Letter to the editor: Natural gas expansion plans unnecessary, destructive

More natural gas is unnecessary in a state striving for full decarbonization and beneficial electrification of buildings and transportation. Mainers are just starting to get over their long-standing dependence on dirty heating oil and do not need to invest in new gas pipelines over solar, heat pumps, and storage that meet our state climate policies and reduce operating costs over time. The Press Herald’s March 5 editorial says, “Midcoast pipeline rejection shows that climate questions aren’t easy to answer.” We believe that they are.

Unlike renewables and heat pumps, “fossil” gas requires an extensive and dirty network of extraction, production, and transmission to deliver fuel to homes and businesses. This network comes with added risks like leaked methane, price fluctuations, worsening air quality and adverse health effects. Or Mainers can skip all of that and electrify now.

Paying for new pipelines is a bad deal for Mainers, who can save more money and reduce more emissions by bypassing gas for clean, efficient electric equipment. Acadia Center analysis shows that switching from oil to gas saves the average Maine family about 10 percent on energy bills, but whole-home electrification in the same home can save 25 percent or more. And while a gas home emits about as much greenhouse gas as an oil home, electrification can reduce emissions by 60 percent.

Maine’s energy, reliability and climate needs are better met by clean heating and stronger building codes rather than decades of expensive and carbon-intensive infrastructure and fuels.

To read this article in the Portland Press Herald, click here

Plan Needed to Handle Influx of Renewable Energy

The shift to reduced carbon power will increase demand for electricity just as the grid will be changing from centralized power to distributed smaller sources of renewable energy for offshore wind and even hydropower from Canada.

Proponents say it makes economic sense to keep power generation local. It creates jobs and keeps more money flowing in a state. A fact brought up the Rhode Island AFL-CIO when it endorsed a key climate bill advancing in the General Assembly.

But is the grid ready? That’s the question New England governors asked ISO New England, the operator of the regional grid, in October when they demanded better planning to ensure “reliability and resiliency” in the power system to meet the changes in electricity use and handle the influx of renewable energy.

….

National Grid is installing 278 fast-charging ports across Rhode Island. The massive utility is also conducting a three-year study, called SmartCharge Rhode Island, of hundreds of current EV owners to understand charging habits and determine if incentives can prompt EV owners to help manage the grid by charging during off-peak hours.

Hank Webster, Rhode Island director and staff attorney for the Acadia Center, agrees with the strategy.

“The key to integrating EV charging into the grid in the near- and long-term is to incentivize off-peak charging to the fullest extent possible,” he said.

This strategy includes the use of battery storage and getting drivers to establish new habits such as charging at home when demand for power is low. So far, the pilot programs in Rhode Island and other state have shown that pricing incentives for charging during off-peak hours are working.

National Grid and the Rhode Island Department of Transportation are testing the concept of battery storage to supplant power from the grid during peak hours with a charging station plus battery-storage systems at park-and-ride lots in Warwick and Hopkinton.

“So by having battery storage that absorb excess energy at low-demand times and discharge it during high-demand times, we can better utilize all of that great clean, renewable energy and avoid calling upon unnecessary fossil power generation,” Webster said.

To read the full article in EcoRI News, click here

North Carolina environmental groups file petition to join other states in combating climate change

In 2019, the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality released its Clean Energy Plan, which vows to cut greenhouse gas emissions from power generating plants by 70 percent from 2005 levels and to make the state carbon neutral by 2050.

And now comes a petition from two North Carolina environmental groups that asks the state to join a regional partnership to combat climate change by forcing electrical power plants to reduce heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions by the same amount specified in the DEQ’s Clean Energy Plan.

The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) filed the petition with the N.C. Emergency Management Commission Jan. 11 on behalf of Clean Air Carolina and the North Carolina Coastal Federation.

“With climate change already harming North Carolina, and science telling us we are running out of time to reduce our heat-trapping gas emissions, now is the time to take action,” Gudrun Thompson, a senior attorney at the SELC, said in a statement announcing the petition.

“Whether we act now or delay determines our future as well as the legacy we leave our children and grandchildren,” Thompson said. “This petition outlines a cost-effective solution that is proven to work and ready to go to protect North Carolina’s economy, environment and people.”

If the Environmental Management Commission agrees, North Carolina would join at least 11 other states, from Maine to Virginia, in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, commonly known as RGGI.

What is RGGI?

The RGGI initiative was approved in 2005 and started fully operating in 2009, Thompson said. A 10-year review in 2019 by the Acadia Center, a nonprofit environmental group, found that:

• Carbon dioxide emissions from RGGI power plants fell by 47 percent, outpacing the rest of the country by 90 percent.
• Electricity prices in RGGI states fell by 5.7 percent, while prices increased in the rest of the country by 8.6 percent.
• Gross domestic product of the RGGI states grew by 47 percent, outpacing growth in the rest of the country by 31 percent.

To read the full article in the North Carolina Health News, click here

A Clean Energy Future for Rhode Island

Acadia Center’s Goals in Rhode Island

Rhode Island offers a unique opportunity for clean energy action. With its small geographic size, high population density, and a single utility serving nearly all the state’s energy customers, Rhode Island is a model venue for the equitable, clean energy vision central to Acadia Center’s work. Known in history as the birthplace of the American industrial revolution, Rhode Island is poised, once again, to become a center for innovation and the birthplace of a clean energy revolution. Rhode Island is also particularly vulnerable to the worst effects of climate change given its 400 miles of shoreline and low-lying topography. Rhode Island has set a goal of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050, but Acadia Center is pushing the state towards even more ambitious and meaningful targets through the Act on Climate 2021 bill (S. 78 / H. 5445), which aims for net-zero in 2050, and includes transparency, equity, and accountability provisions.

Landscape

Acadia Center played a significant role in some recent victories for clean energy in Rhode Island, including the following:

• 2017: Governor Raimondo announces a commitment to increase Rhode Island’s clean energy production 10-fold by 2020, moving from 100MW to 1000 MW.
• 2019: Regulators approve the 400MW Revolution Wind offshore wind contract.
• 2020: Rhode Island commits to generating 100% of its electricity from clean energy by 2030.

Yet Rhode Island still faces many hurdles to clean energy development, including some of the following:

• Low-income households and communities of color in Rhode Island are most affected by outdated systems, and climate-warming pollution, are often the last to benefit from solutions.
• Periodic efforts to terminate energy efficiency programs thwart additional progress.
• The state’s utility regulations do not appropriately weigh the health, economic, and environmental benefits of clean energy options against the risks of continued fossil fuel dependence.
• National Grid, the state’s monopoly utility, continues to push for natural gas expansion that is incompatible with the state meeting its current climate goals, much less the emissions reductions targets in line with the latest science.

Our Priority Issues

Acadia Center has built strong, lasting relationships with stakeholders throughout the Rhode Island climate community. Through these relationships and a holistic approach combining, data, advocacy and implementation, Acadia Center is well positioned to create change in Rhode Island.

Energy Efficiency: Rhode Island has been a leader in energy efficiency; since 2011, the state has scored within the top 5 states in the nation in energy efficiency, according to the yearly reports by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEE). Acadia Center is proud of its role shaping the efficiency policies that led to this ranking and advancing the creation of a stakeholder energy efficiency council.  We will continue to offer guidance and input to Rhode Island’s Energy Efficiency and Resource Management Council and press for heating electrification incentives to be included in energy efficiency programs, which will also help transition buildings away from fossil fuels.
Clean Power: Support additional procurements of large-scale renewables and work to align the regional grid operator with climate goals.
Transportation: Build upon Acadia Center’s leadership in the Rhode Island Mobility Innovation Working Group to help build a strategy for clean transportation policy.
Climate Planning: Ensure Rhode Island meets its goal to reduce GHG emissions 80% by 2050 through intermediate and specific targets, and work to pass the Rhode Island Act on Climate 2021 bill.
Utility Innovation: Reform the utility business model to put climate and consumers first and make sure the Public Utility Commission holds the utility accountable when exploring non-pipeline alternatives.
No Natural Gas: In addition to the work to switch to clean power sources, we continue to educate stakeholders and consumers about the dangers of natural gas. We will intervene where necessary to encourage options beyond new pipelines.

