Governor Maura Healey of Massachusetts has done the thing serious public officials are supposed to do when the facts on the ground outrun the slogans of four years ago: she has changed her mind. Last week she wrote Energy Secretary Chris Wright asking the Trump Administration to move federal permitting “quickly” and with “urgency” so the Algonquin pipeline can be expanded enough to meet total household heating needs in the next cold snap, save 600,000 utility customers roughly $40 million a year, and remove the risk that “any federal delay could put those consumer benefits at risk.” That is what good governance sounds like under cold pressure. It is not a flip. It is leadership.
The chorus ridiculing her as a hypocrite caught in embarrassing contradiction has the story upside down. They added her name to the lengthening list of climate-minded governors “mugged by reality.” They missed the actual story. Read her letter to Energy Secretary Chris Wright carefully. She is not recanting. She is sequencing. “On several occasions we have discussed our mutual desire to get more U.S. natural gas into New England,” she wrote, “to reduce reliance on higher-cost imported fuel and lower costs for customers.” The expansion she now backs would, she notes, have given the region enough gas capacity “to meet total household heating needs this past January.” That is not a betrayal of climate ambition. It is what climate ambition looks like when it has to honor the lived experience of 600,000 utility customers facing $40 million in avoidable annual costs.
While campaigning for governor four years ago, Healey openly boasted that as state Attorney General she had “stopped two gas pipelines from coming into this state.” In 2015 she wrote that “[w]e do not need increased gas capacity to meet electric reliability needs,” and pushed instead for the state to “embrace energy efficiency and demand response programs.” Those positions were principled climate commitments, and at the time they were defensible. The story is not that Healey was wrong in 2015. She was right. The story is that even when you are right about the destination, the road turns out to be longer and more brutal than the climate movement admitted at the time — and the only unforgivable move now would be to refuse the course-correction that the bridge demands.
What has shifted is not Healey’s seriousness. What has shifted is the operating reality of New England’s grid. Several nuclear and coal plants that once anchored the region’s baseload have closed. Last year, natural gas supplied about half of New England’s electricity generation. Solar and wind together covered just 8%. New England’s grid operator has been plain: solar cannot fill the winter power gap because of “snow, clouds, and shortened daylight hours,” and “winter storms that limit solar power can also significantly limit the output of wind generation if high wind speeds force plant operators to shut down in order to protect equipment.” About half of Massachusetts households heat with gas in a region where winters are measured in feet of snow. Imported LNG — the only scalable substitute for domestic pipeline gas in a deep cold snap — is not a plan: its “timely arrival depends on long-term weather forecasts, global market prices, and other logistical challenges.” The grid is gas-dependent in winter not because of climate dogmatism but because the alternative generation does not yet exist at the scale or seasonality the region requires. That is not a system. It is a gamble every January.
This is the climate-honest position. Healey is not walking back Massachusetts’s decarbonization commitments. She is closing a winter reliability gap that the previous decade’s choices — and the slower-than-touted pace of firm clean generation — left exposed. The leader who, in January, refused any incremental domestic pipeline capacity while constituents burned heating oil at $6.12 a gallon (up from $3.53 a year ago) and while Massachusetts already pays the fourth-highest residential electricity rates in the country would be the one deserving of disgrace. Healey is letting the urgent be urgent and the long-term stay long-term.
What happened last January is the case in point. During the Arctic freeze, a full third of the region’s power came from oil. That is what an under-supplied gas grid looks like: more expensive, dirtier per unit of heat delivered, and worse on every climate metric than a gas pipeline would have been. The $40 million in annual savings Healey cites is the climate case, not against it: imported LNG costs about six times more than U.S. natural gas. Every pipeline-cubic-foot that displaces an LNG tanker or a heating-oil delivery is a cubic-foot of methane leakage and oil-train risk that does not happen. The “delay” Healey is pushing back against is not a setback for the climate; it is a forcing function for more oil and LNG imports during the very winters when their emissions and prices spike together.
The critics want to frame this as “anti-fossil-fuel follies” catching up with a governor. Read it the other way and the follies were always on the other side: a decade of treating dispatchable winter supply as if it would materialize by climate-conference plenary, while the region watched baseload retire faster than its replacement could firm up the winter load. Healey’s 2015 line reads badly now because the capacity that was supposed to fill the gap did not arrive. Solar and wind hit 8% together. Demand response and “energy efficiency” did not, in the depths of January, replace a peaking pipeline. That is not a reason to mock her earlier position; it is a reason to be honest that the transition requires natural gas as a bridge fuel for longer and at larger scale than the more enthusiastic voices were willing to admit even four years ago.
The harder, more interesting case is the one Healey’s detractors refuse to engage: if Massachusetts needs the Algonquin expansion this winter, what does the state need for the winter ten winters out? The bridge has to be built. But the bridge is not the destination. The same letter that asks the federal government to move “quickly” and with “urgency” is also a confession that the state cannot decarbonize by sabotage — it can only decarbonize by sequencing. That sequencing now has an honest map: keep the gas flowing where renewables and demand-side measures cannot yet cover; electrify heat at scale; build the winter-peaking renewables and storage that close the eventual gap; treat every LNG tanker and heating-oil truckload as a problem to engineer out of the system, decade by decade, not a slogan to win a primary with.
The position now fashionable among the commentariat — that any incremental gas hookup is an unacceptable surrender — produces exactly what Massachusetts is trying to prevent: winter emergencies, stratospheric heating bills, and a grid operator leaning on imported LNG whose price punishes ratepayers, not carbon. Pretending otherwise in a cold-climate state where about half of households heat with gas is not idealism. It is performance.
Massachusetts’ electricity rates rank fourth-highest in the country, behind Hawaii, California and Maine. That is the climate-policy record the critics want to pin on the state’s clean-energy ambitions. Look at the same number from the other end: those four are the four states furthest along the curve of pulling fossil generation out of the system. The rate pain is real. The decarbonization is also real.
Healey does not face a serious re-election challenge in November. She has no coalition to perform for, no primary to placate. She is making the call she believes is right — one grounded in the actual winter operating reality of New England, not in slogans about grid transformation that do not survive first contact with the polar vortex.
The critics want voters to choose between cheaper power this winter and a livable planet for the rest of the century. Healey has decided — visibly, at some political cost, in a letter to a Republican administration she disagrees with on most everything else — that the climate case requires delivering both. She should not be mocked for that. She should be read. The federal review sitting on Chris Wright’s desk should move with the urgency she requested. Cold homes are not a climate policy. They are a humanitarian problem, and they deserve an adult answer.
