Climate activists persist despite frustration at home and at U.N. summit

Frustrated by a lack of progress on cutting carbon emissions at home and at a United Nations climate change conference in Scotland, environmental advocates and lawmakers in Connecticut are urging a doubling down on efforts to lessen the effects of fossil fuel consumption.

In New England, plans for a multi-state pact to place caps on vehicle emissions — the largest source of greenhouse gases — appeared to crumble last week after Gov. Ned Lamont said he would abandon his push for Connecticut to join the effort.

Lamont was soon joined by Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, who had supported the consortium but backed out on Thursday, citing the lack of partners. In Rhode Island, the state’s top environmental official reacted to the news by urging officials to “explore other options in clean transportation,” the Providence Journal reported.

James O’Donnell, director of the Connecticut Institute for Resilience and Climate Adaption at UConn, who attended the Glasgow conference, drew a parallel between the troubles of the multi-state agreement — known as the Transportation and Climate Initiative, or TCI — and international efforts to lessen the global warming crisis.

Promises to reduce carbon emissions by leaders around the world often sputter at first, O’Donnell said, referring to pledges that nations and corporations have made but not enacted. His message to Lamont and legislative leaders was simple: try again.

“Find out better ways to reduce the emissions of CO2, ones that people will get behind,” O’Donnell said.

It was clear, O’Donnell said, echoing many observers, that that the TCI had suffered from a lack of political support even before the spike in gasoline prices this year. It was “difficult to sell,” amid that surge.

The program would have raised gasoline prices by an estimated 5 cents to 9 cents a gallon over the next ten years, with the participating states receiving hundreds of millions of dollars for climate initiatives inside their borders.

State lawmakers are already discussing the next strategies for reducing vehicle emissions, according to state Rep. Christine Palm, D- Chester, vice chair of the General Assembly’s Environment Committee.

“Yes, it’s a blow and a setback, but we’re not going to throw in the towel,” Palm said.

Unlike several of his fellow Democratic governors, Lamont did not attend or send a delegation to the two-week climate change conference in Glasgow, which concluded Nov. 13 with a commitment from attending nations to speed up revisions to their current emissions-cutting while gradually closing coal-fired power plants.

Those commitments drew the condemnation of protesters in Glasgow and around the world, who described the plan of action as too little, too late to stem the worst effects of climate change.

Regrouping at home

In Connecticut, environmentalists similarly chided Lamont, saying he lacked urgency after he announced Tuesday that he would not pursue the TCI as part of his agenda in 2022, when he is running for re-election.

Lamont defended his decision, saying there was not enough support for the proposal within the General Assembly. Republican opponents of the plan said it amounted to a gas tax increase and promised to make it an election issue if Democrats went ahead with plans to join.

Lamont made it clear he still supports the TCI, saying he would sign the bill if lawmakers sent it to his desk. Even with his active support, the bill never came to a vote in either the House or the Senate, as Democrts balked.

Despite that, state Rep. David Michel, D- Stamford, said Lamont’s promise to sign the bill left the window open for lawmakers to pass a TCI bill in the legislative session that starts in February. Pointing to activists' disappointment over the Glasgow summit, he called on Democrats to take action.

“All those issues need to be addressed urgently,” Michel said.

“Otherwise we are going to seem like the COP26,” he added, referring to the Glasgow conference, “a lot of ‘blah blah,’ and little action as to protecting biodiversity, the ocean or our life support system.”

In recent days Sen. Will Haskell, D-Westport, Senate chair of the Transportation Committee, and Sen. Christine Cohen, D-Guilford, Senate chair of the Environment Committee, said they would work together and with Lamont’s office to enact climate change mitigation strategies that focus on vehicle emissions.

One benefit: Significant federal money may be available through the pandemic relief bills and the federal infrastructure bill that Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed this month.

“We have the opportunity to make real change and be a leader on climate,” Cohen said. “It’s time for us to advance the necessary policies that will provide a habitable future for the next generations.”

What CT will look like

O’Donnell, the UConn climate scientist, said projections discussed at Glasgow and previous UN conferences described the severe impacts on places like Connecticut if emissions are not curbed.

“If we don’t do it, things are going to be very unpleasant,” O’Donnell said.

A rise of global average temperatures by as much as 1.5 degrees Celsius — a foregone conclusion under currently-accepted climate models — would mean that parts of Connecticut that flood a few times a year would start to see weekly floods, O’Donnell said. In Hartford, the number of summer nights where temperatures rise above 90 degrees Fahrenheit would increase from roughly a dozen now to as many as 50, leading to more hospital admissions for people prone to heat-related illnesses.

During the day, laborers will likely have to cut their hours spent under the sun and take more breaks, reducing productivity, O’Donnell said.

The current goal among many climate experts is to limit the rise to 1.8 degrees Celsius. If emissions lead to a rise of 2 degrees Celsius or more over pre-industrial levels, each of those issues O’Donnell described will be compounded by several multitudes, he said.

“If we can cap and reduce CO2 emissions so that we can limit temperature rises and sea level rises, then life along the shoreline and in the cities is something we can modify slightly,” O’Donnell said. “But if we don’t, then by 2100 water levels could be a meter or two meters higher than they are right now — in which case much of the cities in Connecticut are going to be wet a lot of the time.”

Who pays the most?

When asked about the Glasgow conference, Lamont indicated that he had been watching from afar and that he remained focused on a multilateral approach with other states.

“What I loved about Glasgow, what I loved about the Paris Accords, is working with other countries,” Lamont said in comments after an unrelated event last week. “What I liked about TCI was the fact that we were working with the Northeast and then at least a few of our regional neighbors and I like to think that over time we’ll be able to expand the group of people that believe in this, maybe even do it on a national basis.”

Like Connecticut, O’Donnell pointed out that many nations have put forward ambitious proposals for reducing emissions of carbon dioxide, only to struggle over how to get it done.

For example, O'Donnell said concerns about the “regressive” nature of some solutions — hikes in fuel costs that hit low-income families hardest, and global strategies that hurt poor nations — were evident both in the TCI discussions in Connecticut and in negotiations in Glasgow.

Still, while he agreed the transition away from fossil fuels must be done in an economically “just way,” O’Donnell said there was no way to avoid costs altogether.

“There’s not like a no-cost option,” O’Donnell said. “There’s a cost of doing nothing and a cost of reducing CO2 emissions and adapting, and I think that the cost of doing things now is going to be much less than the cost of inaction.”