Spotlight on Aquidneck Island

Rhode Islanders on Aquidneck Island (Newport, Portsmouth, and Middletown) had a recent brush with danger in January 2019, when an operational failure of National Grid’s natural gas pipelines to Aquidneck Island forced a gas shutoff that left about 7,000 people in Newport County without heat in sub-freezing temperatures and forced them to evacuate their homes in the middle of the night.  Since the gas accident, Acadia Center has been engaged in the community, pushing back against the utility’s narrative and proposed solutions set. Acadia Center presented information to the town councils demonstrating weatherization and heating electrification are viable and preferred alternatives to building more gas infrastructure. Following this engagement, two of the three towns on Aquidneck Island supported moratoriums on natural gas pipelines, including new gas connections, instead choosing what are known as “non-infrastructure solutions” to eliminate the need for additional natural gas capacity on the island and encourage replacing gas with electricity.

Although we collectively managed to get National Grid to commit to planning non-pipeline alternatives and studying gas reliability, Acadia Center will be tracking developments to ensure that the work is being done. We will continue evaluating the options put on the table and advocating for the best possible scenario, as the utility still has no financial incentive to stop pushing for new pipelines.

Contact us:

Hank Webster, Staff Attorney and Rhode Island Director
hwebster@acadiacenter.org

For Media Inquiries:

Nancy Benben, Director of Communications and External Engagement
nbenben@acadiacenter.org
617.742.0054 ext. 104

The Missing Piece of State Climate Goals: Public Utilities Reform

Acadia Center is shaping reforms to the statutory mandates that guide state agencies in order to enable those agencies to be stronger partners in meeting climate goals. By reforming directives, state agencies will be better positioned to address the climate crisis and to make decisions that work for all communities, both now and in the future.

States have committed to significant economy-wide cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. But despite these goals, states have not explicitly empowered the agencies that impact carbon emissions – such as Public Utilities Commissions (PUC) and Departments of Transportation – to prioritize climate, equity, and environmental justice, in their decision-making. To achieve our climate goals, government agencies should be empowered to prioritize climate change impacts and mitigation in their decisions.

The decisions that PUCs and other state agencies make in 2021 will create the building, transportation, and energy infrastructure of 2030, 2050, and beyond. But because of outdated mandates, agencies are limited in their ability to make decisions in line with state climate goals. Public Utility Commissions, for example, which regulate the rates and investment decisions of electric and gas utilities, are legislatively mandated to reduce the costs of energy, ensure reliable gas and electric service, and guarantee utilities the opportunity to earn a profit. PUCs cannot regulate utilities in alignment with state climate targets or make decisions that value reducing greenhouse gases.

The result of outdated mandates is that PUCs often fail to treat clean energy resources on a level playing field as fossil fuels, furthering a dependence on energy sources that are exacerbating the climate crisis and leading PUCs to undervalue the future costs and climate impacts of energy investments that lean heavily on fossil fuels.

Other state agencies make many decisions with long-term climate ramifications, including establishing building codes, setting land use policy, and approving transportation projects such as new highways and road construction. Without taking long-term climate risks into consideration, these types of decisions could reinforce existing systems and products that rely on carbon emissions and fail to make the changes that will be necessary as we transition to a more resilient, zero-carbon economy.

By updating agency mandates, we can allow regulators and other policymakers to make decisions that support greenhouse gas reductions and consider climate change impacts. This would minimize long-term costs from climate change that now fall outside the scope of the core responsibilities of many state agencies.

To put these reforms into action, Acadia Center is working with other organizations, such as the Environmental Priorities Coalition in Maine, to support legislation for reforming PUC and state agency mandates in order to put climate and energy justice front and center and to ensure that all agencies are committed to helping states reach their emissions reduction targets.

Progress is already underway in the Northeast. In Massachusetts, Bill S.9, the major climate bill that is back on Gov. Baker’s desk after his initial veto in January, adds greenhouse gas reductions and equity as core responsibilities for the Department of Public Utilities.

In Maine, state representatives will soon introduce a bill that Acadia Center spearheaded to add climate and equity responsibilities to the PUC’s mandate and to task other state agencies to align their decision-making with the state’s climate laws.

And in Connecticut, Acadia Center has put together a factsheet describing opportunities to reform the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) and other state agencies, including amending the state’s Global Warming Solutions Act and modifying PURA’s statutory mandate directly.

