IN THE TRANSITION to clean energy, low- to moderate-income homeowners in Massachusetts have the odds stacked against them. Our state has the second-oldest housing stock in the country, along with some of the highest utility prices.  

A study from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy shows that low-income Black, Hispanic, and Native American households face dramatically higher energy burdens – spending a larger share of their income on energy bills – than the average household. At the same time, this historically expensive market means more homeowners are seeking to improve where they already live instead of purchasing a new house. 

Programs for those types of energy improvements have largely focused on electrifying or decarbonizing units in larger multifamily buildings rather than on single-family homes — even though 1-4 family homes count for 60 percent of building emissions. Plus, higher-income borrowers tend to be the ones to take advantage of existing incentive programs, while low-income communities are vulnerable to predatory lending practices — particularly amid the confusing nature of solar leasing programs.  

Given that Massachusetts wants to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, we need to make clean energy improvements possible for every homeowner. We can’t afford to leave anyone behind. 

The answer: flexible, innovative financing options that empower homeowners — the ones who had been excluded from the chance to upgrade their homes — to make energy improvements that save money and cut emissions.  

Because of its ubiquity and quick return on investment, rooftop solar is an easy choice. When Nectar Community Investments designed and tested our Solar Plus pilot program in 2023, we had a chance to see what worked. The program included decarbonization assessments and subsidies, and three homeowners purchased solar panels and made other required energy-efficiency upgrades or retrofits required to get their homes ready.  

The Massachusetts Community Climate Bank is on the right track with the Energy Saver Home Loan Program, a new $20 million program that launched in April 2024 to help low- and moderate-income homeowners make clean energy improvements to their homes. After our Solar Plus pilot, we became an early participating lender in the Energy Saver program. We’re proud to partner with the Healey-Driscoll Administration, MassHousing, and others on this sustainable approach to financing green infrastructure. The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center’s Solar for All program is expected to be released this summer, and we look forward to participating in it. 

We’ve closed our first two homeowner loans through Energy Saver, but we know there’s more work to do. Just in our home city of Lawrence, there are more than 400 units heated by electrical baseboard and more than 2,000 units heated with oil, making them potential candidates for electrification and solar.  

Climate change is disproportionately harming these homeowners, and they need options to keep from falling behind. Flexibility and creativity in financing are exactly what we need to meet the moment before us. Our future depends on it.  

Glynn Lloyd is the executive director of Nectar Community Investments, a community development financial institution headquartered in Lawrence. He also serves on the Commonwealth’s Energy Transformation Advisory Board.

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AT SOME POINT between February and early March, as seasonal wind and rain hammered New England coasts, a relatively new but enthusiastically embraced tool for predicting erosion slipped off the Federal Emergency Management Agency website. 

Pioneered on Nantucket in 2020, the Coastal Erosion Hazard viewer that covered all of New England is now unavailable. It predicted erosion risk across the coast for the years 2030, 2050, and 2100, and until recently was publicly accessible on an online map used by planners and individuals alike. 

“The tool was really helpful,” said Leah Hill, Nantucket’s coastal resilience coordinator, “because erosion is episodic. So, an area can be stable for five, 10, 15 years, maybe lose like a foot [of beach] or so, or nothing, and then a storm could come and it could lose a bunch.”  

Historical erosion data and flood maps kept by the state are useful, she said, but the FEMA maps incorporated sea level rise to project potential future erosion over time.  The Biden administration promoted the tool for homeowners, business owners, and community officials making resiliency decisions based on erosion concerns. 

Hill is acutely aware of climate risks to the small island, which has one of the highest erosion rates in the state. These erosion maps, which resulted in a detailed Nantucket erosion assessment, have become baked into her work to inform residents about their property risks.  

“Prospective homeowners or homeowners will call me and say, ‘You know, I’m thinking about purchasing this property. What are the risks associated with it?’” Hill said. “I’ll create, using the best available data, a risk assessment for that property. I don’t give real estate advice, but I can tell them about certain risk criteria. … And in order to do so, I use the FEMA erosion projection maps.” 

When Hill went to the site in early March, the page that used to open up the ArcGIS erosion maps instead took her to a login screen with no way to access the maps. When the maps remained inaccessible for weeks, she reached out to the Woods Hole Sea Grant for help connecting with the FEMA Region 1 team, which covers New England, receiving a brief email response on March 24. 

“FEMA is currently taking swift action to ensure the alignment with President Trump and Secretary [Kristi] Noem’s direction,” wrote Kerry Bogdan, the risk analysis branch chief at FEMA Region 1. “To that end, FEMA Region 1’s Coastal Erosion Hazard viewer will be unavailable at this time.” 

FEMA did not respond to request for comment on the timing or rationale of removing the maps.  

Business magazine Fast Company reported that two software engineers were able to save and recreate data from FEMA’s Future Risk Index tool when it, too, quietly vanished in February. The index mapped the projected economic losses from climate change down to the county level, based on hazards like flooding, drought, heat waves, and wildfires under different emissions scenarios. 

The FEMA future erosion maps are what’s known as “non-regulatory products,” essentially tools that are designed to be accessible and user-friendly, geared toward communicating information to the public, while regulatory products like FEMA floodplain maps are required by law and determine floodplain management, mitigation, and insurance policy. 

For instance, if a building is in a FEMA regulatory floodplain, there may be rules for resiliency improvements. But if a parcel is a long-term future erosion risk, the way to protect it or develop it is often up to the owner’s discretion and informed by the available public information. 

“I’m scrambling a little bit,” Hill said. She saved some of the GIS maps, but not all of them, and it isn’t yet clear if the data sets have been saved elsewhere. 

The map scrubbing is an abrupt about-face on federal data sets, just six months after the federal government touted them as a way to help people plan for a future in the face of climate change. 

Bogdan told The Connecticut Mirror in September 2024 that an assortment of FEMA tools like erosion maps and forward-looking flood risk maps offered critical and helpful insights for municipalities and individuals alike. 

“They’re not going to tell you where you can develop, how to develop, what your insurance rate should be, but they are going to convey that hazard risk,” Bogdan said. “What the risk is so people can plan for it.” 

Communities have incorporated the erosion map viewer with enthusiasm, she said.   

“Some of our severely impacted communities from coastal erosion have really embraced this tool, and they’re incorporating it into their long-term planning for things like grid retreat, placement of utilities, water lines, gas lines, that kind of stuff,” Bogdan told The Mirror. 

The Trump administration has, in its first three months, taken steps to roll back policies around climate resiliency planning. On March 25, FEMA announced that it stopped implementing certain floodplain management requirements for federally funded projects.  

This Obama-era standard, which was a mechanism for federal agencies to manage risk by requiring federally funded projects to be located out of flood risk areas or constructed to reduce the effects of current and future flood hazards, was halted under the first Trump administration, reinstated by Biden, and is now off again. 

“Stopping implementation will reduce the total timeline to rebuild in disaster-impacted communities and eliminate additional costs previously required to adhere to these strict requirements,” the FEMA announcement said in late March. 

Last week, FEMA announced that it is ending the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, which has given states and communities billions of dollars to protect against natural disasters. The agency is also canceling all BRIC applications from fiscal years 2020-2023. FEMA said the BRIC program is “more concerned with climate change than helping Americans affected by natural disasters” in a statement announcing the cuts. 

There has been no official statement on removing public mapping software that anticipates future flood or erosion risk. Other pages removed include the agency’s 2022 “Guide to Expanding Mitigation: Making the Connection to the Coast,” which supplied emergency managers, community planners, coastal and floodplain managers, and other community stakeholders with resources and ideas to mitigate risk. 

A banner atop FEMA’s website reads: “FEMA.gov is being updated to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders. Thank you for your patience and understanding.” 

