Massachusetts
Massachusetts climate chief calls for sweeping actions to reduce emissions
Massachusetts needs to shift from an era of statewide planning for climate policy to the key details of implementing it, according to a new report from the state’s top climate official, which includes sweeping recommendations to accelerate the state’s progress toward its emissions reduction goals.
Climate Chief Melissa Hoffer recommends some more drastic measures, such as having Massport look at limiting the amount of “short hop” flights in and out of Bay State airports to reduce aviation emissions, decarbonizing new public school construction, and developing a Climate Service Corps to prepare young people for jobs in clean energy and climate resilience.
One of the main pillars of Hoffer’s report, released Wednesday morning, is a call for an economic analysis of the state investment needed to achieve greenhouse gas emission reductions mandated by the Clean Energy and Climate Plan, which includes the statutorily-required target that Massachusetts be net zero by 2050.
State officials have made some effort to move towards these goals, but there is no comprehensive analysis of an important aspect of the journey: how much decarbonization will actually cost.
Though there’s no Massachusetts-specific estimate, the report says the cost to decarbonize the total U.S. economy by 2050 may be in the range of $25 trillion to $30 trillion.
Hoffer says federal funding from a handful of new laws such as the Inflation Reduction Act and Chips and Science Act could contribute somewhere in the range of about 8 to 30 percent of required decarbonization spending, meaning 70 to 92 percent will need to be financed “by other means.” She recommends convening the Executive Office of Administration and Finance, Climate Office, Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, and MassDOT and the MBTA to complete this analysis by the end of 2024.
The climate chief’s 86-page report takes a step toward fulfilling one of Gov. Maura Healey’s early promises in office. Healey signed an executive order on her second day on the job to create Hoffer’s position, and tasked her with analyzing the state’s executive offices and recommending ways to bring their operations more in line with the state’s climate goals.
The plan represents suggestions that Hoffer is making to the administration, and it’s unclear which ideas Healey may try to implement administratively and which ones might require legislative proposal.
In addition to getting a handle on the overall price to decarbonize the state, Hoffer strongly discourages any state spending that would undermine climate policy progress. The Climate Office said it does not support new natural gas infrastructure, though necessary repairs may need to be made while residents transition to cleaner energy.
To help facilitate that transition, Hoffer recommends major reforms to Mass Save — a collaborative of Massachusetts’ natural gas and electric utility providers meant to increase energy efficiency in residents’ homes and save people money through tools such as rebates.
“The Mass Save program currently is administered by electric and gas utilities. It has become increasingly clear, particularly in light of the successes of sister-state entities Efficiency Maine and Efficiency Vermont, that, under the current statutory framework, the Mass Save program is failing to take the steps necessary to achieve the transformative levels of building decarbonization required,” the report says.
It does not recommend removing electric and gas utility companies from the helm, but says “the program administrators are not directly subject to [state building decarbonization] goals.” As it is currently structured, the Climate Office wrote, Mass Save is more focused on supporting cost savings from energy efficiency than on decarbonization.
Hoffer recommends that a handful of executive offices and state departments convene to “articulate a vision for a future framework” for the program.
In moving away from fossil fuels, the report also calls on the Massachusetts Port Authority and the Department of Transportation to “develop a plan to reduce aviation emissions including consideration of alternative fuels and reduced availability of certain short hop flights where rail exists as an alternative.”
The trip between Boston and New York, where there’s an Amtrak alternative, would fall under this definition of “short hop” flights.
Massport has a plan to reach net zero by 2031 for emissions within its direct control, and Hoffer’s report encourages the agency to pursue chances to pilot sustainable aviation fuel technology.
The plan also outlines goals to build the clean energy workforce.
The recommended Climate Service Corps would provide volunteer opportunities and youth-focused programs “preparing them for good-paying jobs in clean energy and climate resilience.”
The report says there is strong interest from community colleges, and that the Corps would also offer pre-apprenticeship opportunities for trades that contribute to fighting climate change.
“The Massachusetts clean energy workforce will need to grow by an additional 29,700 full-time equivalent workers to meet the Commonwealth’s 2030 greenhouse gas emissions reduction mandates,” the report says, in a section calling for the development of a new cross-agency plan for clean energy workforce development.
Massachusetts Competitive Partnership Chief Operating Officer Rebecca Davis said there’s a “real opportunity” for the state to simultaneously meet climate goals and invest in workers and the economy.
