THE NATION’S FIRST cabinet-level state climate chief learned to shoot a shotgun before she could drive, started her career working as a public high school teacher in San Francisco, and raises goats on her nearly 18-acre property smack dab in the middle of Massachusetts — and has the homemade yogurt to prove it.

Melissa Hoffer is the force behind Gov. Maura Healey’s climate agenda, or what’s left of it, anyway.

Hoffer was plucked from a plum spot in the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency in Washington to return to the Bay State in a never-before-seen role to lead a hard-charging effort catapulted by a wave of momentum to accelerate Massachusetts’s fight against climate change. When Healey first took office in 2023, such an undertaking looked like it would be good for the planet, it would be good for the economy, and it would be good politics.

If the saying is true that a dream job is one that you craft for yourself, consider Hoffer in a pretty good spot: Hoffer’s role came about through a “mutual envisioning” between herself and Healey, she said in a wide-ranging interview with CommonWealth Beacon.

“What this role is really supposed to do,” Hoffer said, “is catalyze, open doors, remove friction, connect the dots, so that we have a more multidisciplinary team working to solve problems that are inherently multidisciplinary.”

Yet for a portfolio as sweeping as Hoffer’s, it is worth examining whether she was set up for success with the structure of the job. The executive order creating the climate chief position provided Hoffer an almost-untapped well to mine, with a mission to “marshal all resources and authority available to the Governor and the executive department in support of advancing the Commonwealth’s climate innovation, mitigation, adaptation, and resilience policies.”

In practice, that’s meant Hoffer has bounced around state government, picking her spots in something of a grab-bag attempt to nudge the slow bureaucratic wheels toward action on climate change. As she works to bring agencies together, it remains unclear what the status is of her No. 1 priority — an analysis of what it will cost to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

For Hoffer in particular, what a difference three and a half years makes.

Nearly half of Hoffer’s time as climate chief has coincided with the second term of President Trump, who immediately threw out the lofty offshore wind plans of states up and down the coast when he returned to the White House last year. Rising gas and electric bills have prompted a fierce consumer backlash and led Democrats across states to scale back climate efforts.

Those challenges have played out in Massachusetts, where a clean energy future is challenged by struggling major renewable energy projects and rising utility bills that are driving voter angst. The governor displays little hesitation sprinkling in her desire to see more natural gas enter the state as part of her “all of the above” approach to energy — while the gas industry has shown that it views Healey as persuadable and a new pipeline expansion proposal looms. A constrained state budget brought by deep federal funding cuts has put environmental programs at risk. And the fact that the ambitious climate commitments signed into law by Healey’s Republican predecessor are now teetering does not appear to be among Healey’s top priorities as she runs for reelection, standing in contrast to the 5,000-word section of her 2022 campaign platform devoted to climate issues.

In the middle of all of that is Hoffer, a lawyer who worked in the state attorney general’s office and is exceedingly careful in characterizing the current dynamic.

“When we’re talking about homegrown energy, reliable energy, job creation here in Massachusetts, those are things that are coming from the clean energy sector,” she said. “So I think that’s what you’re hearing [Healey] say. It is also true, as a practical matter, that we have two systems running alongside each other right now, and we are trying to shift over to a clean energy system. We can’t do it overnight.”

“So, you might hear us talk about it a little bit differently,” she conceded. “But as far as, are we slowing down in advancing the pace of what we’re doing? No.”

Still, others find Hoffer’s position daunting at best and unenviable at worst.

The tradeoffs that the governor is weighing around energy affordability issues, now a top household concern as electric prices in Massachusetts reach double the national average, have naturally trickled down to Hoffer, her mandate, and her ability to tap into a bully pulpit within state government, said Kevin Conroy, partner at Foley Hoag and a former deputy attorney general in Massachusetts who interacts with Hoffer on behalf of clients in the energy industry.

“The mandate of this job is hard,” he said. “It is nothing, and it is everything. Of any of the cabinet secretaries in the Healey administration, this one is to me the hardest.”

Hoffer’s career arc is a collage of big-time assignments, granting her an exceptional level of credentials for the job.

She has “more vision than anyone I’ve ever met,” said Turner Smith, deputy bureau chief of the energy and environment bureau in the state attorney general’s office, who was supervised by Hoffer there. She has “incredibly high standards for those who worked with her” and “is extremely rigorous in her thinking and analysis,” especially when it came to work she led scrutinizing proposals to bring new natural gas into the state, said Christophe Courchesne, who worked with Hoffer both at the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) and later at the AG’s office and now leads the environmental law center at Vermont Law and Graduate School. And, according to Brad Campbell, president and CEO of CLF, Hoffer is flat out “enormously talented, insightful, and very effective.”

