Clean Air Act

May 4, 2022

Connecticut residents deserve clean air, but transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions have contributed to worsening air quality leading to higher rates of illnesses like asthma. Investing and encouraging wide-scale electric vehicle distribution is necessary to reducing these emissions and ultimately, improving air quality. The House just passed the Connecticut Clean Air Act to help the state breathe a little easier.

Covering the COP 21 as a freelance press photographer and going and meeting with climate refugees, participating at the UN climate action summit a couple of years back, I can assure you the situation is very real. I herded endangered Sea Turtle Hatchlings (endangered) to the water otherwise they would go towards light (another form of pollution). I documented dolphin slaughters in Japan at The Cove in the Wakayama, prefecture for the profit of the aquarium industry. Why do I mention this, because as those things continue or perpetuate and add up to the climate emergency, we need to indeed act where we can, and today it is in our great state of CT.
 
We need the funding for critical investments in our communities to improve the air quality. What impacts the vulnerable communities worst, due to the elevated concentrations of air pollutants in those neighborhoods, also affects the surrounding areas. 
 
A study conducted in Stamford indicated that if you're black or Hispanic and make under $30,000 a year you're most likely to have asthma.
 
We saw in 2020, wilder and more devastating fires in the West Coast, unique ecosystems destroyed by fires in Australia and Brazil. We see more frequent hurricanes and super storms looking like "once in a lifetime" events. Storm outages and flood devastation have been severely felt in Connecticut.
 
There are no questions that our species relationship with nature is behind the increasingly devastating climate.
 
I regularly talk about how the ocean is the climate regulator, and outside of protecting its biodiversity, and on land, we also need to obviously get rid of those emissions linked to human activity, which also affect our ocean.
 
There are infinite amounts of connections in nature but the planet can continue without us, we cannot survive without protecting the current ecosystems that have been our life support system.
 
So I firmly believe that these are our first steps to fight climate change and only the beginning of a new trend that is extremely late to start despite the continuous public outcry and more actively from the youths..
 
The most vulnerable populations on Earth, in the US, in Connecticut, will be the first to suffer and we have urgent and crucial work to limit the damages, and fight for our survival.
 
Many thanks to the climate youth, Sena and Matt at Sunrise, and all other advocates for the environment, and biodiversity, for not losing hope, and also, to a lot more work ahead of us, with all the stakeholders.

Thank you to leadership, to the proponents, the good chairs of Environment and Transportation, and co-sponsors and supporters of this bill
 
I was looking forward to come out with a French quote but on the house floor I quoted the Mandalorian as, THIS IS THE WAY. Click below for my remarks on the floor: