A group of youth activists is appealing a decision by the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management.
The group, Nature’s Trust Rhode Island, made up of young people ranging from elementary to graduate school students, filed its appeal Friday in Superior Court.
In September, they submitted a petition to DEM officials asking them to put in place a system to keep track of Rhode Island’s share of global greenhouse gas emissions. However, the agency denied their petition last month.
Peter Nightingale, president of Nature’s Trust Rhode Island and physics professor at the University of Rhode Island, said DEM barely gave a reason why they denied it.
“They had basically one paragraph that addressed the issues that we brought up and the paragraph was highly incomplete,” Nightingale said.
In a response letter to Nightingale, DEM’s Office of Legal Services said Nature’s Trust’s request is unprecedented and that “the Department does not find such a specific schedule and/or accounting method to be the only or best approach.”
“But they didn’t say why these other things that they might have had in mind were better, there were no references, there was absolutely nothing,” Nightingale said.
DEM denied our request for comment for this story.