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HARTFORD, CT — Connecticut may be a little bit greener after Gov. Ned Lamont signed a pair of environmental bills into law Tuesday morning.
Public Act 25-125 supports increased energy efficiency and the creation of green jobs. Public Act 25-33 boosts state and local planning for floods, creates flood disclosure requirements and limits certain rodent poisons and pesticides.
“For Connecticut, we’ve got to continue to lead, to take the lead and show people by example what we’re doing,” said Gov. Ned Lamont.
Lamont said the two bills were important, but Connecticut was in a position to “play defense.”
“You think fighting pollution is expensive, you ought to see the cost of not dealing with climate change or climate chaos,” he said. “Billions of dollars just in the last five or six storms in the last three or four years.”
He cited last year’s flooding in the Naugatuck Valley.
“The Little River became a raging river, and the big tree trunks get swept down and they take our a bridge,” he said. “So now we’ve got to rebuild that bridge. We’ve got to build that bridge higher. We’ve got to raise the roadways, doing everything we can to prevent a little bit from the nature of this chaos to be a little less impactful next time. But we’re paying for that every day.”
Former three-term state Rep. Christine Palm, known as an environmental advocate during her time in office who had backed previous versions of the bills, said all public policy was incremental. She went on to describe herself as impatient.
“When it comes to climate change, I think time is a luxury we don’t have,” she said. “And I think climate complacency is nothing short of foolhardy.”
Palm said, when it comes to the environment and climate change, “we have to act urgently and with ferocity.”
She said the fight on climate action was not really about climate, but rather about young people. She said young people today are “struggling mightily to understand why we who are in positions of power are desecrating the world they will inherit from us.”
State Rep. John-Michael Parker, D-Madison, co chair of the Environment Committee, said he had come into the 2025 legislative session thinking about how to prove that the state cared about climate and the environment.
“There’s been so many wins we’ve had over the last couple of years, but making sure we got these bills across this year really, I think, underscored that,” he said. “That speaks loudly to the diverse, multigenerational coalition of supporters that we have.”
Katie Dykes, commissioner of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, celebrated the occasion while also acknowledging there remained headwinds at the federal level when it comes to climate legislation.
She cited the Republican taxing and spending plan known as the Big, Beautiful Bill, which she said “would dramatically curtail access to tax credits, and would even impose potentially, taxes, for the first time, on solar and wind projects.”
She said there was a belief that climate action was not compatible with affordability for regular Americans. Dykes, though, took the opposite tack, saying affordability was not possible without climate action. She listed hundreds of millions of dollars in damage caused by various storms from 2012’s Hurricane Sandy to last year’s August flash floods.
“That’s why we’re doing this work,” she said.
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