TCI Regional Policy Design Stakeholder Submissions

My first observation (as an initiate) is the MOU is only partly a memorandum of understanding. When it comes to the description of the program design, this document appears to be more a memorandum of obfuscation. While it may be necessary to be somewhat broad and unspecific, most everything in the paragraphs containing the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth appearances of the words "BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED," is moderately to utterly incomprehensible. Given that these four paragraphs appear to be the "business end" of the proposal, it seemed important to make sense of them, so I referred to a video on the TCI website:

https://vimeo.com/331091117/defadf2a7f

The video was not particularly effective at translating the language in the aforementioned four paragraphs into meaningful understanding of any intended program design. This is not to say the program design won't work - it is only to say that the video does not explain the program design much better than the MOU itself.

That said, in the video, there is a slide which appears at 7:01, and remains frozen on the screen until 8:57 (a mind-numbing two minutes). It appears this slide is aimed at depicting the intended effect of TCI.

If, as shown in that slide, it takes TCI twenty years to effect a ≈60% reduction in carbon, then TCI is a failure. According to most climate science available today, we don't have twenty years.

I have children and I would like for them to be able to have a healthy future. Anything short of 100% sustainable energy by 2030 at the latest will not enable that to happen.

This is a tax given a name that tries to hide this tax attempt. A governor only approval is not right, this should be voted on by all ma citizens. Rational citizens would not approve of a income deduction. This tax is just wrong no matter of its made up issue.

I grew up in the pre-EPA pollution when “smog” was a household word, and saw the visible difference in the air when anti-pollution protections were put into place. Clean air is our most basic need. Please go forward with more protections, and reverse this backward trend into allowing more poisons into our every breath!

It is essential that the USA be able to continue transportation in a era when climate change is a crisis. A carbon neutral transportation system is essential to that goal.

Maryland should make a make a firm commitment to adopt a regional transportation policy that achieves a minimum 40 percent reduction in transportation sector climate pollution by 2030, to keep us on track to meet the climate goals updated by the General Assembly.

I am writing because I am an involved citizen and I and really concerned about the steamrolling effects of climate change we are seeing. Climate change is the looming threat to the security and livability of our country and our planet. We cannot stop it at this point, but the more we continue with business as usual, the worse life will be for all of humanity over the next 100 years. Pollution from transportation is our largest source of global warming emissions (regionally and nationally). Maryland needs to formally join the plan to reduce emissions.

The new policy has a strong component of equity by prioritizing clean investments in areas overburdened by pollution and/or for those who don't have access. This is so important. I want to also thank you for the bipartisan nature of this current project, moving us forward while the federal government under President Trump takes us backward. I hope you take this very seriously and institute a strong emissions reduction program.