An advocate with the Stop Private Jet Expansion at Hanscom or Anywhere Coalition chants outside Gov. Maura Healey's office on Monday, Oct. 2, 2023. (State House News Service photo)

YOU MAY WONDER how a peaceful well-behaved middle-aged academic found himself handcuffed and arrested along with 20 others last year at Hanscom Airfield.

Hanscom sits about 20 miles northwest of Boston in Bedford, on 1,300 acres along the town’s borders with Concord, Lexington, and Lincoln. It abuts the 3,700-acre Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge and is New England’s largest general aviation airfield for private jets, flying lessons, and the like.

Across a quiet country road from the airfield sits the birthplace of Henry David Thoreau. It seems an unlikely place for a ruckus.

Yet, quite a loud fight is brewing there. Private developers are working with the Massachusetts Port Authority (MassPort) on a proposal to expand Hanscom’s private jet capacity with 17 new hangars, the accompanying fuel tanks, and other infrastructure. A coalition of neighbors and environmentalists had been working since at least 2023 to oppose the plan with petitions, meetings with representatives, and yard signs, without success.

In April 2024, about 20 of us went to Hanscom Airfield, held signs, sang songs, and gave speeches explaining our purpose, first at three private jet companies and then, after we were arrested, while sitting on the roadside curb in handcuffs.

The Hanscom expansion would reverse one important element of Massachusetts’s famously progressive environmental policy. Massachusetts rightly gets credit for making partial progress on the first two out of three well-known fundamental principles for a climate-friendly energy system, which I teach in my class on climate change in the Environmental Studies program at Tufts University: (1) electrify everything that can be electrified, (2) make the electric grid green, and (3) reduce demand in a few difficult-to-electrify sectors such as aviation. State law has a target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050, which requires a rapid reduction and eventually a nearly complete stop in burning the fossil fuels that generate climate-damaging greenhouse gas pollution. To meet this goal, Massachusetts invests in electricity from green solar and wind power, and in new electric heat pumps to replace fossil fuel systems for residences and businesses, and more. When the Commonwealth boasted of meeting its interim 2020 goal for reducing greenhouse gas emissions (25 percent below 1990 levels), 95 percent of the progress came just from the electric power and building sectors.

Sadly, the expansion at Hanscom would undermine the third principle about reducing demand in difficult-to-electrify sectors such as aviation. The success in meeting the 2020 goal was 5 years ago. Meeting the Commonwealth’s next interim goal for 2030 (50 percent below 1990) will require progress in more sectors than just electricity and buildings. Converting to green electricity is challenging for transportation and effectively impossible for aviation. Jet fuel provides 20 to 50 times as much energy per pound as even the most advanced electric batteries, which remain too heavy to power full-sized airplanes. And the so-called sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) each have flaws. Some SAFs come from biofuels that compete with food production, contributing to food price inflation and world hunger. Other more advanced SAFs are expensive enough that adopting them would still require less flying overall.

As an alternative to technological fantasies of battery-powered flight, reducing demand in the difficult-to-electrify aviation sector would be more feasible than many people realize. For example, in higher education, which is a major industry in Massachusetts, I am the co-organizer of an initiative encouraging universities to set goals and measure progress for reducing flying, as part of their annual environmental reporting. During the COVID pandemic, universities temporarily made excellent progress using remote communication technologies. As an experimental proof of concept, I stopped flying myself in 2014 and was delighted to discover new ways of traveling overland for work and for recreation. Zero is not the right amount of flying for everybody, but this experiment illustrates the potential for ambitious reductions proportional to the seriousness of the climate challenge.

Far from helping, Massachusetts authorities actively make aviation pollution worse. For Logan International Airport in Boston, the largest airport in New England, MassPort is expanding infrastructure and underreporting greenhouse gas emissions. In Logan’s Environmental Status and Planning Report, the table on greenhouse gas pollution counts only jet fuel burned during takeoffs and landings, a small fraction of the total. An appendix to the same document reports the true amount of fossil jet fuel sold at Logan, 443 million gallons in 2022, which is enough to generate 4.26 million metric tons of greenhouse gases, more than 6 percent of all Massachusetts greenhouse gases. And that’s just the jet fuel. It doesn’t count the emissions from ground operations, manufacturing the airplanes, and the “radiative forcing” effect, which further enhances the climate damage. As a fraction of the state total, aviation emissions from Logan have recovered from their Covid-era slump and now are setting new records.

In this context, it would be absurd for Massachusetts to double the capacity at Hanscom Airfield specifically for private planes serving a plutocratic elite. Greenhouse gas emissions per passenger mile are much higher for private jets than for commercial airlines, which are much higher in turn than for buses or electric trains. After the new infrastructure is built, private jets from Hanscom would produce enough greenhouse gas pollution to undo the benefit from 70% of the solar panels installed in Massachusetts. The project’s environmental impact statement failed to report the full extent of its greenhouse gas pollution and invented without evidence large purported savings from reduced “ferry” flights of empty private jets between nearby airports. The report was so fundamentally flawed that it was rejected by state officials and sent back for a complete resubmission.

You can see why 20 friends and I felt obliged to object to expanding private jets at Hanscom Airfield. If there had been any alternative to public protest, I would have used it. I am a scholar, not a fighter. Before speaking up at Hanscom Airfield, I had never been arrested in my life. Now, at great expense in time and money, Massachusetts has scheduled individual trials in Concord District Court beginning May 13 and running through the summer. My own trial is scheduled for May 27.

So we have come to the point of decision. In this time of national crisis, will the Commonwealth of Massachusetts stand up for climate justice and meet its next interim climate goal for 2030? Or will it accelerate aviation pollution, understate the emissions, obey the billionaires, and prosecute the 21 good citizens who raised their voice and said, “This is wrong”?

Parke Wilde is a professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. He will be on trial in Concord District Court May 27, on charges of trespassing and disorderly conduct related to a peaceful protest against the proposed expansion of private jet infrastructure at Hanscom Airfield in Eastern Massachusetts.