2025 Legislative Summary

5/20/25 - Honolulu Civil Beat - Community Voice What Lawmakers Did — And Failed To Do — For Hawaiʻi’s Environment - The 2025 session showed some movement on conservation, limited attention to adaptation, and inadequate action on climate crisis mitigation.

By John Kawamoto

(John Kawamoto is a former legislative analyst, an environmental advocate and a member of Carbon Cashback Hawaiʻi.)

The Hawaiʻi Legislature adjourned on May 2 after passing 322 bills. Of those, 45 addressed environmental issues.

While all bills remain subject to veto by the governor, this review summarizes the Legislature’s environmental policy efforts — what was done and what the Legislature failed to do.

Environmental policy can be grouped into three functional categories:

1. Conservation — protecting and managing natural resources in the traditional sense, such as maintaining forests, preserving ecosystems, and promoting sustainable farming practices like cover cropping.

2. Adaptation — responding to the effects of climate change, including wildfire prevention, infrastructure relocation in response to sea level rise, and economic diversification to reduce reliance on vulnerable sectors like tourism.

3. Mitigation — reducing greenhouse gas emissions to address the root causes of climate change. Mitigation includes transitioning to renewable energy, incentivizing electric vehicle use, adopting low-carbon building materials, and enacting carbon pricing mechanisms.

Among these, mitigation is the most urgent. Without significant global reductions in emissions, climate disasters will intensify. Prolonged heat waves, droughts, reduced crop yields, and ecosystem collapses will become widespread.

Adaptation alone cannot offset the consequences of insufficient mitigation. Hawaiʻi law already sets a goal of net-negative emissions by 2045, but current efforts to achieve the goal are falling far short.

Conservation: The Most Active Category

Of the 45 environmental bills passed, 31 promote conservation. The most impactful is Senate Bill 1396, which institutes a “green fee” by increasing the hotel room tax by 0.75%. The estimated $100 million in annual revenue will support natural resource protection and climate resilience efforts.

Still, Care for ʻĀina Now, a coalition that pushed for the bill, notes that Hawaiʻi faces an annual conservation funding shortfall of at least $561 million, making the bill only a partial solution.

Other conservation bills include:

1. House Bill 750 – Directs the Department of Health to assess statewide waste reduction needs.

2. House Bill 879 – Funds a staff position to support cesspool conversions, a key step in preventing groundwater pollution.

3. Senate Bill 739 – Enables land exchanges to support diversified agriculture.

The Legislature did not pass House Bill 1421, which would have created a cesspool conversion loan fund that would have provided financial assistance to homeowners to convert cesspools to septic tanks or to connect homes with cesspools to public sewers. Hawaiʻi’s 88,000 cesspools discharge 53 million gallons of untreated sewage daily, contaminating groundwater, streams and coastal waters.

Conversion costs range from $9,000 to $60,000 per household — well beyond what many can afford. The failure to pass HB 1421 means that key financial support remains unavailable.

Adaptation: Mixed Results

Only seven bills addressed climate adaptation. Some are positive steps:

1. House Bill 1064 – Establishes a state fire marshal’s office in response to wildfire threats.

2. Senate Bill 223 – Creates a program to prevent and suppress forest fires.

3. Senate Bill 897 – Allows electric cooperatives to recover wildfire-related costs through utility rate adjustments.

However, one measure actually undermines adaptation. House Bill 732 raises the threshold for requiring a special management area permit from $500,000 to $750,000, making it easier to build homes near vulnerable shorelines — contrary to long-term climate adaptation strategy.

The Legislature did not pass Senate Bill 1395, which proposed to use interest from the state’s $1.5 billion rainy day fund for climate resilience. At a 3% annual return, this could have generated $45 million annually for adaptation, which is now left untapped.

Mitigation: The Most Concerning Shortcoming

Of the 45 environmental bills, only seven are related to mitigation. However, three of them are problematic, such as House Bill 796 which ends solar tax credits in five years (along with other tax credits).

The four mitigation bills that would benefit the environment are:

1. House Bill 242 – Convenes a working group on EV battery recycling and reuse.

2. House Bill 958 – Establishes rules for safe e-bike usage.

3. House Bill 1051 – Extends energy efficiency requirements to 2045.

4. Senate Bill 589 – Directs the Public Utilities Commission to set a goal for customer-sited renewable energy, like rooftop solar.

Unfortunately, these four measures fall far short of what is needed. Recent greenhouse gas emissions data show that Hawaiʻi is far from being on track to meet its 2045 net-negative emissions goal, and sequestration efforts remain minimal.

The Legislature also did not pass House Bill 760, which would have imposed a fee on fossil fuel emissions. A UH study projected that this bill would cut emissions by 10% over 20 years — the equivalent of removing 400,000 gas-powered vehicles from the roads.

Importantly, the bill would have distributed all revenue as equal dividends to residents, particularly benefiting low-income households. The rejection of the bill represents a loss for both climate action and economic equity.

Conclusion: Meager progress

The 2025 legislative session showed some movement on conservation, limited attention to adaptation, and inadequate action on mitigation, despite the growing climate crisis.

Presumably, most legislators accept climate science and understand the long-term dangers of inaction.

But political incentives often reward short-term thinking. Bills with far-reaching environmental and economic benefits, like HB 760 and HB 1421, were shelved — perhaps because their effects will not materialize within an election cycle.

This pattern has left many environmental advocates frustrated, and they are not alone. Advocates in other areas, such as affordable housing, supporting working families, human rights and education, share a sense of disappointment.

Advocates for democratizing the legislative process are also working to make it more transparent and accountable. If they are successful, a reformed Legislature will pass more effective bills for the environment and in all other areas as well.