Ron Reilly’s Summary of the Town Hall with Rep. Tokuda

Ron Reilly, Rep. Tokuda Liaison CCL Hawaii , Hawaii Island CCL Chapter Lead and CCL Hawaii State Coordinator wrote this summary of the Rep. Tokuda Town Hall meeting along with some reflections.

Thank you Rep Tokuda for organizing this Townhall. I'm Ron Reilly, Volcano Village, and I volunteer with Citizens' Climate Lobby a non-partisan climate advocacy group in favor of climate friendly legislation. Our top priority is national legislation to reduce carbon pollution, specifically the Energy Innovation Act, a House of Representatives Bill - H.R 5744.

And I'd like to respectfully urge your support for H.R. 5744.

Jill wrote the bill number down and said she would check into it.

After the mtg (which ended at one hour) there was an opportunity to come forward and speak with Jill. I thanked her for House Resolution H. Res. 1166 regarding the celebration of Earth Day. Told of the super Earth Day event that UH Hilo organized 4/22 and that we had a written record of 30 climate conversations with students and faculty, and that Jill's name was often mentioned as being our HI-02 House Representative. I hoped to find a way to send her some of the butcher-paper comments regarding climate concerns. I gave Jill and her staffers our 1/8th page handout the "One Day - Climate Guilt - Free Pass".  Yeah! CCL.

The tone of the meeting was uniformly respectful, and Jill is great at respecting speaker's comments without necessarily agreeing. There was one person who had a bunch of war related concerns and in passing commented that, "climate is always changing, ice ages have come and gone, and CO2 is good for plant growth". Jill acknowledged and moved on.

A Co-benefit: the West Hawaii Civic Center has a bank of free-to-access Level 2 EV charging plugs in their covered parking garage. Our Kia Niro EV benefited from receiving 13.5 kWh of charge during the meeting. At approx 3.5 miles of travel per kWh, this gave us 13.5 x 3.5 = 47.5 pollution free miles to use on our way home.

I like to stop near the top of the Saddle Road, at the Gill Kahlele Recreation Area, to thoughtfully honor the all the scientists who work at the Mauna Loa Atmospheric Observatory, which stands out clearly, at 11,000ft, on the lava-blackened slopes, and remind myself of the Keeling Curve and check the (April 22) daily reading for CO2 (428ppm). This is up from the first measurements in 1958 when CO2 equaled 315ppm. https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/ 

As the world turns... in 1958 I was just 16 and became aware, in talking with a NZ alpine guide (on the lip of a crevasse, high on the Franz Joseph, with ice axe in hand) of the shrinking and retreating of NZ's glaciers. At that time I didn't connect the dots between the economy of our coal mine town and the coming extinction of many, fabulously beautiful, NZ glaciers.

But Dr. Charles Keeling knew..!!

- Ron

PS.  Dr. Sevante Arrhenius also knew, and in 1895, was the first to use basic principles of physical chemistry to calculate estimates of the extent to which increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) will increase Earth's surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.

Read the newspaper article about the event in Media Below is an excerpt

U.S. Representative Jill Tokuda takes questions from audience members Wednesday, April 24th at a Town Hall Meeting at the West Hawaii Civic Center

“Another Big Island resident (Ron Reilly) asked for the congresswoman’s support of the Energy Innovation Act, HR 5744, which imposes a fee on the carbon content of fuels, including crude oil, natural gas, coal or any other product derived from those fuels that will be used so as to emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and urged her to gain bipartisan support for the measure.

Tokuda responded that in order for Congress to pass anything, whether access to health care or transportation or climate change,they have got to make sure there is bipartisan support, and sometimes that is easier said then done.

“The reality is many of us fighting for climate change initiatives are in the minority, so we need those folks in the majority to be able to join us help us move some of this good legislation along,” she said.”

By LAURA RUMINSKI - West Hawaii Today