conducted studies to inform mitigation planning for sea level rise.
Alii Drive is already suffering from being too close to a rising sea. Twenty years ago it was rare to see water splashing over the seawall onto the sidewalk near the pier – it occurred only during significant swells. More recently, it doesn’t take much of a swell at all to drench tourists strolling along the walk. Some houses built along the seaward side of Alii Drive have cesspools that are flooded with each tidal change, sending raw sewage into Kailua Bay. Others have sewer connections that are damaged by corrosion and/or wave action, causing additional leakage of sewage.
Another recent article in WHT concerned an expensive and traffic-clogging construction project to repair a culvert damaged by wave erosion. Yet our county administrators and council members are still entertaining requests for permits to build in this flood zone, debating such issues as parking spaces and road congestion as if they are not aware that anything built in this zone will likely have to be demolished in 30 years or so at great expense (probably taxpayer expense). It seems as though many of the people planning for the future of our community are suffering from cognitive dissonance (a condition defined as holding two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time).
Another example of this peculiar condition concerns Hawaii’s commitment to achieve 100% renewable energy usage by 2045 and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions back to 1990 greenhouse gas levels by 2020 (that’s next year!).
Hawaii is already well on its way toward achieving these goals in the electrical generation sector, with the utilities on each of our islands making significant investments to achieve these very necessary goals. However, in the transportation sector, which is responsible for roughly half of our greenhouse gas emissions, there has been very little progress. A few years ago, Hawaii enacted a number of incentives to encourage residents to purchase electric vehicles. The incentives, however, were not sufficient to persuade many residents to fork out the high initial outlay to purchase an electric vehicle (with savings in fuel and maintenance costs amortized over a significant number of years.) Less than 1% of registered vehicles on Hawaii’s roads are currently EVs.
Logically, lawmakers, if they believe in the threat posed by climate change (not to mention the significant direct health threats posed by pollution from fossil fuel combusting vehicles), should have both increased incentives to purchase EVs and enhanced disincentives to burn fossil fuels (by hiking fuel tax rates, etc.). Instead, they have allowed most of the incentives to expire or be diminished, while instead proposing disincentives for EV purchase, rather than for ICE (internal combustion engine) purchase.
For example, SB409, which has already made it to conference committee, imposes a registration surcharge on EVs. If this is enacted into law, EV owners will pay the regular registration fee paid on all vehicles plus an additional penalty for the crime of spending what it takes to buy a vehicle that benefits all of us by reducing harmful emissions.
The ability to pursue these contradictory goals contemporaneously is presumably accomplished by psychological compartmentalization. While experiencing fear of a rapidly changing environment in one part of the brain, our leaders are eager to fund reports, studies, and plans for dealing with this problem sometime in the future, without requiring any immediate costly or unpopular programs. The necessity of raising funds to balance the budget is dealt with in another part of the brain, for example by raising fees on EVs, which assuages the concerns of ICE vehicle drivers that EV owners are not “paying their fair share.” Climate concerns are banished from this part of the brain.
It’s perhaps not fair to refer to our legislators as “leaders” in that they are only a reflection of the general population, and are generally perceived to have the role of servants of the people, enacting the wishes of their constituents. By all indications, much of the general population is suffering equally from cognitive dissonance where climate and environmental change are concerned.
Doug Perrine is a resident of Kailua-Kona.