“How can we strategically and collaboratively work across sectors to build up this clean tech ecosystem or the climate innovation economy? There’s tremendous opportunity there,” Davis said. “It’s going to take really a cross-sectoral effort to achieve that. But I think that kind of given what the core elements are, Massachusetts’ strengths is our innovation economy, strong business partners, the universities that we have.”
In the first quarter of 2024, the Climate Office plans to convene “interested private sector stakeholders” to establish a Corporate Climate Challenge for voluntary commitments to reduce certain emissions.
Paul Craney, spokesman for the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, said Wednesday morning that more control should be given to the private sector.
“This administration and the previous administration gives certain energy industries the green light to produce energy while others are not allowed to, that’s talking about fossil fuels, natural gas, home heating oil, combustion engines — those are all things that are being forced out of the market by Gov. Healey and many others,” Craney said.
He continued, “What we fear is the end result is going to be less options for consumers and extremely high costs. And that is completely unsustainable if we want to be economically competitive with other states.”
The report calls for some immediate action on Hoffer’s goals.
The administration will review all executive office grants in the first half of 2024 to ensure they line up with the state’s environmental targets, it says, and the plan tasks Hoffer’s office and the Executive Office of Administration and Finance to come up with a plan to evaluate all proposed capital projects in terms of the climate mandates by Jan. 15, 2024, with hopes of using the new standards during the fiscal year 2025 Capital Improvement Plan process.
In recent years climate activists have ramped up advocacy around greenhouse gas emissions associated with manufacturing, transportation, installation and maintenance of building and infrastructure materials — which has been estimated to account for between 11 and 23 percent of annual global emissions.
Hoffer’s report calls for the Massachusetts School Building Authority to move toward a requirement that all new school buildings be decarbonized, using electric power for building systems rather than fossil-fuels, and to come up with a comprehensive plan for existing public schools to reduce emissions.
In April, Education Secretary Patrick Tutwiler announced the creation of a new Clean Energy Innovation Career Pathway to allow high school students to access opportunities in the energy sector.
But the new report takes this education initiative a step further.
Hoffer suggests that the administration work with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to support a K-12 climate education curriculum.
“Too few school districts currently have a basic public-school curriculum to teach children about climate change — what it is, the causes and projected impacts, and what can be done to avoid more dangerous levels of warming. Numerous stakeholders, including students themselves, have called for such a curriculum to be offered,” the plan says.
Additionally, the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs is planning a large-scale, multi-media public education campaign on climate issues.
Another core element of Hoffer’s recommendations is developing a Comprehensive Coastal Resilience Plan, which would have public authority on programs and regulatory efforts meant to address the coastal impacts of climate change.
The plan, led by the Office of Coastal Zone Management, would have a similar function as the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority in overseeing coastal resources with “specific authority to prevent and mitigate threats to public safety, property and the environment from coastal erosion, flooding and storm damage.”
“There is complexity with the coast, so the recommendation for there to be one authority that can think and act across that complexity — like Boston has both a coast and a harbor and three rivers that meet there, as well as old infrastructure where simply rainwater flooding is a challenge — so that intersection of challenges needs to be met with an intersection of solutions,” said Alison Bowden, interim Massachusetts director at The Nature Conservancy and an ecologist with a focus on the coast. “There are all kinds of disciplines, there are river people and coast people and ocean people and stormwater people. And we need those people working together.”
Though published Wednesday, the climate plan has been held up in Healey’s office since July. The executive order that created Hoffer’s position called for the report to be handed to the governor within 180 days, which was July 5. As of July 7, the governor’s team said the report had been delivered to Healey, but was “still being finalized,” and that they planned to publish it within a few weeks.
Massachusetts
Video shows firefighters rescue man and dog from icy Massachusetts lake
WELLESLEY – A Wellesley father of three and his dog are home safe after first responders rescued them from a freezing lake on Sunday.
Dramatic drone video shows the daring rescue on Sunday as a first responder crawls on thin ice to help Ed Berger struggling in a frigid icy Lake Waban. But it wasn’t just Ed in the water, his 8-year-old Cockapoo Tommy had fallen in the lake first.
“Traumatic experience”
“It was definitely a pretty traumatic experience,” said Ed Berger. “I think anybody who owns a pet would do the same thing, I just knew I had to do something.”
It began on a walk when Tommy saw birds, then ran off, but tumbled into the freezing lake.
As fast as Ed could act, he grabbed a boat from Wellesley College, then went after Tommy, putting his Mass. Maritime cold-water training to the test.