Winter 2021 in Massachusetts – All Climate, All the Time

As the sun set on the last days of 2020, Massachusetts’ Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA) published two key documents – the MA 2050 Decarbonization Roadmap report (plus its 6 technical appendices), which evaluated 8 different pathways towards more than 85% reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) by 2050, and the Interim Clean Energy and Climate Plan for 2030, (“CECP”), which detailed the actions and policies that the Commonwealth proposed to employ to cut economy-wide GHG emissions by 45% from 1990 levels by 2030.  Acadia Center has been hard at work reviewing the 2050 Roadmap, including determining what the “end dates” may be for the use of fossil fuels in Massachusetts, and is leading a coalition in writing comments on the CECP.

Less than a week after EEA released these long-awaited documents, the Massachusetts climate bill – legislation that Acadia Center and its partners had supported through the Senate, House, and conference committee process throughout 2020 – emerged from committee and passed both bodies in the waning hours of the 2019-2020 legislative session. The bill (S.2995) called for a net zero stretch code, 50% cuts in GHGs by 2030, reforms to the enabling statute of the Department of Public Utilities, and requirements that the energy efficiency plans achieve a GHG reductions goal and include the value of GHG reductions in cost-effectiveness calculations – three reforms at the heart of Acadia Center’s Next Generation Energy Efficiency strategy.

Governor Baker vetoed the bill on January 14^th, citing, among other reasons, the expense of a net zero stretch code and a $6B incremental cost to achieve 50% emissions reductions by 2030, instead of the 45% planned for in the administration’s CECP.

Acadia Center debunked the Governor’s primary cited reasons for his initial veto in two blog posts. One demonstrated that a net zero stretch code is both a key provision of the administration’s own Clean Energy and Climate Plan for 2030 and an attainable threshold that many builders in Massachusetts are already meeting at little additional cost. The other concluded that the $6B price tag cited by Governor Baker as the additional cost of achieving S.2995’s requirement of 50% cuts in emissions by 2030, versus 45% in the Clean Energy and Climate Plan was likely off by orders of magnitude, based on the 2050 Roadmap.

The timing of the veto as one legislative session ended and another began made it impossible for the legislature to override the Governor’s veto.  With the overwhelming support for the landmark bill, House and Senate leadership refiled an identical bill, S.9, which passed on January 28^th with veto-proof margins. As one of the co-chairs of the Alliance for Clean Energy Solutions (ACES), Acadia Center brought together over twenty clean energy businesses and advocacy organizations to sign on to a letter urging Governor Baker to sign the bill and empower Massachusetts to address the climate crisis – as well as another letter thanking legislative leadership for quickly passing S.9.

Governor Baker’s second veto took the form of an amended version the bill, S.13.  As of this publication, the legislature is still considering whether to adopt the proposed changes or override the veto directly. Acadia Center has been engaged in conversations with legislative leadership about positive changes requested by the Governor that strengthen environmental justice provisions and stringency of the base building code, and encouraging the legislature to reject other changes, such as making the “floor” levels for 2030 and 2040 interim greenhouse gas emissions limits into “ceilings” and preventing future administrations’ abilities to reduce greenhouse gas pollution faster.

Why Acadia Center wants to see the Climate Bill become law:

As written, S.9 will put into law the commitments made by the Baker Administration’s Clean Energy and Climate Plan for 2030 and beyond, setting Massachusetts on a path to reach net-zero emissions and avoid the worst impacts of climate change. It represents a sea change in Massachusetts’ approach to climate change. While current law enables climate targets to be seen simply as an aspirational goal that feels good, this legislation would require the state to make a real commitment and plan to reach net zero by 2050. It also:

• Includes vitally important provisions ensuring that front line communities and low-wage workers will benefit from the Commonwealth’s transition to a low-carbon economy;
• Gives the Department of Public Utility (DPU) the authority it needs to consider equity and climate in its decisions;
• Requires interim targets and all sectors of the economy to strive towards emissions reductions;
• Puts in place real protections for environmental justice communities; and
• Makes the Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) a true tool to add significant renewable power on the system.

These are just a few of the benefits, and why Acadia Center is advocating so strongly for this bill.

Image credit: Office of Governor Baker on Flickr

Weatherization: The Little Climate Action that Could

New England is full of drafty houses. Regionally, almost a third of housing units were built before 1940, and more than half were built before the 1970’s, when the first building energy codes were adopted. Anyone who lives in such a house knows how uncomfortable it can be, on a February day, to feel the cold outside air seeping in through cracks around the windows and under the baseboard.

