State should not throw in towel on transition to electric vehicles
Senate Minority Leader Kevin Kelly, my former colleague, told a radio interviewer that “government ought not be telling people what they can and cannot do in the regard like what kind of car you can drive.”
His remark stopped me in my tracks. As the former Senate chairman of the legislature’s Transportation Committee, I know that our state regulates motor vehicles in countless ways that protect your safety and mine. For example, state law prevents you from driving, or being stuck behind, a golf cart on the Merritt Parkway. State statutes prevent especially heavy trucks from driving on I-95, as overweight vehicles endanger our infrastructure. Perhaps most obviously, state law ensures all vehicles undergo emissions testing to protect public health. In short, the state regularly tells people, for very good reasons, what kinds of cars they can and cannot drive.
I doubt Senator Kelly was calling for the overhaul of these regulations. Instead, he was referring to a new rule that would transition Connecticut toward a future of zero-emission vehicles.
I’m familiar with the rule, because in
2022 I helped to pass it. When we enacted the Connecticut Clean Air Act with bipartisan support, we aimed to bring our state in line with all our neighbors and chart a path toward a greener future. If New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island can all transition to electric vehicles by 2035,
surely Connecticut could do so as well. Do we really think so little of ourselves in this state that we are going to throw in the towel with 11 years left to go while our neighbors take these changes in stride?
But since the Connecticut Clean Air Act passed, the oil and gas industry has been hard at work spreading misinformation and halting the new rule before it could take effect. They’ve convinced some politicians that our state isn’t ready to accommodate more electric vehicles, conveniently forgetting that the rule would provide over a decade for us to prepare for the transition. They’ve pretended as though the rule would force consumers to go electric overnight, papering over the critical role that hybrids will play as we transition to cleaner technology. And they’ve ignored the historic investments that the Biden Administration is making in electric vehicle infrastructure ($14.6 million to Connecticut this year), opting instead to let the future pass Connecticut by.
Lost in all this misinformation is an acknowledgment of why we enacted these regulations to begin with: excessive transportation emissions endanger public health and worsen our climate crisis. The data is impervious to political spin — we can’t protect clean air in Connecticut without reducing motor vehicle emissions. Transportation pollution amounts to more than double the combined emissions of the electrical and residential sectors. The American Lung Association has repeatedly raised the alarms about the poor quality of air in Connecticut, particularly in urban communities that abut major highways. Smog from tailpipes leads to higher rates of asthma and other respiratory diseases, especially among children and seniors.
Supporting Connecticut’s Clean Air Act was among my proudest moments as a state lawmaker. As I said on the Senate floor shortly before it passed, there’s no such thing as Republican air and Democratic air — there’s just dirty air and clean air. And every so often on the radio, hot air. I hope my colleagues will tune out the misinformation and focus on protecting clean air for generations to come.