“It’s more important now to act than it has ever been before.”
That was one of the messages Massachusetts Climate Chief Melissa Hoffer had for North Hill residents when she spoke recently at the Needham senior living facility. Her presentation was part of a Friday Night Forum speaker series in conjunction with the residents’ environmental sustainability committee.
“Today the federal funding environment is quite different. Federal money is a lot less certain than it was just a little while ago,” Hoffer said, referencing the Office of Management and Budget’s January freeze on billions of federal dollars, including environmental funds. That order, which prompted a lawsuit by 23 state attorneys general, including Massachusetts AG Andrea Campbell, was rescinded.
“It’s easy to just feel very overwhelmed and think it’s the end of the road,” said Hoffer, who acknowledged that she’s not a very optimistic person. “But I think there’s another vision possible. I do think in moments like this lots of things can happen.”
Hoffer outlined some of the things happening in the state since she took on leadership of the Office of Climate Innovation and Resilience within the governor’s office. The nation’s first state climate chief, she has revised the commonwealth’s environmental policy approach by integrating it throughout state agencies.
“Climate change is an issue that touches on everything. It has huge economic issues for the state: It touches on insurance, public health, transportation, public safety, public works,” she said. “So you can’t really have the traditional approach.”
Hoffer created a climate cabinet, adding responsibility for climate policy among all executive offices. “This is an effort to really pull the lens back and look broadly at what we are doing and ensure that we are thinking about climate change every step of the way,” she said. “That’s really important and that’s kind of new.”
An example of how it’s working, Hoffer said, is by changing financing models to create incentives for decarbonization to reach the state requirement to get to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. “We have to start thinking about different ways to fund and finance our decarbonization work because the state can’t do it alone.”
She said the Massachusetts Community Climate Bank was launched in 2023 to lend money to homeowners for decarbonization, and affordable housing. It augmented funds from the federal Inflation Reduction Act with an additional $50 million from the state. As a result, Hoffer said, “People are already getting financing and loans to undertake projects at their homes…This is now allowing us to go out to people’s houses, answer their questions about what they can do to make that home more energy efficient — maybe put some solar on that home, get it ready for electric vehicles.”
Because it is a loan program, Hoffer said in time the money will come back into the climate bank and can be used to make a loan to somebody else. “That’s been a great model for how other parts of state government can start to think about using their dollars differently,” she said.
Another area of focus for Hoffer is resilience, which she describes as making ourselves better able to withstand the impacts of climate change that are already here or are projected to happen. For that, capturing and absorbing carbon from the atmosphere is critical, she said, which means preserving and expanding forests.
“We often don’t take into account the value that we’re losing when we harvest the trees that are in a forest,” she said. “Right now there is no technology that we have that can cost-effectively capture carbon directly from the air and sequester it. Direct-air capture is sort of the Holy Grail right now of climate tech. We don’t have it yet, but trees do it every day. They produce oxygen.” Hoffer said the state completed a study to identify where most of the carbon-dense forests are in Massachusetts and is looking at how to align forestry practices with the most recent climate science.
Other resilience steps underway, Hoffer said, relate to investments that can shore up infrastructure affected by sea level rise, storm surges and flooding from extreme weather events. She said working with those in agriculture, workforce development and public health, they are developing ways of managing heat safety during extreme heat events.
Hoffer took questions from the North Hill residents and when asked what individuals can do, stressed the importance of reducing energy use. “It really makes a big difference, she said. “Turn out the lights. Switch to clean energy. If you are driving an internal combustion engine vehicle, stop if you can.”
She pointed out the enormous amounts of electricity now used for data centers, AI and cryptocurrency mining — more than quadrupling the need for electricity. “That means we just need to stop using as much electricity and get way more energy efficient. We can get there and we can do it,” said Hoffer.
“We just need to not give up hope and act. And have the conversations, the very hard conversations that mean facing the reality of the pickle that we’re in. But we can get out of it,” she said. “There’s still some time. It is a rapidly closing window, but there is still some time. And everything depends on it.”
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