While the legislature did pass some environmental legislation last session, there doesn't seem to be anything approaching a comprehensive Green New Deal-style plan that includes jobs, transportation, housing, etc. We should expect more in a state where polls say that residents would happily pay more to save our planet.
Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan chat about Massachusetts politics. You can watch this episode on youtube.
You’re listening to Incorruptible Massachusetts. Our goal is to help people understand state politics: investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.
To stay informed:
* Subscribe to our YouTube channel
* Subscribe to this podcast.
* Sign up to get updates at https://www.incorruptiblemass.org/
While the legislature did pass some environmental legislation last session, there doesn't seem to be anything approaching a comprehensive Green New Deal-style plan that includes jobs, transportation, housing, etc. We should expect more in a state where polls say that residents would happily pay more to save our planet.
Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan chat about Massachusetts politics. You can watch this episode on youtube.
You’re listening to Incorruptible Massachusetts. Our goal is to help people understand state politics: investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.
To stay informed:
* Subscribe to our YouTube channel
* Subscribe to this podcast.
* Sign up to get updates at https://www.incorruptiblemass.org/
Producer 0:00
[This transcript was produced by a computer program then hand edited. It may still contain inaccuracies. The audio is the authoritative version of this podcast. Last edits were made on 7/9/2021 @ 12:20ET by CFH and @ 00:43ET by FL.]
Anna Callahan 0:01
Hey there! You are listening to Incorruptible Massachusetts. Our goal is to help people understand state politics. So we're investigating why it is so broken, reimagining what we can have here in Massachusetts if we fix it, and we're reporting on how you can get involved. So today, if you want to have an uplifting, feel great about your day, don't listen to this, because we're going to talk about climate change. It's gonna be pretty depressing. But we hope by the end that we're talking about what we can really do here, which, which is inspiring. I know we were just chit chatting about how the other day last week was, like 95 degrees multiple days in a row. We're all crazy buying window air conditioners, and then a day later, or was it a day and a half later, I went outside and I needed a coat! It was 55 degrees. And I was just confused. No way reconcile this.
Jordan Berg Powers 0:58
Forty degrees in four days.
Anna Callahan 1:00
Yeah.
Jonathan Cohn 1:01
Yeah.
Anna Callahan 1:02
Yeah, super quick. And there has been some terrible, just terrible news about the temperatures in the Northwest. It was 108. My brother lives in Seattle. It's 108 there. My nephew lives in Portland, it was 116 degrees in Portland. And I believe that was multiple days in a row. They say that the roads in Seattle like interstate five are just buckling. The concrete expanding and just breaking up into pieces. I know they were just talking about BC where it was pretty terrible. And in Lytton, British Columbia, it was 116 degrees. And then 118 and then 120.
Jonathan Cohn 1:48
I saw somebody point out about how the weather on Christmas last year, that is 2020, and July 4 this year weren't actually that dissimilar, which is a fundamentally disorienting thing to think about.
Anna Callahan 2:04
Very disorienting for sure. Yeah,
Jordan Berg Powers 2:08
Should we do intros?
Anna Callahan 2:10
We missed the intros, of course!
Jordan Berg Powers 2:13
Now that we've gotten straight into it.
Anna Callahan 2:14
Man, I'm just jumping right in here. Absolutely! Um, Jordan why don't you go first?
Jordan Berg Powers 2:22
My name is Jordan Berg Powers. I use he/him. I have a new contraption today. And so you're not going crazy thinking it's there. [gestures to his new professional microphone setup] And I have 11 years experience in politics in Massachusetts.
Anna Callahan 2:35
Great and you won't hear it but if you're watching the video you will see his new contraption which looks amazing!
Jonathan Cohn 2:44
Yeah, shout out to the new setup there! Jonathan Cohn, he/him/his, been working in progressive electoral and issues campaigns since 2013. Amusingly I'm rapidly approaching the eight year anniversary of having moved to Massachusetts.
Anna Callahan 3:02
Awesome! Happy anniversary on that. Our gain! Anna Callahan, she/her, live in Medford, super interested in what's happened at the state level. Alright, climate change. Ouch. It is not fun. Especially in Pakistan. Where in Jacobabad it was 126 degrees and they were talking about how your body can no longer function at those temperatures.
Jordan Berg Powers 3:34
Yeah, it was too hot, according to scientists, for humans to live. So there are now places in the world that we inhabit which, through us, we have made too hot for us to live in. If that's not a warning sign I don't know what is.
