Is New Hampshire the Donut Hole of Climate Ambition (Courtesy images)

John Gage, Katharine Gage

While neighboring states are moving ahead with offshore energy plans, solar panel and EV charging station deployments, energy efficiency investments, and climate ambitions, New Hampshire is falling behind. As a result, the state has become known as the “donut hole” of the clean energy transition in the Northeast. New Hampshire’s leaders have been guided by out-of-state influences and believe that government intervention is unnecessary, but this is out of step with citizens’ concerns about climate change.

The Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provided $3 million per state in non-competitive grants, which most states applied for and received to help create climate action plans. Those plans made states eligible to apply for billions of dollars of competitive grants from IRA funding to accelerate energy efficiency, electrification of transportation and heating, and clean energy production and solutions.

New Hampshire applied for and received the initial grant, but its Legislature failed to set updated, science-based climate pollution reduction goals. As a result, the NH Department of Environmental Services plans to focus on federally funded programs and work with the business community to identify emissions reductions achievable through voluntary actions, and use the result as the state’s “goal.” This will not likely lead to a responsible target for pollution reduction or serve the interests of citizens. Major policy changes are necessary to meet important, science-based targets for our safety.

Why did New Hampshire fail to set science-based goals to address climate pollution responsibly? The same force that has delayed addressing climate change nationally and globally for decades: a profitable mature industry has resisted policy changes to address pollution from its products because doing so would reduce its profits. Senator Whitehouse recently described this situation with the fossil fuel industry in a thought-provoking talk on the Senate floor: bit.ly/time-to-wake-up-295.

The fossil fuel industry uses a good actor face and a bad actor face in a two-faced game of deception and delay. With their good actor face, major oil and gas producers have accepted the scientific understanding of climate pollution from their products for decades. They say they take the problem seriously. They say they support policy solutions based on sound economic principles, such as cash-back carbon pricing (carboncashback.org), and deny delaying effective and equitable legislation to do it.

Yet at the same time, with their bad actor face, they have funded “front groups,” that include Dark Money, SuperPACs, and Merchants of Doubt, that exaggerate the uncertainty of science and downplay the risks of climate pollution from fossil fuels. They have manipulated politics and policies to delay legislation to address the problem. They prioritized private profits over preserving a livable world despite knowing that failure to reduce climate pollution would result in catastrophic damages and losses for society and nature. The front groups create and promote anti-science propaganda and media, mislead elected leaders about climate science and policies, and push polluter industry-favorable legislation at “educational” conferences they pay for politicians to attend. The front groups wrap themselves in a veneer of legitimate Conservative values to disguise their objective of keeping it free to pollute and delaying the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy solutions (notnotter.org/the-game).

This is where New Hampshire got stuck. Leading state legislators attend the front groups’ conferences and get reimbursed for travel, lodging, and food expenses by those groups. Last session, the House GOP Whip, who recommended how her party members should vote on energy and climate matters, had taken at least fourteen such trips since 2018 and reported reimbursements from front groups valued at over $20,000. The evidence of leaders being played in New Hampshire is undeniable (notnotter.org), and the gap between the state’s climate ambitions and citizens’ concerns about climate change is large as a result.

The New Hampshire Legislature could do more to act on the scientifically identified pollution problem and citizens’ growing concerns. A good first step would be to set science-based greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals and work to meet those targets. The state could also join other states in holding the fossil fuel industry accountable for its deceptive practices. New York passed a bill that establishes liability for parties responsible for GHG emissions and will collect $3 billion per year for 25 years in compensation. Vermont’s legislature passed the Climate Superfund Cost Recovery Program to require fossil fuel companies to pay for climate change damage.

Finally, New Hampshire could take sensible steps to prepare for federal carbon pricing. Carbon pricing is spreading around the world, prices are rising, and countries are implementing carbon border adjustment mechanisms to charge their carbon price on imports from free-polluting countries, which will increasingly motivate the U.S. to close the growing U.S. carbon price gap (bit.ly/carbon-price-gap-pdf). By anticipating this, New Hampshire could save taxpayers money and position the state to be more competitive when it is no longer free to pollute. New Hampshire citizens can ask their legislators to support these efforts by going to newhampshirenetwork.org/NH-bills for information about how to weigh in on legislation being considered this year.