Incorruptible Mass
Incorruptible Mass
State Energy Bill
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This week, the Incorruptibles are tackling H.4744, the energy bill put forth by their chair of the Massachusetts Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy. We'll take on how it would drive up your energy bill, how it would hurt our environment, and how it would be great news for corporate profits.
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ANNA
Hello and welcome to Incorruptible Mass. Our mission here is to help us all transform state politics because we know that we could have a state and state legislature that truly represented the needs of the seven million of us who live here. And today we have a wonderful guest who's going to talk about some environmental policy, sorry, some energy policy, shall I say, that certainly affects our environment. He's from the Sierra Club. We are going to talk about an energy bill, tell the whole story of what happened last year. We are going to give you information on what this bill is, what's actually in it. We're going to talk about the affordability, concerns and dialogue that has been going around and our progressive take on what that means. We will also tell you what you should be worried about in terms of what should not be in this bill going forward. We will tell you what you should fight for, what should be in this bill going forward. And we are excited to have you here. We're excited also to have Vick, who will introduce in just a second. But before we do, I'm gonna have my illustrious co-hosts introduce themselves today. I will start with Jonathan.
JONATHAN
Jonathan Cohn, I'm he/him/his, I've been an activist for a progressive issue in electoral campaigns here in Boston for over a decade and joining from the south end.
ANNA
Wonderful. And Jordan.
JORDAN
My name is Jordan Berg Powers. I use he/him, and I have been involved in politics for way too long and in state politics. And if you're on, if you're watching this on the YouTube, which I guess encouragement for the YouTube, you're also going to see my cat.
ANNA
Oh, yeah. And I am Anna Callahan, she/her, coming at you from Medford, where I'm a city councilor. I've done a lot of work on the local level around the country in electoral politics and some state level stuff as well. We are very excited to have Vick Mahonka from the Sierra Club, Sierra Club Massachusetts. And Vick, if you would be so kind as to just sort of introduce yourself and your organization before we get into the energy bill.
VICK
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I'm Vick Mahonka, I use he and they pronouns. I'm the director of the Massachusetts chapter of the Sierra Club. I've been doing Massachusetts politics since I was in middle school here. And I've been doing Massachusetts environmental policy for the last 13 years, including working for the energy committee at the state house. So I came from the inside and became an advocate. So Sierra Club, Massachusetts is a grassroots environmental organization. We are a member led democracy. Jonathan has participated as a member and in our democracy. For many years. Thank you for your leadership. And we have a ton, we work on what I described as every issue that touches climate and environment. So toxic chemicals, forest protection, transportation, energy and climate. If it's out there, if it's in Massachusetts, we work on it. We have a great dedicated group in Cape Cod and the islands. We're statewide and we also do electoral politics. So we're one of the few environmental organizations that endorses candidates for office. Oh yeah, we did endorse you. Yeah. You're welcome. So thank Jonathan, really. Yeah.
ANNA
Awesome. So we would love for you to tell us the story of this energy bill. Tell us what happened.
VICK
Yeah. So I'm going to give you a play by play around the week of Veterans Day last year. And I remember this because I was on the phone for 8 hours on my day off with state representatives. That's how I wanted to spend the day. So on Monday the 10th, the chairman of the TUE Committee, that's telecommunications, you told me that.
JONATHAN
Well, I'll say thank you for your, like, in terms of spending eight hours of your holiday doing work, thank you for your service.
VICK
I don't, yeah, should I have sent it to voicemail? That's the question I ask myself even now. So on the 10th, the Monday, Veterans Day is the Tuesday. So on the 10th, On the Monday, the chairman of the Telecommunications Utilities and Energy Committee, the House Chairman, released a bill draft. This bill took a four-page solar bill that was filed in the House and replaced it fully with 105 pages of new draft material.
ANNA
And if I may, for people who haven't listened to this podcast for very long, Go back to the earlier ones. This happens all the time. Like suddenly something comes out of committee, it's 100, 200, 300 pages long, and you have like 24 hours to respond. Anyway, go ahead, go on.