In interviews with three dozen people in government, environmental advocacy, business, and academia, none of the questions or consternation that some feel over Hoffer’s place in the administration has anything to do with her raw intellect or competence.

It’s the structure of the role itself that’s up for debate — and whether it’s enabled Hoffer to be most productive. As is often the case in these czar-type roles, the job title can seem vague and not fit neatly into an organizational chart, occasionally leading to ruffled feathers in a bureaucracy not well-adjusted to a sudden shake-up.

Hoffer’s power, created by executive order, comes directly from her mandate from Healey. She’s charged with aligning all of Healey’s cabinet secretaries toward reducing planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions across the economy, from pollution stemming from car travel to the natural gas pipes heating homes — not just the state’s environmental and energy agencies. Yet, she has basically none of the staff, regulatory authority, and budget sway as the other arms of the executive branch.

She’s recently had to reshuffle the little staff she does have. In March, Hoffer’s deputy, Jonathan Schrag, left for a new role at the Massachusetts Development Finance Agency.

Hoffer seems fully aware of this challenge in a job that’s basically something of an experiment.

“We are asking people to do things differently, and that can be quite threatening sometimes,” she said. “You’re asking somebody who’s been quite successful at doing something one way for a long time to think about something else when they’re already very busy, they’ve got an overflowing plate. Because it’s state government, most of them could go out into the private sector and get paid three times what they’re getting paid here. And then here’s the climate chief knocking on your door and asking you to do something else.”

Healey said in an interview that the structure of the role is a “national model” and that Hoffer has a “willingness to challenge conventional thinking” and is “exactly the kind of leader that the state needs for this moment.”

“I regularly talk with her, and she regularly provides input on any number of things,” she said. “The role of climate chief is … about bringing climate considerations into every corner of government, rather than treating it as a separate conversation. Melissa convenes and connects with all of the secretaries regularly and me on a variety of issues. I seek her input, and her colleagues do as well.”

Hoffer, a Pennsylvania native and a graduate of the soon-to-shutter Hampshire College in Amherst, can get equally animated, and maybe more so, over technical carbon reports as much as talking about macroeconomic trends showing significant increases in global investment in renewable energy sources. She ticked off wins she’s had a hand in landing, from crediting insurers for making resilience investments to compelling hospitals to track their emissions to changing the standards for state procurements so that greener products are purchased to establishing nation-leading biodiversity goals to launching a youth climate council.

Given all this, though, an obvious question emerges: What exactly is her $169,000-a-year job?

And does Healey’s climate chief hold actual sway within the administration when it comes to policy decisions?

Hoffer’s influence can feel hard to pin down, posited Evan Horowitz, executive director of Tufts’ Center for State Policy Analysis, because we’re now in a different landscape — one that has altered her political utility to Healey.

“When the governor took office, she thought it would be valuable to create a button that said, ‘We now have a climate chief.’ It sent a signal of commitment,” Horowitz said. “Now, if there was a button that would let her undo this, she might seriously consider it because it is not politically valuable now in the way that it was then.”

At the center of those shifting politics is skyrocketing energy costs plaguing Bay State residents that amounts to a “third rail” and “limits what climate officials can actually accomplish,” said Stephanie Pollack, a former state transportation secretary under Republican Gov. Charlie Baker. Pollack later served as acting administrator of the Federal Highway Administration.

“When the state creates these cross-agency positions, they have to have a clear focus,” Pollack said. “If the portfolio is so broad that it touches almost everything, the official may struggle to accomplish anything.”

Healey, though, credited Hoffer with being nimble and evolving in the role as the landscape around climate and energy changed throughout her first term.

That’s demonstrated by Hoffer’s influence over the development of the state’s first climate bank and a proposed revolving loan fund to help communities prepare for extreme weather, Healey said. Those programs help address both sides of the fight against climate change: The climate bank is targeting lower-income households disproportionately burdened by high energy costs to finance home insulations, heat pumps, and solar panels, while the revolving loan fund included in the governor’s environmental bond bill would help communities adapt to a warming world with funds for coastal resilience and flood prevention projects.

“That’s why I created this role,” the governor said. “Because we understood that what was really going to be effective and also really required for the moment was a comprehensive coordinated approach that was across state government.”

Even though Hoffer doesn’t have a true predecessor, she also doesn’t have to look far to find someone in very similar shoes.

