Nearly three months into Trump, here’s where Massachusetts’ climate work stands – The Boston Globe

What it also means is that the state’s aggressive climate goal to effectively zero out its greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, as state law demands, will be harder to achieve without a willing partner in the White House.

So, where are we?

“We now find ourselves in a completely different world when it comes to federal climate policy,” state Senator Cindy Creem said Tuesday at the opening of a hearing of the Senate Committee on Climate Change and Global Warming.

“But we are not powerless,” she said. “In Massachusetts, we may have to change our course, to recalibrate our plans to reflect a lack of financial or regulatory support from the government, but we’re still pressing for reaching our net zero emissions [target].”

Over the course of two hours of testimony on Tuesday, experts from the state and climate advocates presented that new reality — what’s been lost, what’s been regained, and what’s being done to adjust.

Here’s what they said.

Trump’s first-day executive orders attempted to gut much of the progress that Massachusetts has made on climate, largely by trying to claw back the funds awarded via President Joe Biden’s signature piece of legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act. That Act, passed by Congress, directed hundreds of billions of dollars toward kick-starting the clean energy transition, while seeking to create jobs and address historic inequities.

Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell and a coalition of her counterparts from other states fought back, successfully restoring much of that funding, but not all of it, according to Kathryn Antos, state undersecretary for decarbonization and resilience.

“This has been a rapidly evolving situation, with the fate of some of our most important climate grants remaining uncertain,” she said.

That includes a $389 million grant from the federal Department of Energy that would upgrade and expand two electric substations in Massachusetts and Connecticut. That work would accommodate enough power to support 2 million households, and would support the development of the region’s first multi-day battery storage system, which is planned for Maine.

Another grant that remains frozen: $378,000 from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help address the riskiest dams in the state. The funds would go to creating a new tool to help prioritize risk — a critical step as the state considers how to repair and remove dams while keeping infrastructure resilient, Antos said.

And while federally funded work to install a fast-charging network for electric vehicles is still moving ahead, a $14.4 million grant for slower chargers at select park and ride and MBTA transit parking lots has been put on hold, according to Andrew Paul, director of strategic initiatives at the state Department of Transportation.

Ever since he was out on the campaign trail, it was clear that offshore wind would be a major target of President Trump. That has borne out.

A day-one executive order to pause all leasing for offshore wind in federal waters and review existing leases has sent shivers up and down the industry, putting projects still in need of permits on hold and delaying progress in the state.

“Without all the federal permits, projects planned for New England waters cannot begin construction, even if projects do have all of their federal permits,” said Kelt Wilska, offshore wind director for Environmental League of Massachusetts. “These actions send an immensely negative market signal to developers.”

As of now, the state is on track to have just three offshore wind projects completed by the end of this decade — Block Island Wind and Revolution Wind, off the coast of Rhode Island, and Vineyard Wind 1 south of Martha’s Vineyard. That adds up to just under 2 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030, Wilska said — far short of state’s goal of 6 gigawatts.

It’s not just state-level grants that have been eliminated. Federal grants on climate that had been awarded to local and regional groups have also been subject to freezes (and, in some cases, thaws).

The Association to Preserve Cape Cod was unable to access funds from two federal grants for six wetland restoration projects in January — work that would make the area more resilient to rising seas. By mid-February, that funding had been restored, said Andrew Gottlieb, executive director of the association. But, he said, it’s hard to trust it.

“We’re spending money not knowing with any certainty whether or not we’re going to continue to be able to access reimbursement, and whether or not the local contractors who actually did the work on good faith are ultimately going to get getting paid,” Gottlieb said.

A $500,000 grant for the Mystic River Watershed Association, meanwhile, was eliminated last week, according to Patrick Herron, executive director of the association. Those funds were intended to address extreme heat in Chelsea, Malden, and Everett caused by the urban heat island effect, when highly urbanized areas experience worse heat than outlying areas. Those cities can be 10 degrees hotter than their neighbors.

And at the Charles River Watershed Association, executive director Emily Norton said that the organization won’t be receiving a million dollars in federal community project funding it had been expecting, nor will it get the $30,000 from the EPA it had applied for after the entire grant program was eliminated. Other projects — to address water quality or make the area more flood resilient — are also likely to suffer, Norton said.

“These are the sort of areas that the federal government has been providing services that a lot of people probably aren’t aware of, but we are going to notice the cuts,” Norton said.

With all these setbacks, it’s the state’s job to figure out where it can step in and keep progress moving, Creem and others said.

That means looking for creative ways to beef up funds for climate work — whether through an expanded green bank to provide financing for clean energy projects, increased incentives for electric vehicles, or other creative solutions, according to other experts at the hearing.

“Mass. law requires us to reach net zero emissions by 2050 and that hasn’t changed,” Creem said. “If we’re going to comply, we can’t have time to be in despair. We have to work immediately.”

Sabrina Shankman can be reached at sabrina.shankman@globe.com.