VICK
Absolutely. So he releases this, and the way it works is that they want the committee members to vote for it. So he released it on Monday. We had a vacation day that, you know, state holiday, pretty important for public officials to be doing stuff during Veterans Day. And he wanted the committee to vote for it on Wednesday. So we, you know, mobilized, we spent all this time analyzing it. Turns out a lot, a huge percentage of the 105 pages was completely new draft, which means it wasn't legislation that went through the public committee process or the public hearing process. These are fresh new ideas that never got the light of day in the legislature. So then what we did is so we called through all the committee members. We're going on the phones, trying to pressure them not to vote for it, trying to create summaries of the bill to say what's bad, what's good, how this affects you.
ANNA
I know we're just doing the story right now. We'll cover all the details, but can you give us a tiny hint as to like, Sounds like you're opposing it. Wow.
VICK
There's a lot that we don't like in this bill. The environmental and climate movement is strongly opposed to it. I'll say, this is the worst bill I've seen in 10 years of working at the legislature, specifically. And like I said, these are not ideas that had a chance to be socialized, heard in public. These were new, fresh, bad ideas. So that was part of the issue here.
JONATHAN
And one thing, just to quickly interject, it reminds me of so often when legislators want to block something that progressives want, can often say, oh, well, we haven't had a proper hearing for this, even if often they actually have. But this is them saying, no, this is not something that we've actually discussed in any way, and it's terrible, and some money lobbyists want it. So we're putting it in a bill. Continue.
VICK
Yeah. So we were on the phone this whole time. It created a huge pushback. We ended up getting four representatives on the committee to reserve their right for the vote. There's 11 votes, seven voted for it. That's Chair Cusack, Rep. Kusmerick, Rep. McGregor, Rep. Turco, Rep. Robertson, Rep. Tyler. And Rep read. So those are the folks that voted for it just to name names. And then we had two progressive folks in our circle reserve their rights. So that's Rep Higgins and Rep Scarsdale, who did a really good job of listening to their constituents doing things that the Commonwealth voters wanted them to do and say, let's slow down, let's look at the process, let's pass a bill that is politically popular. And then it passed through committee on Wednesday. On Thursday, we had an unrelated- Quick.
JONATHAN
Point of vocabulary for people who don't know state house terminology. What does it mean to reserve rights?
VICK
You could think of it like abstaining. In this context, it is similar to a no vote. I think there's, and you can see an article that I'm cited in from like six or eight years ago. There is a strong culture of control and retaliation at the state house. So sending a direct no signal to the speaker is a pretty strong, you lose a lot of political capital with the folks that have all the power there. So I think reserving rights is like a coded way of saying no. The best way to think about it is that these folks did not like what's going on and voted against it.
JONATHAN
Yeah, I've often kind of described it as where you're saying like, I'm not committed, I'm like, I'm not dead set against this bill, but I think it needs work. Or like, it's either you need to work on me because I'm not there yet, or you need to work on the thing to make it something that I'll be, but I'm like, kind of like, I'm not there yet.
VICK
Yeah, I don't, I don't, you know, make, I don't interpret political signals and procedure as literal. So whether they reserved rights, whether they voted no, I see that as very similar thing. It's not a literal signal, it's the same thing.
JONATHAN
It sends the same message.
VICK
Exactly. So after it passed committee on Wednesday, we were hearing that they wanted to bring it to the floor the next week. There is a huge unrelated telecommunications, utilities and energy hearing on Thursday where we flooded the room. This is the first, I used to run these hearings as a staff person on Beacon Hill, and this is the first time I've ever seen a hearing where the sergeant at arms stood at the door and stopped letting people into the room. So that tells you how much the chairman did not want us at that public hearing. And we hammered the state house. We called every single representative. We called senators, even though senators didn't even have a voice in this. We put out a bunch of communications, news articles, social media, everything. And basically the bill has been on pause. It was in the Ways and Means Committee, and we've seen no progress on it since in the process. So we took this as a huge success. They wanted to pass it out within ten days, and here we are three months later, and there just hasn't been any movement publicly.
