气候变化领域集成服务门户

Ross Hollander has a lot of trucks. He owns 60 trailers, leases the tractors to pull them and owns another 20 vans. They deliver beer in six of Connecticut’s eight counties, a job his family has been doing since 1962 as Hartford Distributors.

They drive a lot of miles and they use a lot of fuel, mostly diesel. And given climate change, which according to the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is even worse than had been thought, Hollander doesn’t want to be using fossil fuel any more.

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“Early on, I felt as though it was important for companies like ours to invest in changing our carbon footprint,” he said. So he installed enough solar on the roof to power 80% of his 100,000 square feet of refrigerated space. But he said: “We want to go a step further.”

He wants to convert his fleet to electric. First, however, he needs charging infrastructure that can recharge each vehicle overnight.

“We want to be a beacon,” he said, but he could use a little help. “We believe that there should be some grant money for us to be able to go with it.”

It’s the kind of initiative and funding that could have been provided through the Transportation and Climate Initiative that failed in last year’s legislative session after Republicans inaccurately branded its funding source from an increase in gasoline prices as a tax, and the label stuck.

TCI is not back this session, but there is a comprehensive climate and transportation bill — SB4 — that would start several large clean transportation programs, including some that would help Hollander. It also sets up funding mechanisms that would piggyback on the nearly $5.4 billion in federal funding from the infrastructure legislation that is coming to Connecticut along with other competitive pools of infrastructure money that, in some cases, require state matching funds.

It’s getting an all-hands-on-deck effort with nearly four dozen co-sponsors including the Democratic leadership that was barely lukewarm on TCI. Republicans? Not yet.

“The whole concept of electric vehicles and lower emissions is something that crosses party lines and people generally support,” said House Minority Leader Vincent J. Candelora, R-North Branford. “Funding sources always become the bone of contention, and obviously, in the wake of what we’re seeing with gas prices, that just spurs that debate all over again.”

But Democrats on the transportation and environment committees, who are jointly working the bill and holding a hearing on it Friday, are not leaving Republicans with a message opening this time. The bill is called An Act Concerning the Connecticut Clean Air Act.