On Earth Day, backers of CT environment bills show hope
The high-minded platitudes on climate change came fast and furious Friday morning at the state Department of Transportation, from the governor, two commissioners, three state senators, a large employer with a fleet of trucks and even a Republican state representative.
It was, after all, Earth Day — and this group stands among the core of people committed to making progress 365 days a year. But even in liberal Connecticut, advancements have come slowly, with backlash from both political parties.
The question is, will this year be different? Will key environment legislation, especially a pair of bills aimed at prodding electric vehicle sales, actually make it to the desk of Gov. Ned Lamont?
There is reason for optimism even after last year’s meltdown of the Transportation and Climate Initiative, which held out hope of a multistate effort.
The May 4 deadline for legislation approaches, with — as usual — some significant environment bills still in the queue.
The electric vehicle measures would broaden and enlarge subsidies for EV cars, commercial vehicles including trucks and even e-bikes; bring the California emissions standards to Connecticut, assuring a dramatic switch to EVs in the next decade; set a “carbon budget” for state agencies; and match federal dollars for such enhancements as vehicle charging stations and ultra-efficient traffic signals.
“I think it’s going to pass. I think we’ve got some bipartisan support,” Lamont told me after the speeches. “I think they know it’s the right thing to do. I’ve got truckers who are with us on this thing. Look, it doesn’t take much opposition to derail an idea . ... I don’t hear that this time, I think I’ve got good support.”
Lamont reminded us that Richard Nixon, who initiated Earth Day and the Environmental Protection Agency, was the first U.S. president to utter the words, “Happy Earth Day.”
No one is planning a zero-carbon parade just yet.
“The first Earth Day was 1970, and yet I feel as though we’re going backwards,” state Sen. Christine Cohen, D-Guilford, co-chair of the Environment Committee, said at the gathering at the DOT, in front of a low-emissions bus.
Sen. Will Haskell, DWestport, talked about what this generation of politicians can say to high school students who demand progress, urgently, in climate change,
“Let’s tell them that we made those big investments and those small investments,” Haskell said. “There’s no such thing as Republican air and Democratic air, there is only clean and dirty air.”
Haskell, himself on the border between millennial and Gen. Z, explained why this year might really bring the big bills home.
“The spending side of this, it’s far less controversial than the revenue side of TCI,” Haskell said of the EV measures.
Recall, the TCI bill, as the Transportation and Climate Initiative was known — is known, although it’s dormant — would have set target limits on motor fuel consumption, requiring producers and distributors to pay for credits.
That might have raised the price of gasoline by a few cents a gallon, thereby threatening American freedom and democracy in a way that spikes in, say, health care or child care never could. Republicans, loudly, and a few Democrats, quietly, rallied around the “gas tax hike” label for TCI, and that was that. No vote even happened in either chamber.
This time, Haskell and others explained, the subsidies — up to $5,000 for an electric vehicle, with the vehicle price threshold rising to $50,000, for example — would come from existing fees such as the greenhouse gas levy we pay when we register our cars. And the benefits are clearly spelled out, unlike the poorly spelled-out goodies including urban environmental justice efforts that the $90-million-a-year TCI would have bought.
“We’re trying to be not just specific but tangible,” Haskell said.
And the TCI fiasco could actually provide fuel or this year’s bills, supporters say. “There’s a lot of momentum because of how badly things went last year,” said lobbyist Lori Brown, executive director of the Connecticut League of Conservation Voters.
Other environment bills that remain alive and well heading into the last full week of the General Assembly session include a measure that calls for zero-carbon emissions in the state’s electric grid by 2040 — which is part of Lamont’s policy but is not spelled out in statutes. Also, another bill would reduce caps and other barriers to small-scale solar generation, for example on rooftops, among other solar energy enhancements.
Inertia, not cost, is the main hurdle for most of these bills, although they don’t come free. By and large they are designed to prod a market that’s already moving in the right direction, way too slowly. “Look,” Lamont said, “consumers are leading by example.”
One potential buyer: Hartford Distributors Inc., one of the state’s largest wholesalers of beer and other beverages, based in Manchester. HDI executives on hand Friday said they’re committed to a changeover to electric delivery trucks.
That’s a market-based move that will take some help from the government, same as the rest of the economy. There is no such thing as an unfettered free market, certainly not in an age of climate-based destruction.