Anna Callahan 3:51
Broke a world temperature. That's right.
Jonathan Cohn 3:55
The striking thing about all the stuff out of the Pacific Northwest as well when you're seeing the places is one doesn't think of Portland or Seattle as being particularly hot places. I've seen photos of people showing that it's like 115 degrees, or something like that when probably it doesn't even get as hot as it does here in the summer traditionally. And we're not even at the highest end of it.
Anna Callahan 4:15
Yeah. And nobody has air conditioners.
Jonathan Cohn 4:17
Yeah. Yeah, which is especially the striking thing. We're not used to-- If you're not used to extreme heat, you don't have the infrastructure for it.
Anna Callahan 4:26
And then I was talking to my mother in law who lives in Minnesota. And last winter she was talking about the polar vortex, which is I don't know how many people know what this is but the jet stream is strong and straight when the difference in temperature between the Arctic and the equator is high. And because the Arctic is heating faster than the equator, that means that the jetstream is weakening and it's wobbling and it brings like arctic cold down into places like Minnesota and North Dakota where it's getting down to like minus 40 minus 50 degrees in the wintertime.
Jordan Berg Powers 5:08
Yeah, and so for those, for those of you who who don't quite understand the jet stream, if you want, Massachusetts or London or Paris to be inhabitable, or more importantly, Minnesota because of the curve that it does, we need a functioning jetstream. And one of the parts of climate that we don't think about a lot is not just that it's going to get hotter overall, but that it messes with the systems that keep that sort of, we inhibit that we inhabit the earth, based on predicted temperatures, and those are changing dramatically. And when we change them dramatically, it changes what is literally where we can live and not live. Those are the pieces that we don't think about it, just how even before we heat up the earth to a place where it's uninhabitable, we are also changing earth and whether or not we can live in certain spots.
Jonathan Cohn 5:58
[INAUDIBLE] as it relates to agriculture, because different crops grow in specific bands based on the ranges of temperatures that they experience. So if that average temperature goes up too much, and you experience a lot of days that it's just either too hot or too cold for a certain crop, that could have massive impacts for agriculture and food access in general.
Anna Callahan 6:19
Yeah. And then the other thing about is, it's not *just* temperature. So there are a lot of things that are affected on the planet because of climate change that are not temperature, like the acidification of the oceans, for example, is one of those and I was reading some terrifying statistics that coral reefs, which feed 500 million people around the world-- was saying that the coral reefs in all 29 reef-containing World Heritage Sites would cease to exist by the end of this century if we continue to emit greenhouse gases under a business-as-usual... if we just keep doing what we're doing right now, coral reefs in all of the sites that they are in will cease to exist.
Jordan Berg Powers 7:03
Yeah, I mean, thinking about just the biodiversity, the life, the things we care about, I will tell you important things to me, that we're affecting, like coffee and wine are things that are dramatically-- whether or not we can have them, right? There's gonna be shortages of those things.
Anna Callahan 7:23
Yeah
Jordan Berg Powers 7:23
...let alone what's happening with chocolate, for those of you who care about cocoa-- those are all things that we're affecting. So how we human beings tend to think of the world is that yesterday is going to be the same as tomorrow. We believe in that. And that is how humans are able to go about our things. It's how we rationalize the world. It's in our genes-- that's how we figure things out. But the truth is, that's not what's happening. We are literally the frogs in a boiling pot of water unless we do something.
Anna Callahan 7:59
Yeah. I love that you're mentioning coffee. That's actually, to me, the single thing that you've just got to say to people. "Look, if it keeps doing down that this bad, there will be no more coffee!" We'll get all these people jumping on the bandwagon. Yeah, that's all you got to say. No more coffee!
Anna Callahan 8:20
So you know, bad California wildfires. Bad.
Jonathan Cohn 8:25
Like, do it for people in countries that are at risk? Nah! Do it for your grandchildren? Nah! Do it for the coffee!! The coffee!
Anna Callahan 8:39
Yeah, that's all you got to say.
Jordan Berg Powers 8:41
I mean, you know, it'll be there. It's just like, it's like everything else. There's regions that have expertise, they have places that--
Jonathan Cohn 8:49
yeah
Jordan Berg Powers 8:49
--know how to do it. They have all those things. And because we're changing the climate, the ability to grow those crops, the sort of predictability of how you grow those crops lessens, and it's going to become, it's gonna be more expensive, because it's gonna be harder to grow. If the places that we normally grow them can't sustain them. And as we started off the show on, it's really hard to grow crops, if you have a 40 degree difference in four days, that's a lot.