Shannon Hulst, a floodplain and community rating system specialist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Sea Grant and Cape Cod Cooperative Extension, who was able to connect Hill with FEMA Region 1, said ad-hoc data removal is cause for concern. 

“It’s disconcerting,” said Hulst, who works on projects like developing flood insurance programs for towns along Cape Cod. “And it certainly can make our jobs more challenging. I know, on our end, we’re working on downloading some of that data to make sure we continue to have access to it.” 

In her capacity, Hulst mostly relies on regulatory products like the floodplain maps, which are “a whole different ball game.” There is no word that the flood maps will be taken down, Hulst said, and Massachusetts keeps state-level flood maps as back-up. 

“We’ll still be OK with that data,” she said of the flood maps, but the disappearance of solid predictive data is an issue for consistent long-term planning. “When we know that there is a risk, and that is what we were using as the best available data to inform us about that risk, and we’re trying to manage our communities to the best of our ability to protect ourselves from that risk,” she said, “it makes it difficult.” 

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MASSACHUSETTS FAMILIES ARE facing skyrocketing energy bills, and the Trump administration’s reckless energy and trade policies are making it worse.

Already, some Bay Staters are paying double what they did last year on their energy bills, largely thanks to an aging gas system struggling to respond to extreme weather fueled by climate change. And in New England, where approximately 10 percent of electricity and 80 percent of gasoline and diesel fuel come from Canada, Trump’s on-again, off-again approach to tariffs is creating significant uncertainty and instability in the energy market. 

The last thing Massachusetts families need is an administration lurching from one headline-driven policy to the next.  

In March, President Trump announced a 25 percent tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico and a lower 10 percent tariff on Canadian energy imports, with certain exemptions. If just the 10 percent tariff level on energy imports from Canada is fully implemented, Bay Staters could foot more than $370 million per year in additional costs, and New Englanders could be out over $1 billion.  

The temporary halt in March of electricity exports on a key transmission line carrying primarily hydropower from Quebec to New England underscored just how interconnected Massachusetts and the broader region are with Canadian energy.   

Then, earlier this month, Trump announced broad tariffs on top of those already in place. On Wednesday, he backed down and paused some of their implementation for 90 days. Once they go into effect, these tariffs will disrupt supply chains, shrink paychecks, and drive up energy costs across the country. The increasingly high tariff on China, and general uncertainty around the tariffs, is likely to still do just that.  

Yet this isn’t just about today’s energy bills — it’s about the future of our energy system and our planet. In Massachusetts, the climate crisis is no longer a distant threat. Cities like Boston are enduring more frequent extreme heat days and record-breaking temperatures. 

Sea level is projected to climb as much as four feet by 2070, threatening homes, businesses, and critical infrastructure from Cape Cod to the South Coast. And heavy rainfall is overwhelming stormwater systems and exacerbating environmental injustices in places like the Mystic River Watershed. These escalating impacts hit hardest in communities already grappling with unaffordable energy bills, aging infrastructure, and limited resources. Without urgent action to curb emissions and build resilience, the consequences — to lives, livelihoods, and our economy — will only grow. 

Tackling climate change requires a comprehensive energy strategy that invests in cost-effective and quick-to-deploy renewables, safeguards community health, and boosts resilience. Trump’s haphazard trade war — coupled with attacks on renewables and executive orders expediting oil and gas production and exports — does none of that.  

His tariffs exempt the oil and gas industry — the very industry that donated $1 billion to his campaign. And as oil and gas executives further invest in the dirty energy that fuels the extreme weather, consumers will only spend more on heating and cooling their homes while the wealthy continue to profit.  

Just as Massachusetts families must not be left at the mercy of chaotic trade policies, volatile fossil fuel markets, and greedy oil executives, neither should they be left at the mercy of utility profit seeking or price-gouging suppliers.  

While Bay Staters struggle to pay for heat, multibillion-dollar utility companies continue to hike rates and rake in massive profits for their shareholders, largely thanks to misaligned incentives for investor-owned utilities. At the same time, certain competitive electric suppliers disproportionately target low-income households and communities of color with tactics that lure many into contracts that promise savings but end up costing more.    

Families deserve long-term strategies that lower costs, ensure energy security and resilience, and protect ratepayers. That means deploying renewable energy and energy efficiency, upgrading our grid, and ensuring policies that serve working families — not corporate profits.  

While state officials work to provide immediate relief to consumers, we must fully invest in energy assistance that meets the scale of the crisis. In Massachusetts, more than 150,000 families depend on the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) to heat and cool their homes each month.  

My Heating and Cooling Relief Act would expand LIHEAP and ensure more families can afford to stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Yet the Trump administration just eliminated the federal staff responsible for LIHEAP — increasing the risk that more families will be forced to choose between paying their bills or putting food on the table. We must protect energy assistance for low-income households as energy prices increase.   

Massachusetts families shouldn’t have to bear the costs of Trump’s trade war and corporate greed. We must break our dependence on expensive and polluting fossil fuels by accelerating the transition to clean energy — no matter what Trump and his Big Oil barons try to do. As Massachusetts continues its climate leadership, I will keep fighting in DC for policies that put renewables over fossil fuels and people over profits — not the other way around. Together, we will deliver the energy security and affordability our communities deserve.  

Edward Markey is a US senator from Massachusetts. He is a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee and co-author of the Green New Deal resolution.  

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AS GLOBAL TEMPERATURES rise to record levels and places across the world see devastating weather events linked to climate change, the Trump administration has begun to roll back key environmental protections designed to transition the country off of fossil fuels. 

Since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the US has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, the federal government has frozen funding for climate projects, dismantled programs aimed at curbing pollution, and planned mass reductions in staff at agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency. Lee Zeldin, the current EPA administrator, has promised to roll back protections for clean air and clean water. He has promised to take “historic actions” to deregulate fossil fuel power plants, reconsider emissions regulations on vehicles, and potentially scrap the endangerment finding – a document that underpins much of EPA’s regulatory authority.   

Trump himself has called climate change a “hoax.” He reaffirmed his commitment to fast-track oil and natural gas projects only hours into his second term, saying, “we’re going to drill, baby, drill.”   

Environmentalists, scientists, and other advocates working to decarbonize and mitigate the effects of climate change have decried these statements and sued his administration over many of the changes at the EPA. 

CommonWealth Beacon spoke to Gina McCarthy — the former head of the EPA under President Barack Obama and the first White House National Climate Advisor under President Joe Biden — about the impact of the Trump administration’s policies on Massachusetts and what can be done to keep pushing forward on climate goals. 

As EPA administrator, McCarthy signed the Clean Power Plan, which set the first-ever national standards for regulating power plant emissions in 2015. Under Biden, she implemented climate policy across federal agencies and pushed for the landmark Inflation Reduction Act which has provided large investments in climate change mitigation and adaptation. McCarthy is a Dorchester native and prior to joining the EPA, she served in different environmental roles under five different Massachusetts governors. She is currently a senior fellow at The Fletcher School’s Climate Policy Lab at Tufts University. 

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.   

COMMONWEALTH BEACON: How is the Trump administration redefining the role of EPA? Can you talk about what the shift means and how it will impact the people and the environment in this country? 

GINA MCCARTHY: The mission of the EPA is to protect health and safety. It’s a very simple mission, but that mission is clearly being redefined under the Trump administration. It’s going to make life considerably more challenging, especially for people in communities that have been left behind — where there’s still a tremendous amount of work needed to meet EPA’s mission. 

One of the things we’re seeing right now at EPA is a real diminishment of the staff. The agency will not have the range of scientists it once had — if it has any remaining after this administration continues its efforts to reduce staff by what they hope will be 65 percent. We no longer have an Environmental Justice Office at EPA, and they are considering an entire redefinition of EPA’s mission 

We’re also seeing a rollback in millions — if not billions — of dollars that would have gone toward meeting the agency’s mission.  

