Democrat Governors Get Mugged by Reality on “Green Energy”

In 2022, Massachusetts’ soon-to-be Democrat Governor Maura Healey made a repeated boast that she would come to regret. “Remember,” she told a candidate forum on energy and the environment, “I stopped two gas pipelines from coming into this state.”

Fast forward to earlier this month. With her reelection barely a month away, Healey wrote a letter to President Donald Trump's Energy Secretary Chris Wright asking him to speed up the construction of a desperately needed gas pipeline expansion.

For a governor who built her brand fighting fossil fuel companies, the sudden flip-flop is humiliating. But Healey is hardly alone – she has become just the latest in a growing list of Democrat governors who are being forced to face reality on their fantastical “green energy” promises. One by one, liberal leaders are quietly abandoning the “climate change” policies they once swore were necessary to stop imminent environmental catastrophe.

The Massachusetts project in question is Enbridge’s expansion of the Algonquin pipeline, known as RARE, which would bring more Gulf of America natural gas and Appalachian natural gas to the Bay State by 2028. Healey’s own office says it would serve 600,000 customers and cut their gas bills by $40 million a year, largely by reducing the state's reliance on expensive foreign imports of liquefied natural gas. In her letter, Healey even mentioned the “mutual desire” shared with the Trump administration “to get more U.S. gas into New England.”

Healey did not stumble into Massachusetts’ energy mess – she built it, defended it, and campaigned on it. As the state attorney general, Healey released a 2015 study which she claimed showed that Massachusetts did not need more gas pipeline capacity. The two new pipelines she opposed were eventually shelved due to opposition from Healey and other Massachusetts liberals.

When Healey’s 2022 Republican gubernatorial challenger warned during their final debate that blocking pipelines would drive up energy bills, Healey insisted her opposition had saved residents “billions of dollars” and blamed the war in Ukraine for rising prices. “That is not Massachusetts’ fault,” she said.

Her campaign insisted that Healey’s “clean” energy proposals were “the way out of this mess.” Four years later, Massachusetts is still looking for the way out amid ongoing public outcry over sky-high energy bills.

The state’s residential electricity rates run far above the national average. Heating oil, which warms one in five Massachusetts homes, hit $6.12 a gallon this month, nearly 75 percent higher than a year ago.

Days after writing to Wright, Healey declared a statewide energy emergency and announced a three-month suspension of the added charge on electric bills that funds the state’s solar program.

The green lobby that helped elect her is feeling jilted. The Massachusetts Sierra Club, which endorsed Healey as a climate champion, called the pipeline request an “about-turn.” Healey maintains that it is just her “all-of-the-above approach that includes solar, wind, storage, nuclear, geothermal, hydro and gas.” That list would have surprised candidate Healey.

Healey’s defenders blame this upcoming winter’s prices on the war with Iran, which has pushed oil past $100 a barrel. The war has had an impact on energy costs, but Massachusetts did not get hooked on tankers of gas from overseas because of kinetic strikes in Tehran. The state could have approved projects to deliver cheaper energy long ago. Instead, Healey and other liberal leaders chose to virtue signal to the environmental movement by blocking new pipelines while quietly importing foreign energy to fill the gap that “clean” energy never could.

Healey is hardly alone in being forced to acknowledge that left-wing virtue signaling to “combat climate change” isn’t a realistic energy platform.

In New York, Democrat Governor Kathy Hochul, also on the ballot this November, spent the spring dismantling her state’s landmark 2019 climate law. The budget she signed in May scrapped the law's binding mandate to cut emissions 40 percent by 2030 and replaced it with a non-binding 60 percent target for 2040. “We cannot meet the current timelines without driving energy costs higher,” she admitted at a press conference.

In California, Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom’s air regulators voted in May to hand oil refiners and other industries up to $4 billion in free emissions allowances, a change the state’s own Legislative Analyst’s Office said would “reduce certainty” that California meets its 2030 climate target. Newsom delights in attacking these fossil fuel companies, but now he has been forced to admit that he needs them to keep the lights on.

Connecticut also quietly cut its 2030 renewable energy mandate from 40 percent to 29 percent. Democrat Governor Ned Lamont, once a climate change evangelist but now a born-again affordability hawk seeking a third term, credits this shift with saving ratepayers about $60 million a year.

The timing of these conversions is no coincidence. Healey, Hochul, and Lamont all face voters on November 3. Rhode Island has already shown the potential political fallout from rising energy costs as a result of “green” policies. Democrat Governor Dan McKee proposed pushing the state’s first-in-the-nation deadline for 100 percent renewable electricity from 2033 to 2050, warning that the renewable charge on customers’ bills would quadruple if the state kept its schedule. But his own Democrat-controlled legislature refused.

In September, primary voters showed McKee the door anyway, 62 percent to 38, making him the first sitting governor in the country to lose a primary since 2018.

Despite these lessons, Democrats don’t seem to have gotten the message. In Virginia, Democrat Governor Abigail Spanberger returned the commonwealth to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative this past summer, a cap-and-trade compact among many blue states that forces power plants to buy permits for every ton of carbon they emit. Utility companies like Virginia’s Dominion Energy are passing the additional cost on to ratepayers by asking regulators to add a monthly charge of $10 to $13 to customers’ bills – an amount that is likely to rise even higher.

Spanberger’s new energy plan, released the same day as Healey’s letter, paints an even bleaker picture for Virginians. The governor’s office claims that the plan – which calls for massive expenditures on “clean” energy infrastructure, including an eye-popping 277,000 acres of solar panels – would save ratepayers money. But that calculation rests on a phantom “social cost of carbon” that Spanberger’s administration pegs at an absurd $285 billion.

Meanwhile, the direct cost to ratepayers for the buildout of solar and wind facilities is estimated to be $127 billion. As State House Republican Leader Terry Kilgore put it, “The Governor's plan only becomes the ‘affordable’ option when it includes ‘social costs,’ something that doesn't show up on power bills.”

For years, climate deadlines were cheap promises, set for dates comfortably beyond the next election and often beyond the careers of the politicians who made them. Now the bills have arrived before the deadlines, and angry voters are reading them.

Democrats’ retreat from their extreme climate change agenda amid voter backlash proves what President Trump has argued since returning to office: rising energy costs are largely a result of poor policy choices, not a supply problem.

If other Democrat states don’t take note of the failures of the left-wing climate change agenda, their communities will face ever-escalating energy emergencies as well. And even in deep-blue areas, voters’ willingness to tolerate higher costs may begin to wear thin.