ANNA
Fantastic. That is quite a story. Well done. Well done. Sorry, Jordan, were you- yeah, I was.
JORDAN
Gonna say that, like, I think it's important just to, like, when you ask, like, what type of bill, like, it was a bad, it was a really, just to, like, overview it without getting the details, it's a bad bill that moves us backwards on a time where our, like, if you were, like, if you could put Trump in charge of Massachusetts, like, response to climate change, it would have been, like, it could have been coming from them. Like, it was a- I'm not gonna, I would, Jordan. Yeah, I don't say that out loud. At a time where Trump is moving us away and we need our state to be really thoughtful about leading, it was as if Trump was in our legislature pushing forward policy. It's just an absolute step backwards at a time where we cannot go backwards because we're not going forward fast enough. And so the idea that Massachusetts of all places would be going backwards on climate response, we would be making the climate worse. We're already making it worse, but we would fast charge that. And at a time where Trump is fast charging America down this path, it's just shameful. And I just wanna say a real thanks to Vick and all the people who called. This is why it's important to call. It does actually, we can be, I can be cynical, we can be cynical, but it does matter to respond because we stopped that from happening so far. There's still work to be done, there's still things we need to do, but it was gonna pass and it didn't pass because of people's work to say Massachusetts should not be going backwards on climate change. We need to be picking up the pace, not go, not making it worse of all places. Like we should, on top of the fact that like we have industries that support making climate change. We care about this issue. Voters here overwhelmingly care about this issue. We want to live in a state by the water. Like it just does not make sense to be doing, you know, things are getting worse. And it was just-- and so I'm just really thankful that everybody stepped in the way they did.
JONATHAN
I just wanted to give a quick comment. The one thing that I thought was particularly impressive during this is how much a lot of the activism from the environmental and climate community here did percolate the general-- how many people actually did start paying attention? I just remember talking with one friend who-- his kind of joking we were describing it is that friends of his who probably didn't even know we had a state legislature. Suddenly were aware of it and being like, what the hell's going on here? And so that was able to kind of puncture that kind of general disengagement that we can so often see. And it takes a lot of work to do it, but it was able to succeed. And wanted to also just underscore something that Jordan was saying is that it's always depressing on an issue like climate when you realize how little has happened across the 21st century, like, right in, like, the 21st, 25-year first quarter of the 21st century, when we could have done so much, which is why states that can do more when the federal government is sabotaging everything really need to.
ANNA
Well, I'm hoping that this is a good transition for us to actually dive into some of the details of what was in the bill, and if you can If you can also tie in, like, who do you think was influencing the legislature to put these things in there?
VICK
Yeah, I'm very happy to get into it. And I also just want to do a quick shout out for Mass Power Forward and Carl Miller, who kind of puts all together this giant grassroots coalition. Because the reason we're able to do all this and the reason we're ready for this step was because of our grassroots coalition where we have democratic consensus based decision making. So I really want to underscore that is the group that put together this opposition effort, not just Sierra Club Massachusetts. We do this together. So what's in the bill? Like I said, it's 105 pages. It is very long. It is an omnibus bill. There's a lot of stuff that is new in it. And the way that I've been describing it is that like an omnibus, there's stuff that we like in it. There's at least two bills that are Sierra Club priorities that are in this bill. But there's also 10 things that are so bad that we think that this whole thing needs to die. And in legislative parlance, we would call this a poison pill. So I'm going to list out a bunch of the poison pills in this bill. Where even if we had all the stuff we liked in one of these, we would still pretty much oppose the bill. So what the bill does is it gets rid of state climate goals. That's our mandatory greenhouse gas emission limits. It weakens the Mass Save program. That's our state energy efficiency program. It allows for that program to spend a bunch of money locking us into natural gas. And it, it, Limits the tools that the program can use to reduce our energy use, which reading through this makes no sense. We want to use less energy, not more energy. It resurrects a pipeline tax. So they called this affordability, but the bill literally adds more line items to our utility bills. It creates an untested legal mandate for competitiveness and affordability. It removes the social value of greenhouse gas reductions in analysis. It decreases our renewable portfolio standard, which is the main market mechanism we use to fund renewables. And it completely changes the alternative compliance payments. So when they don't buy the renewables, they're required to, they have to pay a penalty. This is the utility companies. And that penalty gets spent on renewable energy and energy efficiency. So they remove that in two different ways. It removes voter input on new nuclear facilities, which is the old bill passed at the ballot in the '80s, a huge environmental victory that voters in the state should have a say if we're going to have a huge new nuclear plant like Pilgrim down in Plymouth. And it handicaps municipalities in the 10-town fossil-free pilot from using mass save energy efficiency incentives. So it actually punishes the towns that want to move forward on achieving climate goals.
