The Will Brownsberger Podcast

Climate Change in Massachusetts: A Conversation with Senator Mike Barrett

• Matt Hanna • Episode 4

Share episode

In this episode, Will invites Mike Barrett (Massachusetts Senate Chair of the Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy) on the podcast to discuss Massachusetts' evolving approach to climate policy, starting with the earlier environmental movement and the 2008 Global Warming Solutions Act, which leads to conversation on wind, solar, the electrical grid, the transportation and building sectors, and how these all tie into Massachusetts' efforts on climate moving forward.

For more information on Will and to share your thoughts, please head over to willbrownsberger.com. Find more information about Mike and his work at senatormikebarrett.com.

Matt: 0:00

Welcome to the Will Brownsburger podcast. Hi, I'm producer Matt Hanna. In every episode, I'll be sitting down with Massachusetts State Senator Will Brownsberger to explore some of the biggest issues facing the Commonwealth and its people. This episode is a conversation between Will Brownsberger and Mike Barrett, who's the Massachusetts State Senator for Bedford, Carlisle, Chelmsford, Concord, Lincoln, Waltham, Weston, and a large part of Lexington. Mike serves as Senate Chair of the Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy, which is relevant to today's episode, where Will and Mike will dive into climate change and energy in Massachusetts. So let's get into the conversation with Will Brownsberger and Mike Barrett.

Will: 0:39

Yeah. So I'm just really grateful to have today with us on this podcast Mike Barrett. Mike Barrett is a really distinguished public servant, I mean someone who is, you know, at this time is state senator and is the chair of the Committee on Telecommunications.

Mike: 0:55

Utilities and Energy.

Will: 0:56 

Thank you. Which is a critical role as we talk about climate change and really the Senate's leader on sorting out what we're really going to do to address climate change, which, of course, is of critical interest to everybody, and I'm glad we're talking about it today. But Mike's got a long career in public service. He's been a mentor and friend of mine for a better part of what 

Mike: 1:14

A long time.

Will: 1:15

45 or 50 years now because I first met Mike when I was looking for a job coming out of college. But, you know, he's been elected in Reading. He's been elected out of the very seat that I sit in as a state senator. And then separately, later in his career, now is representing Lexington and points west of that. So someone who really knows how to judge the zeitgeist and put things in context, and so I'm really glad to have Mike with us today.

Will: 1:38

So we are talking about climate change. Just talk about climate change, Mike, your personal journey. How did you sort of engage with the issue initially and we all sort of woke up around 2006, right, with Al Gore. But that was me, but I don't know about you.

Mike: 1:52

Well, you know, the climate movement has its roots in the environmental movement. And I know that you were active in the environmental question before climate came along. So for me, I mean to really go back, I think the formative influence was in fact Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. I was a teenager when John F Kennedy was elected president and somewhere in that era, before he was killed in late 1963, Rachel Carson published this book about pesticides and environmental harms being done by corporations. It had a huge galvanizing impact. It took eight years from the publication of her book or so until the first Earth Day. But all through the 60s, at the same time that we were involved with civil rights and fighting the war or against the war in Vietnam, the women's movement, the gay rights movement, and the environmental movement were gathering steam. So that really freaked me out to realize that we were pouring pesticides on all kinds of foods and that they were making their way to us. That was the beginning of my interest in the environmental stuff.

Mike: 3:04

I did after college, very soon after college, around 1972, I went to work for Ed Markey's predecessor as the member of Congress representing Malden and places in suburban Boston, Torby Macdonald, who was John F Kennedy's college roommate, as it happens, and co-chaired the subcommittee of the Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee named Power and Communication, so it was electricity and telephones, in those days, landlines. So, beginning in 72, 73, 74, I started to engage with what became largely a set of climate issues and working with Torbett Macdonald and later with another Massachusetts congressman named Michael Harrington. When I ran for office for the first time in 1978, the environmental movement was very well along. We had an environmental caucus in the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 79 and 80, and I was chair of that caucus. In those days we were grappling with hazardous waste. So that was a huge issue.

Mike: 4:06

I grew up in Reading right across 93 from the Woburn hazardous waste site which became infamous. Trichloroethylene in the water, A Civil Action, a famous book was written on the Woburn situation. That part of Reading was freaked out, just as people in Woburn were. So that colored my first stint as a state legislator. I guess this is all by way of saying that there was a lot that preceded the climate movement and by the time it came along I was of necessity sensitized to a lot of stuff.

Will: 4:39

Yeah, so it sort of took off as a real force focused on climate, really with the inconvenient truth.

Mike: 4:45

Yeah. No, Gore did an amazing bit of evangelizing.

Will: 4:49

Right, and launched a lot of people into their awareness of it. I mean, I think people were aware of it previously, but weren't really focused on the potential consequences. It's like, okay, well, might get a bit warmer, that could be good in winter, but didn't really understand the implications, potentially from storms and species change and agriculture and everything.

Mike: 5:09

You're right. 

Will: 5:10

So well, talk a little bit about, you know, how you've related to it personally in your own life. I know you've done a lot. You're driving an electric car.

Mike: 5:15

Well, let's see just a bit of preface. There are a lot of problems we face in the world where there is no commonly agreed upon strategy for resolving them. We don't know how to alleviate childhood poverty, although we've experimented with a lot of things. We don't know how to even out achievement levels in school of kids of different races and backgrounds and ethnic groups.

