Climate emergency requires more action from Connecticut, Lamont

Our planet is sending clear warnings. Record-breaking temperatures, wildfires and heat-related deaths across the Pacific Northwest, “ice quakes” in Alaska, and here in Connecticut, more extreme storms, historic droughts, warmer temperatures, flooding events and sea level rise. Prolonged power outages like those Connecticut experienced in August 2020 are urgent reminders that we are unprepared for the intensifying impacts of the climate crisis.

This week, the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change reported alarming findings that we are locked into a climate crisis, the full severity of which is yet to be determined. The vast majority of Connecticut residents believe climate change is a threat to our future and that more should be done to limit climate-destroying emissions and transition to clean energy sources for electricity, transportation and buildings.

The science and public opinion are in agreement — the climate emergency requires an emergency response. Yet Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration has not done enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.

In fact, this administration continues to expand the use of climate destroying fossil gas with no end in sight.

Lamont has expressed concern about the accelerating climate crisis while his administration is taking actions that dig our state into a bigger climate problem. Energize CT, our state’s energy efficiency program, promotes and incentivizes fossil fuel boilers, furnaces and water heaters, and the Energy Efficiency Board is considering a threeyear plan for the program that will continue subsidizing fossil fuels. The Public Utility Regulatory Authority is contemplating funneling more ratepayer funds into gas utility companies to build more pipelines and encourage more customers to use fossil gas rather than clean alternatives like zero-emission heat pumps, and the Connecticut Department of Energy & Environmental Protection continues to permit unneeded new fossil fuel power plants despite their climate harms and threats to water and wildlife.

Decision makers should be investing only in clean alternatives like renewables and battery storage. Gas expansion only serves fossil fuel interests like developers of dirty power plants and profit-hungry utilities. More gas infrastructure is not good for the people of Connecticut, the air we breathe, or the planet we hope our children and grandchildren will be able to inhabit. Connecticut needs our administration — from the governor, to his state agencies and decisionmaking bodies like DEEP, PURA, and the EEB — to choose people and the planet. It is time for the Lamont administration to make a clear and decisive choice for the future: a livable climate, or fossil fuels?

Associated Press Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont in Hartford in July.