In particular, it’s important to recognize that the current EPA administrator is redefining the agency’s mission as “unleashing American energy.” If you look closely at that, what they’re really talking about is advancing fossil fuels. 

CWB: The EPA has said that it will take action to deregulate fossil fuel power plants, reconsider emissions regulations on vehicles, and potentially scrap the endangerment finding that underpins much of EPA’s regulatory authority. What are the effects of these policy rollbacks that states like Massachusetts should be thinking about? 

MCCARTHY: My fear is that they’re not really reconsidering these rules — they’re looking at ways to ensure they are no longer implemented.  

One example is the Mercury and Air Toxic Standard, which I shepherded through the process when I was at EPA. That was an effort to understand the danger that mercury poses as it’s emitted from smokestacks and ends up going into lakes, getting in the fish, harming children’s health, and leading to poisoning or death in some instances. That is one of the rules under reconsideration.  

If you start adding up all these rollbacks, you realize they are fundamentally doing two things: 1) reducing Americans’ ability to stay healthy and safe and protect natural resources and 2) providing an opportunity for the agency itself and what it does in its mission to be destabilized. 

If rules made consistent with Congress’s directives or longstanding laws are up for grabs, the agency will have no stability. The people in our country will no longer be the focus of EPA in the same way that they have been over the past decades. My main concern is that this also includes a dismantling of the agency itself. 

CWB: These changes are coming at a critical time when temperatures are rising, storms are intensifying, and wildfires are devastating communities. Can you give us a sense of what these rollbacks will mean for the fight against climate change? 

MCCARTHY:  The fight to address climate change is one that needs to be a big fight, not a small tweak. Even the rules that EPA has available to it now won’t stop the climate from changing.  

These actions are not the end all be all, but it is taking the United States totally out of the picture in terms of the international community. Every other country recognizes that climate change is happening, that it’s real, and that we need to address it in an international context if we want to slow down the progress that climate change itself is making. 

The instability of the world in which we live, all of these terrible fires that we are seeing, all of this unsettling weather is a reflection of the change in the climate that’s already happened. It will simply continue to get exacerbated, especially if one of the largest and richest countries decides to pull out of this effort.  

These changes [from the Trump administration] are all intended to deny that climate change exists. They are ensuring that scientists who work on climate are silenced by basically eliminating them from the federal agencies. It’s an effort not just to question science but to silence it.  

It’s absolutely shocking and mind boggling and should be to everyone in this country that our leaders are actually denying the biggest existential risk of our time.  

CWB: How do the Trump administration’s actions taken together impact individual states? 

MCCARTHY:  It will be a significant disadvantage to every single state if the federal government diminishes its resources and its capabilities across the country to protect human health and the environment. 

What you’re seeing here across the states is an effort to basically take away services that have been provided to those states for decades. Like FEMA response when there is a problem. Now, this administration wants to delegate that to states.  

Do you realize that 40 percent of EPA’s total budget goes directly to states? The reason is that states don’t have the resources to protect themselves the way that the federal government has.  

States are now beginning to be the place where the federal government goes to die because they don’t want to do that work anymore. And they’re demanding that states do it with full knowledge that states don’t have the full authority or the kind of resources they need to do anything near what the federal government has been doing for decades and decades.  

This is a turnaround that will do nothing but limit the ability of folks that are living in states to have healthier air and cleaner water. Most states — in fact, most Republican states — don’t have the kind of state resources they need to fill the gap when the federal government decides to drop programs. 

CWB: What can states do to fill the gap left by the federal government? 

MCCARTHY:  States have to work together. We only have a car rule [stricter emissions standards on vehicles] because 12 states have aligned together with EPA to make cleaner air because of a demand across those states. We only have cleaner air because we have had the ability to work with states to define a path that could get them there. State efforts are essential. 

CWB: What tools do states like Massachusetts have to maintain stricter air and water standards? 

MCCARTHY: A lot of the larger states which have good resources — like Massachusetts — can defend themselves. They can move forward. Many states have the ability to develop their own regulations and rulemaking.  

But we cannot do what the federal government does. It is simply impossible. We do not have the expertise at the state level that EPA has to develop regulations and to enforce them. There are some things that are not delegated to state authority, and you cannot do it.  

It’s going to take a long time for states to figure out how they can power up their resources in their staffing to fill those gaps. It will be a significant step backward for our country and our states. 

CWB: What kind of work can be done? Do you see hope anywhere for climate progress? 

MCCARTHY: We do have to have hope. We have to understand that our opportunities are tremendous. 

When [the Trump] EPA makes decisions that go to litigation, most often the agency has to continue with that work until the litigation is settled.  

As much as this federal government wants to ignore clean energy, they can’t because clean energy in the US has brought more power generating capacity online in 2024 than it has in the past 20 years. It’s crazy. It’s huge. It’s exciting.  

People want to see clean energy because it’s advancing. It’s an investment in people, in jobs, in health, and in economic growth.  

People need to understand that between litigation and the excitement of the new technologies and the clean energy we have, we have time to reverse this. We have time to step up. But people are going to need to step up. 

They’re going to have to ask their states to step in when the federal government goes away as best they can. They’re going to have to maintain their level of excitement and hope that the clean energy world advances.  

CWB: You’ve written a satirical essay called “Make America Suck Again,” praising President Trump after he issued an executive order banning paper straws in favor of plastic straws. What made you do that? 

MCCARTHY:  I just did it to amuse myself, to be honest with you. I had been getting so serious and so concerned that I realized I needed to lighten up. When I saw, in the middle of a presidential executive order, something that was so ludicrous as that, I just had to make fun of it. 

It was basically praising the president for protecting us from the ravages of paper straws and touting the benefits of kids and others who could literally spend their lives sucking on petroleum products, which is what plastic straws are made from. 

People have to read things like that and realize that they’re all tongue-in-cheek. But the point was: How silly is it that a president of the United States would write that? How incredibly ridiculous is it that a president of the United States would demand that straws have to be plastic?  

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PAYMENT IN LIEU of taxes, or PILOT, provides reimbursement to towns and cities for lost revenues from tax-exempt land and property within their boundaries. In rural parts of the state, a major source of PILOT reimbursements are state forests.  

Reimbursement payments to towns are based on a complicated formula, which has changed over the years, that includes the appraised value of the property and the latest three-year statewide average tax rate. That’s where the problem begins.  

Communities represented by the Woodlands Partnership of Northwest Massachusetts—a public body established in 2018 state law and led by 20 towns in the northwest corner of the state—have been acutely aware of something that has come to be known in Massachusetts municipal circles as the Plymouth-Savoy conundrum.  

This prototypical example illustrates the inequity in the current formula by comparing the coastal town of Plymouth and the Berkshire County town of Savoy. Though the two communities have similar acreage in the program through state forests, the PILOT payment for Plymouth is nine times that of Savoy (in FY24, this was $1,210,586 versus $132,040).  

In January, state Auditor Diana DiZoglio’s office and the Division of Local Mandates released the report Pursuing Equitable State-Owned Land Reimbursements for Municipalities, which recommends, among other things, a funding floor to address systemic inequity in the PILOT formula.  

According to the report, the median reimbursement rate per acre in the state is $127, but there are wide disparities in the rates paid to different communities. In Franklin and Berkshire counties, the median rate is $32 and $33, respectively, with some towns paid far below those levels. Hawley, for example, a town in Franklin County, is paid $10 per acre, while Monroe, another Franklin County town, receives just $5 per acre. At the other end of the state—and the PILOT reimbursement spectrum—Norfolk County’s median payment is $408 per acre. 

The valuation of these lands based on property values specific to the communities they are in does not consider the harder-to-monetize benefits these public spaces provide, while simultaneously bringing local impacts and stressors to roads and public safety. What’s being ignored in this calculation are the crucial elements of biodiversity, habitat, carbon, clean water, natural resources, and recreation, among others.  