Less well-known is just how much these drafts contribute to the region’s greenhouse gas emissions. Acadia Center analysis shows that heating equipment in the draftiest houses can emit more than six times the CO2 of the same size house built to the current building code.

Not only is it possible to increase comfort and reduce energy bills in these drafty homes while also slashing emissions—it’s easy. Tens of thousands of New England homes undergo weatherization treatment through energy efficiency programs every year.

How does weatherization work?

Imagine poking holes in the bottom of a plastic cup and holding it under the tap. The larger the holes, the faster the water needs to come out of the tap to keep the cup full. Heating your home is like that: the cup is your house, the water is heat energy, the tap is your heating equipment, and the holes are—well, holes. Tiny cracks all around the house can let in cold air from the outside, while gaps in insulation allow heat to move faster through walls, ceilings, and floors. In the summer, heat and humidity can sneak in just as fast as they sneak out in the winter.

Weatherization is a way to slow the movement of heat by sealing up cracks and adding or improving insulation. Blocking the pathways that heat uses to escape your house means that heating and air conditioning equipment doesn’t need to work as hard, which saves money and avoids emissions.

Wait, I don’t see any cracks.

Like water, heat can move through spaces that are hard to spot. Window frames, door thresholds, fireplaces, switch plates, duct supply and return grilles, recessed light fixtures, attic hatches, and the joists that sit atop foundation walls are all common sites for air leakage. Homes settle over time, which unavoidably creates small cracks in all manner of locations.

Yikes! What can I do about that?

There’s an energy efficiency program in every Northeast state that will cover a big part of the cost of weatherization. These programs are designed to make it easier for homes and businesses to be more energy efficient, which benefits everyone. Weatherization work is often completely free for income-eligible households. Here is a list of programs by state:

Is there anything I can do myself?

Hiring a weatherization contractor will save you the most money, but some weatherization measures are easy enough for homeowners to do on their own. For example, V-seal weather stripping can be applied to the tracks of double-hung windows or sliding doors. Foam tubing on exterior door thresholds is also effective and easy to install. Caulking can be useful for larger gaps around baseboard molding and in the framing around windows and doors. Some caulking products dry clear, making the seal invisible. Others are white but can be painted.

Other types of air sealing projects are better completed by a professional. These include any work done on or near something hot—the vent for a furnace or clothes dryer, for example. Some projects are also just too onerous for building owners to do by themselves. While it may be technically possible to seal and insulate an entire attic as a DIY project, it is perhaps not advisable—for safety reasons, because of the effort involved, and because small mistakes can affect the success of the project.

Why would I insulate my attic?

While air sealing stops the movement of warm air through cracks, insulation stops the movement of heat through building components. Older homes very often have little or no insulation.

Heat moves slower through insulation because it’s full of air pockets—that’s why six inches of pink fiberglass insulates better than a brick wall four feet thick. Aside from fiberglass, contractors also commonly insulate with blown-in cellulose. Made from ground-up newspaper treated with a flame retardant, cellulose can often be inserted into wall cavities from the outside by temporarily removing a piece of siding, drilling a small hole, and then capping the hole when the insulating is complete.

Together, insulation and air sealing can improve the comfort of your home while cutting emissions. And because strong incentives are available no matter where in the Northeast you live, the work often pays itself off in bill savings in three years or less.

So this can save me money?

Weatherization is one of the best ways to save money on utility bills. For an older home, insulation and air sealing can reduce bills by more than 50% and emissions by 60% or more. If your heating bill in a cold winter month costs more than $250, look into weatherization.

PowerHouse and Building Electrification: Fact vs. Fiction

Nearly a third of greenhouse gas emissions in the Northeast come from buildings, and most of these emissions result from burning fossil fuels on-site for space heating, water heating, and cooking. Electrifying these end uses with clean, efficient electric equipment—like air- and ground-source heat pumps—is a necessary part of any realistic state climate policy.

Yet the fossil fuel industry and its allies have invested heavily in sowing doubt about electrification. Acadia Center’s PowerHouse home energy simulator counters this misinformation with a detailed analysis of the real costs and benefits of eliminating fossil fuel use in homes.