Brian Swett, Boston’s first chief climate officer, said he and Hoffer have a natural synergy: Both are responsible for prioritizing climate change across their respective jurisdictions, with Hoffer at the state level and Swett working in the state’s largest city. The two have regular monthly meetings.

“Both roles came about with the same realization that we can talk about all-of-government approaches, but if somebody isn’t responsible for leading them, they’re far less likely to get done,” Swett said. “Part of the role of these positions is to make sure that climate action and climate resilience is embedded in every decision in the right fashion. Having somebody solely focused on asking that question and moving that agenda forward is helpful.”

There’s also arguably no one better than Swett to assess how the job has changed in such a short period of time.

“We arrived in an area where we were fundamentally on offense,” he said, citing historic levels of funding opportunities and investments from the Biden administration. “We talk a lot now about being on defense. It takes a different head space.”

It isn’t always just playing defense against Washington, though.

This past November, House Democrats appeared to be on a path to fast-tracking a controversial weakening of the state’s ambitious 2030 climate commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half compared with 1990 levels. And they floated the idea of using a rewrite of Healey’s energy affordability legislation as the vehicle to do so.

For a few days, after CommonWealth Beacon broke the news of lawmakers’ plans, it looked like one part of the Democratic supermajority on Beacon Hill was preparing to give the state an out from meeting those targets in response to soaring energy bills that prompted Healey to issue relief for customers. This wasn’t political needling from the Trump administration. It was, in the eyes of environmental advocates, an attack from within.

That version of the legislation never came to pass. House leaders balked at the plan after facing intense backlash, ultimately passing a measure without that provision but one that cut Mass Save, an energy efficiency program funded by a charge on ratepayers’ utility bills, by $1 billion.

It was enough to deliver a shock to the system.

To Hoffer, though, when it mattered most, the state stood up for the importance of fighting climate change.

“It’s always difficult to hazard a guess about why a dynamic like that may have occurred,” Hoffer said, reflecting on the events that transpired late last year. “But the most important thing about that story to me is the manner in which folks in the Legislature responded to that proposal. That is the clear signal here that people really do feel very strongly that climate change is a priority in Massachusetts.”

The fact that legislative leaders ultimately decided not to pull the trigger on the most contentious part of the bill is contrasted by other Democrats like New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who in the name of affordability — and in the middle of a reelection campaign of her own — weakened her state’s emissions reduction targets that were enacted in a wave of climate action in states during Trump’s first term.

But to advocates in Massachusetts looking for proof of life that the Healey administration still takes climate change seriously and that the state isn’t retreating from its reputation as a climate leader, the governor’s relative silence about the proposal at the time its fate was still undecided spoke volumes.

When asked, Healey didn’t share details of her thought process during that moment or role in stopping the House’s effort but ultimately said that “no one’s moving off of climate goals and the need to reduce emissions.”

Hoffer, Healey, and Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Rebecca Tepper have now worked together off and on for about a decade — a trio of lawyers that have now risen to the highest echelons of state government.

Hoffer was Tepper’s boss at the state attorney general’s office under then-AG Healey. Much of that time occurred while a Republican, Charlie Baker, occupied the corner office in the State House and Donald Trump was carrying out his first term in Washington.

Healey then brought Hoffer and Tepper into top roles in her administration when she won the 2022 gubernatorial election. A number of Tepper’s deputies, like Peter Mulcahy and Elizabeth Mahony, are also lawyers and came from Healey’s AG outfit.

The relationship between Healey and Hoffer goes back even further, when they were classmates at Northeastern law school and graduated together in 1998. Later, they wound up at the law firm now known as WilmerHale together.

And their journey to the top of state government involved reaching new heights outside of four-walled conference rooms in law firms.

“We hiked Mount Washington together,” Healey said of her ascent with Hoffer in the summer of 1997. “We go way back.”

So, any organizational tensions — or blurry lines — that may bubble up between the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs and Hoffer’s newly-created perch pale in comparison to the “familial” relationship Hoffer says she has with Tepper. The two meet roughly once per week, in addition to another meeting between them and their senior staffs every other week, according to Tepper’s office.

Hoffer has also met regularly over the past year — often multiple times per month — with other key cabinet leaders, including Interim Transportation secretary Phil Eng, Administration and Finance secretary Matthew Gorzkowicz, and the head of the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities, including monthly “Climate Cabinet” meetings, according to schedules between Hoffer and other top Healey officials obtained by CommonWealth Beacon via public records request.

