(Illustration by Round Icons on Unsplash)

THE ENERGY DEBATE in Massachusetts has entered a new—and revealing—phase. According to Commonwealth Beacon, some environmental advocates are frustrated that Gov. Maura Healey is talking more about affordability, and signaling a greater openness to nuclear power and natural gas supply than they would like. Some are reportedly holding back campaign contributions and endorsements, complaining directly to Healey officials, and lamenting that the governor has moved away from the sweeping posture of her first campaign. 

That reaction says less about Healey or even climate politics than it does the state’s environmental community, which in its zeal to “lead” on climate and “electrify everything” has become increasingly unmoored from the growing economic concerns of ordinary people.

Like all Democrats, I care about the environment. I’m furious about Donald Trump. I also care about costs and the ability of working families to pay their bills. While that’s something that too many in Massachusetts’s environmental community seem to have forgotten, voters certainly haven’t.

Commonwealth Beacon reports that energy affordability ranked as the state’s top household concern this past winter, while Massachusetts electric prices have surged to roughly double the national average. So, while families care about climate, they are more concerned at the moment why their electric bills are so high and heating their homes has become a source of anxiety.

Yet too many in the environmental movement still talk as if the chief threat to Massachusetts is not unaffordable energy but insufficient deference to the preferred climate script. How else to explain why a Democratic governor acknowledging that supply, reliability, and price matter is viewed not as pragmatism, but betrayal?

This isn’t the first time the environmental community has threatened longstanding allies when they didn’t get their way. Earlier this year, the Massachusetts Sierra Club took the unprecedented step of calling on House Speaker Ron Mariano to remove Rep. Mark Cusack as House energy chair. What was the Braintree Democrat’s sin? He suggested that policymakers should revisit the cost of Mass Save, the state’s once-cost effective energy efficiency program that has ballooned into a $4.5 billion heat pump rebate machine.

Climate action and affordability is not a binary, either/or choice.

People can believe that climate change is real – and that their government has a duty to deliver reliable power at a price they can afford.

People can want offshore wind, solar, storage, hydro, geothermal, efficiency, and new technology – while also supporting natural gas as an affordable and reliable bridge to that transition. This was, in fact, the position of President Obama and his energy secretary only a decade ago.

Healey is very much cut from that mold. She has backed permitting and siting reforms for clean energy projects, climate technology investments, a lower electric rate to encourage heat pump adoption, climate resilience legislation, Vineyard Wind, and Canadian hydropower. She has won the endorsement of the Environmental League of Massachusetts Action Fund, whose board chair praised her for marrying sustainability with affordability.

The environmental community could learn a thing or two from her approach. For years, advocates treated “electrify everything” as the only solution to climate change – but minimized the cost of investments in affordable, reliable power and infrastructure. So, too, have they refused to acknowledge that retiring all of Massachusetts’s zero-emissions nuclear plants and gas generation faster than replacement resources can be built, connected, and paid for could leave us in a supply shortage with record-high energy prices.

When environmental groups refuse to grapple with reality—a reality worsened by the Trump administration’s canceling of offshore wind contracts—they do damage to their cause and their credibility. Not only do they leave the state vulnerable every winter to burning millions of barrels of oil during cold snaps at exorbitant costs to ratepayers, in so doing, they also make climate advocates look elitist and indifferent to ordinary people. They hand actual climate opponents an easy argument: that activists care more about symbolism and virtue signaling than emissions progress and household budgets.

The environmental movement played an important role in forcing the public and policymakers alike to confront the reality of climate change and the costs of denying it. The question now is whether it is willing to confront its own hard truth: the political limits of ever-rising energy costs.

Harry Brett is the international representative for the United Association of Plumbers, Pipefitters and Sprinkler-fitters of Massachusetts.