ANNA
Unbelievable.
VICK
That's a short list.
ANNA
Okay.
JORDAN
Just to be clear, I just want to say like this is, this is what I mean. Like it's a really bad bill. Like imagine punishing people, imagine punishing towns and cities for doing more on climate. Right now in knowing what we know about the world, the future we want to have for our kids. Like that really, that last point is the one that I just was like, are you, are you bonkers? Like, like what are we doing? Like just imagine saying yes to a bill that says if you do more than, if you want to be as best as possible to serve the future so that we, so it's livable, you're gonna get punished for that. Like that's it. That is, that is, you know, Donald Trump would love that.
ANNA
Like, I don't know how to say it. A lot of those things were insane. I mean, how hard people thought for just having the climate goals was a big, big victory. And to get rid of the climate goals, like, what?
JORDAN
What?
JONATHAN
Right.
ANNA
A mechanism for buying all of them are like crazy.
JORDAN
Yeah, yeah. It's really bad. I just want to say that's a really bad bill.
JONATHAN
I would, I would highlight the Trumpian stuff around like the social cost of carbon, which is like what the EPA is. Trying to roll back now. So this would be like, this would have been Massachusetts saying, we love what you're doing, Trump EPA. Let's do it here. And then it's also what's kind of wild to me about this, and this is something that I came out when I was talking to certain different state reps, is not only was that bill directly sabotaging our state's response to climate change in a giveaway to fossil fuel companies, It was actually in many ways an attack on all of the people in the building who had worked to pass things in like the very prior session and the like other recent sessions where they put all this work into passing policy and this says, thank you, delete.
JORDAN
Yeah, I just want to, so, you know, why did they do this? Like, why, why give all these giveaways to corporations and like, move against the very things these same people passed?
VICK
Yeah, that's a great question. I wish I could answer that past saying, this is for the shareholders, is for the fossil fuel industry. I can only imagine that groups like ALEC, if folks have heard of them, it's like a big conservative network submitting legislation all over the country. Some of the stuff that we can point to is that In the resources that Chari Cusack gave to other house members, there were direct links to fossil fuel lobbyist SharePoint accounts. That's their Google Drive account. Yeah, so that is... And the other one I really want to mention, the Globe and Commonwealth Beacon broke this article. So we use campaign terms, cash on hand is how much money a candidate has in their account. Chair Cusack got donations equivalent to 10% of his cash on hand in the two or three days after submitting this bill. So I do think this came straight from the fossil fuel industry. I think this is a shot across the bow for all these different states because they're saying, if we can do this in progressive Taxachusetts, we can do this anywhere. That's kind of, you know, our role is to be more progressive and more liberal than other states. And I do think that this was like, it was just a very brazen step by the industry to see how much they can get away with.
ANNA
Wow. And before we go on, yes, go ahead, Jordan.
