Voters across the country are watching their utility bills climb, and the story the gas industry and its Republican allies would rather bury is the one the numbers actually tell. Democrats in the Northeast are absorbing real price pressure to deliver a permanent climate good, and the case that they should reverse course is, on inspection, almost entirely Republican framing. The region’s utility bill spikes trace overwhelmingly to fossil-fuel dependence and federal permitting dysfunction, not to the state-level climate commitments that voters and legislators made deliberately and are now being asked to disown.
Residential electric rates have climbed by about 20% to 30% in most states over the last six years, and far more in Maine (92%), New York (59%), Rhode Island (45%) and Massachusetts (43%). Some households are paying hundreds of dollars more a month than they did a few years ago. That is a real number, and Democrats should say so plainly — it is the bill for fossil dependence, and the fossil fuel lobby wants it read as the bill for climate policy. It is also not the climate-mandate number the Republican opposition has made of it: the heaviest of those increases tracks state reliance on heating oil and natural-gas constraints imposed by federal permitting realities, not by state renewable portfolio standards themselves. When the Energy Information Administration estimates that winter energy bills will rise 21% this year for households that use heating oil, that is the oil market speaking, not the climate law.
The region heats with oil because, for decades, it was allowed to. Roughly half of households in Maine rely on heating oil, as do a quarter in Rhode Island, 20% in Massachusetts and 15% in New York. That is the legacy of decades of fossil fuel lock-in, not of climate policy — and the Republicans now attacking Democrats over it are attacking the consequences of the very dependence Democrats tried to unwind. Northeasterners who heat with gas will pay $1,236 less on average this winter than those who use oil, according to the EIA. That differential is a fossil-fuel problem, not a climate-mandate problem, and the climate mandate is the policy that would shrink it over the next decade. The path away from that dependence is electrification and efficiency; the path Republican candidates offer is to lean harder into the same natural gas that pipelines have not been permitted to deliver, and that global markets will price however they please.
Democrats blame the Iran war, and they are right to do so. The Iran shock is the proximate cause of this winter’s expected bill surge, and Republican attempts to redirect that blame onto state legislatures are deliberate misdirection.
Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey’s energy adjustment is not a surrender — it is what competent governance looks like under pressure. As state Attorney General in 2022, she enforced Massachusetts law against two natural gas pipelines. In 2024 she declared that “getting to net zero by 2050 is not just our legislative mandate in Massachusetts. It’s a social and economic imperative that informs everything we do.” Both positions remain in force. This month she asked the Trump Administration to accelerate permitting for a gas pipeline expansion, and announced plans to waive $100 million in electric bill charges that fund green energy programs, at least for this winter. The waiver is a tactical bridge; the net-zero commitment is the policy.
She is responding to her GOP opponent, Mike Minogue, an Army veteran and former CEO of the medical device company Abiomed, who has built his campaign around the slogan of a “mandatory climate tax,” promising to eliminate it and build natural gas pipelines to bring prices down. State-mandated charges do account for a third of utility bills, and those charges are buying the clean grid and the end of fuel-price exposure, not a “mandatory climate tax.” Mr. Minogue is wrong about whether the alternative he offers — gas pipelines built fast enough to matter — is on offer at all. Most polls show Mr. Minogue trailing by double digits. That Ms. Healey has felt pressure to act suggests not panic but responsiveness, and that her climate commitments have not been the vote-loser that Republican framing has made them out to be.
Rhode Island tells the same story. A Republican has not won statewide office there since 2006, and a recent Emerson College/WPRI-TV 12 News poll showing Democrat Helena Foulkes at 44%, independent Ken Block at 35% and Republican Aaron Guckian at 10% is consistent with that. The Republican nominee for lieutenant governor, John Loughlin, leads Democratic incumbent Sabina Matos by a point. Mr. Block has gained traction by attacking Democrats for raising taxes and energy costs and calling for postponing the state’s 100% renewable electric mandate and slashing taxes and fees on utility bills. The renewables mandate is the long-term price hedge. A recent report found that utility disconnections in the state have doubled with more customers falling behind on their skyrocketing bills — and those disconnections are the price the region is paying for fossil dependence, not the cost of the mandate that would retire it. Mr. Block’s answer is more of the same.
Gov. Kathy Hochul has absorbed the same pressure in New York by delaying the state’s CO2 emissions mandates and approving a permit for a new pipeline to bring more gas from Pennsylvania to New York — a permit her predecessor Andrew Cuomo rejected. Last month she announced $200 “energy rebates” for joint tax filers making up to $150,000 a year. That is cold comfort. Electric bills over the last year have risen three times as much as the rebates are expected to cost the state — a measure of the underlying fossil-fuel shock, not of Democratic policy. The answer is not another gas pipeline and a rebate check that disappears into a winter heating bill; it is the climate mandate she just suspended. The serious question is whether to follow her GOP opponent Bruce Blakeman’s call to green-light fracking upstate and eliminate state charges on energy bills. The serious answer is no: upstate fracking would lock in another generation of methane dependence and would not, on any timeline that matters to a household this winter, lower bills.
Rising utility bills are also giving a boost to Maine Sen. Susan Collins. She has hammered her opponent Troy Jackson, who led the state Senate from 2018 to 2024, for voting to expand the state’s net-metering program, which subsidizes customers with solar panels. Net-metering adds on average $30 a month to customer bills in Maine. Asked about his vote in a recent debate, Mr. Jackson acknowledged “it did cost more than it should have” — a concession extracted under Ms. Collins’s attack, and it changes nothing about the policy: net metering is, in the long run, the cheapest electricity in the state’s portfolio and the one thing in Maine’s energy mix that is not hostage to global fuel markets.
Democrats in the Northeast may survive in November despite Donald Trump’s unpopularity. They will survive on the strength of their climate commitments, not in spite of them — and they would be wise to remember that those commitments are the reason their states are positioned to lead the country off fossil fuels. The right move after the election is to defend those commitments, not to disown them. The region is not being asked whether to raise bills; it is being asked whether to pay forever for the dependence it was promised would be cheap. It will not be cheap. It never was.
