Connecticut’s Clean Energy Finance and Investment Authority — the first state green bank anywhere — got a major shout-out from the Brookings Institution, the nearly 100-year-old left-leaning Washington-based think tank.
Jan Ellen Spiegel
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.
Posted inEnergy & Environment, Money
Former CT DEP chief takes fire for the EPA
Former Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection (when it was still called that) chief Gina McCarthy has gotten herself onto a hot seat for the Environmental Protection Agency where she’s hung her hat during the Obama administration as the EPA’s assistant administrator of the Office of Air and Radiation. Politico reports that McCarthy had to answer […]
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Millstone shutdown is a sign of broader power problem caused by climate change
Waterford — Last month’s unprecedented 12-day shutdown of part of the Millstone Nuclear Power Station sent a shudder through the nuclear energy world. Caused when the seawater used to cool the plant’s generating Unit 2 became too warm, it was the first time any U.S. nuclear plant was shut down because of intake water temperature […]
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Tale of two cousins: A year after Irene, shoreline barely safer
East Haven — On a morning he described as a “10,” Andy Weinstein and his cousin Sara-Ann Auerbach stood on the stretch of Cosey Beach the two have shared for decades. Just short of a year after Tropical Storm Irene reduced Weinstein’s home to rubble and sent half of Auerbach’s into the water while toppling […]
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Task force recommendation: more municipal care for trees
In the year since Tropical Storm Irene battered the state, Connecticut’s trees have come to be regarded as instruments of evil. They’ve been blamed for the extensive power outages caused by both Irene and the October snowstorm two months later, and utility companies have since been sawing away at the roadside forest around their transmission lines. […]
Posted inEnergy & Environment
Was Reagan right about trees?
Ronald Reagan’s much maligned assertion in 1981 that: “Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do,” may have more truth to it than most folks imagined. Researchers at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies have discovered that trees right here in Connecticut that are diseased by fungi can emit high concentrations of methane – […]
Posted inEnergy & Environment, Money
Malloy noncommittal on resetting RGGI
The pressure is ticking up on Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and nine other Northeast and Mid-Atlantic governors participating in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative — the nation’s first carbon dioxide trading and reduction program. Letters went out Thursday to all 10 RGGI (pronounced reggie) state governors asking them to support adjusting the program to make […]
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Plenty of agricultural worries even without ash borer problem
Even without the arrival of the dreaded emerald ash borer, environmental and agriculture officials were braced to have their hands full this summer with a number of insects, diseases and other maladies posing threats to a swath of the state’s plant life. A midsummer check reveals a counterintuitive bit of good news: drought. The mostly […]
Posted inEnergy & Environment, Money
A new tool for state’s energy reduction drive
A second critical piece of the process to help agencies reduce energy use 10 percent by January, as mandated in the 2011 energy law, is moving into place. The Department of Energy and Environmental Protection today unveils its performance contract program — also required in that law. Performance contracts finance energy efficiency projects with the […]
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Regulations to prevent ash borer spread begin this week
The first steps to prevent the highly destructive and invasive emerald ash borer beetle from spreading beyond the four communities where it’s been found in Connecticut begin later this week. A quarantine that prohibits the movement of certain wood products out of New Haven County, the only county afflicted by the ash borer so far, […]
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Fraud happens at Connecticut’s farmers’ markets — but not often
Rick Macsuga has heard the allegations for years. That “jobbing” — farmers buying produce to sell as their own — occurs regularly and illegally in the farmers’ market system he oversees for the Connecticut Department of Agriculture. “Does it happen?” he asks semi-rhetorically. “Most likely it does happen.” But not much, he and others agree. […]
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Owner responsibility for private well quality is at heart of contamination issues in state
Two recent developments regarding contaminants in private well water in Connecticut point to one uncomfortable truth: There very well may be pesticides and naturally occurring nasty substances in private wells — which are used by 15 percent to 20 percent of Connecticut residents — but we don’t really know what’s there, and there’s nothing in […]
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Pesticides found in LI Sound lobsters for the first time: more study planned
The Department of Energy and Environmental Protection has confirmed the presence of pesticides in Long Island Sound lobsters — albeit a very small sample — for the first time since the crustaceans began their precipitous decline in 1999. The findings are a surprise to the scientific and environmental communities, which have generally thought that warming […]
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Connecticut’s fuel cell industry braces for potential change
Before the clean energy world knew about fuel cells, United Technologies knew about them. UTC pioneered the modern fuel cell for NASA beginning with the Apollo space program in the 1960s through the end of the shuttle program last year. But UTC’s love affair with fuel cells could be about to end. In the last […]
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Cut to pest control program leaves farms vulnerable this summer
North Branford — Joe DeFrancesco stands midfield surveying a swath of healthy, red-tasseled sweet corn he figures is a week from harvest. Nestled between the stalks is a scarecrow-height white bag that is a trap DeFrancesco uses to catch the moths of a pest known as the corn borer. If the moths reach a certain […]