Past time to go big

Block Island Wind Farm

Old Higgins Farm Windmill, in Brewster, Mass., on Cape Cod. It was built in 1795 to grind grain. Many New England towns had windmills.

“By partnering with our neighbor states with which we share tightly connected economies and transportation systems, we can make a more significant impact on climate change while creating jobs and growing the economy as a result.’’

-- Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker

Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island and the District of Columbia have signed a pact  to tax the carbon in vehicle fuels sold within their borders and use the revenues from the higher gasoline prices to cut transportation carbon-dioxide emissions 26 percent by 2032. Gasoline taxes would rise perhaps 5 to 9 cents in the first year of the program -- 2022.

Of course, this move, whose most important leader right now is Massachusetts’s estimable Republican governor,  Charlie Baker, can only be  a start, oasbut as the signs of global warming multiply, other East Coast states are expected to soon join what’s called the Transportation Climate Initiative.

The three  states account for 73 percent of total emissions in New England, 76 percent of vehicles, and 70 to 80 percent of the region’s gross domestic product.

The money would go into such things as expanding and otherwise improving mass transit (which especially helps poorer people), increasing the number of charging stations for electric vehicles, consumer rebates for electric and low-emission vehicles and making transportation infrastructure more resilient against the effects of global warming, especially, I suppose, along the sea and rivers, where storms would do the most damage.]

Of course, some people will complain, especially those driving SUVs, but big weather disasters will tend to dilute the complaints over time. Getting off fossil fuels will make New England more prosperous and healthier over the next decade. For that matter, I predict that most U.S. vehicles will be electric by 2030.

Eventually, reactionary politics will have to be overcome and the entire nation adopt something like the Transportation Climate Initiative.

Noises in a summer night

“What rattles in the dark? The blinds at Brewster?

I am a boy then, sleeping by the sea,

Unless that clank and chittering proceed

From a bent fan-blade somewhere in the room….’’

— From “In Limbo,’’ by Richard Wilbur (1921-2017), New England-based poet, literary translator and teacher. He served as U.S. poet laureate. The “Brewster’’ here is the town on the Cape Cod Bay side of the peninsula. It’s best known now as a summer-home center.

Linnell Landing Beach, in Brewster.

Brewster was named for Elder William Brewster, the first religious leader of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony. The town grew around Stony Brook, where the first water-powered grist and woolen mill in the country was founded in the late 17th Century — an early sign of New Englanders’ world-famous inventiveness. Rich sea captains built many of the town’s stately homes, some of which are now inns and bed-and-breakfasts. The most notable of these are the Brewster Historical Society’s Captain Elijah Cobb House, on Lower Road, the Crosby Mansion, on Crosby Lane by Crosby Beach, and the Captain Freeman Inn on Breakwater Road.

Stony Brook mill.