Hawaiʻi’s Green Fee Is Latest Climate Change Effort Challenged By Trump
By Marcel Honoré for Honolulu Civil Beat
The DOJ looks to join the cruise industry in its suit challenging key parts of Hawaiʻi’s landmark green fee. (Ku‘u Kauanoe/Civil Beat/2022)
Hawaiʻi’s new green fee aimed at offsetting tourism’s impact on the environment has caught the eye of the Trump administration, which has grown increasingly hostile to efforts to fight climate change.
A U.S. Department of Justice motion to intervene in Cruise Lines International’s lawsuit against the state and county landed earlier this month, just one day before federal Judge Jill Otake held the first court hearing on the case.
The tax was heralded as historic when it passed the Legislature last April. As of Jan. 1 it will apply to hotel guests and other short-term visitors and, in a concession intended to gain the support of the hotel industry, it was expanded during the session to include cruise ships as well.
In the motion, Assistant Attorney General Stanley Woodward calls the green fee, the first of its kind in the nation, a “scheme to extort American citizens and businesses solely to benefit Hawaiʻi.”
A court decision there could shape just how sweeping Hawaiʻi’s green fee will actually be — and whether cruise ships that dock and unload passengers in the nation’s lone island state will be treated and taxed the same as hotel and visitor rooms on land.
It’s not clear what percentage the tourism industry represents of the $100 million in estimated annual green fee collections.
Richard Wallsgrove, co-director of the William S. Richardson School of Law’s Environmental Law Program, characterized the DOJ’s motion to join the case as ideologically motivated overreach by an administration that has called climate change a hoax.
Scores of plaintiffs around the country regularly allege in court that the U.S. Constitution is being violated, Wallsgrove said, and the DOJ doesn’t intervene.
“You have to ask the question: Why this lawsuit and why now?” he said. “It’s because of this notion the federal government needs to protect U.S. citizens from a climate change hoax, which, you know, couldn’t be a bigger bowl of nonsense.”
The Trump administration also sued Hawaiʻi earlier this year to try and stop the state from holding fossil fuel companies responsible in court for climate change impacts.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi heads the DOJ, and under her leadership that department has pursued in court Trump’s rollback of climate initiatives. Her brother, Bradley Bondi, is the lead attorney representing Cruise Lines International in the lawsuit against the state.
Typically, Wallsgrove said, such a familial connection to a case doesn’t raise any ethical red flags. But, based on all the norms being broken during the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, he said, “it’s not off-base in this particular moment in history” to question whether the DOJ is stepping in to do the bidding of someone related to the Attorney General.