“I did a couple of things right and I did a couple of things wrong because obviously becoming part of the problem was not my intention,” said Ed Berger. “I knew the first thing I needed to do was control my breathing and not panic and I had the boat.”
But boat tipped over. Within minutes, firefighters and police teamed up to first pull the father of three out of the water. Then they got Tommy out too.
“I kept telling the fire department, ‘I’m fine I’m totally fine go save the dog,’ but they said ‘no sir, people first, it must be people first,’” said Ed Berger.
Tommy was taken to the Veterinary Emergency Group where Dr. Allan Heuerman treated the dog.
“Our first concerns are hypothermia,” said Dr. Heuerman. “Tommy’s a fighter, that definitely helped him stay alive and breathing and fighting throughout this whole process, so definitely lucky.”
Ice warning
It’s a dangerous time on the ice that can lead to tragedy, like in Atkinson, New Hampshire where a 56-year-old mom fell through ice and drowned over the weekend.
In Wareham, first responders found a man clinging to a kayak after he had fallen through an icy pond.
“Even though we’ve had cold temperatures. We don’t really recommend going in there at all because you never know if the water is moving, if there’s a pocket of warmer water underneath,” said Wellesley Fire Chief Matthew Corda.
What could have ended in tragedy, became a happy ending for Ed and Tommy, and for that they’re so thankful to the first responders and medical staff who made it happen.
“The fact that they got me, and they got him was just absolutely amazing, so incredibly thankful,” said Ed Berger.
First responders say the lesson here is to keep your dogs on leashes and if they go out into the ice, don’t follow them, just call 911.
Massachusetts
Massachusetts insurance agent says rates could go up across country after California fires
NORWOOD – As harrowing images of homes burning to the ground come in day after day from California, Massachusetts homeowners are understandably questioning whether they are prepared and properly insured should a catastrophe hit our coast.
“There’s a ripple effect”
“Whenever you see catastrophic losses like they’re seeing in California right now, there’s going to be ramification, repercussions across the country, if not across the world,” explained local insurance agent and former chair of the Mass. Association of Insurance Agents, Patrick Dempsey of Norwood.
“That could mean rates go up for people across the country, even though it’s not happening in our backyard. It’s happening to a market that’s going to impact ours here. So, there’s a ripple effect for sure,” he said.
Dempsey explained that insurance companies are not equipped to cover sudden losses of hundreds of billions of dollars, and in a time like we’re seeing in California, they tap into their own insurance companies in the “reinsurance” industry.
Fortunately for now, Massachusetts doesn’t seem poised to experience fires like the West Coast does as weather intensifies worldwide. “[Fires] haven’t really been prominent here, although we did have some this past year in kind of the Milton Blue Hills area there. There were legitimate forest fire concerns,” he said.
One huge challenge in California right now, Dempsey explained, is that the state “has been noted to go through some struggles in the recent past with certain larger carriers kind of pulling back in large scale.”
Massachusetts safety net
Since insurance is governed on a state level, Dempsey feels Massachusetts residents should be comforted by our state’s safety net.
“I think it is a little bit of a feather in the cap for Massachusetts, that the Insurance Commissioner’s office and the companies work quite well together in the sense that they’re not taking aggressive rates that are unnecessary, but they’re keeping the companies in a way that they’re bringing enough premiums to pay out the claims. It’s a delicate balance,” he said. “Other states might be jealous of how well it’s being done right now, and I’m proud that that’s going so well in our state, so hopefully good things in the future.”
Dempsey’s advice to Massachusetts homeowners is likely not surprising, given that he is a local agent. He recommends staying local and using an agent to find the home insurance policy that’s right for you.
“When you deal with an agent, they can really take you through these steps, and they also know their backyard,” he said. “You know, if I’m writing a policy in Norwood, I’ll know when certain homes are going to be near, say, a brook or a stream that might put it in a flood zone.”
Massachusetts
Massachusetts court weighs whether all prostitution is sex trafficking
“So every John is a sex trafficker?” asked Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Scott L. Kafker in the courtroom last week.
“Yes, your honor,” replied Plymouth County Assistant District Attorney Julianne Campbell.
The case—Commonwealth v. Garafalo—represents the latest assault on civil liberties and basic language to be carried out in the name of stopping sex trafficking.
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Victimizing ‘A Fictitious Individual Created by Law Enforcement’
It’s long been a goal of certain radical feminists to define all sex work as sex trafficking. If you completely remove agency and free will from the equation—at least for women—then anyone who accepts money for sexual activity can be a victim and anyone who makes or facilitates this payment a criminal.