In the frequent discussion around limited financial resources in rural communities, and the resulting increasing and often desperate talks of regionalization as remedy to underfunding for schools, roads, and emergency services, it’s important that this systemic issue be included as both cause of fiscal stress and potential avenue for solution. 

The Woodlands Partnership, Auditor DiZoglio, state Sen. Paul Mark, and local officials are convening a public forum on this issue on Monday, April 7, at 1 pm, at Windsor Town Hall. 

There have been repeated legislative efforts to rectify the inequity in this program, which would not only provide critical support for small towns lacking capacity and services but would also support the state’s climate and conservation goals, as towns in areas with low reimbursement rates are often indifferent—or even hostile—to additional proposed conservation.  

When it comes to legislative efforts, programs that cost relatively little and have great effect on services, such as this one, should be prioritized—especially when such efforts connect to and further broader state and climate goals.  

When a small town has only a few hundred people in it, however, and is struggling to provide basic services to its residents, it’s often hard to have that message heard all the way out in Boston.  

Dicken Crane of Windsor is chair of the Woodlands Partnership of Northwest Massachusetts. Art Schwenger of Heath is vice chair. Sam Haupt of Peru is chair of the Partnership’s Municipal Financial Sustainability Committee.   

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While the winter winds battered away at the south coast of Nantucket, the island hummed along in year-round mode. Around 14,200 people puttered into work, sent their kids to the local schools, hit up the few dozen restaurants open during the off-season, and dodged downtown when the tides rushed in and flooded over brick and cobblestone. 

Before the high summer season roars in, when the population booms to 80,000, the wind and the water will have carved off more of the island, prompting some returning seasonal residents to pace around their properties with a wary eye on the bluff’s edge. 

“If people aren’t there during the winter, and they’re not seeing some of the biggest impacts and changes to the beach,” said Cynthia Dittbrenner, vice president of natural resources for The Trustees of Reservations. “So they come back to this beautiful, occasionally tragic, scene of erosion,” she said. “But if you’re there in the winter, you’re experiencing these incredible storms and the winds, and you see the erosion happening first-hand right in front of you. It’s like an education tool.” 

Across the Cape and Islands – the region with the highest share of seasonal housing in Massachusetts – headlines and eyeballs have been transfixed on the bluff-side luxury vacation homes tumbling into the ocean or threatening to do so.  

The region is already struggling with the workforce impacts of changing housing patterns while trying to maintain the seaside tourist draw that’s essential to local economies. A 2022 state assessment noted that a major consequence of climate change on the Cape and Islands is a reduction in affordable housing availability and tourist attractions and amenities.  

This is creating a housing crunch and a climate crisis at the same time – demand for these sandy, tony shores conflicting with the need to literally shore up the coastline.   

Groundwater is rising, low-lying areas are regularly flooding, and the ocean is slowly turning some peninsulas into islands, but there’s nothing like a house toppling into the sea to drive the point home: plan or paddle. 

And regardless, someone has to pay. 

The anecdotes, at first blush, seem like first-world math problems.

If a $5.5 million home nearly falls off a cliff in Wellfleet, who foots the bill? If a house bought on an eroding beach on Nantucket drops in value from $2.2 million to $200,000, but needs another $200,000 of work before the town finally orders it demolished, was it worth it? If the value of homes across the coast more than doubled during a global pandemic and the water continues to rise, who can afford or be able to live there now?  

The demand for coastal houses is quickly bumping up against the reality of nature, with soaring pandemic prices dropping along some of the more erosion-prone shorelines.  

At-risk houses pose a threat to more than the owners’ wallets. The saga of a controversial 5,100-square foot Wellfleet mansion entered its final chapter this year, after it was purchased for $5.5 million in 2021 despite the fact that wind and water had already clawed the bluffs dangerously near the sprawling house.  

A 2024 report prepared for Wellfleet by Bryan McCormack, a coastal processes specialist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Sea Grant, estimated that the bluffs were eroding at a rate of 3.8 to 5.6 feet a year. The report estimated the house would collapse within three years.  

Cape residents and officials fretted that, should the property fall into Cape Cod Bay, the nearby oyster beds could be physically damaged and poisoned by toxic fiberglass and refrigerant materials. Radio station CAI reported that, after years of back and forth over who would shoulder the cost of demolishing the property, a demolition crew surprised the town by starting to dismantle the house in February.  

McCormack talked to CAI as the home was demolished. “Seeing that this is happening, going into dumpsters and being taken off site, rather than next week in a storm, it is, I think, a preferable outcome for a lot of the people in the town and for the people that use the beach, the people that are eating shellfish out of Wellfleet Harbor, the people that are living all through this system,” he said. 

But the showpiece homes aren’t alone. A 2020 report by First Street Foundation, a climate data organization, found 193,000 properties in Massachusetts face a substantial risk of coastal flooding, which includes more than half of the properties in some coastal towns.   

“Water doesn’t know property lines,” said Leah Hill, Nantucket’s coastal resilience coordinator, as she stared at a grey ocean. Hill was out in the field on a late March afternoon, checking on a stretch of the island’s 88 miles of shoreline, along which perches some of the state’s priciest and most vulnerable real estate.   

A 2021 assessment of Nantucket’s coastal risk, which informed a tailored resiliency plan, slapped a $3.4 billion cumulative annual price tag on doing nothing over a 70 year period. By 2070, some 2,373 structures on the island will be at risk from flooding and erosion, the assessment found, and the costs would rack up through direct physical damage, direct and indirect economic disruption, and direct social disruption for things like relocation and health costs from injuries and mental stress.  

“We’ve got essentially three types of flooding,” explained Hill. “We’ve got flooding from rain, so stormwater flooding. We have flooding from coastal storms, when we get those big nor’easters. And then we get flooding essentially from sea level rise.”   

When sea level rises around the island, it pushes on groundwater, which then pushes fresh water up above ground. This can cause water to settle on areas that were historically dry, expanding wetlands and causing issues like basement flooding far inland. It also causes salt water to intrude into wells and make them undrinkable, Hill said.  

And then of course, there’s erosion. 

“We have one of the highest erosion rates in Massachusetts,” Hill noted. “We are essentially, as you know, a body of sand in the middle of the Atlantic.” 

Nantucket’s climate assessment noted a key tension between “current private development practices and norms” and “a future built environment that is resilient.” It continued, “given these norms, any approach that aims to restrict development is likely to be met with significant opposition and must be carefully crafted to encourage resilient development.” 

There are strains on resources created by “a growing and seasonally fluctuating population,” the assessment further stated. There is more foot traffic, more vehicular traffic, and more demand for services and utilities on one hand. On the other hand, there are more people contributing to the seasonal economy. 

On Martha’s Vineyard, a 2022 climate action plan noted that the island’s south shore beaches are eroding three to five feet every year, threatening more than 700 local jobs that could be lost in vulnerable areas and impacting travel to the island when weather events force the ferry to suspend operations.  

“Shipping, trucking, and ferrying food to the island is becoming increasingly unpredictable,” according to the Martha’s Vineyard plan, and increased demand for local food as the climate changes will be constrained by lack of affordable housing and access to affordable land.

Depending on the time of year, prime waterfront housing on the Cape and Islands is also some of the state’s emptiest.  

About 60 percent of Nantucket units are now only in seasonal, recreational, or occasional use. The island’s part-time percentage is topped only by the Martha’s Vineyard towns Chilmark and Edgartown, both of which are in the high 60s, and Truro near the northern tip of Cape Cod, which is 71 percent part-time homes. 

“We’ve been growing,” Nantucket Select Board member Matthew Fee said of the island where he grew up. “We have more houses, and more bigger and nicer houses, and more people than we’ve had at peak before.” 

