There was, seemingly, broad consensus on Beacon Hill on the outlines of what needed to be done.
Governor Maura Healey had laid out the major priorities more than once: Make it easier to locate and approve clean-energy projects. Invest in a big way in technologies that prepare for a cleaner future. Address longstanding issues of environmental justice, including the plague of unscrupulous energy suppliers who disproportionately prey on communities of color.
All those worthy ideas were pretty much left for dead early Thursday morning, as the Legislature ended its session without passing any of it.
In a perfect illustration of what went wrong with this historically bad session, the big players in the House and Senate left 18 months of work for the last night, only to find that they couldn’t resolve their differences in a matter of hours.
Gee, what a surprise.
Like kids squabbling on a playground, the Senate blames the House and the House blames the Senate.
Activists who have watched this unfold over the past two years blame a broken system, and they are right.
“We’re frustrated and angry,” said Larry Chretien, executive director of the Green Energy Consumers Alliance. “We’re not treating the climate crisis like a crisis and we’re not treating environmental justice as something that needs to be fixed.”
Chretien noted that the state’s data show that emissions from construction and transportation have risen in the past two years. “By law, they’re supposed to be going down. We’re going backward.”
Chretien said he suspected things would end badly as the end of the session approached. Though the progress of most bills was shrouded in secret House-Senate conference committees, the gridlock was apparent to those in the know. “The indication we were getting was that they were struggling to find common ground.”
Essentially, the Senate wanted to pass broad climate legislation, while House Speaker Ron Mariano and his deputies insisted on something much narrower — limited, perhaps, to only addressing issues of making it easier to approve site locations for the infrastructure needed to transition from fossil fuels to electricity. After the House passed its slimmed-down version, the Senate refused to take it up.
“Both sides played chicken,” Chretien explained. “The House said we’re not going to expand beyond siting and the Senate said that if that’s all you’re going to do, we’re not going to play.
“What’s a shame is that it took two years to get this far.”
Playing chicken is a pretty accurate description of much of what happened as the session wound down. One chamber essentially dared the other to take or leave what it had passed. As a result, even measures with broad support — there were many of them — were left to die.
Legislative leaders like Mariano claim this is the normal outcome of a sometimes messy process. That’s not true. It’s normal, historically speaking, for major issues to be left for the last month of a session, as conference committees work through compromises.
The new normal is to do nothing, with as little public exposure as possible. It’s a process that almost completely shut out the public, while shielding individual lawmakers from any meaningful accountability.
John Walkey, director of climate justice at the Chelsea-based environmental group Greenroots, says one-party rule has made it harder for advocates to influence legislation.
“I’ve always thought we had an easier time when we had a Republican in the corner office, because you have a dynamic to play one side off against the other,” Walkey told me. “When you don’t have that, it’s like trying to put a crowbar in a marshmallow: You don’t have any leverage.”
The legislators’ rallying cry now is: We can still address some of these issues in the fall, in informal sessions.
Don’t take that seriously. Passing legislation in informal session requires unanimous votes — and everything is opposed by someone. By design, informal sessions are a bad vehicle for passing anything substantive. And why should we be optimistic that the next session will be any better?
“You spend all this time, and when it comes down to the last 72 hours, everything happens behind closed doors,” Walkey said. “It feels like this is not how the great, progressive state of Massachusetts should be managing its business.”