Information Gaps

PowerHouse is designed to fill a gap in analysis and information available to the public, enabling Acadia Center and its partners to provide credible data to rebut arguments made by the opponents of electrification. The simulator evaluates residential energy needs using ACCA Manual J algorithms and ten years of hourly weather data for eight locations around the Northeast. This allows for an analysis of operating costs, peak demand impacts, demand management potential, and net emissions that is both detailed and state-specific, rather than relying on regional or national averages.

A key capability of the PowerHouse tool is to quantify the compounding benefits of delivering whole-home electrification and weatherization as a package for a variety of residential building types. Weatherization measures like insulation and air sealing can dramatically reduce both the up-front and operating costs of electrification for most homes. PowerHouse puts a dollar value on these savings.

PowerHouse counters common misconceptions about electrification, including:

• MYTH: Heat pumps cost too much! The simulator demonstrates that whole-home electrification and weatherization leads to an overall cost reduction, which can be even more substantial in the drafty, old homes where marginalized communities often live.
• MYTH: Electrification won’t actually reduce emissions! As the model clearly demonstrates, whole-home electrification can immediately reduce emissions by more than half—an impact that grows each year as the grid adds more renewable resources.
• MYTH: Electrification will blow up the grid! Peak demand impacts are an important factor, but concern about the grid is overblown due to unreasonably pessimistic expectations about heat pump performance.
• MYTH: Heat pumps don’t work in the cold! Currently available cold-climate heat pump models can meet a home’s full heating needs in temperatures well below zero. Thousands are installed in the Northeast every year.

Equity and Justice

Low- and moderate-income households, communities of color, and English-isolated households in the Northeast are more likely to live in older, less efficient housing units. They are also more likely to be renters with very little control over their energy use decisions. Extending the benefits of energy efficiency and electrification to these households will require a concerted and meaningful commitment of resources—something that can be understood perfectly well without a home energy model.

However, PowerHouse can help to make the case for investing in marginalized communities by demonstrating the energy burden that these households suffer. A drafty, old house or apartment can cost six times as much to heat in the winter than a new unit of the same size built to the current building code. Providing clear, accurate numbers about energy burden for state decision-makers and other stakeholders can help bring the issue home for people who might never have dealt with energy bills like this themselves.

Grid impacts

Electric grid impacts are a common area of concern when it comes to heat pumps. Understanding the relationship between equipment performance, weather, and the peaks and troughs of electric demand is critically important to the overall project of building electrification.

PowerHouse closely parses this relationship, accounting for building shell characteristics, heat pump capacity, and input power for each hour of the year—granularity that is not possible with existing home energy modeling software. In this way, it can help to develop strategies for achieving building electrification at scale, for both new construction and retrofits.

Acadia Center’s PowerHouse home energy simulator meets fossil fuel industry misinformation with clear, fact-based analysis that proves the benefits of building electrification. By arming Acadia Center and its partners with this fine-grained analytical capability, the models will give advocates an advantage over the army of consultants working with oil and gas companies to irresponsibly prolong the use of fossil fuels.

Opinion: Developing floating offshore wind can help protect Maine’s seafaring culture, marine environment

The $6 Billion Question: Reality-Checking Baker’s Claimed Cost of Extra Climate Protection

In the flurry of activity at the end of 2020, two landmark (though long-expected) climate visions were put forward by different branches of the Massachusetts government. One, offered by the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs and backed up by its comprehensive draft Clean Energy and Climate Plan for 2030, called for the state to reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the year 2030 by 45% compared to 1990 emissions. The other, a bill passed with overwhelming legislative support entitled “An Act creating a next-generation roadmap for Massachusetts climate policy”, called for a 50% reduction by 2030, instead of 45%, among many other positive provisions. On January 14^th, Governor Baker vetoed the bill. But with the arrival of the 2021 session, the legislature passed the same bill again on January 28^th, which the Governor must sign or veto by February 7^th (although the large majorities in both bodies’ initial vote mean the legislature could override any veto).

Acadia Center has already debunked other claims in the Governor’s first veto. In his explanatory letter, the Governor claimed unlocking that extra 5% of GHG savings (the difference between 45% and 50%) would come with an extravagant cost: $6 billion more, to be exact. That figure, and how the Governor’s Office arrived at it, has touched off a number of conversations within the legislature and environmental advocacy community, because there has been little information revealed about where it came from.

