Massachusetts is at the forefront of green tech, eco-conscious policy, and overall public awareness of the dangers presented by climate change and other anthropogenic impacts. Over the past few years, more state agencies have placed sustainability issues at the top of their agendas, and businesses are doing what they can to minimize their environmental footprint. It was clear to newly-appointed Governor Maura Healey that the vast array of state initiatives around climate change had to be coordinated by one office.
On the first full day of her administration, in 2023, Governor Healey signed an Executive Order establishing the position of Climate Chief and creating an Office of Climate Innovation and Resilience within the Governor’s Office. Melissa Hoffer was appointed as Massachusetts’ first Climate Chief, and Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to establish a position like this at the cabinet level. Hoffer has a rich and extensive background in environmental law, education, and advocacy, and is passionate about keeping Massachusetts on the cutting edge of climate innovation.
Bluedot Living got a chance to speak with Hoffer about her upbringing in rural Pennsylvania, her diverse range of experience over her long career, and actions that are being taken right now to keep Massachusetts on the cutting edge of climate innovation.
Bluedot Living: Could you describe some of your previous experience before being appointed to the role of Climate Chief?
Melissa Hoffer: I started out my career as a secondary school teacher. I was interested in environmental education and always saw it as a way to help young people build a relationship with the natural world. From that education might flow greater care and understanding of our dependence on a healthy environment. I taught for a number of years and then went to law school. After that, I clerked for a year at Boston Federal District Court. From there I went on to work at a law firm that was then known as Hale and Dorr [now Wilmer Hale]. My practice there really focused on superfund work — cleanups of sites where there had been releases of hazardous materials. I really enjoyed that work a lot. I was a defense attorney in a number of those cases, so I really got to see from the inside out where companies run into problems with compliance. In order to come into compliance, companies often require a culture change. That was a really excellent training ground.
After that I became the Vice President of the Conservation Law Foundation. I picked up some of the active litigations there and filed some new ones. I was able to participate in the first clean cars trial that took place up in Vermont. The auto industry was challenging Vermont’s and other states’ adoption of California’s more stringent greenhouse gas emission reduction standards for vehicles. I was also able to bring a case against one of the last coal-fired power plant stations in New England to try and challenge the improperly permitted construction of an air pollution scrubber there. You might wonder why an environmental firm would challenge the installation of air pollution control tech; in that instance it was because this was a very old coal fired power plant. By putting this new expensive scrubber on, it virtually guaranteed that the plant would operate for much longer than it normally would.
BDL: How did you first hear about this newly-established office and role?
MH: The then chief of the Public Protection and Advocacy Bureau at the Attorney General’s office was my former firm colleague, Maura Healey. When there was an opening to run the environmental protection division in the state Attorney General’s office, Bureau Chief Healey gave me a call and recruited me to that role. After she became AG, we took a look at the different bureaus and made the decision to put anything that dealt with energy and environment into one bureau. I ran that bureau from its inception until I left to take a job with the Biden administration, where I went into the Environmental Protection Agency and served as Acting General Counsel at EPA for roughly the first year of the Biden administration. Then I stayed on for another year in the role of Principal Deputy General Counsel until I was recruited to become the first Climate Chief for Massachusetts.
BDL: Have you always been passionate about sustainability and environmentalism?
MH: The first 10 years of my life, I grew up in rural Southeastern Pennsylvania, so I was always outside as a kid. We had a garden and were always out walking in the woods. My father was always out fishing and hunting, so I grew up as someone who placed a lot of emphasis on respect for nature and the importance of the natural world. At that time, in the early- to mid-’70s, there was an enormous amount of development underway. People talk about this notion of solastalgia, a homesickness for your home while you are still living there, because it’s changing around you. I could really see that in my father — dirt roads would become paved, woods would be cleared and turned into construction projects. As I grew up, I was reading books like Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” Lewis Thomas’ “Lives of a Cell” [both available on Amazon]. I had a phenomenal AP English teacher (whom I am still in contact with) who really inspired me. My project in AP English was looking at the relationship of humans to nature.
