Blue Mass Group

A new report from Brown University* proves what we already knew: Climate action in Massachusetts is bought off and delayed by well-heeled special interest lobbies. This is in spite of overwhelming public support in polls, and a display of activist power in the form of testimony at hearings and the like.

The most blatant example of this comes in the form of Governor Baker’s veto of the climate bill, citing cost figures for a net-zero stretch code ($6 billion! Wow!) that no one can figure out where they come from or how they’re derived. It doesn’t take too much imagination to infer that they came from the real estate development lobby.

From the Brown report’s executive summary — it’s about what you’d expect, and what you’ve been hearing for years about Our Dumb Process [emphasis mine]:

The study can be summarized in a dozen findings we document with quantitative and interview data:

1:​ Four distinct industry coalitions lobby against environmentalists
2:​ Testimony in legislative committees is nine to one in support of climate action
3:​ On lobbying, clean energy advocates are outspent more than 3.5 to one
4:​ Renewable energy interest groups stick to narrow industrial interests
5:​ Utilities lobby against solar energy, but support large hydro & wind power
6:​ Utility companies are uniquely successful throughout the legislative process
7:​ AIM (Associated Industries of Mass.) lobbies and speaks against rapid climate action
8:​ The fossil fuel industry lobbies heavily against pipeline rules, divestment, and carbon pricing
9:​ The real estate industry resists residential energy efficiency bills
10:​ Power generators fight hydro and wind supply
11:​ Opponents no longer deny the reality of climate change, but focus on cost and reliability
12:​ Climate action is tightly controlled by State House committees and leadership

…

Our systematic review shows that the vast majority of public testimony given in legislative committee hearings supports climate action—major energy and utilities corporations and their trade groups only rarely submit public testimony in opposition to legislation advancing climate action here. Despite seeing strong support in legislative testimony for environmentalists’ priorities, however, the evidence shows a completely different story behind closed doors. We find that the state’s utilities and their allies are the most powerful actors in the state climate and energy policy landscape. Fossil fuel, real estate, and power generation interests also play significant roles opposing environmentalists in the legislature.

A singular moment: Sonja Tengblad of Mothers Out Front sings “What a Wonderful World”; Gardner Auditorium, State House, 11/12/19. (Does the real estate lobby sing to the Governor behind closed doors?)

This definitely squares with my observations. You never hear much dissension in a public hearing, and the rooms tend to be packed with enviro coalition members, who have done their homework and brought people out to show public support, which is real, broad, and deep. You would hardly be aware of a fossil fuel lobby! AIM doesn’t poke up its head; the real estate industry doesn’t send in a flack to push back (as far as I can remember); etc. Why not? Oh, they’d get hissed, or at least endure some serious side-eye in a hostile room. Their demands are not popular! Not in a hearing room, and not in the public at large.

Now, it’s interesting that this report comes out now, when the climate bill, and the legislature itself, are in a bit of flux. The Roadmap bill did pass, after all, and it’s a major bill. It did not include, however, the mandate for 100% renewable energy by 2045 (Garballey-Decker amendment), which would have had sharper teeth and higher ambitions. Speaker DeLeo didn’t allow the bill in its entirety to pass until the absolute last minute of the session and his own Speakership. As former Sen. Ben Downing has stated and the report re-states, this timing enables lobbyists and leadership at everyone else’s expense:

This haphazard process benefits one group and one group only – entrenched special interests. Without time for public debate and input, special interests defending the status quo have an outsized voice. They are able to kill or water down some of the very proposals which could help tackle the major issues Massachusetts is facing, simply because the legislature waited till it was too late. Instead of having to defend their position multiple times under the harsh light of public scrutiny they are able to do so once or twice, if at all, in hushed conversations in the State House halls.

This leaves us waiting for a plume of white smoke announcing a bill … or as has been the case up to this point, nothing.

So, nothing we didn’t already know, I suppose! Kudos to Speaker Mariano and Senate President Spilka for putting the bill back in the Governor’s face  — although, as Sen. Barrett worries, this is definitely an opportunity for even yet still more big-money lobbyist mischief. We should keep the net-zero stretch code.

It shouldn’t have taken this long. We’re not on time; we’re about 30 years late. All this special interest power has deprived us of time we didn’t have.

