Connecticut scored some of the highest marks given out by the League of Conservation Voters in its 2011 Congressional scorecard. That despite a year the organization called the U.S. House’s “truly breathtaking and unprecedented assault on the environment and public health.”

The state’s two senators each scored 100 percent on the 11 votes ranked by the LCV last year, though to be fair, 12 states came in with 100 percent ratings for their senate delegations.

On the House side – where 35 votes were used – no 100 percents, but Connecticut came out on top with Hawaii and Vermont. All three scored 97 percent. Rep. Joe Courtney voted against the LCV position on pesticides and Rep. Rosa DeLauro went the other way Gulf coast restoration legislation. The other three, Reps. John Larson, Jim Himes and Chris Murphy, each missed a single vote and that counted against them.

The LCV also ranks state legislative action. You can see how every member did on a dozen issues last session here – though not the big energy bill. That passed too late in the session to make the scorecard.

Jan Ellen is CT Mirror's regular freelance Environment and Energy Reporter. As a freelance reporter, her stories have also appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Yale Climate Connections, and elsewhere. She is a former editor at The Hartford Courant, where she handled national politics including coverage of the controversial 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. She was an editor at the Gazette in Colorado Springs and spent more than 20 years as a TV and radio producer at CBS News and CNN in New York and in the Boston broadcast market. In 2013 she was the recipient of a Knight Journalism Fellowship at MIT on energy and climate. She graduated from the University of Michigan and attended Boston University’s graduate film program.

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