The case for a Biden short-lister from Conn.

Back in the early years of the Gov. Dannel Malloy administration, I sat in on a “lean management” session at the newly formed state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, in which Commissioner Dan Esty and a roomful of water resources folks crafted charts with circles and arrows and sticky notes.

Maybe it was brownfields or air quality, I forget. This was not sexy stuff. No one pounded fists and railed against industrial polluters. No one rolled out a plan to generate 40 percent of the state’s electricity by renewable technologies.

And yet, thinking back on that day tells me something about why Esty, a Yale professor before he ran the Connecticut DEEP and again now, is reportedly on the short list as President Elect Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator.

That session, one of dozens, was the humdrum task of figuring out how to cut days or weeks out of the time it took for the department to issue permits. Money was tight, Malloy was shrinking the state employee payroll and old ways of operating didn’t work anymore.

Esty dived in with the same quiet but forceful zeal he has brought more famously to his collaborative, science-based approach to enforcing energy and environment laws. The details weren’t an end. They were a part — a crucial part — of his very broad vision of making energy regulation, pollution control and economics work together.

At the same time, Esty also built up Connecticut’s Green Bank and other creative financing for alternative energy; and he pushed ahead with auctions in which renewable energy generators bid for the right to negotiate lucrative, longterm contracts with Eversource and United Illuminating.

Those contracts led Connecticut to exceed its thengoal of 20 percent of electicity generation by 2020. We pay more for power as a result, but the system has forced solar and wind generators to lower prices, so the gap is narrowing.

If Esty ends up in the job, it’s his market-based, getstuff-done philosophy that will land him there. He’s a longshot for lots of reasons. But even in the more likely event Biden doesn’t tap him to head the agency that President Donald Trump trashed, just the fact that Esty is on the list tells us the incoming administration could view science-based collaboration as the way of the future.

Call it the Connecticut doctrine. Since Esty returned to Yale, two disciples that he brought to the agecy have run DEEP: Rob Klee, now a lecturer at the Yale School of the Environment and Yale Law School; and Katie Dykes, formerly the state’s energy regulation chief, now commissioner. All three hold Yale law degrees, which former President Bill Clinton — a Yale lawyer — turned into a sort of administration meal ticket, and Biden may follow suit.

Either one of those former commissioners could themselves end up in the Biden administration. Dykes, an energy markets expert, was deputy general counsel for the White House Council on Environmental Quality and a lawyer at the U.S. Department of Energy under former President Barack Obama.

Gina McCarthy, a previous Connecticut environmental protection commissioner, headed EPA for almost all of Obama’s second term — after a 136-day confirmation fight.

Esty, 61, also holds an undergraduate degree in economics from Harvard. He isn’t commenting on his place on the short list, as reported by Bloomberg News and Politico.

He’s already very influential, having recently edited a compilation of essays on ideas for battling climate change, and with appointments at both the environment and law schools at

Yale, various board positions and a hefty speaking fee.

If you’re Joe Biden, Esty — whose wife, Elizabeth Esty, represented Connecticut’s 5th U.S. House district until 2018 — represents one of a thousand hard choices. Biden might like to have a renowned thinker who’s a seasoned administrator and knows his way around policy. But Esty doesn’t fill a lot of political holes.

He’s male. He’s white. He’s not an environmental crusader, like the reported frontrunner, Mary Nichols, the California Air Resources Board chair. Despite Elizabeth Esty’s experience, he’s not a Democratic Party insider; in fact, Dan Esty held top positions at EPA as a young lawyer under former President George H.W. Bush.

He’d be a great choice in the view of Eric Brown, vice president of manufacturing policy and outreach at the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, who told me about Esty’s “beyond open” management style when it came to issuing industry rules.

“He’s a creative thinker and he’s interested in providing creative solutions,” Brown said. “He always tried to find solutions that had both an economic benefit and an environmental benefit, and he wanted to make sure the business community understood both.”

Klee said the Connecticut doctrine — my word — could win the day.

“The new Biden-Harris administration has already clearly signaled that undoing the damage done by the Trump administration’s war on science, the environment and global warming is a top priority,” he said in an email. “I think looking to the states for models of what has worked over the past decade on the intersection of environment, energy, and climate policy is a great approach, and Connecticut is definitely among the leading states to look to for models.”

Maybe the doctrine isn’t doctrinaire enough for the environmental movement. It is, at the very least, an insight into the options Biden and Harris face as they craft a transition from utter chaos o some kind of order.