Despite this, one can still infer valuable information from the Administration’s estimates for 2030. To explore this further, it is important to distinguish between an annual and a cumulative value. If, by 2030, Massachusetts reduced its annual emissions by 50%, the state would be emitting about 4.7 million metric tons[1] of GHGs less, annually, than if it only achieved a 45% reduction. Assuming those two reduction pathways gradually diverge between 2020 and 2030, that means – with a little help from high-school geometry – that the cumulative difference would be around 20-25 million metric tons. This is the triangular “wedge” of GHGs shown in the chart below, and this wedge, according to the Administration, is what costs $6 billion extra.

Now consider two important charts, included below, taken from December’s Massachusetts 2050 Decarbonization Roadmap reports, which contain the technical analyses that underpin policies set forth in the Clean Energy and Climate Plan, or CECP. These two charts show cost and emission differences between the study’s “All Options” scenario, which by 2030 attains GHG reductions of 47% compared to 1990[2], and its “Reference” scenario, which attains reductions closer to 15%. Reading the charts, it appears the “All Options” scenario cumulatively avoids about 150 million metric tons of GHGs and costs roughly $4.75 billion more than “Reference” by the year 2030.

To phrase it another way, the Roadmap analysis suggests that the average cost to get from 15% to 47% (and avoid about 150 million metric tons of emissions by 2030) is about $32 per metric ton avoided. This figure is also in line with a recent Applied Economics Clinic paper that explicitly calculated carbon “abatement costs” for Massachusetts. But the Baker Administration, in their justification for a more restrained 2030 target, says that to go from 45% to 50% could cost almost ten times that amount: $240-$300 per metric ton[3]. It is no surprise that bigger emissions cuts cost more, and costs per ton escalate as the least expensive options are exhausted first. Here, increased costs could mean that some polluting cars and fossil-fueled heating equipment would be replaced before they completely wear out. But the vast difference between these numbers, both of which come out of the same Administration within a few weeks of one another, suggest that different math is being used to tackle the same question.

Figure 5 from the Economic and Health Impacts Report, showing annual costs for modeled scenarios versus the “Reference” scenario. The area below the brown “All Options” line shows the cumulative cost difference for that scenario to be approximately $4.75 billion between 2020 and 2030.

Figure 46 in the Energy Pathways to Deep Decarbonization Report, showing cumulative emissions for the “All Options” and “Reference” scenarios. By 2030, the accumulated difference between the two would be 150 million metric tons.

A recent Boston Globe article by David Abel sheds some light on the Administration’s math, focusing on what it would take to stretch beyond the 45% target. For example, the article cites members of the Administration who say the Commonwealth would need 450,000 additional electric vehicles (EVs), which alone would cost $2.4 billion. That would mean over $5 thousand per car in extra costs. But what about the lower fuel and maintenance costs that EV owners enjoy? Even Consumer Reports acknowledges that the total cost of ownership for EVs is less than a car running on gasoline. And what about the other benefits to the public from breathing cleaner air with almost half a million fewer fossil-powered cars on the road? It appears that the Baker Administration’s math may not be accounting for all the benefits in the same way that the Decarbonization Roadmap does.

To be clear, achieving either of these 2030 aspirations, whether 45% or 50%, would be a significant milestone in Massachusetts’ fight against climate change. All other things being equal, fewer total emissions are better than more, since what really matters is the accumulation of GHGs in the atmosphere. Acadia Center is a firm believer in evidence and data-backed policymaking, and the CECP is a tremendous accomplishment, founded on solid analysis. If the Baker Administration is going to use cost to explain why it opted for a less aggressive emissions target, Acadia Center simply feels that the same level of rigor should be brought to that decision as is seen in the Decarbonization Roadmap. Luckily, the bill containing the 50% goal is already back on the Governor’s desk. Acadia Center urges him to reevaluate his position – or at least base it on cost figures that are supported by evidence his own Administration has gathered.

Image credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/massgovernor/50881414713/

[1] This can be calculated from the annual GHG emissions inventory.

[2] This value lies in between 25% in 2020 and 90% in 2050, and Acadia Center understands that the “All Options” scenario follows this straight line emissions trajectory.

[3] This is Acadia Center’s estimate of the range of marginal abatement costs implied by the Baker Administration’s letter. It relies on approximate values estimated from charts and simple reasoning, since the complete information needed to perform the calculation has not been provided.