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*Ironic we had to get a Rhode Island joint to point out our faults.

From the inside of the Lincoln Memorial, Dec 2019

And so the Presidency of Joe Biden begins. It is beautiful and telegenic — the rippling flags on the Mall and the ranks of National Guard making a striking image. The latter should have been unnecessary: This isn’t a peaceful transfer of power, but a transfer nonetheless, and a patriotic event in spite of everything. I appreciate Sen. Blunt’s gracious and appropriate remarks, acknowledging the unconscionable threat to democracy posed by the rioters, and honoring and even celebrating the result of democratic processes.

The change of tone, the honorable use of the bully pulpit, will be such a vast difference we will hardly know how to receive it. (The absence of Trump from the usual media megaphones is palpable, isn’t it?) Biden is stubborn about appealing to unity, even while acknowledging that it sounds like a fantasy. I suppose that’s his duty. Nonetheless, he spoke of “lies, lies told for power and for profit.” Unity doesn’t mean losing discernment. Biden is where he is because he walks that line. He’ll get no allowance in the arenas of social media, where having two ideas in mind at a time is suspect. Fortunately he pays no attention.

Biden has shown himself to be more impressive than I would have expected: More resilient, more temperate — but also bolder when necessary, when the facts demand it. “It’s time for boldness”, he says, exhorting the public to move forward in ways that he’s already demonstrating. His kind of expansive, hopeful decency is the way out.

Onward, not a moment too soon.

Placard from memorial march reading “HONOR KING: END RACISM!”
National Museum of African American History and Culture

First things first: Don’t read me, read MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, for a poke and prod of motivation.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fan in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with an its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

Not two weeks since a white-nationalist riot at the nation’s capital, it seems hard to zoom out, to take a wider view of racial politics. We don’t need to erase the rise and endurance of Trumpism from our evaluation. The recrudescence of the violent, conspiratorial right wing is in explicit reaction to the Black Lives Matter movement: BLM is the arch-villain in their alternate-reality cinematic universe. The “white moderate” waiting for a “more convenient season” gives the same answer as the MAGA-hat whatabouting the supposed destructiveness of BLM: Whether decorous or abrasive, No is No.

Some people with political power and status feel threatened today. Their status may be imagined or real; it might be economic, or racial-caste-based; but they feel their world is being upended. In a way, they are right. I’m not alone in thinking this moment in our racial history feels different, more pregnant with possibility. That’s why the reactionaries are reacting.

This is evident in the Georgia Senate victories and here as well. In Boston and Massachusetts, the political scene is actually changing, in personnel and in policy, and in the assumptions about what is achievable. As Marty Walsh goes to Washington, Kim Janey will become the first Black woman mayor of Boston. The city just added the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule to its zoning code, to counter the legacy — sorry, the current practices, actually — of discrimination and displacement.

On the state level, the legislature just passed amendments to the climate bill addressing environmental- and energy justice, increasing low-income access to solar power (which the Governor vetoed, of course). The legislature passed a police reform bill — not as strong as it should be, but nonetheless its passage proved that the political juice of police unions has its limits; the Governor specifically cited the power of the Black and Latino caucus when signing the bill. Last year the state passed a major restructuring of school funding which is supposed to especially help low-income communities of color — although, perversely, the state is not obligated to actually find the money to find the money! The incomplete, provisional quality of these measures is proof of the challenges they faced. Nonetheless, they exist, a foundation to build upon. Nothing is complete.

History is not progress. Whatever gains have been made by previous generations are long since compounded, and the passage of time eats into the principal. As Keynes observed, in the long run we’re all dead. Any parent knows how fast kids grow up, how time flies; how much more so for children growing up in deprivation as the result of discrimination — especially as COVID rends wider the gap of inequality. Those kids will not get their childhoods back; they’re not experiencing “progress” right now — just the opposite.

But in spite of all the darkness we see in on this very day, we are nonetheless living in a window of opportunity for action. And as Sonia Chang-Diaz said on the Senate floor last year, that window may close. How much policy will improve the lived reality of African-Americans is another question still. But if we don’t appreciate what’s happening right now, and identify progress when it happens, I fear we’ll neglect to defend it when it’s under attack. But it surely should be motivating to those who have taken the last few months, or years, or a lifetime, to try to push this boulder uphill.