Mike: 5:37

What's interesting about the climate movement is that very early on there was worldwide agreement that the way to deal with the situation is to, to oversimplify just a little bit, electrify everything. Because if you can have a clean grid, and that's an important if, and you can drive a car electrically, you can get off gasoline or oil, the combustion of which generates greenhouse gases.

Mike: 6:02

If you can electrify the heating of your house and get off home heating oil or natural gas, you can avoid using natural gas which, like gasoline and oil, emit greenhouse gases. So very quickly, and this was a blessing that people don't think about too much, we realized that if you could use solar and wind and hydro and even nuclear and other sources of non-greenhouse gas emitting energy to generate electricity, you could then move almost, there are some residual areas that we could talk about, almost everything off reliance on coal, oil, and natural gas. And one reason we're ultimately going to tackle climate change successfully is because this consensus pretty much holds up. And that is a spectacularly convenient thing, a convenient truth that makes climate change a lot different than the social issues with which we continue to grapple.

Will: 7:03

Interesting way of framing it. Yeah, so we're all trying to do the right thing on that. Electric cars and heat pumps and so forth. Well, let's shift gears and talk about your trajectory in the legislature on this more recently. You became chair of telecommunications utilities and energy.

Mike: 7:22

It was around 2018 under Harlee Chandler, so 2017, 2018. Harlee was a terrific interim president of the state Senate.

Mike: 7:31

Actually, I guess it started a little earlier under Stan Rosenberg, who was president of the place for a short time. We've been lucky to have a succession of state senators who have been progressive and individually decent human beings and who kind of manage the Senate with a kind of soft touch that's pretty inclusive. And so we've actually lucked out and chosen our leaders within the institution pretty well. So I guess Rosenberg made me chair. As it happens, the climate issue was cresting at the same time. And so we've done, so far, three huge multi-part climate bills, right, and you've been involved in shaping a lot of it. We've gotten a lot of work done. There's work yet to be accomplished, but we made, I think, rapid progress in the 2019, 2020 legislative session, these things last for two years. And then 2021, 2022, and then 2023, 2024, and now in 2025, 2026, we're doing a fourth bill focused on energy affordability. But the first of the four really set us off in a new direction, I think.

Will: 8:36

Hold that thought for a second. Let's just back it up a little bit for people who may not have the full context. Following Al Gore, in 2007, 2008 session, the legislature took a big step forward with the Green Communities Act.

Mike: 8:50

Global Warming Solutions Act.

Will: 8:52

And the Global Warming Solutions Act, which is a particular focus of mine, which set in place the idea that the state should have a greenhouse gas inventory and should be trying to manage the economy, if you will, speaking broadly, but particularly transportation and housing and the electric power sector, to reduce emissions, and that we should measure the progress of that towards a set of goals. So that framework was created. Then you've, in your leadership, have really moved that forward a lot, but I thought it was important to sort of discuss that stage.

Mike: 9:25

Well, I may have moved it forward, but I want to give you a lot of credit, Will, and the people who were around in 2008, 2009, because, you're absolutely right. The basic rules of the game were set forward in Massachusetts and in a couple of other states. They all did, there are about a half a dozen of them, Global Warming Solutions Acts for their states.

Will: 9:42

And your air quotes should be identified. You put air quotes about the word Global Warming Solutions Act because the irony is sort of painful. 

Mike: 9:48

It was a little short on solutions to be honest with you, but it was all about global warming, of that there can be no question.

Will: 9:53

But what it did do, which is legit, is set up the idea of a framework and a measurement framework, an inventory. You know, how much fossil fuels are we burning in each sector and, you know, are we making progress?

Mike: 10:05

Yeah, I really do mean it. And that preceded my. I had been out of politics for 18 years, working in the private sector. I was reelected from a new district in 2012. So the spade work you guys did in 2007, 2008, 2009, absolutely critical. So I, in that sense, I am a follower, not a leader. I am a Johnny come lately.

Will: 10:29

No, not at all, not at all.

Mike: 10:30

But, no, to very good effect. I will tell you that, of course, that thinking evolves.

Will: 10:35

That it does. And our understanding of reality and our perceptions evolve, so yeah.

Mike: 10:40

But 2008, to your point, set the precedent, set the benchmark here. By 2018, 2019, some real challenges had developed with the basic framework, which other states, by the way, still follow. For example, the original Global Warming Solutions Act only required that a goal be set every 10 years, and nobody can remember a goal that's 10 years in the offing, or nine or eight or seven. So as a practical matter, it ceased to become a behavior change agent. People just weren't really adjusting because whatever the hell had to happen didn't have to happen for, fill in the blank, five or six or seven years.

Will: 11:18

Well, I mean, we only set a goal. We had a 2020 goal and a 2050 goal. And the 2020 goal. I'll actually confess a little bit of bitterness about this, because, you know, what I now appreciate was, you know, we were sort of negotiating with the Patrick administration then, you know, would they take this bill? And they finally came around and decided they were going to support it because they were not on board originally. 

Mike: 11:38

Oh, interesting.

Will: 11:39

You know, it was all about the Clean Communities Act, it was all about utilities, so they were doing a lot. But the Global Warming Solutions Act was not sort of something they were trying to do originally. But I think they kind of realized. You know what? They're asking for 20% reductions by 2020. And you know what, we're almost there already.

Mike: 11:53

It was no threat.