Those meetings, if nothing else, are likely important for relationship-building — key for a role like Hoffer’s, where already-oversubscribed department heads who are charged with stewarding hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money and scores of employees have no obligation by law to report to Hoffer or include her in agency decisions.

None of this is to say Hoffer doesn’t exert real power in her own right. Multiple people with knowledge of the administration’s inner workings described her as a trusted adviser for Healey and that the climate chief can command a room with her attention to detail and level of preparation for meetings.

But if success is ultimately measured by how close Massachusetts is to reaching its emissions reduction targets or the robustness of new funding sources brought on to help pay for the clean energy transition, Hoffer’s record hasn’t been particularly stellar, said Vick Mohanka, director of the Massachusetts chapter of the Sierra Club. The Healey administration, he noted, is seeking to attract data centers and has shown support for gas pipelines.

“The governor, the Legislature have this fallback of, ‘Oh, the Trump administration pulled back all this funding,’” Mohanka said. “I totally understand that. That doesn’t mean that there’s things that we can’t do here. It’s unclear what Hoffer’s role is in moving past the planning stage.”

The idea of getting siloed government agencies to collaborate and work horizontally to achieve a larger cross-cutting objective isn’t new in Massachusetts. In late 2002, then-Gov. Mitt Romney appointed Doug Foy to a “super cabinet” position overseeing the sprawling state transportation, environmental, and housing agencies with an eye toward sustainable development.

JD Chesloff, president and CEO of the Massachusetts Business Roundtable who also serves on the advisory council for the Environmental League of Massachusetts, said that Hoffer’s presence alone is evidence that the Healey administration takes this concept of a whole-of-government approach to tackling climate change “very seriously.”

Just having that point person can hold value in itself and send a meaningful signal that can resonate well beyond climate policy in Massachusetts, especially with Trump in the White House, said Casey Katims, executive director of the US Climate Alliance, a coalition of 24 states fighting against climate change, who also served with Hoffer in the Biden EPA.

In her role as climate chief, Hoffer has done “a great deal of forward thinking” about how states and activists can “leverage our collective power, our collective market share across states,” Katims said.

And, he added, Hoffer’s high-profile position and experience working at both the federal and state levels has meant that “there’s been a lot of really fantastic expertise, knowledge, and skilled folks in Massachusetts state government who’ve been able to plug into national work streams as a result of her leadership and her approach.”

For all the moving pieces Hoffer is constantly juggling, from a landmark resilience study that found the state will need up to $130 billion in investments to combat climate change, to thinking through how best to structure the state’s Mass Save program that has come under political attack, there’s one item on the top of her to-do list that has remained stubbornly unresolved.

Hoffer set out to conduct an ambitious analysis of the financial investments required for the state to reach its commitment of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. The study would put a price tag on the net-zero policy for the first time so that state officials can then identify fiscal and revenue-raising tools to meet that bottom line and deploy funds most effectively for dramatically ratcheting down pollution in Massachusetts.

It was Hoffer’s No. 1 agenda item for herself, laid out in a thorough 87-page report she issued in October 2023 that essentially reads as a roadmap of her priorities.

Hoffer wanted that report completed by the end of 2024, yet it still hasn’t been made public.

The state released a request for proposals for the project through the Department of Transportation in early 2024 and received five bids before selecting Boston-based consulting firm AECOM for the job, according to public records obtained by CommonWealth Beacon.

When asked about the status of the report, now 18 months after Hoffer’s initial timeline, the climate chief offered an answer about the separate study on the resilience investments that has already been completed. After being pressed further, though, Hoffer would only offer that the net-zero analysis is “largely informing policy” but “is still under review.”

Venice Teeter, a spokesperson for AECOM, said in a statement that “the work under the contract is ongoing.”

And an attempt to obtain the net-zero analysis through a records request was denied. William Doyle, the records access officer for MassDOT, withheld the document, citing an exemption “intended to avoid the premature release of materials that could taint an ongoing deliberative process” since the report pertains to “negotiations and/or discussions which have not been completed.”

The optics in an election year, of course, have led officials to wonder whether the Healey administration would want to release a state-commissioned study likely finding that the investments required to meet net-zero would run into the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in the middle of a campaign centered around affordability.

But, given that the net-zero analysis was at one point Hoffer’s top priority intended to cascade through a host of other critical decisions around financing the clean energy transition and has still not been publicly released, it’s a window into the larger picture of her office.

“Anyone who’s reporting to the governor can only be as aggressive on policy as their principal,” said Campbell, the head of CLF. “In the case of the climate chief’s position, you also have to rely on leadership from the cabinet departments.”

