Hawaii’s environmental strides are more smoke than substance

If you started at sea level and hiked up to the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration’s Mauna Loa Observatory, stopping 11,135 feet up the volcano’s flank, you come to the birthplace of global warming.

We didn’t start global warming, of course, but scientists using Hawaii-collected data tracked the facts that Earth’s inhabitants were, and still are, slowly cooking ourselves.

Back in the 1950s, San Diego scientist Charles David Keeling set up two air monitors in a small, unremarkable metal building on Mauna Loa to measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The product became known as “Keeling’s Curve.”

Yes, it is a quickly rising curve. The numbers are not debatable, this is not a theory, this is not a “some believe” caveat to caution high school science students; this is a fact: When Keeling started measuring the CO2 level, it was 310 parts per million.

Last week the reading on Mauna Loa was 409.68 parts per million.

The CO2 traps heat, which melts polar ice, heats the oceans, causes heat waves, huge hurricanes and punishing droughts. That is not good news for coral polyps, polar bears or us.

Last week, Hawaii got a little publicity when Gov. David Ige signed into law two bills to fluff up Hawaii’s environmental protection laws. It was largely hyped as Hawaii making news as the first state to implement parts of the Paris climate accord. It poked a political sharp stick at President Donald Trump’s foolish decision to withdraw from the global agreement and allowed Trump opponents to climb the green hilltops of environmental correctness.

What precisely did the new Hawaii Paris accord laws do?

First, Senate Bill 599 did a good job of tracking Hawaii’s history regarding global warming. For instance, the new law changes the name of the Hawaii Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation Committee to make it a commission.

The commission will then check into the problems of global warming and issue reports.

“The commission shall identify existing climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts at the federal, state, and local levels and make recommendations for how to meet or exceed Hawaii’s state mitigation goals and shall adopt a liberal approach in preparation, so as to minimize future risk to the people and environment of Hawaii,” bellows our new law.

Henry Curtis, executive director of the environmental public service group Life of the Land, was not impressed.

“To say that Hawaii will adopt part of the Paris Climate Agreement, but not specify what part, and to say that we are leading the world, when 10 U.S. states and 200 U.S. cities have pledged similar things, is beyond credible,” Curtis said in response to an email query.

“Hawaii has enacted weak laws that say we will do things in the future,” noted Curtis, who suggested that the state should at least “detail greenhouse gas emissions in all sectors, publish it, and make a detailed roadmap on how to progressively cut emissions in each sector.”

Remember, it was the Ige administration through its Public Utilities Commission that ended the popular net energy metering program two years ago. Since then the solar industry reports that the once-red-hot transformation to rooftop solar has almost disappeared — falling 59 percent in the last year.

Also it was the state Legislature that in 2015 passed — and Ige signed — a special tax break for AES Hawaii Inc. to continue burning up to 700,000 tons of coal a year for seven years at its Campbell Industrial Park generator.

Next year, instead of posing for self-congratulatory pictures, maybe Ige and company could give our laws some teeth instead of just a toothy grin.