The new hotel room tax called the green fee (with the cute double meaning because it refers both to environmental causes and the governor’s last name) passed because it finally won the support of members of the Hawaiʻi hotel industry after years of the visitor industry fighting against the idea.

Coincidentally, under this new law, hotels can get the state to pay to fix the erosion and do other mitigation projects in front of their properties in places that are being chewed up by the surf because the hotel was built so close to the ocean.

Got it.

I mean, yes, of course, it’s a wonderful law. (Don’t want Gov. Green mad texting me IN ALL CAPS as he sometimes does when someone dares write anything slightly un-awesome about his general awesomeness. NAH IT’S OK, GOV. UR LAW IS GR8)

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It is a good step. It’s been a long time coming, for sure.

But it’s not like, “Whew! We’re good now! Fixed it! Hawaiʻi is SO green! On to the next thing!” because money for mitigation doesn’t address the problem. It’s like Ozempic for a patient that eats a dozen donuts for breakfast. The problem is the donuts.

The problem is way too much tourism, overdevelopment because of tourism, and the constant insane push for ever higher numbers of tourists. And global warming, of course, but that’s a global problem. Overtourism is something Hawaiʻi can fix on its own.

The concept of making tourists pitch in for their impact on (nice way of saying “damage to”) Hawaiʻi ’s environment is long overdue. At this point, it’s a bit too little too late. So many mitigation projects will be competing for that money. The damage has already been done and it continues every day.

What needs to happen is a complete overhaul of Hawaiʻi’s economy so that we’re not building golf course communities on good ag land and importing food we should grow here, and so that every time there’s a natural disaster or a global pandemic or the president ticks off Canadian snowbirds and they stop snowbirding here Hawaiʻi’s economy doesn’t tank.

According to the governor’s media release on his signing of the bill: “The Green Fee is projected to generate $100 million annually, and the Green Administration will work with the legislature to confirm projects next session as revenue becomes available. These projects include environmental stewardship, climate and hazard resiliency and sustainable tourism.”

Sustainable tourism is an oxymoron.

Tourism is not sustainable. Ten million visitors a year is too many visitors a year. Re-creating the madness of 2019, when neighbor island airports were slammed, Airbnbs were taking over neighborhoods and Southwest Airlines was bringing planeload after planeload of people here on cheap flights should not be a goal. There’s no way to mitigate the impact of all those extra people on these islands, renting cars, driving all over the place, hiking all over the place, taking up space, using up water.

I mean, love tourists for their inherent humanity. And for a lot of businesses, they’re great revenue. Calling for less human impact on small islands is not about being insular or a hater or xenophobic or anything like that. It’s about maximum capacity. The way a school cafeteria has the max capacity sign posted and an elevator has a maximum weight posted, the islands have a limit too. We don’t have signs like a cafeteria or an elevator, but know we’ve exceeded what we can handle because we need millions of dollars to fix up trampled trails, etc.

Things got better at Hanauma Bay when a reservation system was put in place. And things got better at ʻĪao Needle and Haleakalā on Maui when daily visits were limited and the sites stopped being a free-for-all with people clambering all over everything.

Remember how nice it was out on the roads and at the beaches during the pandemic? Hawaiʻi was peaceful and verdant. You know things are out of whack when you wistfully look back to Covid as “when Hawaiʻi kind of felt like Hawaiʻi again.”

So let’s cheer this new law and hope it leads to a shift in priority so that the health of Hawaiʻi’s environment starts to be more important than squeezing profit from Hawaiʻi ’s environment. The surefire way to reduce tourism numbers is if Hawaiʻi starts to look like it can’t handle much more, and it’s already kind of looking like that in places.