Lawmakers in the New Hampshire House quashed several efforts to address the local impacts of climate change during Thursday’s session.
In mostly partly line votes, the House’s Republican majority rejected proposals that ranged from adding a climate change division to the state’s environmental services department to studying how much climate change is costing New Hampshire and how to recoup those costs.
At a press conference after the votes, Rep. Kat McGhee, the top Democrat on the House Science, Technology and Energy committee, which handles much of the state’s climate-related legislation, said the bills were attempts to gather more information to make better decisions about the future.
But, she said, the committee has struggled to make strategic progress on climate change as lawmakers in the Republican majority continue to reject settled climate science.
“I'm more than willing to compromise. But in this case, they don't even agree there's a problem,” McGhee said. “When we try to come up with solutions, they don't see them as solutions. They see them as irritations or costs.”
House Republicans have said their priorities are to lower energy costs and decrease the size of the state government, among other things.
Democratic Rep. Tony Caplan proposed the bill to study the cost of climate change in the state. He says that was based on decades of research on the risks of fossil fuel emissions.
“The science is unequivocal, and the evidence points to these changes, which we can see with our own eyes: increased coastal flooding on our seacoast, shorter winters impacting on our tourism industry, hotter summers with cyanobacteria blooms, with increased rain events washing out our roads,” he said.
Republican representatives said the bill ran contrary to the Trump Administration’s “Drill, baby, drill,” approach to climate change and sought to cast doubt on established climate science – a dynamic that has been present in committee hearings throughout the session.
Rep. Doug Thomas, a Republican on the Science, Technology and Energy committee, said Thursday the bill was based on a “premise that is flawed and under dispute,” saying the committee heard testimony on “various reasons why climate change is still up for debate.”
“We should not be putting speculative premises into statute,” he said.
There is overwhelming agreement among scientists that human activities are warming up the atmosphere, and climate change brings new hazards for communities across the world and in New Hampshire.
A bill that would change the state’s definition of clean energy, allowing it to include “low-emitting sources,” was passed by the House and will advance to the state Senate.
Lawmakers voted to table two other bills – one that would have studied carbon pricing and its effect on the state and another that would have established a climate change and damage division at the state’s Department of Environmental Services.
That means those bills will be suspended until the House votes to take them up again, something McGhee said is unlikely to happen.
Instead, she said, the Trump Administration’s reversal of federal climate policy may slow efforts to address climate change in the state.
“There is an emboldened-ness to the idea that we don't have to do anything, and no one's going to ask us to do anything,” she said. “It's okay if we reject technology and science that might help us understand or plan better.”
The House will consider legislation in the coming weeks to eliminate several existing climate-related policies, including one that would phase out the state’s renewable energy standard, which currently requires utilities to generate about a quarter of their power using renewables.