JORDAN
Oh, okay. Yeah, I just wanted to highlight that, like, I mean, so Vick is not, I'm not gonna speak for the Seattle Club, but I'll just say really clearly, like, He's, he got, like, he got money from direct, he got campaign donations for doing this thing where, where they are literally copying and pasting corporations. Corporations paid for this, paid lobbyists, though, that, those lobbyists talking points are in the bill. He's linking to them directly. And then, and like, and then they, and then money appears in his campaign. Like, it's not hard to suss out what has happened. And, I think that's why they wanted to move it so quickly, because they don't want you to see what's so clear, which is that these are grab, you know, how could Democrats pass something that is so Trumpian? Well, the way you do it is you do it quickly without anyone noticing, and then you get some money on the back end, because that makes it worth your while. Like, it's just that simple. So I do think it's important that we get that. Even if we can't know exactly we're not in his brain, we don't know what his motives are, we can see what happened. And, you know, I just think that's a real problem, you know, overarching for the State House, which is the corporations have the ability to move legislation in a way that regular people do not. They do not move this quickly to fight for us. We, you know, there are simple things they could be doing on affordability that they're not doing, that get ground in because corporations say, I don't know, we can't do this, we can't do that. But they're not this quick to move on our behalf. If they're worried about pushback from corporations for something that they want to do, they could move it quickly before the lobbyists could find out. They could do the same tactic on our behalf. They could be pushing quickly to make things to take on corporate power on our behalf, voters, regular people, but they do not. And it's just a real problem with the system. Go ahead, sorry, Anna.
ANNA
Well, I was actually going to jump in super quick and say, I hope you folks listening are excited to hear this whole story of what happened to learn about this process, to learn about the great work Sierra Club is doing. You don't hear these kinds of stories in your regular media. And I'm just going to encourage you to there's a link below. You can always donate to the show. None of us here get paid. It just goes to our folks in the back end who do some of the, you know, the real, like, graphic design and editing, video editing and other kinds of work that needs to be done in order for us to get this into the ears of as many people as possible. Thank you for listening, for your attention to this matter.
JONATHAN
I appreciate the graceful transition that was so much better done than what I would have done of, like, speaking of money.
ANNA
And so now to go on, I really want us to talk about affordability because This was a very interesting piece of this whole story that I think is important because the other side, right, is trying to make this an affordability argument. So I would love for you to dive into that and for us to talk about what affordability could really mean.
VICK
Yeah, no, I really appreciate that. My background's in economics. So this is something I've been looking at. I track inflation numbers, household spending, household debt, all that stuff. And I think this is really key to defending our climate goals. So you're right, the other side wants to paint this as an affordability issue. They say if meeting our climate goals, protecting the environment makes your bills more expensive, we have a lot of evidence that that is not the case. The things that are making your bills more expensive are gold plating, the electric delivery system. So that's the wires, the poles, the substations, the services to feed into all that, all of the administrative costs. That has been just completely unchecked growth for decades in Massachusetts. And that is our Department of Public Utilities who is in charge of keeping that, you know, keeping that, like keeping the utility companies accountable. They have not been doing their job. One thing I point out is the Attorney General just made a 40 or $50 million settlement somewhere in that range for ratepayer savings in December. How many more settlements like that could they make if they just looked through the books of what we're paying for on our bills? So the other thing that Sierra Club has done a study on, the number one factor in why your bills are higher year over year is an over reliance on natural gas, fossil fuels. So between utility gold plating and an over reliance on natural gas, that is why your bills are going up by the numbers. Check your bill right now. You'll see the mass save line item is a small percentage compared to the delivery charge where they hide their profits, their gold plating, all of this kind of stuff, and they're lobbying. So we have a, we have a wish list for the climate bill. And these are all things, two of them are things that were in the governor's draft and.
ANNA
Hang on.
VICK
Overhead. Go ahead.
ANNA
Yeah, I don't, I'm not ready. Let's wait a second before we go into the things about the bill that we like, because I, I really appreciated what Jordan was talking about affordability wise, before we started. So.