Will: 11:55

It was no threat, and so they said we're fine with that, as long as you let the secretary hit a benchmark that's somewhere between 15 and 25. And I think they realized, you know, what? We got 15. We're already there. Because there'd been so much reduction in the use of coal, people had shifted to gas for power generation and then also to gas from home heating oil. The emissions were already down a lot. So they saw the trend and they said we're fine for that, so they signed up for that. We got 2020 in the bag already, so we can agree to that. And 2050, you know, who knows, that's somebody else's problem. And so I think that's sort of what happened there. And so I think you're 100% right in what you led on doing, which was setting some interim goals. Now go ahead with that.

Mike: 12:37

Well, first, I want to acknowledge the importance of the breakthrough that you're referencing. As a newbie who hadn't been in the legislature during this very important period, I could tell that the executive branch types under Charlie Baker were not changing their behavior to meet the 2020 goal, which was the first goal. I entered office in 2013. I became chair of the committee as I say maybe 2017. The administration had given itself three years to decide if they had met the 2020 goal, so we weren't going to find out until 2023 because the data supposedly took that long to trickle in. Well, again, behavior wasn't changing. The state wasn't really ambitious about getting all the ducks into a row. So, with the legislature's encouragement and the Senate's support in particular, I proposed that we move away from 10-year goals. They weren't making all of us work hard. So we went to five-year goals. They're always intended to be interim and the idea wasn't legal enforceability. The idea was benchmarking.

Mike: 13:41

I had been in the private sector again for 18 years. We set all kinds of corporate goals of various kinds, including revenue, profit. But actually we got very granular at Forrester Research. We actually counted the number of times we were mentioned in the newspapers because that was considered an important marketing metric. But the notion wasn't that we were going to horsewhip ourselves if we failed to meet them. You set goals, people are naturally motivated to try to reach them. Most of us strive to do our best and to play our part. So goal setting is a motivational thing and doesn't depend on your ultimately hitting the ultimate objective right on the money. So I moved our goal setting to every five years instead of every 10. I shouldn't say I did it. We did it collectively.

Will: 14:26

No, but you authored that. That's one of those things that you really put together.

Mike: 14:29

And then the other thing is that I wasn't happy with one overall goal, much too amorphous. Nobody could even think about what, reducing emissions, even every five years, as one big fat number. I wanted us to get real. So I did propose that we create six subcategories. Residential buildings would be one. Electric power production would be another. The business sector, commercial and industrial activity would be a third. I won't go through the entire litany of six, but I wanted really concrete problem solving of the sort that I had seen in the private sector applied to our getting to the end game, which is net zero by 2050.

Mike: 15:10

Again, the idea wasn't that the sublimits would be enforceable. The idea was that you engage in goal setting, even within your family, and for the most part, people try to get there. I'm grateful that the legislature bought that idea, or at least the Senate did. The House fought it, Baker vetoed it, but we overrode the veto in the first months of the next session, which is why that's technically a 2021 statute. It was actually written during 2019, 2020. Well, that set us on the right road and I want to acknowledge your important role, Will, you were actually very active during this period in support of these kinds of metrics. So, ever since, we've been able to at least ask the question, realistically, how are we doing, and can you dangle numbers to be attained in front of people so that they're looming in the short term enough to really get us all to hustle? That was the basic idea and I think, to a large extent, that goal setting has worked.

Mike: 16:07

Now, I did draft the language very carefully. So, again, all these five-year limits and sublimits are meant to be additive and cumulative, ending in 2050. They're not meant to be rigid, you must make every one. And I made sure the language doesn't require us to hit every single one. So legal enforceability is out the window. It's fake news in terms of a charge you can levy against this goal-setting exercise. I really borrowed it from the private sector. And they are stimulating, they're provocative, they make us stretch, but they don't put us into overdrive and expose us to liability.

Will: 16:45

That's really important, so let's just underline that point. So wasn't there a case back in 2016 where the Conservation Law Foundation tried to enforce the goals, or something?

Mike: 16:54

There has been one early SJC decision, yes.

Will: 16:56

And now, but so your subsequent language does that sort of change. CLF could not file a lawsuit.

Mike: 17:03

Right. Well, CLF’s position today, I know because I heard from CLF last week, that's the Conservation Law Foundation, a very important litigator on behalf of environmental and climate objectives, is that they now acknowledge that the goals were not meant to be legally enforceable. They're not going to sue to try to enforce them because they know that the language belies that. That's all good stuff.

Will: 17:26

That's very important.

Mike: 17:27

Yeah, and it's kind of an interesting and positive observation about people that, even though enforceability hasn't really loomed as a motivating factor, people aren't running around afraid of being sued, people have still knocked themselves out. I mean, within state government, but also in the grassroots community and in the business sector. They've treated these goals as things they wanted to get to, even though no one was truly wielding the whip hand over their heads. 

Will: 17:54

No, I think that's true.

Mike: 17:55

And all of that reflects well on humanity, I think.

Will: 17:59

Yeah, you say the business community, but let's say it specifically, right, the utilities. The utilities have worked very hard to achieve these goals. They've worked very hard to achieve these goals.

Mike: 18:06

And we've made sure that they can make pretty good money. They've taken the bit in their mouths and they've committed some very talented people to being part of the effort. 

Will: 18:19

Indeed, they have. Indeed they have. Okay, so. So that's that goal framework evolution. But then there's other very important strands to the work of TUE. One level down in particular, especially in the power sector, right. I mean talk about some of the steps we've taken and, you know, wind, the grid.