This paradigm is the basis for the “Nordic Model” of regulating prostitution, in which paying for sex is illegal but the basic act of offering sex for money is not. The Nordic model is established in many European countries, was adopted last year in Maine, and is gaining ground in the U.S. (where it’s sometimes, confusingly, called the Equality Model).
In keeping with this paternalistic mindset, some places have also started to raise penalties for prostitution customers, even elevating solicitation from a misdemeanor to a felony. Meanwhile, at the federal level, trying to pay for sex with someone under age 18 counts as sex trafficking even when the solicitor does not know the minor’s actual age.
Massachusetts may take these ideas one step further and declare anyone who tries to pay for sex at all to be a sex trafficker, thereby defining all prostitution, even between consenting adults, to be a form of sex trafficking.
A case that came before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) last week involves a prostitution sting conducted by Massachusetts state cops in 2021. The officers, posing as adult sex workers, posted ads online and arrested people who responded to the ads and attempted to meet up for paid sexual activity.
Regrettably, this type of sting is incredibly common in the U.S. It typically results in solicitation charges—still a misdemeanor in most places—for those ensnared. But in this case the state indicted those who responded to the sham ads on sex trafficking charges.
Massachusetts law says that anyone who “subjects, or attempts to subject, or recruits, entices, harbors, transports, provides or obtains by any means, or attempts to recruit, entice, harbor, transport, provide or obtain by any means, another person to engage in commercial sexual activity, a sexually-explicit performance or the production of unlawful pornography” is guilty of trafficking of persons for sexual servitude—a.k.a. sex trafficking. The crime is a felony, punishable by at least 5 years in prison (without eligibility for probation, parole, or work release) and a possible 20 years, plus a potential fine of up to $25,000.
The five defendants in Garafalo, arrested in the 2021 sting and charged with trafficking of persons for sexual servitude, pushed back against the charges, filing a motion to dismiss them in 2022.
State Judge Maynard Kirpalani agreed to dismiss the charges. “The grand jury heard no evidence that there were any actual victims in the cases involving any of the Defendants, as the woman in the advertisements was a fictitious individual created by law enforcement, and there was no money and/or sexual services exchanged,” wrote Kirpalani. “Consequently, there was no evidence that any of the Defendants knowingly enabled or caused, or attempted to enable or cause, another person to engage in commercial sexual activity.”
‘We’re Going To Take Tvery Single John…and Put Them in Prison for Five Years?’
The state appealed, but the Appeals Court judge also sided with the defendants. So the state appealed again.
The Massachusetts high court heard oral arguments for the case on January 6.
Massachusetts’ position is that the state’s sexual servitude statute clearly captures paying for sex among its prohibited activities. It comes down to the word “obtain,” the state argued.
But at the same time the state legislature enacted a sex trafficking statute in 2011, it also raised the penalty for “soliciting a prostitute,” making this misdemeanor crime punishable by “a fine of not less than $1,000 and not more than $5,000” and up to two and a half years in jail.
“We’re going to take every single John, charge them with sex trafficking, and put them in prison for five years? I don’t think that was the intent,” defense attorney Patrick Noonan told Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court justices last week. It would make the misdemeanor offense completely redundant.
It’s unclear when a decision will be issued, but “SJC cases are typically decided within 130 days,” the Boston Globe reports.
The Dangers of Exploitation Creep
This is an important case to watch for folks concerned with the inflation of human trafficking and sex trafficking—concepts that have undergone a massive case of what sometimes called “exploitation creep.” In recent decades, we’ve seen a series of attempts to expand the parameters of these crimes from truly heinous and coercive acts to much less serious offenses.
In many cases, this has involved roping in third parties—drivers, websites, hotels, social media platforms, sales software companies, etc—into liability for coercive or violent acts that did take place but of which they had only the most tangential and unwitting involvement. Another element of this impulse involves defining consenting adult sex workers as prima facie victims and anyone who pays them as a victimizer or trafficker.
If Massachusetts’ high court justices side with the state, it obviously won’t bind other states to similar interpretations of their own sex trafficking statutes. But plenty of police agencies and prosecutors across the country already refer to plain old prostitution stings as “sex trafficking operations” and the arrest of potential prostitution customers as a “human trafficking bust,” even when the only charges brought are misdemeanor solicitation charges. The authorities in many states would clearly welcome the opportunity to include attempting to pay for sex under the official rubric of sex trafficking.