Fee wears two hats: select board member running for a sixth term and owner of the local bakery and sandwich shop Something Natural. He’s always been able to tell when a summer is in high demand mode by his “bread index,” that is, how many loaves of southern Massachusetts’ classic Portuguese bread have trundled out his bakery doors. 

The island, like much of the region, has always had a strong vacation season identity. But the savvy economic move for those who want to rent out a house is now to optimize short-term rentals. A one-to-three-bed Airbnb during the prime season can run from $350 to over $1,000 a night, while some eight-bedroom homes on rental listings will still go for around $25,000 a month. 

As state Sen. Julian Cyr puts it, “the real issue is our housing market is valued basically on what a given home or apartment rents for by the night in July and August.”

Fee’s bread index theory “really holds true,” he said of late, “and we are seeing huge spikes now over a Friday-Saturday-Sunday.” 

According to the state’s recent housing needs report, half of all registered short-term rentals statewide are in Barnstable County, despite having only 6 percent of the state’s housing units. From 2009-2019, 5,800 year-round homes on Cape Cod were “lost” – taken out of the normal housing market – to seasonal use or for other reasons. New production made up part of the difference, but not enough to stem the overall loss of year-round units. 

“Thousands of homes are at risk due to increasingly severe coastal and riverine flooding,” the report’s authors wrote. “But a home doesn’t have to be flooded to be lost. … The availability of modestly priced homes and apartments is dwindling as they are acquired and upscaled by investors who sell or rent at a much higher price point.” 

Sale and rental data trackers show a slow but consistent climb for years across these seasonal communities, but the pandemic sent prices into a new stratosphere. Buyers who wanted to spend more time on idyllic shores dropped in with higher budgets, with an eye toward short-term renting or leaving it vacant except for personal vacation use. 

What once was a “life-cycle” of housing is more complicated, Fee said.  

Past a certain price point, the house “usually doesn’t get rented but still demands all the services,” Fee noted, in terms of needing town infrastructure, contractor and staff parking and housing, and utilities to serve the bigger footprints. 

And, the houses that are now being bought, renovated, and kept empty during the off-season are the ones that used to be rented to middle managers, teachers, or town workers. They now have to find somewhere else on the island to live, if possible. Workers on the Cape have a similar issue, often commuting in from the mainland rather than compete for pricey housing where they work. 

“It’s good for business and we rely on it,” Fee said of the seasonal resident ebb and flow, “but it also puts pressures on the island.” 

For Cyr, who grew up in Truro and represents the Cape and Islands, the focus on the billionaire home imperiled by nature is something of a distraction. Coastal erosion risk is “a compounding challenge” to the broader housing crunch, he said.  

“There’s going to be some places that we’re going to have to retreat,” he said, citing locations with severe erosion along the Cape Cod National Seashore in Barnstable or the bluffs of Nantucket. But Cyr and resilience experts noted that erosion is a long natural process, which itself has carved the outlines of Massachusetts’ iconic shape. “This is part of a natural rhythm of a place,” he said, pointing to areas with little development that are eroding as well. 

Martha’s Vineyard beaches have lost more than 1,400 acres since 1897, and Nantucket nearly 1,900 acres, according to the State of The Coasts report from the Trustees, which preserves places of scenic, historical, and ecological value for public use. The islands also have nearly 1,800 acres of marsh at risk from sea level rise. 

In Cyr’s experience, the focus is on the dire day-to-day impacts of places dealing with groundwater issues and ever rising tides. 

“How do you bolster Commercial Street in Provincetown, or Beach Road from Oak Bluffs to Edgartown [on Martha’s Vineyard]?” Cyr said. “How do you deal with the pretty routine flooding that’s occurring now during high tides in Nantucket? That’s what much more of the conversation is, less these bigger, more dramatic examples.” 

Climate and planning efforts in Massachusetts have tended toward the town-by-town, until recently. 

Cyr’s brisk reference to “retreat” connects to a thorny debate over managed retreat, a process of moving infrastructure, people, and property out of vulnerable areas through policies that could include options like voluntary buyouts, relocating roads, and changing zoning districts. 

A 2023 state-wide assessment of coastal communities’ willingness to consider managed retreat, reported on by CommonWealth Beacon, found that there is still significant reluctance to contemplate relocating infrastructure unless absolutely necessary. Chief concerns were the lack of places to relocate to, political feasibility, and a loss of tax revenue – especially when it comes to high-priced real estate. 

Since then, some municipalities have moved ahead with plans to consider significant changes.  

The small coastal town of Hull, a peninsula including the particularly vulnerable Hampton Circle neighborhood, is engaged in planning efforts that include elevating certain homes or planning for a buyout program encouraging homeowners to move out of an area with a particularly high risk of flooding. 

In Falmouth – which considered a plan to make a historic retreat from its iconic Surf Drive coastal roadway in the face of sea level rise, flooding, and other impacts of climate change – there is a desire to push the conversation off as long as possible. According to The Enterprise, town officials recently learned that, because of an eelgrass bed near the beach, the town will no longer be allowed to dump new sand onto Surf Drive Beach to stall erosion and protect the roadway. 

Beach committee chairwoman Barbara Schneider said people need to face the fact that Surf Drive Beach will disappear. “We are no longer talking about saving beach,” Schneider said, according to The Enterprise. “All we’re talking about right now is saving a road and people’s homes.” 

Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, both of which occasionally lose coastal houses to erosion, are working to refine their resilience plans. 

Hill, from Nantucket, is putting out a bid soon for a retreat and relocation program that would incorporate a climate risk assessment and put procedures in place for contacting and technically assisting homeowners if they need to relocate their home – either to a safer perch or for demolition. 

Resiliency advocates are somewhat limited in their efforts because of public-private barriers. Nantucket’s climate plan is only tailored to town-owned land, where it can build up sea walls or beaches. 

“We don’t have control of what private property owners want to do on their property as far as risk management, if anything, unless it’s through a regulation,” Hill said. “So we’re focused on mitigating flooding and erosion out to 2070 on our most critical roadways – the way to get to the Steamship Authority and all of those critical assets.” 

State building code regulations can create some obligations. For instance, if an owner in the downtown Nantucket flood plain wants to do renovations that would cost more than 50 percent of the market value of the structure, the whole building must be brought up to code including flood mitigation measures. But, the parcel-by-parcel process can be unwieldy. 

A new report from Massachusetts’s Unlocking Housing Production Commission on meeting the state’s housing goals recommends creating a separate residential building code so that projects that cost a higher percentage of the total building value will have to meet higher flood protection and other climate requirements, and vice versa. 

Given the speed of erosion on the islands, finding a way to contact owners if their houses are in trouble can be essential. It’s a quirk of the wealthy seasonal community – on some streets the owners of many properties are corporations or LLCs, not a person, so the town will send a letter to the corporate address if there is a structural concern.  

There may be a chance for less piecemeal planning on the horizon; at least, less piecemeal than town-by-town. 

Recent initiatives on coastal climate resilience planning and seasonal housing stressors offer a chance for more coordination between regions. 

In late 2023, the Healey administration launched ResilientCoasts, an initiative that promises a “comprehensive framework” to coordinate local and state efforts. According to public presentations in March, a final draft plan is expected this spring, which will establish coastal resilience districts based on geography, coastal characteristics, and risks, as well as identify strategies to support local and regional efforts to improve resilience coastwide. 

“Climate change presents a unique opportunity to build safer communities – but no municipality can do this alone,” said Maria Hardiman, spokesperson for the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management, in a statement. Though no exact figure is attached to the effort yet, Hardiman said “for every dollar we invest in resilience now, we save $13 in damages and economic impacts in the long run. These investments are critical to protecting public safety and our economy, including the Massachusetts tourism industry and access to beautiful outdoor spaces.”  

Discussion about who should pay for resilience improvements reminds select board member Fee of debates about sewer access decades ago as the island expanded.  

