Baker administration shares targets for 2025, 2030 policies
Baker administration officials shared aggressive targets to meet the state’s 2025, 2030 and 2050 energy goals.
“As required by the 2021 climate law, the Clean Energy Climate Plans act as a road map for how the commonwealth would achieve its greenhouse gas emissions reduction,” said Judy Chang, the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs’ Undersecretary of Energy.
The hearing takes into account over 1,100 written comments submitted by Bay Staters between January 2021 and March 2021 on the interim Clean Energy and Climate Plan for 2030, many concerned with the environmental justice components of the plan.
The plans presented in the public hearing also took into account changes to the climate landscape that happened in recent months, including the collapse of the Transportation Climate Initiative, and changes to California’s electric vehicle policies which require Massachusetts to follow in its footsteps and ban the sale of nonelectric vehicles by 2035.
Chang outlined specific greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets for sectors including power, transportation, residential heating, industrial processes, waste and agriculture. The state is statutorily required to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030, so to reach those targets, transportation greenhouse gas emissions will have to drop by 39%, building emissions will have to drop by 40% and electricity use will have to drop by 70%.
In practice, that would mean 200,000 electric vehicles on the road by 2025 and 900,000 by 2030, achieved through incentives and an investment in electric vehicle infrastructure, as well as an electrification of school buses, for example.
Other targets include “deep weatherization” of 20% of the housing stock by 2030, electric heating in about 1 million homes, 16,000 new jobs created in the clean energy sector and at least 16,100 acres of new tree cover by 2030.