If Massachusetts’ top court greenlights the state’s attempt to charge sex-work customers as sex traffickers, you can bet it will encourage authorities in other states to play faster and looser with their own definitions. If the court sides with the state here, I think we’ll be looking at a major escalation of an already dangerous trend.
Labeling people who want to pay a willing adult for sex as sex traffickers is certainly unfair to those people, and not just because they can be imprisoned for so much longer. It’s one thing to have a misdemeanor arrest on your record or to have to disclose a solicitation conviction; it’s quite another to have a felony record and have to tell people you’re a convicted sex trafficker.
And the negative consequences of this shift don’t stop with those convicted. Defining all prostitution as sex trafficking threatens to drive the industry further underground and to make customers less likely to engage in screening protocols and other safety measures, making the work more dangerous for adult sex workers and for adult and minor victims of sexual exploitation alike.
It also takes resources away from fighting crimes where there are actual victims, instead encouraging cops and prosecutors to conduct sure-thing stings where the only “victim” is an undercover cop.
And it does all this while letting authorities ratchet up sex trafficking arrest and conviction numbers, confusing the issue by conflating two very different things in public data. This spike in arrests and convictions can then be used to stoke public fear and build demand for more action. It’s can be used to justify raising police budgets, expanding surveillance power, suppressing online speech, and generally calling for more tough-on-crime policies. It can also be used to call for new regulations on businesses as diverse as massage parlors, hotels, and social media platforms.
Policies like these affect people far beyond sex workers and their clients, and they do nothing to help actual victims of sexual violence, coercion, and abuse. Let’s hope Massachusetts justices see the state’s ploy for what it is and make the right call here.
More Sex & Tech News
Things aren’t looking good for TikTok after a U.S. Supreme Court hearing last week considering a law that would force the platform’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell off its U.S. operations or be banned. Reason‘s Robby Soave has written a rundown of what transpired in court. “The Supreme Court appeared largely—though not entirely—unmoved by arguments that a federal ban on TikTok would violate the First Amendment rights of the app’s millions of American users,” writes Soave:
During oral arguments before the Court on Friday, the justices seemed inclined to agree with the federal government that a national security rationale was sufficient to force the app’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell to an American company…. President-elect Donald Trump opposes the ban and petitioned the Court to delay it until he takes office so that an alternative can be worked out. Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary and billionaire Frank McCourt have offered to buy the app for $20 billion, but ByteDance has insisted that it would sooner comply with the ban than sell the company. Supporters of the ban tend to see this as evidence that the Chinese government deems TikTok too useful for its nefarious propagandistic purposes.
Of course, even if it were true that the app is rife with Chinese propaganda, Americans enjoy the First Amendment right to consume such content. The justices seemed most skeptical of the government’s case to the extent it hinged on this point. Justice Elena Kagan likened the banning of TikTok to the Red Scare, in which the federal government violated the free speech rights of American communists due to their affiliation with the Soviet Union.
“That’s exactly what they thought about Communist Party speech in the 1950s, which was being scripted in large part by international organizations or directly by the Soviet Union,” said Kagan.
Several justices also seemed disturbed by the secretive nature of the government’s case against TikTok. National security experts have posited that TikTok poses a fundamental risk, but the evidence they showed to lawmakers has not been released to the public. Justice Gorsuch objected to “the government’s attempt to lodge secret evidence in this case without providing any mechanism for opposing counsel to review it.”
If it was just a matter of TikTok itself being banned, the justices would probably deem this an impermissible, content-based suppression of speech. Unfortunately, most of the Court seemed sufficiently persuaded that forcing ByteDance—a foreign company that does not itself enjoy First Amendment rights—to sell the app was not necessarily a content-based restriction on speech.
What is Tubi? You might find Tubi tucked away among the apps preloaded on your Smart TV. The free, ad-supported streaming service owned by Fox fields “the kind of movies you might have once found mindlessly flipping through the channels, back before streaming came along and algorithms began crafting our entertainment diets,” writes The Washington Post‘s Travis M. Andrews:
Tubi isn’t only filled with so-bad-they’re-good movies. It’s got a bit of everything. A Criterion movie here. A strange Rob Lowe-hosted game show there. “Bad Boys,” “Dances With Wolves” and every episode of “Columbo” and “The Magic School Bus” are neighbors on the streaming service. It’s like a T.J. Maxx or a Marshall’s: an awful lot of bargain-bin fare, not particularly organized—currently, you’ll find “Despicable Me 3” but not its predecessors—but also packed with diamonds in the rough if you’re willing to spend time sorting through the riffraff.
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