Mike: 18:33

Well, I would say that again, I've got to give, and this isn't because of anything I've done, I've got to give the other folks who work on climate policy in the state of Massachusetts a lot of credit here. Baker and then Healey both decided, and I would differ with them just a tad, but I don't want to quibble, that offshore wind was the easiest win when it came to cleaning up this grid which, remember, remember has to feed clean energy into your car or into your heat pump or, for that matter, into your electric clothes dryer or your stove. So there are reasons for choosing offshore wind, but practicality isn't one of them. The reasons you choose offshore wind is it's a mega project, just like an old-fashioned fossil fuel power plant. You're building a humongous something, creates lots of jobs in one place, although it happens to be in the ocean and involve a whole bunch of individual windmills whirring at the same time, but they're in proximity to one another, so they liked the sheer scale of it. It was easy to press release about. The unions got very interested because these are union jobs, and that was another great and positive aspect of offshore wind. But its vulnerability has now been revealed. A dummy like Trump can come along and decide he hates offshore windmills because they defaced his view from his golf course in Scotland. No business decision making there, it's pure personal animus. He's going to kill this central source of clean energy.

Mike: 19:58

What we ignored to some extent, to our detriment, was the more important solution, which is solar. Solar was there before offshore windmills. In the aggregate, it's much more important to New England, to Massachusetts, to the world, than windmills are, but they don't make for as potent a press release because you're talking about dozens, hundreds of discrete projects, each of which is smaller than one offshore wind project. And the unions were much less interested because the workforces that install solar aren't uniformly unionized. There's just all kinds of contractors doing this work hard to organize. And so we in retrospect should have put the attention which I now hope we will put, to making sure that solar is there. Offshore wind is key and there are very smart steps we're taking to keep that industry afloat, despite Trump's best efforts. But the solar piece, strategically and in terms of sheer productivity of clean megawatts, always was more important and is now poised, I think, to help us weather the Trump years.

Will: 21:07

Well, that's an interesting take. Of course, the challenges for solar, I mean New England, we’re not Arizona in terms of blue skies. 

Mike: 21:14

That's what batteries are for. 

Will: 21:16

Batteries, that's a lot of batteries to get us through.

Mike: 21:20

That's true, but on the other hand, battery technology is evolving quickly and is, relative at least to an offshore windmill, easily deployed, except in Brighton, Massachusetts.

Will: 21:32

Well, any place around housing is a bad place for a great big battery installation. I'm not a battery fan, as we've discussed. That's a different conversation. My perception is there's definitely a role for batteries, but placing them at the center of our power strategy is.

Mike: 21:45

Well, I'm not saying they're at the center, but they are useful ways to address a topic that you very usefully surfaced a moment ago, which is the intermittency of wind and solar, of both. Now, remember, we're not abandoning wind. I want those big projects that throw off a lot of jobs to flourish. I'm merely pointing out that Trump's effort to quiet offshore wind as a sector can be thwarted by our focusing on the other half of the equation, which we had de-emphasized a tad, and that's solar. Of course, we've, then, got other things going on, some of them very important.

Mike: 22:20

Quebec does have a whole bunch of hydro dams. You've seen some of them. We can now bring that electricity down through the state of Maine, despite the citizens of Maine doing their best to frustrate Massachusetts. And that is an important complement and that's not perfectly dispatchable. It's not quite baseload, but it's not as intermittent as solar and wind either. So we need all of the above in terms of the clean energy sector. And I believe that we are going to surprise ourselves and figure out a way to keep climate policy together during these dark Trump years. And, by the way, important to remember, as we speak, it's almost mid-September 2025. Hey, this sucker Trump only has about three years and four months left. He's going to be history very soon, and most of the clean energy investments we're making now take longer than that to gestate, so we should just continue on our way.

Will: 23:16

You mentioned earlier the thing about, you include nuclear in the list, which is something I very strongly include in the list as well. I mean, where do you think that’s at?

Mike: 23:23

I think it's in big trouble. It's buzzy at the moment. Biden supported and supports nuclear, and so does Trump. This is an area where they're congruent. But, you know, I was just looking coincidentally this morning at a news piece announcing that the private sector financing for the US's first small modular reactor had been pulled. Because, you know what, it had nothing to do with Trump, who supports this stuff. It has to do with the fact that financing nuclear, whether it's small or big, is a son of a gun.

Mike: 23:58

I don't need to tell you because you know the history here. There are only two nuclear plants in the last 20 years that have come online. It isn't because of discouraging government policy. The two Vogel plants in the state of Georgia were supposed to be completed by a particular date and for a particular amount of money, blew past the deadlines by years, blew past the budget by hundreds of millions of dollars. All because the private sector doesn't have faith that this is technology that can be brought in on time, on budget.

Mike: 24:27

So I am in favor of nuclear, but my eyes are wide open. This is not something that's going to come along quickly to supplant Trump's devastation of offshore wind. Like everything else, it's going to be a drama years in the making. And we aren't going to know for quite a while whether we can bring this stuff online to help us during any particular time period. Because, more than any other, certainly compared to solar and even wind, nuclear has a terrible record in terms of just managing to get built by a particular dollar amount and by a particular date.

