Mention of the farm bill generally conjures visions of big payouts to Midwestern corn and wheat growers with little relevance to the small farmers or just about anyone else in Connecticut. True those subsidies don’t mean much here, but there is plenty in the legislation that does. It is packed with provisions from dairy supports […]

According to the Connecticut League of Conservation Voters, the state’s legislators are slipping as environmental watchdogs. But curiously absent among the 12 votes the CTLCV used to make that assessment is the huge energy bill that created the new Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and set in motion dozens of programs designed to revamp […]

Rebecca Waldo remembers the frantic phone calls from her and her husband’s many Waldo Renewable Electric solar customers after Tropical Storm Irene blacked out much of the state: “What can I do? What can I do?” For most, the answer was suffer without power like everyone else. Irene and the freak October snowstorm each were […]

Horse poop. It might sound like the punchline to a giggling-kid joke. In Connecticut it’s no joke. With 45,000 to 60,000 horses–the most of any New England state–producing 50 pounds of manure each a day,  that’s about eight tons a year per horse. And with Long Island Sound pretty much the catchall for anything that […]

Joel Gordes, an energy consultant and former state legislator, remembers what happened on September 26 when he started talking about cyber attacks and ice storms during his presentation to the legislative committee investigating the utility response to tropical storm Irene. At one point, he recalled, Sen. John Fonfara, co-chair of the Energy and Technology Committee […]

Lost in the storm over storm response by the state’s two major utilities is the fact that about a half-dozen communities are at least partially served by neither. They are served by municipal electric utilities, which for the most part has meant fewer outages and faster restoration when the power did go out during this […]

Among the items in Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s jobs package for next week’s special session is one on brownfields – those polluted properties that have become darlings of the environmental and economic revitalization sectors in recent years. The package earmarks $20 million to develop and market five to-be-determined state-owned brownfield sites, to review and ultimately […]

TORRINGTON — Kim Barbieri, the zoning and wetlands enforcement officer here, points to what looks like a gravel-topped garden set in a steep concrete sidewalk in this city’s old downtown. There is one cherry tree growing in it. “If I took a gallon of water and dumped it right here, it would not spill off […]

After a balky start, due in no small part to the budget uncertainties in the first half of the year, the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection is on the verge of launching its first major energy efficiency initiative. Called Lead By Example–a name not uncommon around the nation for energy conservation programs–Connecticut’s is designed […]

Gateway Community College in New Haven had great expectations for the inaugural term of its Center for a Sustainable Future, with 10 continuing education courses from hands-on solar training in a brand-new lab to certification as a sustainable building adviser. But so far, only two of the courses have enough people enrolled to make them […]

Connecticut farmers who suffered crop damage from tropical storm Irene may be one step clpser to potentially getting federal assistance to help cover their losses. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy Thursday sent documentation of crop damage to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack along with a letter requesting a secretarial designation. Such a designation would release […]

Shelly Oechsler managed a touch of humor offering a photo of fields on her family’s 400-acre Botticello Farms two days after tropical storm Irene struck. “What you are looking at is some of our peppers,” she said in an email. “If you were a scuba diver, that is.” Just about all 400 acres, most of […]

The head of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the nation’s first carbon emissions trading and reduction program, has been named to a key position in the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. Jonathan Schrag will become deputy commissioner in charge of DEEP’s energy division, a key component of the newly-constituted agency and one with […]

EAST HAVEN–Nearly two weeks after Tropical Storm Irene sent two feet of water through the first floor, Rick and Karen Ruggiero’s home on Cosey Beach sits locked up, an official sign stuck in the siding declaring it “unsafe for human occupancy.” Their terrace, just feet from a tattered seawall and, beyond it, the water of […]