Want To Curb Emissions? Start With Transportation

Strengthen incentives for people to buy electric vehicles. Build more, and more varied, charging stations. Replace school buses with zero-emission vehicles. Make public buses electric. Expand public transit into more rural parts of the state. Cut down on truck idling at highway construction sites.

Those are just some of the ideas at the center of state and regional planning efforts for how Connecticut can reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 80 percent below 2001 levels by 2050.

A federally funded competitive grant program has state and regional environmental entities readying proposals on that very topic — with a focus on reducing climate change-exacerbating emissions, especially in low-income neighborhoods. 

In the process, data is being collected, and lessons learned, about just what the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions are.

Those were among the takeaways from a Monday evening Zoom meeting from the Office of Climate Planning at the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP). It featured presentations by Rebecca French, director of the Office of Climate Planning; Coralie Cooper, deputy director of the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management; Michael Towle, deputy director for the Western Connecticut Council of Governments (WestCOG); Kyle Shiel, principal planner for the Capitol Region Council of Governments (CRCOG); and Benjamin Lovejoy, director of regional planning and municipal services for the South Central Regional Council of Governments (SCRCOG).

The federally funded initiative in question is called the Climate Pollution Reduction Grants (CPRG) program, established under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022 and administered through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

As the EPA describes it, the CPRG program ​“provides $5 billion in grants to states, local governments, tribes, and territories to develop and implement ambitious plans for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other harmful air pollution.” The ​“two-phase program provides $250 million for noncompetitive planning grants, and approximately $4.6 billion for competitive implementation grants.”

Under the first phase, Connecticut got $3 million ​“to update and undertake further climate action planning to reduce greenhouse gases,” or GHGs, in the state ​“with an equity and environmental justice lens,” as DEEP phrased it in a public notice about the meeting. 

The plan is less about creating new initiatives than it is about strengthening and furthering existing programs. 

The planning stage is broken into two key parts. 

First, the EPA wants to see a priority climate action plan (PCAP), ​“which will include a focused list of near-term, high-priority, implementation-ready measures to reduce GHG pollution.” That plan is due on March 1. 

The second plan is a comprehensive climate action plan (CCAP), ​“which will establish near-term and long-term GHG emission reduction goals and strategies for all significant GHG sources and sectors in Connecticut.” That plan is due in the summer of 2025. 

DEEP’s first plan, its PCAP, will draw from the state’s Governor’s Council on Climate Change (GC3), which outlines the state’s broad goals for reducing GHGs and dealing with climate change, as well as ​“the state’s sector-specific climate plans in the areas of transportation, energy, buildings, and natural and working lands.” It is crafting its second plan, the CCAP, to ​“serve as a roadmap to reach the state’s statutory GHG emission reduction targets of 45 percent below 2001 levels by 2030, a zero-carbon energy supply by 2040, and 80 percent below 2001 levels by 2050.”

DEEP, however, isn’t the only entity operating in Connecticut to have gotten a planning grant from the EPA. Each of the three aforementioned COGs — WestCOG, CRCOG, and SCRCOG — in addition to other regional organizations not represented at Monday’s meeting, received grants as well, and have been busily developing plans of their own. 

They’re not doing that in isolation; the parallel processes have thus far been marked by communication and coordination, with one another and with other places. SCRCOG, which covers New Haven County, has developed its plan, ImpaCT 2045, with the regional planning program at UMass Amherst, as have the other COGs.

DEEP’s PCAP is forming around a few key ideas, as presented by Cooper on Monday. The meat of the plan is aimed at the state’s transportation sector, including a push toward electric vehicles, building on the state’s current CHEAPR program and expanding access to more and more zero-emission cars.

There are also plans to make houses and commercial buildings more energy efficient, build a cleaner energy sector, improve waste management, and plant more trees in cities (see this DEEP public notice for more details). ImpaCT 2045’s plans for New Haven County fall along similar lines (see a video presentation of that report here) with additional emphasis on workforce development and moving toward more solar power. 

The emphasis on transportation was no accident; it was driven by data. In her segment of the presentation, French reported DEEP findings that 40 percent of the state’s total GHG emissions came from transport. The level of emissions was twice as high as it was from residential buildings, and perhaps most sobering, remained the same as it had been in 1990.

Breaking the data down by municipal area, Towle found the overall state data mirrored in the Bridgeport, Hartford, and New Haven areas.

Diving into the data further, Towle demonstrated that trucks alone accounted for a substantial amount of transportation emissions. While reducing GHG emissions in any sector would be a step in the right direction — and reducing them across all sectors a robust way to go — it was clear which sector might require the most work.

DEEP and the COGs are coordinating their efforts in part because the ​“competitive implementation grants,” the money to put all those plans into action, coming out of the EPA’s pot of $4.6 billion are expected to be highly competitive. 

The EPA has awarded planning grants to 116 municipal areas and states across the country, as well as 4 territories and 90 Indigenous tribes or tribal consortia. It is expected to fund, at most, 115 of these projects, and possibly as few as 30, with only 4 to 10 grantees getting the biggest grants of $200 million to $500 million apiece. 

This doesn’t mean that DEEP and the COGs are necessarily competing with one another. The tone of the meeting suggested the opposite: as officials working toward improving the environment for the parts of the state that need it most, they understood that any benefit to one of them would benefit them all.