Will: 25:03

That's for sure. That's for sure. You know, there's so much money going into the possibility that you could create modular reactors that would, you know, work off the shelf and be repeatable, if you will, so that somebody could just prepare a site and pour a slab and then truck the pieces in and set it up. You know, I guess we're just not there yet.

Mike: 25:21

Well, don't get me wrong. I mean the Inflation Reduction Act. Joe Biden's IRA did supply new financing tools to those who would like to develop small modular reactors. Trump has come along and he wants mainframe reactors. He wants central power plants to be nuclear again. I'm just observing that the problem solving here is as demanding as all the alternatives. So it's not a matter of they're having found a magic bullet. There's no magic to any of this stuff.

Will: 25:48

Yeah, that sounds absolutely right. No, that's right, and you know, stuff's always a few years in the future. We'll get small nuclear reactors. We'll get fusion, and every centimeter of progress happens with a lot of fanfare, but we do have some miles to go yet. So what we've been talking about is really the electric power sector, and you've made clear your thoughts about the key priority now is to move forward with solar. And I'd like to talk about each of the sectors, but before we leave the electric power sector, why don't we talk a little bit about the grid, right, because that's so central to everything we're doing and it's also something where your committee and you in particular have done some great work. So maybe talk about the challenge of improving the grid and what the legislature under your leadership has done to address that.

Mike: 26:30

So you're absolutely right, Will. There are essentially, but let me take a half step back, three big things to talk about. Clean power is one, and the other two are transportation and buildings. Now in the world, there are other things to worry about. I mean, as in agriculture, farming is an enormous source of pollution, given the pesticides used, the amount of trees that are cleared, and cows manure emit methane, which is natural gas. So worldwide we have a serious problem in terms of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. It's only four percent of our problem here, because our farms are small and many of them are pretty green. Another huge sector concern for the world is, well, industry, which is what the left loves to identify as the source of culpability. We actually don't have serious greenhouse gas problems having to do with industry, because we have no industry.

Mike: 27:24

We are a knowledge economy, a post-industrial economy. That's not a good thing by any means, but it's true. And so the contribution made by industries, which in other states are the biggest source of pollution, killing people, giving them cancer. When we lost our jobs in the 1920s in places like Lowell and Lawrence and Fall River and New Bedford to the south, they went south because operating costs there were cheaper. They brought their cancer with them. So folks in Louisiana are getting sick. They would have gotten sick in Massachusetts, except the jobs fled.

Mike: 28:00

So we don't have greenhouse gases coming from business, not to a serious degree, much to the chagrin, as I say, of those who would love to go after business polluters, which are in fact, the deserving main target in other states. We don't have emissions coming from farming. What we've got left are buildings, transportation, and electric power. So we have the luxury, not only of knowing that we have to electrify everything and make the grid clean, but knowing that the only two sectors we have to worry about electrifying are buildings and cars and trucks. Massachusetts is in a good position to continue to lead the country and even the world in terms of these decarbonization trends, exactly because, regardless of what you might say about our lack of farming and our lack of business industry, I mean industrial activity, the truth is that we're down to just two or three target areas, and that's good. We can manage those. You wanted to talk about electric power. Yeah, the next thing for us to do, now that we've set our goals for electric power we know it has to be clean, we know it has to run through everything, is to figure out how the heck we do that as a practical matter.

Mike: 29:09

And I do want to go into a little bit of a wonky democratic policy debate on this one, because you'll recall that, at least in Democratic circles, a big book hit in about August, and that's Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance. Their basic critique, and all of us, of course, are examining ourselves in the wake of Trump's victory, of Democrats is that Democrats, through this environmental movement that I referenced at the beginning, know how to stop things, and ideally, the stuff we stop is bad stuff. What we don't know how to do, these two thinkers have suggested to the Democrats, is build things. We have to get past such a thicket of regulation, including environmental regulation, that thwarts us from even doing the stuff that, on balance, needs to happen and would be good to see happen. So their critique of the Democratic Party nationwide is that we need to get into what they're calling the abundance agenda. That's been picked up by some important Democratic legislators and I'm talking about members of our congressional delegation. Here's the good thing. Again, just to reflect positively about Massachusetts. To our credit, this state has implemented this abundance agenda before Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson wrote their book. And what do I mean by that?

Mike: 30:23

Housing. The Transportation Oriented Development Bill, which requires that every individual community like Belmont or Boston or Arlington or Watertown, rezone so that a certain amount of the town is set aside for multiple unit dwellings, multiple family dwellings, is an instance of clearing away the vetoes currently exercised by local zoning and making way, at least in a portion of every town, for housing to be built. That is an abundance agenda breakthrough. The second one has to do with the subject that we're now talking about. Klein really focuses on housing and electric power transmission, which are basically porting electricity to and fro throughout a given state. He says it's impossible in the modern US to do that easily because environmentalists will stop you. Not so here. In 2024, as we had done in housing in 2023, we took on the idea that everyone's got a veto, including in the municipalities, and can stop a transmission line from running across the boundary to the next town over that might need it. And we changed. We took away the local veto, just as we did for housing. That's an incredible breakthrough and it was very subtle and I want to credit the Healey people.

Mike: 31:39

Michael Judge, the undersecretary of EEA, handled the siting and permitting piece. I was a part of the exercise but he was really in charge of it. He listened to everyone. He listened to the open space people who don't want to see any ground mounted solar constructed anymore in Western Massachusetts. He listened to the municipal folks who didn't want to give up on the veto. He listened to the business community that was intent somehow on getting projects constructed. And he found a way of threading the needle and making the Massachusetts Audubon and the Nature Conservancy happy about the concessions made to open space protection.

