How Are We Dealing with Climate Change in New Haven?

PUTTING THE PUZZLE PIECES TOGETHER

Early last year, New Haven students were asked to draw up their visions of a future under climate change. The winning entries, some still on display around the city, don’t depict a positive, solar punk future with high rise buildings made of engineered wood and living, green roofs. They show dismayed, grieving faces: children walk through an apocalyptic world simultaneously ravaged by floods and fires, and grocery store shoppers cower at surging food prices as farmers lament their scorched crops. The runner ups captured a similarly bleak prediction for the future.

Art by  Rosie Hampson from Wilbur Cross High School.

The poster competition was held by Reimagining New Haven in the Era of Climate Change, a climate action initiative, and the posters were presented at their Spring event in 2023. In attendance was Steve Winter, executive director Climate and Sustainability for New Haven, now running for state rep. Winter commented on how the posters “speak to the level of anxiety that young people have about what the future holds.” Winter followed with discussing several specific steps the city is taking on climate change and several calls to action for the community. 

As an anxious young person myself, I reached out to Mr. Winter to learn more about how these actions are coming along. When this article was first published, I did not have access to the inventory due to a miscommunication error. Mr. Winter has since sent me the greenhouse gas inventory for New Haven in 2021 with supporting data, and this article will be updated to incorporate this information. 

New Haven residents have a right to ask: how is New Haven faring with climate change?

One way to tell is by asking the residents themselves.  According to the Yale Center on Climate Change Communication, 76% of people surveyed in New Haven in 2023 believe global warming is happening; 70% of people are worried about global warming; and 60% believe it is human caused. Could be better, but our community’s sense of reality is significantly better than the national average. Interestingly, most people surveyed claim to have not experienced any personal effects of global warming (that’s their opinion, even though that year was the second hottest year ever recorded in CT, which everyone who went outside personally experienced). Also interestingly: most people surveyed support expanding offshore US drilling for oil and natural gas. 

The US has become the dominant oil and natural gas producer over the last decade. While this has arguably spurred a lot of stuff to get behind, including job additions and domestic energy security, oil and gas production directly and unavoidably counters any progress on climate change mitigation and should cause people to worry. New Haven plays a vital role in this infrastructure: the Port of New Haven holds 209 storage tanks for gas, jet fuel, kerosene, and crude oil, equivalent to about 10.4 million barrels of oil. This terminal was just bought in April by Global Partners LP, incorporating New Haven into their system of 49 terminals spanning the entire East Coast. For reference, that much oil contains at least 4.368 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) greenhouse gases (GHGs), equally damaging as 950,000 cars driving per year.

The New Haven Terminal website boasts a large biodiesel production made by American GreenFuels, LLC, the largest producer of biodiesel in the Northeast. This  biodiesel operation promises to reduce climate warming greenhouse gas emissions by producing diesel made from waste cooking oil shipped in from restaurants in New York. This diesel is blended at a ratio of 5-15% with regular diesel and currently is used in New Haven’s public transportation system. 

For climate, this should be better than regular buses in theory. In practice, however, it’s hard to say. The climate impacts of biodiesel and other “renewable fuels” are normally quantified publicly with a “Lifecycle Assessment” (LCA) that counts the greenhouse gases released to the atmosphere throughout the production of the fuel. LCAs help show just how much better biodiesel and other fuels are than regular diesel. 

Photo by Alec Wallace

Unfortunately, American GreenFuels has made no public LCA on their biodiesel, so it’s difficult to tell whether their fuel is making the environment any better. Based on a LCA of similar biodiesel also made from cooking oil, the greenhouse gas emissions associated with using biodiesel in an engine are only 19% better than regular diesel. For New Haven, the reductions are even smaller because they use half as much biodiesel in their mixes as the referenced study. The impact is smaller still because the cooking oil itself has environmental impacts that are not included, which other researchers have criticized as being misleading. This means that the “renewable” biodiesel used in New Haven buses likely does close to nothing for the environment (which could be a reason why American GreenFuels does not transparently share their LCA). 

 This is emblematic of the larger problem with climate change measures in New Haven: there is little public information or authoritative source showing how well, or how poorly, our city is fairing on minimizing its contribution to climate change. 

Countries, states, cities, and municipalities can track their progress on climate with a greenhouse gas inventory. Inventories essentially count where and how much greenhouse gas emissions are released from year to year. New Haven has not ever had a publicly accessible GHG inventory. The 2021 inventory developed by the New Haven Office of Climate and Sustainability has yet to be published online.

A different draft inventory is tucked away in the last several pages of a draft Climate Action Plan for Hartford, East-Hartford, and Middletown on the Capitol Region Council of Governments’ (CRCOG) website. The inventory was written by two researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The date of the analysis is unclear, but the most recent data quoted is from 2022. Normally, this work is carried out by a larger team of researchers within the region of interest, but I was impressed by the quality of the inventory nonetheless.

The draft paper claims that New Haven’s emissions (presumably in 2022) were about 6.8 million tons of CO2e. There is not yet any data on emissions from previous years or the year since, so it’s still difficult to say how much progress on climate New Haven has made. The first sentence of the paper reads: “Connecticut has been a pioneer in addressing global warming and climate change through its extensive effort in greenhouse gas tracking and reduction spanning two decades.” At the same time, the two largest cities in Connecticut, Bridgeport and Stamford, do not have any greenhouse gas tracking themselves.

