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BOSTON — When House Democrats first floated a plan to take the teeth out of the state’s next big deadline for slashing greenhouse gas emissions, Gov. Maura Healey did not have much to say about it.
Instead, she wanted to talk about reducing household electricity and gas costs.
“I haven’t seen the outlines of any specific plan on that,” she said in November, three days after CommonWealth Beacon broke the news that Rep. Mark Cusack, the House point person on energy, wanted to rework a huge energy affordability bill the governor filed by weakening the state’s 2030 decarbonization mandate. “There are other things in that legislation that will, right now, help us reduce energy costs,” Healey said. “That’s what we’ve got to focus on. That’s what we’ve got to do.”
Facing strong blowback to Cusack’s plan, House leaders abandoned the idea of gutting the emission reduction mandates and pivoted to another idea that would have seemed out of bounds only a few years ago: slashing $1 billion from the Mass Save energy efficiency program.
Healey again skirted the issue — “I’ve got to take a look at it,” she said when the new House idea emerged — and stuck to her message. “I’m really glad to see this energy affordability bill move forward,” she said. “We’ve got to get this done.”
If Healey seems laser-focused on energy costs these days, she is hardly alone. It’s part of a new political calculus on climate and energy policy, one that reflects a striking turnabout, in Massachusetts and beyond.
For many Massachusetts Democrats, never mind those Republicans here who once shared their outlook, fighting climate change has faded from a badge of honor to an often-avoided topic as frustration over soaring utility bills reaches a fever pitch — and as reelection campaigns kick into gear.
Now that federal opposition from the Trump administration and spiking infrastructure costs have dropped massive barriers along the path to a clean-energy future, climate activists are finding it harder to get elected officials to talk about cutting emissions. Aggressive promises to curb greenhouse gases have been replaced by second-guessing deadlines previously put in place to meet those vows. And it’s happening as polls suggest a weakening of voter support for climate action.
The shift has left many veteran activists frustrated and pondering a question with long-term impacts: Is this just a temporary dip in support for clean energy, or a permanent reshaping of political will?
“The conversation has changed. A lot of people are less likely to bring up climate on their own,” said Kyle Murray, Massachusetts state director for the Acadia Center, a climate advocacy organization. “Affordability, as anyone who pays attention to this stuff can see, has become the name of the game.”
State’s climate commitments look remarkable today
In hindsight, the degree to which Massachusetts officials in both parties coalesced only a few years ago around an aggressive decarbonization agenda looks remarkable today.
In 2021, legislators and Gov. Charlie Baker agreed to write a massive commitment into law. By 2030, according to the law they enacted, the state must cut greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent below 1990 levels; by 2040, the reduction must reach 75 percent; and by 2050, Massachusetts needs to hit “net-zero,” with any remaining emissions offset by tools like carbon sequestration, which removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stores it in settings like forests or underground rock formations.
It was a popular enough idea to secure broad bipartisan support. Baker, a Republican who was early in his second term, signed the law after Democrats embraced some of his tweaks. Nearly half of the Legislature’s Republicans gave their support, too, including the minority leaders in both the House and Senate.
Lawmakers and Baker followed that up with a 2022 law investing in offshore wind and other carbon-free sources, offering more electric vehicle rebates, and, following the lead of California, banning the sale of internal combustion vehicles after 2035.
Two years later, after voters sent a Democrat to replace Baker to the corner office, Healey signed another law, designed to streamline siting and permitting of clean energy infrastructure, spur more electric vehicle adoption, allow multi-state partnerships to procure power, and more.
Today, however, enthusiasm for the emissions targets and the tools needed to accomplish them has waned considerably.
That’s what led Cusack, who voiced concern that the 2030 goal of halving emissions from 1990 levels was out of reach, to float the idea of spiking any legal mandate to reach it. He said he was worried about the state exposing itself to litigation by failing to achieve enough decarbonization by the end of the decade.
“This is not an ideological thing. This is not, ‘I don’t believe in clean energy,’” Cusack said in November, emphasizing that he supported the 2021 law but was trying to reckon with the changed landscape through “a fact-based analysis of where we are and where we’re going to be by 2030.”
After facing intense pushback from environmental activists, however, House leaders reversed course and pledged not to touch the 2030 requirement.