There is a “natural tension,” he said, between the homeowners who need upgraded infrastructure because of modern building demands and those who are adequately served by the older systems.  

“One side says it’s a common good and we all should pay for it, and one side says half the island doesn’t require sewer,” he recalled, so why put them on the hook? After years of debate, the island split the coverage and the tax burden – balancing the costs between the current tax base, those who use the sewer, and areas with expected future users. 

That sewer system, which covers about 60 percent of the island, is now actively endangered by erosion and in need of quick remedial action.  

Similarly, the question of resilience often turns onto a question of “who is this for?”  

Nantucket’s resiliency plan lays out about $1 billion of investments to help the town weather the changing climate, and voters at the annual town meeting approved splitting the island into resiliency districts based on their unique challenges. Town officials have mulled – to residents’ chagrin – imposing fees on property owners who stand to benefit the most from the resilience projects. 

Dittbrenner, the vice president of natural resources for The Trustees, said the communal stakes of preventing climate impacts are rising.  

“We haven’t necessarily had conflicts, but we’ve needed to work more with our adjacent landowners, because some of the impacts of climate change and increased flooding and erosion, of course, extend beyond our boundaries,” she said. 

Property owners can have strong aesthetic feelings that sometimes conflict with conservation interests, Dittbrenner noted. Natural brush can hold a beach in place but look untidy, netting to protect sea bird habitats can seem visually disruptive, and sometimes the solid appearance of a sea wall is more comforting than a natural wetlands barrier that might be more appropriate.  

Given the cost of some erosion interventions, like beach nourishment, groups like The Trustees are trying to find a balance for municipalities when there are overlapping property interests. 

The Trustees co-owns the Coskata-Coatue Wildlife Refuge, some 1,117 acres of rapidly thinning barrier beach that stretches around to create Nantucket Harbor, with the Nantucket Conservation Foundation. 

“We can’t afford to spend millions of dollars to come and place a bunch of sand on the beach just to shore it up in that way, because that is really transient and would only last for a few years and costs a lot of money,” said Dittbrenner. “So the cost benefit isn’t there. But if there are nature-based ways that we can improve the resilience of that buffer and increase the habitat, then that’s a mutual benefit that makes sense.” 

For that sort of project, groups can usually go to the state and federal government. Dittbrenner expects the cost will now fall more to the state given the pullback of many federal funds.  

A state grant will cover the last permitting phase of raising Argilla Road in Ipswich, which is the only road with access to interstate tourist draw Crane Estate and Crane Beach. The road has been flooding frequently on the king tide, which are exceptionally high tides tied to moon cycles. Dittbrenner said The Trustees and the city are partnering to nail down a design for the project, but have secured funding from the state. 

Town budgets are tight, Fee noted, and municipalities with areas of sparse but vulnerable housing can be stuck paying for outdated obligations. 

“The state rules have to catch up with the reality of climate change,” he said. “A town road can’t be abandoned if someone’s [living] on it, but what happens when the road goes into the ocean?”   

Don Vaccaro, a businessman and philanthropist who co-founded Ticketnetwork Inc., had owned a Sheep Pond Road property on an-erosion threatened stretch of Nantucket since 2014 and purchased the house and lot next door a decade later for $200,000, putting about the same amount into renovating and eventually demolishing the property. He demolished the second house at the town’s request just six months after buying it, for a $400,000 loss. 

“I was able to use it one week with my family and kids in both houses, which was a priceless experience, so it was worth it in the end,” he told the Nantucket Current in January. 

Housing dynamics are involved in an awkward push-and-pull with climate and open space interests. Protected coastline and green space are desirable to nearby buyers and renters, but also drive up housing costs by limiting available land. And when the impacts of climate change get too pronounced, the land value tanks. 

The former owners of the small Sheep Pond Road house bought it for $2 million in 1988 and held on for decades as the shoreline receded, imperiling the structure. Even local housing nonprofits weren’t interested after three storms carved out the little remaining beach. When they sold it to Vacarro, they got back just 10 percent of their initial investment.  

“Most of these properties that you see that have this dramatic erosion loss,” Cyr said, pointing as an example to a house that had to be relocated at Ballston Beach in Truro two years ago, “these are seasonal homes. These are second homes. I think I hear much more from concerned constituents who may not be living at the water’s edge, but whose homeowners insurance rates have gone up astronomically, or they can’t get homeowners insurance.” 

The state should be able to step in and offer assistance, said Cyr, who supports efforts to establish a flood insurance market and has filed legislation to offer incentives and encouragement to make home investments that would be more resilient to a changing climate. 

The majority of residents are not scrambling to save million-dollar homes, but demand for housing has made even risky bets seem like a good option if the buyer doesn’t mind a short use window or taking a loss that costs as much as buying a studio apartment in Boston. 

And as in the case of the former owner of the demolished Sheep Pond Road house, buying a home in 1988 with a wide stretch between the house and the beach is no guarantee of safety. When the ocean comes, if it’s every homeowner for themself, the options are demolition or a fire sale. 

The post ‘Water doesn’t know property lines’: Where Massachusetts’s climate and housing crises meet appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

HUNDREDS GATHERED outside Hadley Town Hall Sunday protesting a deluge of changes to the USDA by the Trump administration, including frozen grant money, program cuts, staff layoffs, and the slated closure of Massachusetts’ Natural Resources Conservation Service office.  

Facing a crowd of supportive community members, local and regional growers, and a line of six tractors, concerned farmers and state and federal elected officials outlined the possible consequences of losing these funds and services.  

“Our farm estimates over $200,000 in lost revenue this year due to these funding cuts,” said Harrison Bardwell, a who owns Bardwell Farm in Hatfield, referring to recently cut programs like Local Food for Schools (LFS) Cooperative Agreement Program and Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program (LFPA), both of which provide the state with funds so schools and food banks can buy food from farms like Bardwell’s. That represents 20-30% of the farm’s expected revenue for 2025.  

“We have bills to pay, we have loans, and we have employees to support. I’m troubled by the sudden change,” he said.  

Between the cuts to the LFS and LFPA programs, Massachusetts would lose more than $18 million in subsidies that go directly to farmers for providing fresh food to schools, if the cuts stand. Ashley Randle, commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources, sent a letter to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins in early March to urge the funding be reinstated. The uncertainty around federal funding, Randle noted, made it particularly difficult for farmers to plan their crops at a critical time during the spring season. 

In early March, the Department of Government Efficiency’s website listed the Natural Resources Conservation Service for Massachusetts in Amherst, a federally run office, as one of dozens whose leases will be terminated, according to several news sources. Representatives for the agency, which works with farmers and other landowners across the state to protect natural resources like soil and water, referred CommonWealth Beacon to their national press department, which did not respond to a request for comment by press time.  

Annie Diemond from Diemand Farm, a third generation farm in Wendell, described the precarious position that frozen Rural Energy for America Program funding has put her business in. Her farm secured $139,000 in REAP grant money to help pay down a $250,000 loan for rooftop solar. Now their first loan payment is due, and she can’t access the funds.  

“We just don’t have that kind of money sitting around,” she said. “I wish people would understand the reality that farmers face.” 

US Rep. Jim McGovern expressed outrage on behalf of the farmers. “They are launching a full assault on the people who feed this country,” he said.  

“You picked the wrong group of people to mess with,” he said in a complaint to Rollins, receiving cheers from the crowd.  

The USDA did not respond to requests for comment by press time. But in early February Rollins said she supported DOGE’s cuts. “I welcome DOGE’s efforts at USDA because we know that its work makes us better, stronger, faster, and more efficient. I will expect full access and transparency to DOGE in the days and weeks to come,” she said.

Protest-goers held signs with messages including “Cut Hay, Not USDA,” “Don’t Bite the Hands that Feed Us” and “Sequester Carbon Not Government.” A table was set out where attendees wrote letters directly to Rollins.  