The largest source of GHG emissions in New Haven is from the transportation sector. This was primarily calculated based on the number of vehicle miles traveled reported by the CT DOT and the types of vehicles in the area. The number of vehicle miles traveled in New Haven county (presumably in 2022) was 6.9 billion miles, corresponding to about 2.75 million tons of CO2e. 
Although CT DOT does not publicly report vehicle miles traveled, they do report traffic volume along major roadways throughout Connecticut. If we assume traffic volume along major roadways in New Haven correlates directly with vehicle miles traveled, and we assume that the makeup of the fleet is roughly the same over the last few years, then we can roughly tell whether emissions from transportation are going up or down. Based on increasing traffic count volume every year over the last 3 years (the data does not go back further), emissions from transportation have been increasing. By how much, I wish I could say.

The second largest source of emissions in New Haven is from stationary sources. These are large facilities that burn fuel to produce power, like power plants, chemicals manufacturers, or petroleum refineries. Over the last five years, facility emissions in New Haven county reported to the EPA have more than doubled, primarily driven by a massive increase in petroleum and natural gas emissions, which make up over 90% of the total. 

Transportation and large facilities make up far and away the majority of New Haven’s emissions, so it is reasonable to conclude that New Haven’s emissions have been increasing. Maybe New Haven isn’t truly a pioneer in addressing global warming. 

A survey of New Haven’s emissions wouldn’t be complete without including Yale since they run two of the three biggest polluters in the city. Yale does a better job tracking their greenhouse gas emissions than New Haven. Last year, they emitted a little over 200,000 tons of CO2e - the first fact they mention on their website is that their emissions have reduced by 28% since 2015 when they emitted about 300,000 CO2e emissions.

Almost all of Yale’s emissions reductions have not taken place on the campus at all - they come from carbon offsets. Carbon offsets are a market mechanism whereby one party reduces their emissions by x tons, and another party (in this case, Yale) buys “credits” for those x tons with money, claiming financial ownership of the emissions reductions that somebody else physically accomplished. The new owner is then free to count those reductions against their own emissions (offsetting their own environmental impact), or they can sell those credits to somebody else. 

Yale’s carbon credits almost exclusively come from agricultural and waste management methane reductions. This means that, in physical reality, Yale continues to emit 300,000 tons of CO2e every year, but they buy the reductions cheaply achieved by waste facilities in the U.S. These facilities do this by burning off concentrated methane coming from their waste sources, turning it into CO2 gas which heats up the atmosphere less than methane, a process known as “flaring.” Larger waste facilities are required to flare their emissions - the facilities Yale bought credits from are small enough to not be regulated. Because these facilities are not required by law to reduce their emissions, they can easily reduce their emissions and sell their reductions for a buck. 

Yale started redeeming these credits against their emissions in 2016. Yale’s 28% emissions reductions, from this light, are actually based on a morally dubious market scheme that is leading to rampant fraud costing tens of millions of dollars and that is criticized by its earliest supporters. All of Yale’s emissions reductions come from 2016 - Yale has physically reduced its emissions by close to 0% over the last 8 years. 

Although GHG emissions are the driver of climate change, adaptation to the changing climate grows in importance every year we fail to change our behavior. New Haven has done interesting and important work with climate adaptation and sustainability generally. One of my favorite examples is the bioswales scattered around the city: these sidewalk gardens suck up extra volumes of stormwater runoff, helping to fight flooding during severe wet weather events like the ones New Haven is increasingly experiencing. Recently, SustainableCT awarded New Haven a gold star (the first city in Connecticut) for sustainability efforts like making a watershed plan, managing woodlands, and promoting public transit. 

Steve Winter and the New Haven city engineer joined SustainableCT’s podcast to share the good work they’re supporting on climate. They mention putting out a request for proposals to develop solar on city buildings and landfills. They have a fleet analysis on electric vehicles and electrifying city buildings. They’re applying for federal funding for low and middle income residents to replace their boilers. 

One of the few numbers Mr. Winter mentioned was on trash systems: a new composting co-collection system in West Haven has reduced total tonnage by 10%. This is great news for West Haven. The draft greenhouse gas inventory, however, shows emissions from landfills have been increasing over the last five years. I would be thrilled to see a new composting co-collection system in New Haven, but only sharing the “positive” numbers is distracting from the fact that our waste management could actually be getting worse.

I am encouraged to see improvements in sustainability, especially on a limited city budget. But it saddens me to know that, as extreme climate events become more frequent, New Haven will become less able to spend money on preventing climate change while it is forced to erect seawalls and fix power failures. Each year New Haven does not decarbonize, each year future residents of New Haven and the world will pay a greater price. Just look to Tampa Bay, Florida, where roadways out of immediate evacuation zones are backed up in the face of a hurricane possibly more severe than the scale of hurricane severity allows for. Money that will now be spent on repairing its damages and supporting its victims could have been used on public transportation and other measures that improve lifestyles and reduce contributions to climate change. I hope New Haven is more prepared for our future Category 6 hurricane. 

It’s easy to dispel concerns and make people feel like things are moving in the right direction when we see new sustainability measures like the new Ride New Haven bike shares opening around the city. But the fact that the bikes currently cost more to ride than the bus is proof that the numbers matter. Tracking our progress is the first step in making progress. There is room for joy but there is equal, valid cause for concern, especially when there is a lack in communication on climate efforts.