Their revised plan instead took aim at Mass Save, which provides financial incentives for switching to more efficient, lower-emissions systems like heat pumps and has become a punching bag amid a period of sharply rising electricity and gas costs.
The House voted in February to gut $1 billion from the Mass Save’s budget in the final year of a three-year cycle, which Democrats claimed — to some raised eyebrows — would mostly rein in its administrative and advertising costs.
Rep. Aaron Michlewitz, one of the chamber’s most powerful Democrats, linked the bill to the “major affordability crisis” hitting the state. Mass Save, he said, “is an appropriate place to be putting a pause” in order to put money “directly into the pockets of our constituents.”
But just how much money will go back into ratepayer pockets is uncertain.
Over the past decade, average electric bills in Massachusetts have increased by 50 percent or more. Heating bills have surged by at least as much, and in some cases, even doubled.
One variable complicating the landscape is the fact that Beacon Hill has limited control over energy prices.
Most utility bills have three primary components: the price of energy itself, which is subject to macroeconomic fluctuations; infrastructure costs for maintaining and repairing the delivery of energy through pipelines and transmission wires, which are passed along to customers; and charges to fund government-created programs like Mass Save.
While utilities concede the first two points play a role in spiking household bills, they’ve targeted much of their attention on the latter category.
In filings submitted to the Department of Public Utilities, as State House News Service detailed, National Grid said charges stemming from public policies now make up nearly 20 percent of the average electric bill. Eversource said those costs, which barely existed before enactment of a landmark 2008 state climate law, now account for about a quarter of its electric bills today.
House Minority Leader Brad Jones, who supported the 2021 climate law, argued that the rising costs are making Bay Staters lose enthusiasm for clean energy.
“People are willing to pay a little bit more. Now, you’re making them pay a lot more, and you lose them,” he said in an interview.
Still, clean energy initiatives like Mass Save are only one part of the rising utility price dynamic. Ratepayers wind up covering a large part of the fast-escalating costs of building and upgrading pipelines, transmission cables, and other power infrastructure, passed along to bills as “distribution charges.”
However, policymakers have less control over infrastructure investments by utilities like pipeline repairs, so when the calls for action reach a critical mass, state-mandated programs are the easiest lever for Beacon Hill to pull.
That said, even the House’s top Democrat who greenlit the big cut to Mass Save acknowledged after that chamber’s vote that it’s not likely to save ratepayers a lot in the short term. When WCVB’s Sharman Sacchetti asked House Speaker Ron Mariano during a televised interview in early March how much the legislation could help households next winter, he answered in a characteristically blunt manner.
“The completely honest answer is, not much at all,” Mariano said. The real problem, he suggested, comes from the Trump administration’s sustained opposition to clean energy, which forces states to rely on existing power sources more prone to price spikes.
Not only is there uncertainty over how much short-term relief the cut would provide to consumers, the proposal effectively looks to achieve that by sacrificing some of the longer-term climate and cost upsides of Mass Save, which proponents say saved $2 in supply and infrastructure costs for every $1 spent.
Climate activists think that trade-off is dismal.
Mary Wambui, co-chair of the energy equity working group at the Energy Efficiency Advisory Council, tasked with monitoring the state’s work on that front, accused House members of being “disingenuous” by leaving the emissions targets in place while proposing huge cuts to a program that could help the state meet them.
“The Legislature is saying, ‘Oh, we keep the goals,’ as they cripple the mechanism for accomplishing those goals,” she said about Mass Save’s capability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. (Wambui is also a fellow at MassINC, which publishes CommonWealth Beacon.)
Murray, the Acadia Center leader, said energy affordability is an important topic that deserves legislative attention. But he argued the Mass Save cut pursued by the House would “utterly devastate and probably break the program.”
Healey in 2022 vs. now
During her gubernatorial campaign in 2022, Healey rolled out an aggressive platform in support of quickly decarbonizing the state, calling to “electrify everything” and expand the Mass Save energy efficiency program. She put big emphasis on the potential posed by offshore wind, touting it as both a way to create jobs and provide more energy independence for the region, and called at the time for opposing new gas infrastructure.
“Remember, I stopped two gas pipelines from coming into this state,” Healey, then the state’s attorney general, said during a 2022 candidate forum hosted by the Environmental League of Massachusetts, referring to proposed projects by Kinder Morgan and Access Northeast, in comments that have become fodder for her opponents on the right.