Kerry Taylor of Brookfield Farm in Amherst, one of the rally’s organizers, said, “This is a manufactured problem that Secretary Rollins needs to fix.” She called on Rollins to “stick to the agreements that they made with farmers … and pay the farmers what they promised.” 

Some farmers, like Suna Turgay of Flowerwork Farm in Northampton, were particularly worried about the climate impacts that could result from USDA cuts, both in terms of adaptation and mitigation. 

“I was expecting four years of Climate-Smart agriculture grants. These grants help farmers adapt to extreme weather, to become more resilient farms,” she said. “These practices improve soil health, increase productivity, conserve natural resources, improve food security and reduce the temperature of our planet.”  

Beth Girshman, a resident of Conway, was one of many who showed up to support farmers and the regional food system that they make possible.  

“I’m here because I think farming is essential to the local economy and food security. It makes us one of the best places to live in the country.” 

Jesse Lederman, regional director for Sen. Ed Markey’s office, said his office has launched formal inquiries with the USDA on the status of “that were legally appropriated and committed to our farmers.” 

“I will not rest until these dollars are out of Elon Musk hands and invested in Massachusetts farms where they belong,” he said. “If they continue to violate the law, we will see them in court.” 

The protest closed out with country music blasting from one of the tractors. 

The post ‘Cut hay, not USDA’: Mass. farmers rally in Hadley against agriculture program cuts appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

WITH THE SPRING growing season rapidly approaching even earlier than it normally would, the commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources sent a letter urging the federal government to release frozen funds for farmers and reinstate staff at the US Department of Agriculture. 

Farmers in Massachusetts are preparing for their growing season – which means deciding what crops to grow, how many greenhouses to build, and how much money to spend. The recent funding freezes and large staff cuts at federal government agencies initiated by the Trump administration have created uncertainty across industries. Farmers who depend on federal grants and support from the USDA are particularly vulnerable because they have been facing difficult climate conditions and have less cashflow in the beginning of the growing season. 

“It is a critical time for farms as they plan for the season, and there’s already so much uncertainty in terms of climate impacts, market conditions, and potential tariffs which could impact equipment prices,” said Commissioner Ashley Randle, explaining in a phone interview why she chose to send the letter to the newly confirmed secretary of agriculture, Brooke Rollins, earlier this month. “We’re hoping to encourage the federal administration to take a more surgical … approach when they’re looking at programs and potential for impacts if they do terminate a [funding] program or if they reduce staffing.” 

In the letter, Randle encouraged Rollins to come to Massachusetts to see the impact of the cutbacks. “Even if funds are ultimately released at the conclusion of your review, the intervening suspension is harming farmers, and I encourage you to resume payments while you are conducting your analysis,” she wrote. 

The federal government allocates funding through the state for certain programs to support farmers and directly to farmers in the form of grant programs. There is uncertainty around both of those avenues of funding. As of March 18, the $3.1 million in funding from the USDA for the Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure program, which is meant to promote resiliency in the food chain by providing funds for processing, manufacturing, storing, and distribution of agricultural products, is inaccessible to the state. The state receives $450,000 in funding every year through another program called the Specialty Crop Block Grant Program to support crops like cranberries and squash, but the USDA has not announced funding for this year and has made no information available on whether the funding will be made available, according to Randle. 

Two programs that hundreds of Massachusetts farmers depended on as a substantial chunk of their revenue have been terminated – the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement, which aided food banks and meal kitchens in purchasing food from local farms, and the Local Food for Schools program, which did the same for schools and other childcare institutions. The state was supposed to receive $6.4 million in funding for the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement and $12 million for the Local Food for Schools program. That money would have been funneled into farmers’ pockets and facilitated the distribution of fresh food. 

Ang Roell, one of the co-owners of They Keep Bees, said that their bee farm has already lost an entire season of honey production because of the uncertainty around federal funds.  

Roell’s bee farm is based in Montague, which is located in the western part of the state, but they practice a migratory farming technique that has them traveling to three different locations – Florida, North Carolina, and Massachusetts to maximize on the spring season. Last fall, their farm lost 60 hives during Hurricane Helene – one of many events exacerbated by climate change that have impacted farmers – and they’ve been counting on $15,000 of funding through a federal program that provides emergency assistance to farmers who suffer losses to livestock, honeybees, or farm-raised fish. That funding hasn’t been made available to them, which means they haven’t been able to rebuild and capitalize on the spring season.  

Losing one season means that the farm will lose roughly $40,000 profit.  

“Seemingly small losses start to add up when you can’t recover from them,” said Roell. “As a farmer, you’re not making a ton of money early in the season, and we use our early season cash flow to keep us afloat until we can start making money. And now, the federal government has disrupted that on top of the fact that we have these losses from climate change. It just kind of it pushes us further to the edge of risk.” 

Roell said that their farm sold about $3,000 worth of honey through the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement. They were also counting on another $15,000 of funding through another federal program meant to promote “climate-smart” farming that doesn’t seem like it will come through.  

Meg Bantle is one of the owners of Full Well Farm, a two-acre farm based in Berkshire County that grows tomatoes, spinach, salad greens, turnips, carrots, beets, sweet peppers, cucumbers, and summer squash. The farm’s revenue comes from farmer’s markets and a community-supported agriculture model where people sign up for a subscription to food products from the farm.  

Ten percent of the farm’s revenue last year came from the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement. The program’s termination caused Bantle and her co-owner, Laura Tupper, to scramble because they had already planned their growing season with the grant program in mind.  

“We’re definitely kind of in a panic mode because in addition to all the uncertainty, we are also just losing revenue streams left and right,” said Bantle. “I’ll just say it’s a mess. Farmers need to have the season planned early in the winter to leave enough time to order seeds, to order supplies, to hire employees, and as this late winter has worn on, we have been weathering so many different changes that it’s made everything extremely difficult.” 

Bantle said that the farm has a $21,000 federal grant to weatherproof some of their crops by building more sturdy greenhouses that can withstand wind or protect crops from worsening storms.  

Bantle and Tupper are pushing ahead with building the greenhouses even amid the uncertainty about whether the funding will come through.  

Staff cuts at the USDA are also creating new obstacles for farmers. In order to get the grant they have been promised, Bantle and Tupper must coordinate with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a USDA agency that provides technical and financial assistance to landowners and agricultural producers to help them manage natural resources sustainably. However, the contact they had at NRCS was let go as part of the staffing cuts.  

“We have no one even to tell us what’s going on or give us updates,” said Bantle.

The Trump administration made major cuts to the federal workforce with a mass firing of thousands of probationary workers in February across multiple agencies and ordering heads of federal departments to conduct “large-scale reductions in force” by March 13. Nearly 6,000 employees at the USDA were fired since February. The USDA has been ordered by an independent federal board to temporarily reinstate those employees, and on March 13, a federal judge ordered all probationary workers laid off from federal agencies be reinstated until various lawsuits play out. The Trump administration has said that federal agencies are working to bring back the 25,000 people who were fired. 

A group of farmers and nonprofit organizations have filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, arguing that it is illegally withholding USDA grants funded by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Rollins has said that the USDA will begin to unfreeze funds from the IRA, but there is uncertainty as to how many funds will be unfrozen and when. 

A federal judge in Rhode Island blocked the Trump administration from freezing federal grants and loans through a temporary restraining order in January after attorneys general in 22 states – including Massachusetts – and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit to block the executive order. The same judge has extended the order in early March, finding the administration had overstepped in trying to stop the federal agencies from disbursing funds appropriated by Congress. 

“This is a manufactured disaster that we’re going through right now,” said Roell. “There’s no reason that any of those contracts should have been broken or frozen. Because of the choices of this administration, we’re now facing down a disaster that doesn’t even have to be happening on top of recovering from disasters that are real and tangible and related to climate change.” 

