Sen. Michael Barrett, co-chair of the Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy Committee, speaks to the details of Senate leadership's new climate legislation Thursday at a press conference in the Senate Reading Room. Image by Sam Doran/ State House News Service
Transportation, energy and the construction fields feature as primary focus areas in a bill Senate Democrats rolled out Thursday to accelerate decarbonization efforts amidst what lawmakers called a sluggish approach by state agencies.
The policy-heavy, $250-million bill set to hit the Senate floor next week (S 2819) would combine an overhaul of the offshore wind procurement process with new investments in electric vehicle infrastructure, incentives to encourage more drivers to go electric, greater scrutiny on the future of natural gas, and local options to restrict the use of fossil fuels in building projects.
Senators pitched the proposal as a needed follow-up to the law Gov. Charlie Baker signed last year, which committed Massachusetts to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, a target that will require major changes throughout the economy.
Where the 2021 law “was and is about laying benchmarks,” the new bill “is about doing what needs to be done to hit those benchmarks,” said Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy Committee Co-chair Sen. Michael Barrett.
The bill would use $100 million to create a Clean Energy Investment Fund, allocate $100 million to incentivize the adoption of electric vehicles, and deploy $50 million to build out electric vehicle charging infrastructure.
Senate Ways and Means Committee Chair Michael Rodrigues said the legislation would use surplus state tax revenues to seed that spending, though he said lawmakers could opt to add to the trust funds in the future using federal aid or other sources.
“Let’s face it: improvements we make in education or health care policy won’t mean anything if our coastal cities and our cities are underwater,” Senate President Karen Spilka said while unveiling the bill, flanked by about a dozen other senators. “This is the most important issue of our time.”
On the transportation front, the Senate bill aims to accelerate a statewide embrace of electric vehicles. It would require rebates through the Massachusetts Offers Rebates for Electric Vehicles (MOR-EV) program to be offered at the point of sale, making the benefits available to motorists immediately, and increase the rebate amount in most cases by $1,000 to $3,500.
Motorists could receive an additional $1,000, representing a rebate of $4,500 if they trade in a combustion engine vehicle when purchasing an electric car or truck.
Starting in 2035, all new vehicles sold in Massachusetts would need to produce zero emissions, a change that Barrett said would align the Bay State with New York and California. The Baker administration has proposed a similar cutoff of the sale of fossil fuel vehicles, which would be codified into state law under the Senate bill, as part of its 2050 decarbonization plan.
All buses purchased and leased by the MBTA would need to be zero-emissions vehicles starting in 2028, and the entire fleet – which today includes more than 1,000 buses – would need to be zero-emission by 2040.
Other clean energy sources feature in the Senate bill, too. The legislation would allow nuclear fusion, networked geothermal and other new technologies to be eligible for support from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center and would greenlight agricultural and horticultural land to be used as solar panel sites, so long as the panels do not impede existing uses.