Mike: 32:13

Listened to the urban folks and made sure that environmental justice would be well served in urban neighborhoods. Listened to the home rule people and made sure that cities and towns would have a voice, but that none of them could say no, bottom line. So Massachusetts, in the siting of energy infrastructure, just as in the construction of housing, anticipated the abundance agenda argument of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that's now currently the rage in Democratic Party circles and we went there first, to our great credit. And this was a collective effort, certainly not an accomplishment of mine, but it needs to be pointed to because my constituents are disheartened. They're discouraged, they think that Trump runs the world, that his tentacles extend everywhere, they don't. We can thwart him by being very shrewd and very tough minded and seeing through these kinds of alternative ways to make government function, despite Trump's obvious hatred of any government that isn't the federal.

Will: 33:12

Well, that's, that's deep and well said, and just to make sure everybody gets it. What we're really talking about right is, as we talk about electric, as we first of all, you know, deal with just rising electrical demand because everybody's using more electronics, not to mention artificial intelligence and data centers and so forth, but also, just if we're electrifying vehicles, if we're electrifying homes, that creates the need for a lot more power, and many of our distribution systems may not be able to handle that power, especially down to the local level. Also, where we create offshore wind or large new solar installations, those create power sources which may be located in geographies that just are not served by the grid, and so we have to create connections to them. So the foundation for all of this electrification agenda is an upgraded grid. And, as you said, a whole lot of people came together, including you, to make it easier to build the substations, build the transmission lines and the energy facilities themselves, to actually make all this stuff happen.

Mike: 34:12

Which brings us to the current moment. And wouldn't you know, because this is the way life is, the current moment accentuates something entirely different. It's all about people's unhappiness with high electric and gas bills, which have to go up to do everything we've just been chatting about, including building out that grid, which is very expensive. So the current challenge before the legislature, and again I want to thank you because you know this stuff very well, is to ask the question how can we do all of the above without driving people berserk in terms of their monthly gas bill and their monthly electric bill? I think we can do that too, but that's the gnarly thing we're trying to unwind right now. Governor Healey, to her credit, has put forward some legislation. I think it's going to be before the Senate by the end of this calendar year. That's what I'm working on every single day right now and I'm cautiously optimistic that we can get to a good place.

Will: 35:14

Okay, let's bookmark that and make sure we've talked about the other two sectors a little bit, and then let's come back to that current moment thing, because I think, it's very important. That's a great place to sort of end with. But let's talk about the transportation sector. Let's talk about EVs, and you know that's been challenging too, right? I mean, we've got a president that's not so supportive of them. Federal changes. Well, how does that all look to you?

Mike: 35:34

Again, call me nuts, but I'm an optimist. Solar and electric cars are the two worldwide trends that Trump can't do much about. He can make sure we're behind the world, but he can't really stop the worldwide trends, any more than he can stop India, China and Russia and North Korea from having a summit in Asia. He just can't. He doesn't have enough clout and people don't respect him enough. So you're going to see electric cars take off in worldwide markets, unfortunately now led by China, because Trump is retarding the development of the domestic sector here. But here's the sort of things Massachusetts can do, and it has to do with energy affordability, with making sure that people's costs are down, or we can marry the two. The big issue that I've heard about from my constituents is the lack of EV charging on the Massachusetts Turnpike. Everybody takes the pike at some point and for a decade there have been chargers in place, most of whom don't work. And people drive me nuts, but they deserve to drive me nuts, because they pull into a service plaza on the pike in Sturbridge or Natick or Framingham and something is poorly advertised as being a charger, and when they finally pull up, the whole thing doesn't work. So we made a point over the last two years, and I have to give MassDOT a lot of credit, to say we're going to radically redo all the charger plazas. And by the way, and I know this because I've used every single one, there are four plazas that purport to charge your car as you head west, from Newton and Weston, which is in my district, all the way to the Berkshires. And there are another four plazas beginning in the Berkshires as you go east back to Boston that purport to charge your car. So there are eight plazas in all. But then there are all kinds of other very important potential places, including one, there's a major rest stop on 128, I-95 in Lexington. So we're going to, we just let out a contract, MassDOT did, but I was actually very involved on this one. We gave it to a company, an Irish company called Apple Green, and we're going to redo all those chargers and really produce for the first time state-of-the-art chargers and there are going to be performance metrics. Apple Green is going to get dinged if those chargers don't function.

Mike: 37:50

But here's the affordability piece, and this was very shrewd of MassDOT. The contract to redo charging for electric cars in Massachusetts and address charger anxiety and reduce it, depends on the chargers in the early years, when not a lot of people have EVs still being able to be financially sustainable to throw off enough revenue so that they can be serviced and repaired. So what we did was we gave the contract for the entire service plaza to Apple Green. Which means that the revenues from the convenience store and from the fast food eateries, and even from the gas pumps, can cross support the EV chargers, which are this time, are going to be state of the art and high quality. 

Mike: 38:36

Overall, those plazas are extremely lucrative businesses and not a bit of federal or state subsidy, and this is the affordability piece, has to be used because the revenue streams can reinforce one another. So we found a way fundamentally to say, with respect to fast charging for EVs, no state taxpayer money need be involved. This is a private sector operation that in the early years, the gas pumps will support EVs. In the latter years, the EVs will support the remaining gas pumps. And we're going to make sure this works without asking any money of you at all. So there are ways to be very smart about electrifying and moving into the future, headwinds notwithstanding, and I think Massachusetts is doing a decent job of harnessing those.