Jonathan Cohn 9:18
Yeah
Jordan Berg Powers 9:18
That stresses out plants. You think it stresses out your indoor plants? Imagine what it's doing to our food supply!
Anna Callahan 9:24
My zuchinis seem to be doing fine. My little zuchini plants that grew out of my compost. We literally put our compost in there and nothing but zuchini grew. But I agree with you. I will say that if all the bees die out, then we're [INAUDIBLE] because a third or two thirds or some huge number of plants that we depend on for food will no longer be able to be pollinated and they will die very quickly. And I think coffee is one of those. So it's not just temperature but like there are these other delicate balance things that if we lose the bees--
Jordan Berg Powers 9:56
yeah
Anna Callahan 9:56
--we're screwed
Jordan Berg Powers 9:59
We need to be limiting our temperature, we need to be limiting the global average temperature to below two Celsius above pre-industrial levels in line with the Paris Agreement. And we are passing [that level]. There was recently some readings in the Arctic that had us above 350 parts per billion, which is the redzone. That's the "Oh, my God, we're in trouble." And we're there sooner than any of us, like any scientist thought we'd be there. So not only are we not headed in the right direction, we're headed in the wrong direction faster than we had, than anybody was predicting.
Anna Callahan 10:34
I don't think that this is news to to listeners of this show. This is not something that we're breaking some news to people. It's more like listeners of this show, as well as millions of other people in Massachusetts, understand and are ready and would even, according to polling, would pay more money, would *gladly* pay more money for Massachusetts to be on the forefront of a real Green New Deal. And I'd like for us to talk a little bit about what happened last session, because they did pass some legislation for the first time in... How many years had it been since they had passed any environmental legislation?
Jonathan Cohn 11:14
They've done smallbore stuff. It's the first time that they did something of scale in a while. And it technically ended up being at the very beginning of the new session when they ended up actually passing it. The next round, I forget the formal name of it, an Act Creating a Next Generation Roadmap for Massachusetts Climate Policy, that ended up actually falling into this session, because of the tendency to delay, when they finally came to a consensus on climate legislation, it was so late in the session that Charlie Baker was able to pocket-- was able to that he was able to "actually I don't like this, that and the other part of the bill, so I'm not gonna sign it." And there was nothing that they could do about it. So they actually had to refile it this session, and pass it anew. And credit to them, that actually showed, in some ways I think, actually, for all of [INAUDIBLE] I have, I do think that Ron Mariano is less chummy with Charlie Baker than Bob Deleo was, that that was actually a positive example of the Senate President and the House Speaker deciding that we're going to align together against the governor, as opposed to a perhaps more common occurrence of the governor and the House Speaker aligning against the Senate. Um, but the one thing the bill did, it did a number of significant things. However, the one point I've often raised when discussing the roadmap bill is that a lot of it is about targets. It's targets, it's some regulatory policy changes. It's basically like codifying a 2050 roadmap plan with a net zero emissions limit.
Jonathan Cohn 13:00
A quick, small thing there. There was a lot of tension in the environmental community about the whole concept of net zero itself. Because net zero does not mean zero, right? That means that you can still allow the pollution to happen, you just need to offset it. My favorite kind of analogy for offsets is always from the facilities director of my undergrad who called them buying indulgences. That effectively what you're doing, you're saying, well, it's okay that we do all this stuff here as long as we basically buy our right to do it. But given all of the ways in which communities around the polluting sites get that impact-- that still stays. But it did set targets, stronger than a number of other states have, as well as a statewide emissions reductions. What is this, about 50% from 1990 levels by 2030, up to 85% by 2050. That's actually more ambitious than what California has. But notably, California is not on track to meet its goal, which I think gets to the big point. And as well as when thinking about the renewable energy goal, it helps escalate our kind of our renewable energy portfolio standard, the percentage of renewable energy that utilities have to have. But again, it's the question of we can set these goals and they're good and they're important, but we also need to have the policy infrastructure and investments to make achieving those goals even possible. And there are certain small things in the bill: It increases the offshore wind procurement. Not as far as it should. That according to the National Renewable Energy Lab laboratory, identified 8000 megawatts on the Cape alone and the bill just increased it to about two-thirds of that. And had a number of good steps around equity and around codifying a definition of environmental justice for better process and better appliance standards, helping-- because we tend to be strong and efficient on efficiency grounds moving there. But when it comes to our emissions, so much of that comes from the transportation sector, and if we're not addressing how we get around, we're not making as much of a dent as we need to.