Hoffer lives in Barre — a town of 5,365 about 70 miles west of Boston, a fairly far-flung outpost and not the typical place of residence for a top Boston-based state official. Hoffer bought her home there in 2014 with her then-partner for $520,000 when she moved from Concord.

Driving into the town on a state scenic byway, grooved at one point to warn drivers of a hiking trail crossing ahead, you can see why people might move to Barre to find a quiet life with lots of space and access to nature. There’s not a single traffic light in town.

“You can’t beat the small community,” said Richard Stevens, a member of the town’s select board who owns a 400-acre farm in town and whose family has lived in Barre since 1789. “It’s a good quality of life. You don’t have all the hustle and bustle of the city. And if you love nature, there’s nowhere better.”

Yet Hoffer moved here just as her career was accelerating.

Hoffer left her job as an attorney at Conservation Law Foundation in 2012 and went to the state attorney general’s office, where she rose to the head of the energy and environment bureau — a position she held for almost six years.

In 2021, when Joe Biden entered the White House, Hoffer served as acting general counsel and principal deputy general counsel at the EPA in Washington. While there, she came into contact with a fellow Bay Stater leading Biden’s climate agenda: Gina McCarthy, a Massachusetts native and titan in the environmental movement, who was President Obama’s EPA administrator and later served as Biden’s national climate adviser — a role that Hoffer’s is now in part modeled after.

Early on in the Biden administration, McCarthy learned, unbeknownst to her, that Hoffer was challenging the US Postal Service’s decision to purchase new gas-fired vehicles — and pushing “really hard right out of the gate.”

“It is exactly what Melissa does,” McCarthy said. “She doesn’t second guess. She doesn’t feel like she should be asking 92 million people’s opinion about what ought to happen. She just went for it. It was a surprise to me, but it should have been no surprise to me, because I knew that she was doing her job.”

Back in Boston, when Healey won the governor’s race in 2022, Hoffer left her post at the EPA at the end of that year. She served on a policy group that advised Healey’s transition team on climate issues before returning to Massachusetts to take on the climate chief role.

Hoffer says she typically works from her downtown office Tuesdays through Fridays, staying in the Boston area to cut down on the commute, before driving her electric vehicle back to spend the weekend in Barre for the weekend.

When she gets back, Hoffer is treated to a real rural escape. Aside from her dozen and a half acres she has of her own, Hoffer has the added benefit of a friendly neighbor: Mass Audubon.

The conservation nonprofit owns roughly 134 acres of forest directly abutting Hoffer, having acquired the land in 1978, extending the feel of her quiet paradise well beyond her own property lines.

And, she gets to tend to her goats. It’s a bit of a full-circle feeling for her. Her father would take her to visit a house with goats down the street growing up in southeastern Pennsylvania.

“I just hit a certain age, and I thought, ‘If I don’t do it, I’m never going to do it,’” Hoffer said. “The work is so hard — you have to find the thing that you love and just really hold it dear.”

Still, the idyllic setting doesn’t mean there aren’t local controversies that wade into her area of expertise. Signs for “No BESS in Barre,” which is shorthand for battery systems that store mostly solar power, pop up along the sides of roads around town in solidarity with neighboring communities opposing these types of projects.

Residents of the town are so fearful of such a project coming to their community that Stevens thinks they might raise their own property taxes to allow the town to purchase land to block such development in Barre.

Hoffer says she sees the signs around town, too — and wants to course correct. She’s planning to coordinate a convening this summer among concerned conservation groups, community leaders, and everyday citizens in the central part of the state where most of the projects are proposed.

“It’s a big issue. We do need to get the solar built, and we can’t do it in a way that’s going to result in a bunch of ground-mount solar in our carbon-dense forests,” she said of fears that large solar projects will lead to deforestation. “We really have to be thinking about how all of these land uses intersect.”

Beyond the fog of campaign season, it’s not clear yet what comes next for Hoffer — or whether the climate chief role survives beyond Healey’s tenure as governor.

When asked if she’s had conversations with Healey about staying on for a possible second term, Hoffer was tight-lipped.

“If you know our governor, you know that there will be no discussion of a second term during the election cycle,” she said. “The presumption is never one that’s really there. We have to earn it.”

In other words: We’ll see.

Healey herself didn’t seem quite so shy about talking about what might lie beyond November.

“We’ll always want to work with Melissa,” she said.

What the climate will be for such work, come 2027, is the question.