THE REPORT CARD IS IN, and 2025 results show that Massachusetts is going to need to cram if it’s going to meet its ambitious climate commitments.
The slow pace of progress in the transportation sector, which accounts for the largest share of the Bay State’s planet-warming emissions at 38 percent, reveals that the state’s climate mandates are in serious trouble as Massachusetts remains noticeably off track of its electric vehicle targets.
To Katherine Antos, the state’s undersecretary for decarbonization and resilience, the latest climate report card released Friday is evidence that the GOP leadership in Washington is hampering climate action in Massachusetts.
“My big takeaway is 2025 was a difficult year for climate action,” Antos said in an interview. “You really see firsthand the impact of losing our federal partner, from really important federal tax credits that ended early, to the unlawful termination of federal grants, to the halting of permits for key projects, and attacks on states’ authority to move the ball forward.”
The state’s self-assessment comes as it races to reduce its carbon pollution to 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 and produce no new net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 — all while confronting a hostile federal government and an affordability crisis sweeping the state.
Despite more than doubling the medium-and-heavy duty EVs on the road compared with 2024, there are just 735 such vehicles registered in the state — a sliver of the 3,200 called for by the end of 2025 in the Clean Energy and Climate Plan.
Massachusetts added more than 25,000 light-duty or plug-in hybrids in 2025, bringing the total to roughly 166,000 — but is still shy of the 200,000 needed by last year, according to the CECP. And there are about 2,000 fewer public charging ports installed than what the state estimates is needed.
It’s not all bleak, though.
The state beat its goal to install heat pumps in at least 100,000 homes — accomplishing the task in 2024, a year early. That feat was supported by Mass Save, the state’s energy efficiency program funded through ratepayer charges that has become a political football.
Even there, though, a closer look reveals that heat pump installations declined in 2025 after increases each year between 2022 and 2024. The report indicated, however, that such a slowdown is “typical” during the first year of a new Mass Save budget and that the pace of new installations and home weatherizations “significantly increased” over the course of last year.
Reaching the next goal of installing at least 500,000 heat pumps in homes by 2030, though, would require significantly boosting uptake well beyond current rates.
Plus, looming over those heat pump gains is legislation currently under consideration by Democratic lawmakers on Beacon Hill that could cap or cut Mass Save’s budget, which would likely further reduce the program’s reach.
Antos defended Mass Save as a crucial program to help lower utility bills in the state, which is currently home to the nation’s third-highest electricity prices. She said that on the hottest day last year in June, when peak demand was reached, energy usage would have been 10 percent higher if not for Mass Save — saving $2.6 million in a single hour.
“It saves all ratepayers money so that now we don’t need to build as much infrastructure,” she said. “We don’t need to be procuring energy at the most expensive time.”
Assessing the state’s performance in the power sector is trickier. Vineyard Wind, Massachusetts’s lone offshore wind project in operation, came online last year, and a new transmission line carrying hydropower from Canada into New England began delivering power earlier this year, but neither are reflected in the 2025 climate report card. That metric, the percent of state electricity consumption met with clean power, lags by two years, according to the report card.
Though wind power has been particularly slow to grow, first because of high inflation rates that roiled the industry and now because of President Trump’s efforts to stop current and future projects, solar and energy storage deployment has fared better. Both of those categories were close to reaching their 2025 target numbers in 2024, which is the most recent available data.
There’s an unmistakable Trump-sized hole in the Bay State’s green energy push. The White House has undertaken an effort to dismantle state authority to regulate emissions, ripped up fuel economy standards, revoked federal funding and tax credits for electric vehicles purchases, solar installations, and energy efficient home upgrades, and stopped issuing new wind permits.
But what those headwinds have also done is expose what the state has been able to do or not do with what is in its control.
The Healey administration has put forward new seasonal heat pump rates to incentive adoption, expanded its EV rebates, and is in the process of finalizing regulations to speed up the permitting and siting of new energy projects.
But there are also clear sensitivities to programs that would fast-track emissions reductions but also come with costs for consumers. Last year, Healey delayed both a clean heat standard and an EV sales mandate. As of this fall, the state had also not installed a single EV charger on its highway network despite receiving initial approvals in 2022 for $64 million from the federal government for the initiative.
The governor, who faces reelection this year, also proposed a roughly 4 percent cut to environmental programs in her fiscal year 2027 budget.
“I don’t think anything here is insurmountable,” said Kyle Murray, Massachusetts state director for the Acadia Center, an environmental group. “We’ve got to get creative, and we’ve got to show a commitment to these things. We know that this is not just the morally right thing to do. We know it’s an affordability issue. This is why we have to do everything that we can.”