It’s either a climate catastrophe or a climate hero depending on who you ask, but Massachusetts is now dipping its toes in an emerging technology: so-called sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
A supplemental budget bill that Gov. Maura Healey signed last week includes the state’s first foray into SAF, which is made from cooking oil, plant and animal materials, or synthetic fuel, instead of petroleum. Now on the books is a $10 million tax credit for each of the next three years that’s meant to nudge airlines into adopting the nascent fuel despite opposition from some environmental groups.
The new tax break is in large part thanks to Rich Davey, the CEO of the Massachusetts Port Authority and former state transportation secretary and head of the T, who led the charge for Massachusetts to incentivize uptake of SAF, which some believe can be the answer to the aviation sector’s pollution problem.
Davey led an SAF working group that included other top state officials like Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Rebecca Tepper and Healey’s climate chief Melissa Hoffer and urged the governor to implement policies like the tax credit as he pushes for New England to become a SAF hub. The fuel can help cut emissions by around 80 percent, according to both a Harvard study last year and the International Air Transport Association.
“Candidly, this is not just a play about reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, but it’s actually an economic development play,” Davey said in an interview. “One way that states can effectuate policy that actually matters is this tax credit. We just saw this as an opportunity to tell the world through this tax credit that we’re very serious as a state, and so when we brought this to the governor and her team, there was great enthusiasm to get this done.”
Yet even authorizing a pilot program like this is inviting a larger debate about how Massachusetts should weigh the complicated tradeoffs associated with reaching ambitious climate targets, especially for hard-to-decarbonize sectors like air travel.
SAF is a tempting bet for top state officials and lawmakers in Massachusetts, said Chuck Collins, program director at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive research and advocacy group. Even though it seems like a no-brainer middle-ground way to appeal to business interests wanting to maintain their commercial operations while cutting the planet-warming emissions their planes spew into the atmosphere, in reality, it’s an expensive alternative that isn’t a “silver bullet,” he said.
Published by MassINC