BDL: What is Massachusetts doing to educate young people and members of the general public on these issues?
MH: Hands down, while working in this role, I have been most inspired by my conversations with young people. The youth who are working on climate in the state right now are unbelievably sophisticated and passionate about climate advocacy and environmental protection. In May, we announced that we would be doing a Youth Climate Council, and we had an enormous response to that. I was intrigued to hear from both a clinical psychologist and a psychiatrist at MassGeneral who talked about climate despair, concerns about the future, and how it’s all affecting our youth. That’s not something to be pathologized or medicalized or diagnosed, it’s actually a very rational, common-sense response to what we are facing right now. The most important thing we can do to support young people is to give them ways to get involved and act and make positive change. These folks are going to be the leaders of tomorrow. They are going to be making the decisions, so they need to understand how government works, how policy is made, how we are communicating with colleagues in other agencies, and how a state budget works.
In the executive order that established my office, the Climate Chief is required to assess our current policymaking in a number of different agencies over the first six months and make recommendations to the Governor. One of those recommendations is that we should support implementation of K-12 climate and environmental education in our public schools.
BDL: Historically, disenfranchised communities and people of color have been left behind when governmental policy and paradigms shift. How are you ensuring that this holistic focus on climate change includes those populations?
MH: The Massachusetts Community Climate Bank is the first Green Bank in the country with a specific focus on low-income housing. There is a lot of work to be done in terms of decarbonizing, improving building envelopes with insulation and better windows, installing cleaner heating like air source or ground source heat pumps. That effort in lower income homes is not a space where traditional lenders are always eager to get involved because of perceived credit risks, for example. A Green Bank will be able to say to a co-investor “Look, if for some reason this isn’t getting paid back, we will step in and you will be made whole.”
That strategy only works if we are simultaneously cleaning up the grid. We need to bring more of the clean power online and start to phase out those natural gas power plants. We are still at about 60 percent of our electricity being produced by natural gas in Massachusetts. Solar projects, wind projects, geothermal, battery storage, that’s what will aid in the shift to EVs and electric heat and cooling, that’s the comprehensive decarbonization effort.
BDL: What’s one interesting or innovative policy, initiative, or technology related to climate change and sustainability that people might not know about?
MH: One of the things we are very excited about is a virtual power plant. When we are building the wind, solar, and other renewable infrastructure, we need to make sure our distribution grid can handle all the electrification. Electric demand is expected to at least double during this transition process. We need to get much better at using power efficiently and reducing demand. A virtual power plant is like a bunch of small-scale energy resources [networks of small energy-producing or storage devices, like solar panels and batteries, that are pooled together to serve the electricity grid] where, if you coordinate them with the operation of the grid itself, it can provide the same kind of reliability that you would get from a traditional power plant.
BDL: Can you identify some major challenges Massachusetts faces in the climate change and environmental sphere? What gives you hope that we will overcome these challenges?
MH: There are technical barriers. As we are improving the electric distribution grid, if we go into a place and we are going to electrify a significant number of homes, we need to make sure we are speeding up interconnection. If someone builds a solar field right now, they might wait up to 7 years to get interconnected, and that begins to affect project financing, so these projects aren’t tolerable for many developers. There is still vested opposition to the clean energy transition; this was a record-breaking profit year for most of the large fossil majors. We continue to subsidize them a huge amount of money, and you continue to see reticence from folks who don’t want to make the energy transition. It’s called status quo bias, but it’s just being a human.
It’s very hard for people to really get, in their bones, the danger we are facing, and then start to change the way you conduct business or run your household in conformance with those facts. But I have immense hope for the future of Massachusetts. We have people doing incredible work in all areas of government and business, and I think people, especially young people, are becoming really aware of these problems. Both collectively and in their individual lives, they want to take action.
