After Governor Baker vetoed the Next Generation Roadmap climate bill earlier this month, Senate President Karen Spilka and House Speaker Ron Mariano promised to re-file and re-pass the bill in the new session.
They held to that promise today, with both House and Senate overwhelmingly voting to send the bill back to the Governor’s desk. The Senate passed it by voice vote, and the House voted 144 to 14.
This is worth celebrating, but it is also a great moment to reflect on why the bill doesn’t go even further, why it took so long, and how can we better tackle the obstacles to comprehensive climate policy.
Enter the Climate & Development Lab at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. They recently published a study examining the forces at play in supporting and opposing climate policy in the Legislature. The study analyzed the lobbying for and against 291 priority bills from environmental organizations between 2013 and 2018–including 1,187 pieces of submitted testimony and 4,072 lobbying visits.
Their report, for one, shows a clear divide between people and big money: even though public testimony was more than 90% in favor of climate and clean energy bills, opponents — including utilities, fossil fuel and chemical companies, real estate companies, and fossil fuel power generation companies — outspent advocates 3.5 to 1.
National Grid, Eversource, and the Associated Industries of Massachusetts (AIM) — the main actors in the utility group — spent $5.75 million in lobbying, and the top actors in the real estate bloc — NAIOP (the commercial real estate lobby), Mass Realtors, and the Greater Boston Real Estate Board spent almost $2.6 million. The latter is especially noteworthy as the real estate industry doesn’t usually come to mind as a main opponent of climate policy. But the real estate industry testified eleven times against priority legislation for clean energy and climate advocates (and only once in favor), and Governor Baker’s stated reasons for opposing the Legislature’s climate bill are full of real estate industry talking points about how greater energy efficiency standards would bring all development to a halt.
Although in other states, the opponents of climate action will sow doubt about the reality of human-induced climate change, that basic science is widely accepted here in Massachusetts. That leads to a different set of arguments against climate action. Only 1 piece of testimony out of nearly 1200 denied that climate change was caused by humans: opposing testimony, instead, tended to argue that a particular policy was poorly designed, unnecessary, or unfair to marginalized groups (even though these same actors push policies and candidates that would widen the already steep racial and inequality in the state).
These arguments align perfectly with the three reactionary narratives outlined by Albert Hirschman in The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, and Jeopardy. The perversity thesis argues that any reform would just exacerbate the condition it is trying to remedy, the futility thesis argues that any reform will amount to naught, and the jeopardy thesis argues that the cost of a proposed reform is simply too high and puts past progress at risk. In addition to such predictable arguments, fossil fuel companies also argue that they are part of the solution — which is outright laughable.
Well-funded opponents who can pry their way behind closed doors of policymaking aren’t the only obstacles: the opacity of the Legislature, the report argues, makes everything worse. Data collection was much harder in MA than it was in Rhode Island or Connecticut because the lack of published committee votes and testimony (indeed, whether to hand over any testimony at all is at the discretion of committee chairs as the Legislature is fully exempt from public records law).
So what next? The report’s authors outline some key recommendations:
(1) Sharply Improving State House transparency: Committee hearings should be recorded and broadcast over the internet (and archived in a user-friendly portal), and written testimony should likewise be archived and made available online. Lobbying reports need to be much more detailed and shouldn’t include an option to claim that a lobbyist’s position on a bill was “neutral,” and they should be presented in a more consistent and trackable format. And for the sake of basic accountability, committee votes should be public, and more votes on the floor of the House and Senate should be taken by roll call, rather than quick voice vote.
(2) Building capacity and collaboration among advocates: In other words, ramp up the inside game and the outside game.
(3) Greater engagement from clean energy companies: Although climate advocates regularly testify in favor of bills that would benefit clean energy companies, the companies rarely ever testify in support of general climate bills. If they decide to join, they could add some much-needed clout as they tend to be better-resourced than most environmental organizations.
(4) Rein in utilities. The only way to reduce their lobbying power is to more tightly regulate them, and legislators need to start being bolder in their policies.
