By Michael Kuser

WESTBOROUGH, Mass. — The Trump administration’s push to roll back environmental protections has prompted state leaders to recommit to achieving clean energy goals and inspired a surge in grassroots support for measures to tackle climate change, New England environmental and energy experts said last week.

The administration’s “radical agenda on environmental rules has galvanized public opposition,” as well as “created huge morale problems” within EPA, said Melissa Hoffer, chief of the Environmental and Energy Bureau for the Massachusetts attorney general’s office.

Hoffer made her remarks at the Northeast Energy and Commerce Association’s Environmental Conference on Thursday.

Even the Republican-led Congress did not go along with President Trump’s vision to slash EPA’s budget, instead increasing the agency’s funding this year by $760 million, said Normandeau Associates’ Bob Varney, a former EPA regional administrator for New England.

Following the U.S. decision last June to pull out of the Paris Agreement, environmentalists feared a “spiraling ripple effect” discouraging other nations from honoring the pledge to reduce emissions 20 to 26% below 2001 levels, “but that hasn’t happened,” said Ken Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The governors of several large states, including California and New York, joined together to commit to honoring the Paris Agreement, supported by mayors and corporate CEOs, which perhaps explains why other nations did not react too negatively to the U.S. pullout, Kimmell said.

Race to the Bottom

Varney noted what EPA calls “‘getting back to basics,’ with a focus on the agency’s core mission, restoring power to the states through cooperative federalism, and improving permitting and clean-up processes while adhering to the rule of law, according to the administrator in his comments.”

But Hoffer said EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s “notion of cooperative federalism is somewhat flexible and it invites a deregulatory race to the bottom. This is exactly what the primary federal environmental statutes were designed to avoid.”

Kimmell joked that after the 2016 election, “we changed our name to the Union of Freaking Out Scientists, known as UFO.”

He listed the agency’s big three regulatory rollbacks: the “evisceration” of the Clean Power Plan, the elimination of rules requiring oil and gas operators to trap methane and, “perhaps most distressing of all,” the reduction of the Obama-era fuel economy standards.

Hoffer said the administration’s “cavalier approach to the rollbacks that took place during the first 15 months is really not serving them well in the courts. They actually don’t have a good command of administrative law, and they don’t have a good command of federal environmental statutes, so that has caused some difficulty for them.”

She said, however, that the administration may be learning from its mistakes, as they’ve recruited some new experts. “I would expect that we’ll see their game upped tremendously over the course of the next couple of months,” Hoffer said.

Olivia Campbell Andersen, executive director of Renewable Energy Vermont, said state leadership has proven more significant for the growth of renewable energy than federal policy.

“If it weren’t for state provisions like net metering, if it weren’t for state renewable portfolio standards, we would not have seen the growth that we have had to this point,” she said.

Climate Change is Here

“Climate change is already happening and we’re already seeing the impacts, including hotter days,” said Richard McGuinness, deputy director for waterfront planning at the Boston Planning and Development Agency.

The agency commissioned the Climate Ready Boston initiative focused on climate change, the first citywide plan for Boston in 60 years, he said.

“Heat island effect, extreme precipitation events and sea-level rise are the greatest risks to our coastal communities,” McGuinness said. “We are planning for a 36-inch sea-level rise and rounding it up to 40 inches to account for subsidence … we’re not planning on retreating.”

The worst-case scenario for coastal flooding in Boston would affect 85,000 people and damage 12,000 buildings worth about $85 billion, he said.

Grover Fugate, executive director of the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council, said, “The brunt of climate change effects will fall on local communities, the ones with the least resources to deal with them.”

He complained that the Federal Emergency Management Agency makes planning assumptions that do not match Rhode Island conditions, resulting in post-storm dune profiles larger than the state’s dunes are before any storm. Fugate said his agency bases its sea-level estimates for the year 2100 on data from a 2017 report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which describes sea-level rise scenarios for the U.S.

For the Newport tide gauge, the figure is “essentially 9.6 feet by 2100 or essentially 10 feet,” Fugate said. “We also throw on a high-tide event, extreme high tide, which we see six to eight times a year, that will raise the tidal elevation 1.5 to 2 feet above normal tide, so we now have incorporated a 12-foot layer in our mapping system.”

The sleeper issue is groundwater rise compounded by sea-level rise, causing septic systems to fail and damaging local roads, he said.

“If you build today … potentially, within the 30-year mortgage period, that house will be below base-flood elevation.”

Educating the Public

Thomas Murray, vice president for customers and communities at Vermont Gas Systems, said he learned that a large project can be incredibly more complex than a small one, and that it’s important to avoid “utility arrogance” and respect the views of project opponents.

“People see stopping our project [the 41-mile Addison Natural Gas Project] as a symbolic way to stop climate change,” Murray said.

“In fact, what may happen, the unintended consequence, is that they continue to burn dirtier fossil fuel, they continue to burn oil,” Murray said. “Vermont has the smallest natural gas footprint in the country, next to Hawaii, and we have the largest percentage of people that are burning heating oil.”

James Grasso, CEO of public relations firm Grasso Associates, noted that Brookline, Mass., residents voted 61% in favor of legalizing recreational marijuana, but they refused to have it sold in the town.

Emily Norton, chapter director of the Massachusetts Sierra Club, and a member of the Newton, Mass., City Council, said the council voted against solar parking canopies at the public library because the panels were too ugly.

“When people do get involved, they jump right into it, and they don’t understand how state or federal or local laws and regulations work,” said Heidi Ricci, assistant director of advocacy at Mass Audubon. “Most people don’t know where their water comes from when they turn on their tap. I think there’s a basic public education problem here as well as a civic engagement problem.

“People latch on to the one project that they’re concerned about that they oppose … but who’s looking at the big picture?” she said. “I’ve talked with the big gas pipeline opponents about, so, like what are we going to do? Will you work with us on getting some of these offshore wind projects going? It’s really hard to get people engaged in larger-picture planning.”