I Read the Hawaiʻi 2050 Sustainability Plan. Here Are My Thoughts.

Hawaiʻi is beautiful. It is also expensive, fragile, and increasingly governed by plans. Big ones.

Recently, I sat down and read the Hawaiʻi 2050 Sustainability Plan cover to cover. Not the press releases. Not the executive summary. The actual document.

What follows isn’t a rejection of sustainability, mālama ʻāina, or long-term thinking; those values matter deeply in Hawaiʻi. What follows is a libertarian critique of how sustainability is being defined, governed, and enforced, and why the current approach risks undermining the very resilience it hopes to create.

I’ll also offer an alternative: what a libertarian-based sustainability framework for Hawaiʻi could look like; one grounded in incentives, property rights, and local decision-making rather than centralized planning.

What the Plan Gets Right

To be fair, the plan starts from a place of real concern. It correctly identifies that Hawaiʻi faces crushing housing costs, fragile energy systems, stressed water resources, heavy food import dependence, and genuine climate risks that matter more on islands than almost anywhere else. It also acknowledges a crucial fact: Hawaiʻi is uniquely constrained. Geography, isolation, limited land, and supply chains make us more vulnerable to shocks than most states.

On diagnosis, there is significant agreement.

Where libertarians begin to part ways is not over what problems exist, but over how the plan proposes to solve them.

The Core Issue: Sustainability as Central Planning

At its core, the Hawaiʻi 2050 Sustainability Plan assumes that if the state defines the right outcomes, aligns agencies under a unified framework, and coordinates policy across sectors, sustainability can be engineered. That belief is understandable, but deeply flawed.

The plan explicitly aligns Hawaiʻi with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, calls for sustainability to be “institutionalized throughout government,” embeds equity criteria into nearly every policy area, and relies heavily on mandates, benchmarks, procurement requirements, and planning directives across energy, housing, food, land use, and transportation.

In practice, sustainability becomes less about stewardship and more about permission. Permission to build. Permission to operate. Permission to consume. Permission to innovate.

From a libertarian economic perspective, this approach raises serious concerns.

Why Central Planning Struggles in Hawaiʻi

Hawaiʻi is not a single, uniform place. Conditions vary dramatically between islands, regions, and even neighborhoods. Windward and leeward communities face different water realities. Rural Molokaʻi does not share the same infrastructure constraints as urban Oʻahu. Agricultural areas, resort corridors, and dense residential zones all respond differently to rules and incentives.

Yet the plan repeatedly favors statewide targets and standardized approaches. That assumes planners can know in advance what works everywhere.

Economists have a name for this problem: the knowledge problem. No centralized body, no matter how well intentioned, can possess the local, constantly changing information that individuals and communities use every day to make decisions. When planning replaces local adaptation, systems become rigid, slow, and brittle. Ironically, a plan meant to promote resilience can end up reducing it.

The Cost-of-Living Blind Spot

Many sustainability policies are framed as progressive and compassionate, but in Hawaiʻi, policies that raise costs almost always land hardest on local families.

Energy mandates that increase electricity prices don’t hurt tourists or second-home owners nearly as much as they hurt ALICE households. Building requirements that raise construction costs don’t punish developers as much as they limit supply and raise rents. Procurement mandates that sound good on paper can quietly raise food prices for schools, agencies, and ultimately taxpayers.

When sustainability policies increase the cost of living, people don’t become more resilient, they leave.

Any serious sustainability plan for Hawaiʻi must treat affordability as a core environmental issue, not a secondary concern. A state that prices out its residents is not sustainable, regardless of how clean its metrics look.

When “Equity” Becomes Discretionary Power

The plan repeatedly emphasizes that equity must be explicitly addressed across all actions. The intent is understandable: Hawaiʻi has real historical and present-day inequities.

The problem is that when equity is undefined in law, it often becomes discretionary in practice. Vague equity standards give agencies wide latitude to decide which projects proceed, which get exemptions, and which are delayed or denied. Over time, rules stop being neutral and start being negotiated.

Libertarians favor equal protection under clear, predictable rules; not because inequities don’t matter, but because discretion tends to reward insiders, political connections, and institutional familiarity. The communities equity policies are meant to protect are often the least equipped to navigate opaque systems.

Equity should function as a guardrail, not a veto point that undermines rule-of-law governance.

Sustainability as a Permanent Bureaucracy

One of the most revealing phrases in the plan is the call to “institutionalize sustainability throughout government.” Translated into reality, this means new offices, new reporting requirements, new coordination bodies, new metrics, and very few sunset clauses.

Once institutionalized, policies rarely disappear, even if they fail to deliver results.

Sustainability should be judged by outcomes people feel in their daily lives: lower housing costs, more reliable energy, cleaner water, faster recovery from disasters. Instead, bureaucratic sustainability often measures success by process: plans completed, meetings held, reports published.

A system that cannot be unwound or corrected is not resilient. It is fragile.

A Libertarian Approach to Sustainability in Hawaiʻi

A libertarian sustainability framework starts from a different premise: protect rights, enforce accountability, and let solutions emerge from the ground up.

Environmental protection works best when those who cause measurable harm are held financially responsible. Clear pollution standards, strong liability rules, and fast enforcement protect land and water more effectively than layers of planning documents. If you damage ʻāina or water resources, you should pay: fully and transparently.

Scarce resources like water, energy, and landfill space should be governed by honest price signals rather than political rationing. Tiered pricing with lifeline protections encourages conservation without micromanaging behavior. People respond to prices faster than they respond to slogans.

Housing abundance is itself a sustainability strategy. Legalizing housing by right, streamlining permits, and removing artificial supply constraints reduce sprawl, shorten commutes, lower emissions, and keep families together. There is nothing environmentally virtuous about forcing people into overcrowding or off-island migration.

Local food production grows when barriers are removed, not when quotas are imposed. Farmers need easier processing, clearer rules, and fewer permits; not mandated buyers. Let markets work, and local food becomes competitive without coercion.

Resilience is strongest when systems are decentralized. Distributed energy, microgrids, home storage, local water systems, and neighborhood preparedness outperform centralized systems during shocks. Centralized plans fail catastrophically; decentralized systems fail gradually and recover faster.

Finally, sustainability programs should be temporary unless proven otherwise. Every initiative should sunset, publish cost-of-living impacts, and be judged by real-world outcomes. If a policy doesn’t work, it should end.

That is sustainability.