TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2025

Dear Cambridge and Somerville Constituents —

Before you settle in to your Thanksgiving routine, I want to send out an important update from the State House.

Last week, House Leaders were preparing to bring H.4744, a regressive climate and energy bill to the floor for a vote. The legislation would have rolled back our 2030 climate goals, opened the door to new gas pipelines, cut our investments in sustainability, reduced the amount of renewables coming online in the near term, and stripped housing developers and residents in Cambridge of access to green building incentives, among other bad things.

But the climate movement — led by many of my Cambridge and Somerville constituents — pushed back, and we pushed back strong!

Thank you to the many dozens of constituents who contacted to me to share your concerns and objections to this bill.

Meanwhile, I had several conversations with the Speaker, the Ways and Means chair, the T.U.E. chair, their staffers, and my other House colleagues. My message to everyone was clear: stop this bill now, and re-work it in a way that upholds our commitment to climate justice.

And....I'm happy to report — our collective efforts won the day!

House Leaders announced that action on the bill is postponed until at least the new year, and the concerning provisions of the bill are now subject to revision.

To be sure, we are facing some very really challenges and have a lot more work to do. Trump's war on wind energy, combined with his disastrous tariff policy, has completely upended our climate and clean energy plans.

Meanwhile, the political establishment has caught on to something I've been saying for years — they've finally noticed that working people and our most vulnerable are facing an ongoing and worsening affordability emergency.

However, the answer cannot be to pit climate against affordability, as the draft bill did.

We need climate justice and real affordability. And the way to accomplish that, in my view, is to push back against the investor-owned utilities that have been reaping hundreds of millions of dollars in profit on the backs of Massachusetts ratepayers. The response to climate change has to include systemic change!

When utility bills went through the roof last year, corporate giants like Eversource were quick to point the finger at the MassSave program and other state commitments to sustainability. But as I exposed on TV news earlier this year, these for-profit utility companies have been piling big rate-increases on top of massive profits.

For more insight, I want to highlight the work of former chair of the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities, Jamie Van Nostrand. He says, "most of what customers now pay each month no longer goes toward fuel, but toward rebuilding and maintaining a gas network that is larger than necessary to meet future needs." This is the sort of issue I am encouraging my colleagues to address head-on.

In addition, I have also filed legislation to contemplate a public-takeover of our for-profit, investor-owned utility systems. My bill, H.3466, "An Act facilitating public ownership of public utilities," would establish a task force to make actionable recommendations for how we could expropriate or transition the for-profit elements of our utility system to something that's entirely aligned with the public interest, such as full public ownership.

I'll have more to say about this all-important issue as we move forward, but for now, I want to wish you and your loved ones a Happy Thanksgiving!

Please do not hesitate to reach out with any questions or concerns on this or any other matter. Thanks, as always, for being an informed and engaged constituent.

Yours in service,

Mike