JORDAN
You know, the, the state, The state does set the rates. It's supposed to be, it's not like we think of it like, oh, there's some competition, but there isn't really. It's the state sets those rates. And so our legislators could be fighting for us against these corporations. We pay some of the highest cost in the country. They should be fighting for us. They should be saying very clearly, like, you need to be doing things that lower costs. Like they could be putting, they could be pushing solar. Or other types of things onto every household. They can make it easier. So I have solar in my house. It took forever for National Grid to allow us to turn it on. We had it. It was there. They had to come to our house because they knew that would save us money and give them less money. So they are, you know, this is not like there's like 50 different things you could buy and everything else. It's basically a monopoly. And our state is supposed to be fighting for us. It's supposed to be telling them, stop doing things that cost regular people money. Do things that can lower costs. There are barriers or things they need to figure out, but they could be doing that. Instead, they outsource a lot of these things to the lobbyists. They outsource a lot of these thinkings, and they don't push back on these things. And they don't push the DPU to be lowering costs. They don't say, absolutely not. Yes, they could also override it. There's lots of ways that they could be fighting for us. And the legislature is just not doing it. It is just to behold in to the corporate desires. But like there's no reason that it be that it's this way. And so again, this is why it's so important to call and voice our concerns. But it's not about affordability. Like don't believe that for a second. That's an absolute lie. They could make things more. They could be lowering the cost of energy in Massachusetts right now, this moment. There are things they know how to do that people have been asking them to do. They're not doing any of those things. This is a grab bag for corporate lobbyists and corporate interests, and that's it. It's gotta make them richer. It's not gonna bring down your costs. It's like everything Trump promises.
VICK
Yeah.
ANNA
All right, we are gonna round this whole conversation up with the good parts of the bill and the things that should be in this bill and the things that you can fight for. And how you can fight for those things. So Vick, we are going to turn it over to you. We would love to hear what you encourage people to to really keep their eyes out for, but also to call their legislators on and any other ways that they can work with you guys and with a broader coalition on this.
VICK
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. I just I got I got excited to talk about what I want out of this bill. Yeah. So there's two things that the governor and chair Cusack included in both of their drafts. So both of them have provisions to buy more renewable energy and ways to make it easier, quicker, more standardized permitting, lower soft costs, as they call it, as well for renewable energy. And I'm including in that solar, wind, and batteries. Although batteries aren't clean or renewable energy, they really help us unlock a lot of the benefits of intermittent renewable generation. The other one, which the governor and Chair Cusack both included part of our bill, but not all of it, I have some questions there, is a utility accountability bill that makes it so that utility companies, they are not allowed to continue charging us to lobby politicians. Right now, your bill is going towards the Natural Gas Association of America, or whatever they're called. It is going towards the associated industries of Massachusetts. It is going towards lobbyists who make five times as much as I do and have been there five times as long as I have. And are able to just say, hey, you're a new chairman. I've been here for 50 years. Let me tell you how this all works. So that is part of what we're paying for. The governor and chair Cusack both remove some of those charges, but not all of them. Our bill is a bit more comprehensive and a more complete look at it compared to what's. And this is not normal, like. A lot of states in the country have made it illegal for the utilities to charge us for that. Some of the other stuff is really what I was talking about with the gold plating. There's programs like the GSAP program. There's gas pipelines that they're trying to construct, two of them by my count. But who knows with Trump how many pipelines that they're really planning. So we need to stop those pipelines. We need to slow down the gold plating. We need to make sure that any investments into our fossil fuel system are as small and reasonable as possible for safety and to protect the environment. If a bunch of gas is leaking out of our pipes, we need that to stop. And it also makes it cheaper for us. The next thing I want to talk about is Beyonce. That is the tagline that we have for our demand for data centers. I think folks probably are very familiar with data centers. This is something that There is a little bit of legislation filed on it, not a ton. It's not in the bills, anybody's bill yet. But there is a tax credit that the state has for more data centers to come into Massachusetts. So we have a standard called Beyonce. Bring your own new clean energy. If you want to come to Massachusetts, do not make us all pay more for electricity. Bring your own solar panels, bring your own wind turbines. We aren't going to say that you can't build a data center here, but you sure as hell cannot make, am I allowed to say that? You cannot make energy more expensive. You can't use all of our water resources.
ANNA
Amazing.
