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 Aggressive promises to curb greenhouse gases have been replaced by second-guessing deadlines previously put in place to meet those vows.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.”
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. And Unitil said the annual burden of funding public policies on an average gas customer was $325 last year, nearly three times as much as in 2014.
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.”
For the average Unitil gas customer, for example, the average monthly distribution charge has soared from just over $61 in 2014 to $156 in 2025, or more than $1,000 per year, per the utility’s filings with DPU. That massive increase only slightly lags the percent growth in charges for Mass Save and other policy initiatives that are tacked onto customer bills.
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 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 the problem, he thinks, comes when policymakers “assign blame” for high costs and in doing so target programs that are only one factor among many.
He argued the Mass Save cut pursued by the House would “utterly devastate and probably break the program.”
Dan Dolan, president of the New England Power Generators Association that represents electricity producers, said the state is engaged in a political balancing act that must weigh three factors: cleaning the environment through emission reductions, cost, and energy reliability.
For years, “the explicit, clear emphasis was clean above and beyond the other two,” Dolan said. But “if any one of those elements gets out of whack, the rest start seeing consequences to them, and today, clearly, affordability is coming to the forefront in a way we have not seen in at least a decade, probably more.”
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.
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.
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.
A Pew Research Center poll published last year found 68 percent of American adults favor developing more wind power, down from 83 percent in 2020.
In 2021, Pew said, Americans were split nearly evenly when asked whether we should phase out the production of new gasoline-fueled cars and trucks by 2035, with 47 percent backing the idea and 51 percent opposing it. By mid-2025, when pollsters asked the same question again, the once-narrow gap had grown into a chasm: 65 percent opposed ending gasoline vehicle production, and only 34 percent supported it.
Another survey, published in the fall by the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute, similarly suggested growing hesitation among the public to pay for the costs of curbing emissions. As recently as 2021, pollsters said, just more than half of Americans were willing to pay $1 more per month for energy to combat climate change; by 2025, that rate had fallen to 38 percent.
For some, the warning signs were clear before “affordability” elbowed almost every other topic out of the spotlight.
Sen. Mike Barrett, a Lexington Democrat who is the Senate’s guru on all things climate and energy, for years has urged his colleagues to balance their green commitments with proper strategy to manage the costs, warning about the prospect of a “ratepayer revolt” against the financial toll of slashing emissions.
“The expense of it is daunting, so if you don’t anticipate in advance how to soften the blow on people’s monthly budgets, you are courting a right-wing reaction against climate policy,” Barrett said in 2024. “And that’s really what’s at stake here. We’re at risk of exposing ourselves to a backlash, because cleaning up the planet does impose a lot of financial burden.”
The right-wing backlash Barrett warned of two years ago has today become a much broader pumping of the brakes on clean energy efforts that now includes many within his party.
While the political calculus around climate and energy poilcy 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.
“It’s not as though the status quo doesn’t have costs. They’re just hidden costs,” Esty, who served as commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection from 2011 to 2014, said. “We have, right now, serious issues that are not visible to the everyday citizen, not visible to the everyday voter, around air pollution effects that cause health harms for some subsets of the population. We have this buildup of greenhouse gasses, which amounts to a huge debt that is going to have to be paid at some point.”
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.
Environmental activists repeatedly make the pitch that policymakers don’t need to trade one for the other, that an upfront investment in clean energy infrastructure can both curb emissions and cut utility bills in the long run by reducing reliance on fossil fuels with more volatile prices. But the long-run approach doesn’t always win the day, especially with the governor and every member of the Legislature facing reelection less than eight months from now.
Ed Markey, arguably the US Senate’s dean of climate action, insists that the affordability versus climate action debate offers a false choice,suggesting that a better title for his signature “Green New Deal” in hindsight would be “Green New Affordability Deal.”
“It’s impossible to separate climate change from affordability,” Markey told CommonWealth Beacon in an interview in his downtown Boston office. Instead, he argued, the tools that can help stave off the worst impacts of hotter temperatures, rising sea levels, and more intense storms can also provide the region with a more stable energy system, less prone to fluctuations and spikes in cost.
Vineyard Wind has been pounded by delays, but once fully operational, Markey said it will deliver electricity to the New England grid at a fraction of the cost of current wholesale prices.
He pointed to the Inflation Reduction Act that President Joe Biden signed in 2022, widely regarded as one of the nation’s most significant legislative efforts to fight climate change, as a result of sustained focus on the high costs of existing power infrastructure.
Trump and congressional Republicans quickly moved to dismantle much of the IRA, scrapping incentives for electric vehicles and sunsetting tax credits for wind and solar projects. But Markey does not think that was a fatal blow.
Even during the sustained opposition campaign emanating from Washington, DC, there’s still a sense of bruised optimism that a broader, global effort to rein in emissions will not be derailed by affordability politics.
David Wallace-Wells, a veteran climate journalist, wrote in The New York Times last month that it’s not just Trump and Republicans hammering away at climate policies. “Liberal politicians who used to routinely invoke the existential stakes of climate change have moved on, too, preferring to talk about energy affordability,” he wrote, describing the exact tenor of the debate now unfolding on Beacon Hill.
Yet his conclusion was anything but downbeat. Even as the rhetoric shifts, Wallace-Wells wrote, work continues on the ground to advance a global transition, with electric vehicles continuing to replace gas-powered cars and solar installations growing quickly in other nations.
“A decade ago, the challenge of global decarbonization appeared intimidating enough that to many, it seemed the only way to surmount it was through politics. A decade later, we’ve lost a lot of political momentum, and the spirit of solidarity that seemed for a time to prompt it has evaporated,” he wrote. “But in the most obvious sectors, at least, the transition is powering ahead anyway.”
Beacon Hill is all but guaranteed to settle on some kind of action intended to reduce ratepayer bills, even if there’s some element of climate-goal sacrifice, but the details are still uncertain.
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.
For Markey, ever the optimist, the latest round of consternation is just one season of politics, ready to move back in the other direction again.
“There has been a major hit directed at the clean energy sector, but at the same time, they’re not knocked out. They’re still in the game,” Markey said. “They realize that’s the inevitable, inexorable future of energy in our nation, and that’s kind of the message that’s being lost here.”
“The rest of the world continues to move toward green energy,” he added. “The climate crisis wasn’t created by one president, and it won’t be solved by one president, but progress can’t be stopped by any one president, either.”
Or, perhaps, by state leaders throwing up a caution flag while they sweat reelection.