GOP looking to avoid a showdown on climate plan

When it comes to strategy on climate and energy, you’ve got to hand it to Connecticut Republicans and their friends in the libertarian, anti-tax Yankee Institute for Policy Studies.

Once again, the conservative side is using scare tactics to take the upper hand in the fight over the multistate Transportation and Climate Initiative, which should have passed easily this year in the General Assembly — but never even came to a vote.

Recall, the TCI, as it’s known, is the plan to tamp down demand for motor fuels by setting a cap on emissions related to gasoline and diesel fuel, then auctioning off the rights to wholesalers. Yes, it would lead to an increase of about 5 cents a gallon for gasoline, maybe a dime, but that is hardly an onerous hike as the GOP portrays, and it comes with significant benefits beyond Connecticut’s

microscopic role in saving the planet.

TCI would raise an estimated $90 million to $100 million a year, which the state could spend on all sorts of measures to make it easier for people to get around without burning carbon: Cleaner and better city buses; more train service; electric vehicle charging equipment; roads that allow bicycle riders to not risk their lives; some creative approaches to transit; and more and better broadband connections for people in cities and especially rural areas to work from home.

It’s a popular idea in the minds of voters and it’s a reasonable tradeoff of benefits for a very small price increase — about $40 a year for most drivers in a world in which non-motorists already subsidize people in cars massively.

Advocates, including a boatload of environmental groups such as Save the Sound and Acadia Center, have spent the summer lining up support among Democrats in the majority for what they hope will be a special session in the legislature to take up the TCI as soon as September.

“I am incredibly optimistic that we are going to be able to swing this victory,” said Amy McLean, senior policy advocate and Connecticut dirctor at Acadia Center.

She and other supporters report strong headway in the weeks since the legislative session ended in June without a TCI vote. One main target group: urban lawmakers worried about even slightly higher pump prices hurting lowincome residents of the state’s poorest cities.

I would not bet on a September special session but they’re making progress. House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, supports the idea and told me it’s possible for a new tax credit to offset the higher costs of a regressive gasoline price hike.

Some key Democrats in the state Senate, especially President Pro-Tem Martin Looney of New Haven, remain skeptical, making a special session less likely. Lost on no one is that 2022 is an election year when Democrats will do all they can to avoid raising taxes and other costs.

And so the game is for the advocates, including agency heads in the Lamont administration, notably Katie Dykes, commissioner of the Department of Energy

and Environmental Protection, to assure skittish lawmakers that the plan will work, that states will join and mostly that the benefits will outweigh a price hike at the gas pumps that’s smaller than a typical weekly change.

Take urban air pollution that causes alarming rates of asthma among children, for example. Decreasing that alone could make the whole cost of TCI worthwhile.

“A lot of that is being driven by the pollution that’s coming out of the tailpipes of the cars on the road, the trucks on the road,” said Charles Rothenberger, climate and energy attorney at Save the Sound. “A tremendous pollution burden.”

And a matter of climate justice, a local change that can happen even if little Connecticut can’t solve the crisis that will probably wipe out humanity in a few hundred years.

But Republicans aren’t talking as much about the issue as they are about the cost. The conservative side, wisely, took pre-emptive action this week attacking TCI as simply a gasoline tax, a money grab by Democrats.

The Yankee Institute reported that Democrats “plan to use a special legislative session in September to implement the program in Connecticut,” which is quite correct, though hardly some kind of secret.

Sen. Kevin Kelly, R-Stratford, followed that report with an attack on the plan. “The TCI gas tax forces residents to sacrifice much for little gain. The TCI gas tax is a significant burden on working and middle class families, with little improvement in greenhouse gas pollution,” he said in a written release.

He correctly pointed out that even Democrats in Washington D.C. don’t support a gas tax hike (a mistake in my view, as the national motor fuel levy is far too low) and that states to our west that send pollution our way aren’t acting.

That’s a broad-brush attack at a time when we need a debate on details for a complex issue. We don’t know the likely price hike because this isn’t a set tax or fee, but rather a bending of the market to achieve an end result of less use of fossil fuel for cars and trucks.

What we rally need to do is focus on the benefits of the public investment, compared with the cost — rather than talking about the hopeless morality of climate change. As a group, the advocates blundered in the spring by over-emphasizing Connecticut’s role in controlling climate change and under-emphasizing the real, local benefits of TCI.

As for a special session, Ritter said several issues may need attention before the General Assembly convenes in February for a short, election-year round of lawmaking. The list includes coronavirus stimulus spending, Gov. Ned Lamont’s executive powers, the wave of car thefts by young people and yes, TCI.

No one is promising anything. But Democrats can make this happen if everyone views the benefits, even if TCI doesn’t save the world. Republicans shouldn’t have such an easy time overselling the risk of public investment.

“It’s the way that they’ve been killing things for a long time,” said McLean at Acadia Center. “That’s their playbook….They can say that, but we’re not going away and we’re going to fight you at every turn…I can’t give up and we can’t give up.”