VICK
When you come in. And the last one is we do need to make our energy efficiency, I have two more, we need to make our energy efficiency program better. So something that was longtime project of mine and a lot of folks that I'm in community with is making sure that energy efficiency is available for renters. People on electric resistance, people who are renters, do not have any option. I've always had gas in my home because I'm a renter. My landlord is not going to switch it out unless the state does something to make them switch it out or to help them switch it out. So that's something that really affects low income communities, communities of color in Massachusetts. There are a lot of improvements.
ANNA
This is the thing that I fight for a lot in Medford because Medford, two thirds of our carbon emissions come from buildings, which is unusual. It's usually two thirds from transportation, but in Medford, it's two thirds from buildings. And the laggards are, of course, the landlords, because they have you know, the, the problem where they don't have to pay for the bills. So they don't care. Right. It doesn't matter. Anyway, didn't mean to interrupt.
VICK
Exactly. Oh no. Yeah. We call that the split. I could talk about any of these for an hour. Um, we call that the split incentive.
JORDAN
Yeah. And as a, as a, as a landlord, it's actually really difficult. We can't, like, we tried to add our, other people to our solar and it was like, they were just like, don't even bother trying. So we, we work around it as best we can, but it's also, it's, even if you wanted to be a good, person on this, it's actually way more difficult than it should. It could be much easier.
VICK
Yeah, and I was, I was, I mean, this is just an aside on that. I was part of a solar justice application to the department, the federal department of energy to pilot programs that would let folks do that in Massachusetts. And it's just the regulatory difficulty. It was the main reason why we won stage one and two of that grant process. We couldn't make it to stage three. 'cause the federal department was like, no, there's too many regulations at the state level. It's not worth helping low-income people access solar that much.
JORDAN
Again, the legislature could evaporate tomorrow as quickly as they tried to pass this bill.
VICK
Exactly. And yeah, the last thing I wanna say that we really want is there's a bill called Make Polluters Pay. We've seen it pass in New York and Vermont. That is charging fossil fuel companies for their historical emissions. Something I want to also note here, we talked about social cost of carbon. That is a very jargony term. That comes from the environmental economics world. What we're talking about is public health. When you burn gas, when you burn coal, when you turn on your car, you are increasing people's asthma, COPD, cancer, all of that. This is public health that we're talking about. And our fossil fuel companies do not pay for the public health consequences. They do not pay for hospital visits. And that the more we end up using our medical system, the more expensive it is for everyone, let alone the actual quality of life decreases. So that's really important to us. And then on that topic, I also want to make sure that we include the indoor and outdoor air quality bills, because we do not know in Massachusetts how bad the air quality is from our fossil fuel consumption. Any home that has natural gas appliances has polluted air. We think of it as some clean, cheap resource. That's the fossil fuel propaganda. Kids have a multiple times higher asthma rate if they have a gas stove in their home. That is something that our society needs to reckon with. We don't even measure it right now. We have a bill, Indoor and Outdoor Air Quality. Those are bills to measure. Those public health effects from fossil fuels.
ANNA
Great. We are going to round this up. We've been going a little long, but we so appreciate your time. How can people get involved with Sierra Club?
VICK
Yeah. So the first thing I want to say is that I have been switching. This is new for me. You all know me for a lot of years. I am becoming a content creator. We are making videos. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram. That is, you know, I was fighting the internet for a long time, but it turns out people really like watching stuff on the internet. So that is one that I encourage you to do. It's also a good one to share out. It's easy for people to share. Hey, like, tell your friends, check out this one minute video about the climate bill. It's a lot easier than saying, Let me explain to you the ten poison pills in state legislation. So that is a big one. And then the other one, check out our website. So if you're interested in volunteering, if you're interested in joining, we are a membership organization. We have 20,000 paid members. They vote for the board that tells me how to spend my time and how to spend our organizational money. So if you care about this, if you want to have influence on what we work on, how we work on it, join us. We are a democracy.
ANNA
Amazing. Thank you so much. Thanks to all of our listeners. Thanks so much for all the work that you've done. Great story and we look forward to chatting with you all next week.