Will: 39:26

That's exciting. Yeah, you know that's a deep point to observe the worldwide trends that are backed by governments around the world and, in fact, in some places, by the economics of the choice.

Mike: 39:35

Well, you're going to have very inexpensive Chinese EVs, right, even with tariffs. Snd who knows, the tariffs could go down as well as up. You're going to see price competitive EV cars made, unfortunately, by non-American companies, because Trump is too dumb to let the American car companies compete worldwide. But you're going to see these things coming into the market and they're a better ride. You know, I have one Subaru, which is a combustion engine, and one EV, a Kia.

Mike: 40:02

I can tell you the Kia is much more fun to drive. It's quiet as a mouse, it's like driving a golf cart. You hear nothing from the engine and then, in addition, it accelerates like the devil. So for a whole bunch of folks, people who enjoy driving cars, really like driving their EV when they can afford to buy one. And that's where America could have helped us and where the Chinese will help us. Not just the Chinese, but I mean Volkswagen in Germany as well and some other makers, the Koreans, you know, my Kia is a Korean car.

Will: 40:36

You have a positive outlook on, a defensible positive outlook on the EVs. The building sector, of course, is the last sector which you haven't really touched on. Where do you feel we are in that mix?

Mike: 40:44

That's the hardest nut to crack, no question. You and I, by the way, have talked. You know a lot about this and you and I have talked a lot about it. No question, it is the toughest nut to crack because everything we've discussed so far is cost effective in a conventional sense. It is relatively inexpensive to build a big solar development. It is relatively, certainly, I mean, an EV is a good buy once the price points come down and they will and the charger anxiety issue is addressed in the ways that I've described.

Mike: 41:16

On the residential sector, we get back to solar. The way to make the building sector work is to encourage, because you can't dragoon people into putting solar panels on their roofs. But to make sure that every homeowner for whom the payback on solar would be eight or nine years, a reasonable period to regain the cost of your original investment and then to start to make money, that every homeowner is reminded that that's a choice that they can make, right. And there are all kinds of ways to do that. So we have to keep the residential solar industry vibrant and, by the way, that's very hard to do. There are all kinds of counter arguments and everyone is poised to make them. So, while it seems like it ought to be a slam dunk, it is not. Still I think we can get there. And keeping solar in play, because the heat pump piece is the difficult piece. There is no way that retrofitting an old New England house with heat pumps where it once had gas is an easy play financially.

Mike: 42:18

But we've been doing the smart thing. We've focused on new construction. So one thing the Senate did to its great credit, and I will take a little credit here myself, is that we prevailed on the Senate, the House, and ultimately Governor Baker, who threatened to veto it for months, to permit 10 communities to experiment with fossil fuel-free new construction. Lexington, Lincoln, and Concord, three towns in my district, are among the 10. But we've got some major metropoli who are involved, Newton and Cambridge being two of them, and Boston has a kind of quasi-compliant version of all of this. So new construction, it's cheaper to put in a heat pump than a gas furnace if you're building from scratch.

Mike: 43:00

So we're focusing on the new construction sector and while that isn't going to be the majority of homes until the year 2065 or something, it's a substantial piece. And because of transmit-oriented development, remember the abundance agenda effort to build housing in the burbs, there is more new construction than when the data was run, suggesting that new construction wasn't enough to crack the code.

Mike: 43:25

There's going to be a lot of new construction if we do our housing policy job right, and much of it, not all of it, but much of it, is going to be fossil fuel free, certainly in the 10 communities I've referenced, plus the city of Boston, which is a huge source of activity, Somerville and other places who aren't part of the 10, because the legislature, well, wouldn't let us go beyond 10 for the moment, so there were more than 10 applicants interested in playing. The long and the short of it is that we're focusing on new construction. You and I have discussed that we should also focus on people who use home heating oil, because the math if you have an oil burner for converting, even retroactively, to a heat pump works much better. So there are ways to prioritize and ways to move ahead, even in the building sector, which will be the last bastion to fall.

Will: 44:14

What do you say to people that sort of identify an abundance agenda conflict between, you know, the stretch codes, which, you know, I have to say I perceive them as hard to understand. I think there's a lot of builders out there, I've certainly heard this from people in the building sector that I don't know what I need to do to comply with the stretch code and often even the inspectors aren't quite sure either, because it's sort of metric-based, right.

Mike: 44:36

I think that's a transitional problem rather than a real problem. As people get comfortable with the so-called specialized stretch energy code, which was promulgated, only the regs, I think, have only come out about a year and a half ago. But my experience with human beings is that they get very grumpy when asked to change the nature of their work. But sooner or later most of us catch up. And so the Specialized Stretch Energy Code is not, it's complicated, but not inordinately so. It basically says that if you want to, and this is for not the top 10 communities, this is now for about, I think there are about 55 communities that have agreed to another version of a new building code, which is to say stuff that governs what you build. And for these 55 communities, if you want to stick with gas or oil, there have to be solar panels on the roof, with exceptions for roofs that are obstructed by shade. And two, everything has to be electric ready inside the new house. So you could put in gas, but once you do all the wiring so that heat pumps could just be a plug-in option, it really doesn't make sense for you to stick with gas. So, because the building code requires solar panels on the roof and electricity ready connections in the new house, yeah, a lot of developers are going to realize that the path of least resistance, even in the 55 communities, is to go with heat pumps from the get-go. Not overly complicated conceptually.

