News Clips

GBH

The Senate on Tuesday approved another complex set of reforms to accelerate the spread of clean energy in Massachusetts, along the way hearing concerns about potential ratepayer burdens and embracing an expansion of the state’s bottle redemption law. 

“The energy grid needs updating. It needs renewing every 30 years. But it’s pretty boring stuff,” said State Senator Mike Barrett, adding that it’s decarbonization of buildings and vehicles that gets his constituents excited. “It’s a source of emotional reinforcement, to the people who vote for me, that we’re not only doing the esoteric thing — which is the grid; important, but exotic — we’re also getting off fossil fuels with respect to cars and houses.” 

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Boston Globe

State Senator Michael Barrett, who helped write the last two laws and is taking the lead in the Senate on this one, said the latest bill will be voted on later this week. But the aim is clear: “Here in Massachusetts, we have a number of medium-sized and small-sized discrete problems that we need to address,” Barrett said. “We have an opportunity to address them now.”

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Boston Globe

Massachusetts has an ambitious goal to reach net zero emissions by 2050, which will require a massive buildout of electricity infrastructure, retrofits to buildings, new transportation systems, and more. The plan could require what would essentially be a tripling of the electric grid and dozens of new substations.

“Basically, this is a huge construction project,” Massachusetts state Senator Michael Barrett told a crowd on Friday.

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Energy News Network

On constraining gas, the ideas are in place, the support, not so much. We need help communicating a simple message: Massachusetts needs to downsize the gas grid as we upsize the electric grid.

A new gas pipe has a useful life of 30-50 years and takes us years to pay off. We need to put our money into clean electric power. We can’t do both, because monthly bill payers will have a fit.

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Boston Herald

Private jet owners are doubling down on their Hanscom investments. Insulting our intelligence as they injure our environment, they claim they’re doing us a favor!

From Chuck Collins and the Boston Herald: “I know the destruction you folks intend to wreak on Massachusetts and I resent it,” said state Senator Mike Barrett, who represents the four towns where Hanscom is located.

“Please don’t erect these bogus environmental rationales for something that has nothing whatsoever to do with relieving the crisis that faces us in terms of climate,” Barrett said at the developers’ public hearing. “Just be honest about it. This is all about becoming a little richer yourselves by helping people even richer than you.”

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Wall Street Journal

Reducing ferry flights, my ____. Here’s what more private jets out at Hanscom will mean. Massport, put up or shut up on being climate-conscious. Just say no to the Hanscom hangars.

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Bedford Citizen

Bedford students are on track to cut their waste by over 13 tons per school year. Lane Elementary School’s program involves sorting trash, recyclables, food, and liquids into different bins, and using a “share cart” for students to deposit unopened food packages. Kudos to the students and staff.

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GBH

Early education costs are high and getting higher. The Senate has taken note and just passed a bill to lower expenses for families. The bill expands access to childcare subsidies for lower-income families and caps fees for recipients at 7% of their income. It also makes permanent the pandemic-era “C3” grants, which provide monthly payments to many of the state’s early ed providers. Hats off to the Senate President, Sen. Rodrigues, and Sen. Lewis for making this a priority.

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Boston Globe

Data collected by the Massachusetts attorney general’s office shows that between 2015 and 2021, residents who signed up for competitive electric supply plans paid $525 million more than if they had continued buying electricity from their utility. Low-income residents were nearly twice as likely to be enrolled with competitive electric suppliers, and they consistently lost the most money. 

“This has been a 25-year experiment. It’s fair now to conclude on the basis of the evidence that [the market has] failed to produce value for large numbers of consumers,” said Senator Michael Barrett, the Democratic lawmaker who will help lead negotiations on a climate bill later this year. “At some point, you have to throw in the towel.” 

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GBH

Sen. Michael Barrett, a Lexington Democrat, told GBH News he sponsored the legislation — which would open Massachusetts’s state records after they have aged 75 years — in part because he worked at the Fernald School as part of a “buddy” program for disabled children decades ago when he studied at Harvard College. Barrett says he mentored a blind child who was housed in a ward with people who had “cognitive difficulties.”

“Did he belong there? We’ll never know until researchers can excavate the histories of the folks who were there and begin to determine why they were sent there and why they, in many cases, never found their way back into the community at all,” he said.

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