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 state’s lofty offshore wind plans when he returned to the White House two years later. Rising gas and electric bills have prompted a fierce consumer backlash and led Democrats across states to scale back climate efforts.

All of that has 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.”