Climate change that you can smell in the air

“Let’s address this crisis — for our children, grandchildren, and future generations.”

Gov. Ned Lamont

Except in specific circumstances — say, when you’re out camping — the state of Connecticut is not supposed to smell like a campfire. That’s the situation we found ourselves in late last month, with air quality alerts that lasted days. It got bad enough that the governor decided to weigh in.

“If an air quality alert in CT caused by smoke traveling cross country from western wildfires isn’t a sign that we must take climate action now at all levels of government, I don’t know what is,” Gov. Ned Lamont said in a Twitter post, adding, “Let’s address this crisis — for our children, grandchildren, and future generations.”

The worst of the smoke in Connecticut was apparently the result of wildfires in Canada, but huge swaths of this country have been burning for weeks as the area west of the Mississippi River continues yet another year of severe drought.

Lamont, though, didn’t emerge unscathed, as numerous replies to his tweet pointed out that Consaving necticut has on the table a climate change plan that it has failed thus far to enact. Known as the Transportation and Climate Initiative, it’s an interstate compact that would in effect put a price on carbon pollution with a focus on transportation, which accounts for an oversize share of greenhouse gas emissions.

Republicans called it a gas tax, which is at least in the vicinity of truth, since it would increase the cost of filling up your tank. The money it raised was supposed to fund transportation alternatives like bike paths and electric vehicles.

But given their numbers, Republicans on their own can’t do anything other than complain. The failure to enact TCI this past session was entirely on Lamont and other Democrats, who let the get bogged down in discussions around budgets and taxes. In other words, they didn’t treat it at all as an emergency whose enactment should trump other concerns.

It should be clear enough that Connecticut can’t solve climate change on its own, and neither can a 13-state cross-border compact. In opposing TCI, skeptics pointed out how little impact it would have in the overall scheme of things, as if anything that doesn’t solve the problem isn’t worth doing.

But that’s not how emergencies work. In an emergency, you do everything you can, even if the individual impact is small, and combine them together to make a legitimate impact. To argue we’re not in an emergency is to say that temperatures reaching 116 degrees in Portland, Ore., is normal, and that flooding that killed almost 200 people last month is Germany is to be expected. Just because we haven’t seen such extremes in Connecticut doesn’t mean it isn’t coming.

There’s word now that Democrats may reintroduce TCI this fall in a special legislative session, and Lamont has indicated his support. Republicans would likely treat that as a gift, since it would allow them to run next year against the party that raised the price of gas. But they were going to make that argument anyway. The harder issue, which has always been the sticking point for action against climate change, is that thinking long term is bad politics.

You can’t be the governor of low gas prices and also act against climate change. It doesn’t work that way. Somehow or other, consumption needs to go down, and one of the best ways to accomplish that is to make consumption more expensive. Ideally, we’d see replanning of communities so driving wasn’t so essential, with a focus on energyissue mass transit and other options. But before we get there, the average cost of living is likely to go up as the price for pollution increases.

That’s no way to win elections. And when the alternative is an opposition party that views climate change as somewhere between a hoax and an inconvenience, it’s understandable that Democrats are leery of giving anyone a free campaign issue.

But the alternative can’t be to do nothing. TCI won’t solve all our problems, but it’s a policy that’s on the table and would make some important progress, as well as help make the state more livable. It didn’t get done under the heat of budget negotiations, but now there’s another chance.

Before the wind blows the wildfire smoke back into Connecticut, state leaders need to make it happen.