The nation’s first state climate czar dreams of a day when her job is unnecessary

Earlier this year, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey (D) appointed Melissa Hoffer to be the first state climate chief in the nation. If things go as Hoffer hopes, she won’t be the first in a long line. 

“Whether you are a state or local or federal government, or whether you run an institution or a business, you need to begin to have a formalized structure in place to consider climate change,” Hoffer told The Hill in a recent interview. “So our hope is that this will be a replicable model that could be used by other states that it could also be adapted to other local governments.”  

Hoffer spent her early career as an environmental lawyer before joining a nongovernmental organization after becoming increasingly concerned about the threat of climate change. Around the turn of the 21^st century, she said, she read a report by insurance firm Swiss Re “that really made me understand how significant this issue would be for us, and so I wanted to go and have a more focused my career more on that issue.”  

Before Healey appointed her to her current role, Hoffer had served as acting general counsel and principal deputy general counsel of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for the Biden administration.   

Healey signed an executive order creating the Massachusetts Office of Climate Innovation and Resilience when she took office in January.  

In addition to advising the governor on climate change issues, Hoffer has been tasked with developing a review of staffing and policy as it relates to climate change for Healey’s entire Cabinet.  

“The best-case scenario is, after one or two terms of office, we don’t need [the climate chief position] anymore,” Hoffer told The Hill. “That’s the best-case scenario, where climate change as a consideration is fully integrated into all the other executive branch agencies.”  

She pointed to the state’s long history of aggressive climate legislation, including in 2008, when it passed both the Global Warming Solutions Act and the Green Communities Act.  

“So you may ask yourself the question, well, why is it that we haven’t progressed as much as we might have hoped?” she said.

The answer may lie with the wide-ranging responsibilities and mission assigned to the climate chief position, which she said have “long lived within our environmental protection agencies.”

“The locus has been EPA, but the reality is that all agencies really need to own it,” she said. The Biden administration has seemingly come to a similar realization, she added, pointing to Biden’s appointment of former EPA head Gina McCarthy as the first White House national climate adviser.   

As an example of the administration-wide approach to climate under Healey, Hoffer pointed to the state Department of Public Health’s designation of climate as an indicator for the public health data warehouse.  

“That means that that’s going to be the focus of data collection for health policy development,” she said. “And what we’ll be able to do with these data are [to] get a finer point on things like, potentially, the interaction of prescription drugs with higher temperatures or heat events.”  

Hoffer added that “my insight now is that there’s a lot of intersectionality with these priorities” in state government, “and so I’m very focused on identifying where these critical goals overlap.”  

Part of that mission, she said, is to “think about climate change in an agency that doesn’t necessarily have you know, climate change as its mandate kind of writ large.”   

For example, she pointed to efforts in Massachusetts to decarbonize the construction sector.   

“We have about two-and-a-half million homes in Massachusetts. And our goal would be to move towards retrofitting them so there’s more energy efficiency and where it makes sense electrifying them with heat pumps or ground-source heat pumps,” she said.  

Hoffer’s purview also includes the intersection of climate issues and the state’s Executive Offices of Health and Human Services. She cited a major episode of winter weather in February, driving temperatures as low as 17 degrees below zero in parts of the state. State hospitals, she said, experienced several code-black events during this weather, the term for a situation where they cannot admit any new patients. Individual consequences included burst pipes and fires.  

Her responsibilities, she said, include considering questions such as, “When we have weather events like that, whether they’re extreme cold or other unusual weather events, how can we make sure that our hospital and healthcare infrastructure is really going to be resilient to those types of events?”  

As to whether other states will create similar positions, Hoffer said she “hope[s] so.”   

“We all need to be thinking about not only how to reduce emissions at this point, but also how we’re going to make ourselves more resilient to the increasingly disruptive impacts of climate change,” she said. “I’ve had an incredible welcome from our stakeholders across the state, and we’re just working awfully hard.”