By CHRIS POWELL
Connecticut’s so-called environmentalists are following the state’s employee unions in contriving new ways of destroying what is left of democracy and accountability in state and municipal government.
They want to put a “green” amendment in the state Constitution to guarantee everyone the right to a clean and healthy environment.
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How would the amendment define and guarantee such an environment?
It wouldn’t, since such an environment can’t easily be defined. The amendment would simply transfer environmental policy from the elected branches of government, the General Assembly and the governor, to the unelected branch, the courts, which would define the amendment’s terms. The governor and legislators might actually like that, since it would exempt them from responsibility for the controversies and costs of environmental policy.
The so-called environmentalists are also seeking tax legislation similar to what has been enacted in New York and Vermont and is under court challenge there. Their slogan is: “Make Polluters Pay.” That is, they would levy a huge tax on companies that have produced conventional energy — oil, natural gas, and coal — in the hope that the revenue would be used to mitigate the effects of the “climate change” they blame on the companies.
It’s hard to see how such a tax could be calculated and applied fairly, but advocates of the tax don’t care. They just want to punish the conventional energy industry in the belief that it is destroying the world even as most of the world’s progress has been a consequence of the inexpensive energy the industry has produced.
Besides, to make the polluters pay you have to identify them correctly, and the polluters are not the producers of oil, natural gas, and coal. They are the governments that have authorized and taxed use of those products and the billions of people who use them. Indeed, insofar as these products are already taxed, a special tax on their producers isn’t necessary. To “make polluters pay” it would be necessary only to raise the taxes already in place.
But then the so-called environmentalists would lose their corporate scapegoats and pious posturing, and people would have to confront their own responsibility for any “climate change” caused by conventional energy and weigh it against the value conventional energy brings to their lives. That might prompt intelligent discussion and argument about public policy — which would be the end of environmentalism as Connecticut lately has known it.
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OPEN-AIR MENTAL HOSPITALS: Commenting last week on the two recent fatal shootings by Hartford police in separate incidents involving mentally ill men brandishing knives, this column lamented that the city had become an open-air mental hospital because of state government’s indifference.
Contrary to some responses to the column, this was no exaggeration. For two months ago Connecticut Public Radio reported that the squad of emergency social workers the city had established to respond to dangerous incidents of mental illness had answered more than 2,000 calls for help since it started in 2022. Hartford police say they typically get many hundreds of such calls every year, more than 1,900 in 2025 and another 341 so far in barely two months this year.
Connecticut Public Radio also reported that while the emergency social workers squad was deemed successful, city government recently reduced it to save money.
Of course Hartford isn’t alone in experiencing more mental illness. While the increase is worse in cities, where people are poorer and more stressed, the whole country seems more frazzled than ever, even as President Trump and Governor Lamont want people to believe that they are more prosperous than ever and that social conditions are improving.
The surge in inflation likely to result from war-related impairment of oil supplies may drive many more people over the edge. Yet Connecticut already is unable to do much more for the homeless mentally ill than to call them off the street temporarily when winter nights get unusually cold. The General Assembly has many ideas for new spending but none involves putting a roof over the state’s open-air mental hospitals.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 