During her first term, Healey has remained a vocal supporter of clean energy and continued her push to expand the nascent offshore wind industry that has been tossed into limbo by President Trump’s intense opposition.
But in the past year, Healey has also delayed enforcement of a rule designed to mandate more electric-vehicle sales and postponed the launch of a clean heat standard that might result in higher consumer costs.
The administration did not make anyone available for an interview for this story. In a statement, Healey spokesperson Karissa Hand ticked off several clean-energy and environmental initiatives Healey is pushing and said the governor is simultaneously working on “making life more affordable in Massachusetts, while also protecting our communities from the mounting impacts of climate change.”
These days, when climate comes up, Healey tends to steer the conversation toward the high utility bills straining household budgets.
At a legislative hearing about her state budget proposal in February, Healey returned to what’s become a common refrain: She favors an “all-of-the-above” approach to energy, including expansion of gas infrastructure that many environmentalists still don’t like.
With so many households struggling, she said, “everything is about a balance right now.”
A month earlier, on the morning of her annual State of the Commonwealth address in January, Healey reached for a quick win in looking for that balance: She announced that the state would redirect $180 million in utility company payments that would otherwise have gone toward clean energy and energy efficiency programs to underwrite a 15 percent cut in residential electric bills in February and March.
For all of her past and present embrace of clean energy, Healey’s political impulses, like those of her Republican predecessor who signed the 2050 mandate into law, are moderate. In the midst of a reelection campaign against GOP challengers eager to depict the state as an unaffordable hellscape, Healey has opted to thrust pocketbook concerns into the spotlight, even at the expense of angering climate activists.
“Any political leader that doesn’t pay attention to energy prices does so at their own peril because the public is very sensitive,” said Daniel Esty, an environmental law professor at Yale University and former energy regulator in Connecticut.
Setbacks for clean energy
Even before Trump returned to office, the clean power future turned out more difficult to achieve than supporters had hoped.
A transmission project designed to bring hydropower from Québec to the New England grid stalled for years after Maine voters moved in 2021 to scrap it partway through development. The New England Clean Energy Connect finally launched at the start of 2026, only for Hydro-Québec officials to decide almost immediately that, amid a cold snap, they couldn’t share much power with their neighbors to the south yet.
Developers behind a pair of offshore wind projects each paid tens of millions of dollars during the Biden administration to cancel agreements, arguing that inflation, supply chain disruptions, and Russia’s war in Ukraine made their original plans financially impossible. Meanwhile, Vineyard Wind, the only installation to generate any utility-scale power for New England so far, ran into delays of its own when a turbine blade shattered and plunged into the Atlantic Ocean in 2024.
Once Trump swept back into office last year, he quickly launched a crusade against offshore wind, stalling virtually all work on the fledgling industry up and down the East Coast.
Vineyard Wind, the state’s first and only offshore wind project, officially wrapped construction on Friday — news first published by The New Bedford Light. But it could be years in a best-case scenario until another offshore wind project starts construction off of Massachusetts.
After a series of federally imposed delays, Massachusetts is getting only a few hundred megawatts of power from wind turbines off its coast, a fraction of what officials hoped to have online by now. That’s left New England more reliant on existing, aging electric and gas infrastructure and susceptible to surging power-delivery costs.
As efforts to reduce carbon emissions ran into obstacles, public opinion research suggests that Americans have become less enthusiastic about clean power, driven mostly by sharp declines among Republicans.
Senate may hold the line on climate
While the political calculus around climate and energy policy has shifted, the science hasn’t.
Experts still agree that rising global temperatures fueled by greenhouse gases will lead to more powerful storms, massive ecosystem damage, food and water scarcity, and a range of other consequences.
To be fair, those risks still seem to weigh on Healey and Beacon Hill Democrats in the Legislature, even if they’ve shifted their near-term messaging to the more election-friendly topic of ratepayer relief.
Senators will now get a chance to rewrite the House bill, then lawmakers from the two chambers will need to negotiate a compromise version to send Healey. The Senate might opt to soften some of the proposed Mass Save cuts.
While Senate President Karen Spilka has been tight-lipped about the details, she pledged last month that she would “not back off” on climate issues.
A longer version of this article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.