The post Mass. agriculture commissioner urges federal government to release funds and rehire USDA staff  appeared first on CommonWealth Beacon.

ANNUAL STATE BUDGET hearings got off to a late start this year, but lawmakers packed two hearings into three business days before pausing for an unusual two-week break that is coinciding with a general lack of activity among all legislative committees 10 weeks into the new session.

While it doesn’t explain the full length of the pause, nearly a dozen lawmakers, including the chairs of the House and Senate Ways and Means committees, were out of the country recently for three days.

In response to a News Service inquiry about the longer-than-usual break in budget hearings and possible out-of-state travel, aides to House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate Way and Means Chairman Michael Rodrigues said 11 legislators, all Democrats, left for Canada on Thursday with plans to return Saturday.

Rodrigues spokesman Sean Fitzgerald called it an “alternative energy fact finding trip.”

In an email late Friday, Fitzgerald called the visit “part of a broader strategy to explore affordable, sustainable, and renewable forms of carbon-free energy” and said the legislators planned to tour the HQ James Bay Generating Facility, which is part of Hydro-Québec’s operations. 

“The facility is a two-hour propeller plane flight out of Montreal and is one of several options to ensure the availability and viability of New England’s energy future,” Fitzgerald said. “With uncertainty at the federal government occurring in all sectors of the American economy, it is especially important to maintain the partnership with Hydro Quebec as one avenue to help meet the Commonwealth’s renewable energy goals and future grid demand.”

The trip comes as state energy policies shaped through a series of clean energy laws are suddenly at odds with the new direction of federal energy policy under President Donald Trump.

State policies are geared toward compliance with strict carbon emission reduction mandates, while US Energy Secretary Chris Wright this week emphasized “the critical role of fossil fuels in meeting global energy demands,” according to the energy department, and hyped the the need to “end the Biden administration’s irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change that imposed endless sacrifices on our citizens.”

In the last week, the US Department of the Interior approved a plan to extend the operational life of Montana’s Spring Creek Mine by 16 years, enabling the production of nearly 40 million tons of coal. The US Department of Energy signed a major liquefied natural gas export permit approval, the White House said, and the Environmental Protection Agency launched the “biggest day of deregulation in American history.”

State officials in Massachusetts also face new and serious questions about federal support for ongoing and future clean energy efforts. As Trump looks to build jobs in fossil fuel-based energy, plans in Massachusetts to grow jobs and produce a major new supply of clean power through offshore wind projects are in doubt.

Sen. Ed Markey and eight other US senators released a letter Friday demanding that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin “cease his illegal witch hunt to claw back nearly $20 billion in congressionally appropriated and legally obligated funds that underpin the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.” The fund is designed to “spur economic development, lower energy costs, and reduce pollution,” Markey said.

Ana Vivas, a spokeswoman for Mariano, said in an email Thursday night that legislators planned to visit the Hydro-Québec Research Institute, the dikes, dam and spillway that are part of the Robert-Bourassa hydroelectric facilities, and an underground generating station that she said are part of “the largest hydroelectric facility in North America” and include a dedicated transmission line to Ayer, Massachusetts.

Budget hearings paused after a March 10 hearing in Gloucester and will resume March 24 in Amherst, starting a string of four budget hearings in six business days. After two final budget hearings in April, the House Ways and Means Committee plans to release its redraft of Gov. Maura Healey’s $62 billion budget during the week of April 14, with floor debate scheduled for the week of April 28.  Healey filed her budget Jan. 22. The Legislature has made a habit of not completing annual budget by the July 1 start of the fiscal year.

Rodrigues, Sens. John Cronin and Jacob Oliveira were on the trip, according to Fitzgerald. Cronin is a member of the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy.

House members who went on the Canada trip included Rep. Mark Cusack, the new House chair of the Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy, and vice chair Rep. Michael Kushmerek. Senate co-chair Sen. Michael Barrett and vice chair Michael Brady were not listed as trip participants.

Rep. Jeff Roy, who Mariano moved off his former Energy Committee chairmanship and up into his leadership team, was also on the trip to Canada. Roy has been the focus of Boston Globe reporting over his relationship with an energy sector lobbyist.

The other House members who went to Canada, according to Vivas, are Ways and Means Committee Chair Aaron Michlewitz, Rep. Danielle Gregoire, Rep. Kathy LaNatra, Rep. Meghan Kilcoyne and Rep. Michael Finn. None of those representatives are among the House members of the Energy Committee.

Fitzgerald said senators on the trip were responsible for paying for transportation, lodging and expenses.

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AVERAGE SPRING TEMPERATURES across Massachusetts have warmed by approximately two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 55 years, according to a new analysis.

Suffolk County, which includes Boston, has seen the highest temperature rise, with an increase of 2.9 degrees, followed closely by Nantucket County at 2.8 degrees, researchers at Climate Central, a nonprofit group of climate scientists and communications experts, have found. Franklin County, Norfolk County, Worcester County, and Middlesex County all warmed by 2.6 degrees – a trend that can lead to an earlier and more intense fire season, contribute to drought, prolong seasonal allergies, and alter the growing season.

Climate Central analyzed monthly temperature data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – the federal agency tasked with predicting and monitoring weather and climate – in the months of March to May from 1970 to 2024 to find the average change in temperature over those 55 years.

“We continue to burn coal and oil and methane gas and put this heat-trapping pollution into the atmosphere,” said Shel Winkley, a meteorologist with Climate Central. “That is the reason that we’re seeing the temperature shifts both in the wintertime, which is the fastest shrinking season for most of the country, and the springtime, which we’re seeing arrive earlier for most of our locations across the country. All of that ties back to the heat traffic pollution that we put into the atmosphere.”

The Paris Agreement has set a goal of not exceeding a maximum global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius past pre-industrial levels, but last year was the warmest year on record and breached that threshold for the first time. This does not mean that the 1.5-degree warming mark has been permanently crossed, but this is a warning sign, Winkley added.

Massachusetts experienced a particularly severe fire season last fall, with more acres burning in October and November than in the two years prior. Drought conditions, worsened by higher temperatures, have made it easier for wildfires to ignite and spread, experts say.

David Celino, chief fire warden at the Department of Conservation and Recreation, said that the data on the warming of the spring season corresponds exactly with the experience of fire managers across the northeast. As warmer temperatures melt snow earlier, surface vegetation – leaves, pine needles, and grasses dry out faster, leaving them more susceptible to burning.

“It’s not surprising and it maps so well,” said Celino. “There’s a common feeling that our spring fire is now starting earlier in March than it traditionally used to, and part of that reason is going into spring with warmer temperatures or sort of warmer environment.”

This month, fires have been reported in areas like the Cape Cod region where the snowpack has melted, according to Celino.

When the “snowpack” melts faster than the ground thaws, the water from the snow is less likely to be absorbed into groundwater or go into nearby bodies of water which in turn leads to fewer water stores for later in the year. 

“Higher temperatures contribute significantly to drought because the water that falls evaporates more quickly,” said Julia Blatt, executive director of Mass Rivers Alliance. “So then, you’ve got dry soils and dry streams, and when there is rainfall, less of the water makes it into streams or groundwater or lakes or ponds.”

Some cities and states in the country have experienced much more dramatic warming with average spring temperatures jumping 6.8 degrees in Reno, Nevada, 6.4 degrees in El Paso, Texas, and 6.1 degrees in Tucson, Arizona.

Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center on Cape Cod, said that due to climate change, there is bound to be “more volatility and more surprises” when it comes to extreme weather events across the globe.

“This is still very alarming,” said Francis. “It’s not unexpected. It’s not a surprise. But it really should be ringing alarm bells in everybody’s heads more than it is. Even though the temperature or change seems really small, we’re already seeing the impacts of this warming happen across the globe and in very different ways but all very devastating to the people who live in those communities that are affected.”

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