Anna Callahan 15:28
It's like two-thirds or something right, two-thirds of our emissions approximately, in Massachusetts come from transportation. And there's not a lot of movement there.
Jonathan Cohn 15:37
I remember reading a good article by former Secretary of Transportation Jim Aloisi in Commonwealth [magazine] about how the bill sidesteps transportation policy more broadly, in how you address the cars and buses, etc. But especially how you get people out of cars. And the things that we need to do, because even just like if electrification arrived, if you get people to have cars that don't rely as heavily on gas, you're still relying on cars, [laughs] they're still materials heavy. They're still, even if it's not gas, it's still taking a lot from their electric. And whereas walking uses just so much less. Biking uses so much less. Buses, trains, and what impact that has on the built environment broadly?
Jordan Berg Powers 16:38
Yeah, I think a lot about this. It gets to infrastructure problems, right? Even if every car were electric on the road, that power needs to come from somewhere, and a lot of that power is still coming from fossil fuels, right? So it fixes one problem, but you're straining a system that's already pretty strained, and if you haven't built the infrastructure, you don't have the ability to get that power around places very well. Our infrastructure is falling apart, it's not very good. And, you know, we have gas that leaks all the time. I was reading, I saw a whole thing, actually, on Samantha Bee about gas stoves. So it's actually a very toxic way to make food. But it is also an emitter of carbon dioxide, right, it is another emitter of carbon dioxide. So there's all these infrastructure things that we have, that we don't-- that we don't have the infrastructure to meet our goals. And so it's really important, I think we should always celebrate victories, because we don't get enough of them. It's really important to set broad goals, otherwise you can't meet them. But we don't have the infrastructure right now to meet them, and we have a governor who's interested in giving away money to rich people, as opposed to just investing in the things we know work. He's *cut* transportation. He's made it harder to get around through public transportation, and when he has opportunities to invest in those systems, because that's literally going to be how we survive as a civilization, as a people, right? Like, that's how people are gonna survive. He's like, 'it's gonna force people'. You know, we need to have a vision for where this money is going to go. But not just the money we're getting because we're sort of bringing in more taxes than we thought. There's going to be federal money coming in. Where is that money going? Is it going to go to creative jobs that build us for the future, that enable us to be able to survive as a people, as human beings on this earth? Are we going to build towards that or are we not?
Anna Callahan 18:43
Yeah
Jordan Berg Powers 18:43
Because we really are at that point.
Anna Callahan 18:45
And one thing that I-- oh Jonathan go ahead,
Jonathan Cohn 18:47
Oh, yeah, just a comment. I felt like the investments that we need and how like they actually would improve, like, often the experience of living in places reminds me of one of my favorite kind of political cartoons, which was from-- I forget what year it actually was, and I'm trying to-- 2009 I'm trying to actually read it, by Joel Pett, who's a Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist from the Lexington Herald-Leader, that people will probably remember describe is one of our climate summit. And you have somebody saying, 'What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?' On top of the board it's energy independence, preserving rain forest, sustainability, green jobs, and most of these renewables, clean water and air, healthy children, etc, etc. And I'm going to claim Not only that, the response to climate change can also be a good thing when it comes to job creation out of a recession, and making sure that those are good jobs people are getting, but also insofar as the things that we need to do to address it are often things that help with cleaner air and cleaner water. That's basic quality of life that people deserve.
Anna Callahan 19:53
Wouldn't it be terrible, if it's actually a hoax, and we create a better world for no reason! That would just be awful.
Jordan Berg Powers 19:58
Yeah. What a terrible world it would be to be able to easily get around without this--
Anna Callahan 20:04
Right? Exactly. For our houses not to like leak like sieves and just pour heat and money out the door? You know, that'd be terrible, you know?
Jordan Berg Powers 20:16
I would just say, because the other part of this, which I think is so great about what's happening in the environmental justice movement, is the linkages of this to people's lived experiences, especially people of color. And one of the things that we found in Poland that has really helped actually move some of this conversation is that when you ask the people who live in cities, mostly people of color, especially Latinx, families, if they think of themselves as environmentalists, or care about the environment, it was higher than white folks. We have a vision of who environmentalists are as being white people, but it's not. It's the people who live on the tail end of this terrible capitalist system, right? Those are people like, yeah, my lived environment is crap and we need to change it dramatically. So imagine if you could get around, not just sort of go into the middle of town, and out of town, right? You could go into Boston, and then go to the suburbs. But you can actually get a route. Imagine getting a route through the state and your city fast and clean, where you're not having to cough after you get off.