Mike: 46:06

Building codes are always a son of a gun in terms of their detail, but that's true of the status quo too. You're going to see a lot of new construction in the 55 communities, and not just in the 10 pioneers. And we're going to get there during these bleak Trump years. And then, you know, the thing about climate change is it's coming for us always and people are aware of it here, painfully so. And they're scared that we're not doing enough. They're being frightened and kind of bummed is in conflict with they're also needing to manage their household budgets. So there's a tension there. And that's sort of what our jobs are, right, is to figure out how to reconcile the tension as best we can, affordability and the inevitability of needing to make the transition.

Will: 46:53

Yeah, that's well said and that's a deep statement. It is our job to reconcile these conflicting priorities and to strike the best balance that we can. So I think that's a good place to start to wrap up. You said earlier and we should come back to it and which we promised to do, which was in the context of all these climate efforts, and we've covered the efforts in each sector and the outlook in each sector, we also are struggling with the conversation about affordability. Which really came to the fore last winter, when it was a cold winter, so there was a lot of power use and a lot of fuel use, and it was a winter where the worldwide markets bumped up fossil fuel prices, especially gas prices and so forth. So it was a, not exactly a perfect storm, but a storm where a lot of things came together to make it especially painful for consumers. And that brought the issue of affordability to the fore. We're still working on it. I think, as an outlook thing, that's kind of at the top of your agenda now, right.

Mike: 47:45

It sure is. The governor, as you know, Will, and this is a distinction which understandably eludes people, and why shouldn't it, but there was a time, and there still is a time in other, where you pass a bill in the legislature and the bill for the most part addresses one or two discrete paths forward on health care or on public safety or criminal justice reform. Although you've done some notable work, in any event. Like your criminal justice bill, all these climate bills involve multiple moving parts.

Mike: 48:16

They're not really bills in the narrow sense. So the current energy affordability bill has 62 sections. It's 119 pages. Every line is dense legal prose. And the 62 sections for the most part contain discrete ideas, each quite different one from another. So getting your head around all 62 ideas is sort of my job right now and ultimately will be the legislature's. The Gov, to her credit, has a lot of, there's no magic bullet again, but a lot of interesting ideas for reducing costs in the mid and long term. There's no short term relief. If we have a cold winter again, nothing in this bill will immediately take the sting out of the monthly bills, but I don't expect us to have a winter as cold as last winter.

Will 49:07

You’re knocking on wood about that.

Mike: 49:10

Right. And so I don't know whether the sense of pain is going to be as acute, but I do know this. That anybody living in Massachusetts who's concerned about her overall exposure to energy costs over, you know, five to 15 years out, is going to be helped by this bill. There's a lot of very shrewd stuff that changes the rules of the game going forward for all of us when it comes to the impact on our wallets.

Mike: 49:35

You know, as good as the bill is, it certainly can be made better. Karen Spilka, the President of the Senate, with whom you and I work, Will, is terrific about supporting us as we try to take a product that’s already pretty good, maybe it comes from the House, maybe from the Governor, and that are making it even better. And in this case, we really have to strive to, well, to save people money, right. People are exasperated about their monthly gas bill, their monthly electric bill, and the Senate President’s marching orders to you and to me is to drive down those costs as much as we can without impairing our fundamental commitment to climate policy, So that’s a task before us in terms of this energy affordability bill and I think we’re going to try to discharge the responsibility as best we can.

Will: 50:20

Well, I think that's a great place to wrap up. You're working hard on that. It's probably too soon to articulate exactly which of those pieces are going to move forward. That's going to be subject to negotiation, subject to politics, subject to a lot of challenges, but I think everybody in the Senate knows that you are working extremely hard. You've got your mind around every last line of that bill and when it comes to the floor, it will reflect a lot of thought by you and your team, as well as the input of everybody in the much larger world that's been working on that bill over time and, of course, all of our colleagues. So, Mike, thank you for your leadership and what you do. Thank you for taking the time to be with us. I just really appreciate both of those things.

Mike: 50:55

This was fun. Thank you, Will, for doing this. And I do want to just a little tribute to you at the end. Your website, your blog, willbrownsberger.com, I found is required reading among policymakers, and not just in housing and transportation, but also in climate. When I talk to people about the best summary of a given piece of legislation or a proposed idea, they reference your writing. There was a time when we would have referenced major newspaper dailies, but the era of major newspaper dailies unfortunately may be passing. We still have willbrownsberger.com. 

Will: 51:35

Yeah, well, I don't pretend to cover the waterfront like a newspaper. You know, we only write about the things we actually have managed to learn a little bit about. So it takes all of us to find the truth working together. But thank you, thank you again, Mike.

Mike: 51:46

Pleasure being with you.

Matt: 51:49

So that's it for this episode. If you'd like to join in the conversation, please head on over to willbrownsberger.com. As this is an ongoing conversation, Will would love to hear your thoughts on the issue and how it’s affecting you. You can find more information about Mike at senatormikebarrett.com. And you can subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts so you can know when the next episode is out, where Will will continue to dive into the issues and share his thoughts on them. Thank you for listening and take care.