Anna Callahan 21:19
And you can read a book while you're doing it!
Jordan Berg Powers 21:20
That affects us! That affects a lot of people. It affects a lot of people who are currently at the-- it's hard to get around. It's expensive. It's really expensive to take public transportation. It's hard to get around. It's not reliable. And then you get off and it's spitting out God knows what and you're coughing, right. Like I remember the first time I had air that was clean, I coughed because my lungs were like, I don't know what this is, what is this fresh air? City kid, right? Like, what is this fresh air? What is that? Like we would--
Anna Callahan 21:57
So I want to bring this all together because we've talked about infrastructure, we're talking about transportation, talked a little bit about housing, and housing leaking heat, and also gas stoves, and that sort of thing. When you talk about all these things together, especially if you throw in jobs and climate, we're talking about what people think of as a Green New Deal. And I do want to mention that I feel like what Medicare For All became known, and everybody loved it, suddenly, every candidate had their own special Medicare for all that was not Medicare for all, but meant something totally different but was called Medicare for All. And I feel like that happens with the Green New Deal as well. There was a suite of bills that had been named the Green New Deal for Massachusetts, and yet had no jobs, had no-- this didn't include housing. It was six bills that mostly had something to do with environment, and yet, my friends in the environmental movement were bothered that this was being called the Green New Deal. Because once you say that, and then you pass it or some of it then you're sorta like, "We've done it! We're done." And so this concept that we're talking about, like Massachusetts, could do this. And it would be especially important after COVID, when a lot of people do not have jobs. But the jobs they had before people are looking for fulfilling work. And there's a ton of work to be done. We're going to overhaul the transportation system, we got to overhaul our buildings, there's a huge amount of work, and that leads to jobs. You know, it leads to us rebuilding our infrastructure. It leads to changing our transportation. It leads to all of these things that we've been talking about.
Jordan Berg Powers 23:49
Yeah, and I just want to give a good example of it. So a few years ago, Worcester got a ton of money when we passed, I don't know, I guess some time ago Massachusetts passed money for jobs in the green sector. And there was a local group that worked mostly with youth of color and had a lot of youth who were so-called 'at risk', which is in itself a problematic term, but that's a different podcast, you know, at risk youth, and they were de-leading a lot of Worcester housing. Worcester had a lot of leaded houses.
Anna Callahan 24:23
Somerville has 'em, [INAUDIBLE]
Jordan Berg Powers 24:25
Yeah. I live in a house that was de-leaded by this group. And they provided jobs for young people that was subsidized by the government. They learned skills of the process. And a lot of those people went on to start companies, a lot of young youth of color started companies that work on deleading, because they learned expertise in that process that was enabling them to have futures. And, you know, a lot of what happens is that people understand that they've been divested from. People in West Virginia, the reason that they're angry is because we don't care about them. They see that. They understand that. Politicians have forgotten about them. They haven't provided real opportunities. People will see it, young people, especially young people of color in communities, in the inner cities, they know that society just wants them to go away. It wants to police them in such a place that just keeps them housed, keeps them away from the regular folks, and gives them no future, if we start giving people opportunities to excel, to choose and to be a part of making, you know, a vision, right? Like, it's also that they're making the world a better place during this work. If we connect all those three things, we're providing futures that are worthwhile for people so that they're going to want to invest in themselves. So these linkages are really important. It's not just that we will then save the environment, right and enable us to live, because currently, we're on the path to not be able to live on this Earth, which is fun. There's also these linkages between providing people futures that are worthwhile, that are union, that are well paid, providing futures that are investing in those things, and making the lived experiences of people who live in these communities better, healthier, live longer. There are all these knock-on benefits to doing these things, which is probably why there's so much pushback against it.
Anna Callahan 26:16
So I love that vision. It's really amazing. I hope that our State House and the people-- there is a group of people there called leadership. I don't see a ton of vision. I want to see more vision. I want to see a vision like that coming from the folks at the State House and leadership of the State House. And we will be back next week with more about what's happening here in Massachusetts. Thanks so much everybody!