Meeting the Moment – Aligning the Work of State Government with the Reality of Climate Change
Each day, as government leaders, we are presented with opportunities to make different kinds of choices, choices that are aligned with the reality of our current circumstances, choices to listen carefully to, rather than turn away from, the voices of millions of people around the world, and here at home, already suffering from climate change, environmental degradation, and crashing biodiversity. Every tenth of a degree of warming avoided matters. And so, as the philosopher Donna Haraway invites, it is our privilege and our obligation to “stay with the trouble.”[1] We can take courage and strength from the fact that each day we are joined by more and more people awakening to the preciousness, indeed, the sacredness, of all that sustains and inspires us on the living Earth, and working together to protect our common home, as Pope Francis has urged.[2]
Government leaders in this time of climate disruption must develop the necessary skills to rigorously interrogate the purposes and processes of their organizations to determine whether the outcomes – services provided, monies allocated, incentives offered, laws enforced, policies enacted, physical structures maintained and operated – are aligned with the realities of climate change. They must manage transformational change across their organizations, change that may not always be welcome. They must become nimbler in responding to changing conditions (both physical, like increased heat and flooding, and socioeconomic, like insurance market failures), and rapidly shift away from siloed thinking to systems thinking approaches. As we undergo further destabilization of our climate system, much of the relative predictability we have depended on in the past – stability of natural systems, economies, insurance and financial markets, agricultural productivity – will erode. Because climate change impacts different geographic areas in very different ways, there will be a variety of responses to the systemic instability and disruption induced by climate change.
The single most important skill a government leader can cultivate and model in this time is imaginative capacity.[3] That requires leaders, first, to truly understand and reckon with the vast and unprecedented (for humans) nature of the climate and biosphere transformation currently underway. Second, leaders must be able to imagine possible futures, including those resulting from continued failure to take necessary action, and the “solution pathways and visions of . . . sustainable futures.”[4] Leaders must pose to each other, and to their staffs and constituents, questions that engage imaginative capacity, specifically exploring what the world might look like if our decisions and policies reflected our scientific understanding of climate change and the fact that human well-being depends on the health of the natural world.
A difficulty inherent in imagining possible futures is the fact that “the way societies, economies and cultures are organized and experienced today . . . serves as a major constraint on the imagination of alternative future realities.”[5] As Manjana Milkoreit has written, “[t]hings that exist heavily shape what we understand to be possible, desirable, and ultimately, what is mentally conceivable . . . Where are alternative models supposed to come from? Whose mind is capable of constructing them?”[6] Leaders must create the conditions that cultivate and encourage imaginative capacity, both within and outside of their institutions.
Most of us were educated in a system that prioritized specialization, and many in government have spent their lives mastering a particular discipline, typically within the confines of a highly siloed institution. Specialized knowledge will remain critically important, but it is no longer enough. Governments need generalists focused on the intersections between and among policy disciplines, such as economic development, climate, health, and transportation. Fiscal management must be aligned with carbon pollution reduction and resilience mandates.
In plain terms, what that looks like is a graceful de-siloing, putting in place administrative structures that drive interdisciplinary teams across government agencies to solve the urgent new problems presented in the Anthropocene, among them how to accelerate exponentially development of technology that can mitigate emissions and modernize the electric grid, dramatically reshape past approaches to land use to maximize carbon draw down, create the finance innovation necessary to cover the scale of investment needed fully to transition away from fossil fuels by 2050 or sooner and – this is critical – do all that while building the capacity of our communities to navigate disruptive climate change and strengthening the resilience of ecosystems and the built environment.
It is indeed a tall order for subnational governments that often lack sufficient resources. And indeed, individual governments cannot do this work alone; for that reason, state government leaders must develop an unprecedented level of partnership with other states, private sector companies, universities and colleges, communities, local governments, non-governmental organizations, philanthropy, and, where possible, subnational governments in other countries. In doing so, the momentous technical and infrastructure challenges presented by climate change can be leveraged to drive a new wave of economic development and job creation that is aligned with, and does not undermine, the scientific imperative to zero out greenhouse gas emissions in the next twenty-five years or sooner.
Woven into all this work is the urgent project of communicating authentically to the public and all stakeholders about the reality of our circumstances, and the new ways in which we can and must now work together to imagine a better future and navigate this transition. We have a responsibility to those we serve to learn the essential lesson of the Anthropocene: that we are connected to each other, to the natural world, and our challenge, our opportunity, is to recognize that and reorder our societies and harness our economies to protect our communities and the ecosystems that make human life possible.
This paper will describe the rationale for and outline the elements of Governor Healey’s whole-of-government blueprint to drive the institutional change necessary to meet the urgent climate challenges we face. Our nascent effort is still very much a work in progress. Like all endeavors that seek to create deep institutional change, the work is not easy. Yet one can see its promise – in the creativity unleashed through cross-agency collaborations such as the one that established the Massachusetts Community Climate Bank, the first green bank in the U.S. focused solely on decarbonizing affordable housing, and the Climate Careers Fund, a green workforce training program to be funded, in part, by impact investment. In this way, Massachusetts is a microcosm of the dynamics that will play out in institutions around the world as physical and transition climate risk and impacts force innovation in governance.
Why the Climate Crisis Demands New Forms of Governance
As the economist W. Edwards Deming said, “every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.”[7] Design in this sense need not implicate any malign intent, and yet, exploitative labor practices, ecosystem destruction, climate destabilization – these results are produced by systems designed to yield such results. In other words, these outcomes are features, not bugs. These conditions are typically byproducts of systems designed primarily to achieve other ends (e.g., mass production of inexpensive goods); in the case of climate change, greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution is a negative externality – largely a cost of fossil fuel production and use that is not paid by producers or consumers of fossil fuels.[8]
For example, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) economists have developed estimates of the social cost of greenhouse gases – that is, “the monetary value of the net harm to society from emitting a metric ton of that GHG into the atmosphere in a given year.”[9] For gases emitted in 2030, and using the mid-tier discount rate of two percent, EPA determined that the social cost of emitting one metric ton of carbon dioxide is $230 dollars; one metric ton of methane, $2,400 dollars; and one metric ton of nitrous oxide, $66,000 dollars (all in 2020 dollars).[10] Putting a price tag on the damages caused by uncontrolled GHG emissions allows us to see with crystal clarity the exceptionally high cost the public – not polluters – is already paying for these harms our current systems are designed to produce.
State governments are no exception to Deming’s theorem in that they are also designed to yield the results produced. Further, legal (statutory and regulatory) and policy frameworks have as a central aim predictability. This is for good reason – the ability to carry on one’s business, finance, insure and invest in projects, construct facilities, render services and market products – in short to carry on all lawful forms of economic activity requires confidence in the future existence of relatively certain legal frameworks and governance structures. Predictability of these processes – sometimes understood as path dependency – is a feature and is often beneficial.[11]
Laws, regulations, and policies can change over time to respond to new circumstances – those might include evolving social norms recognizing expanded rights frameworks, for example, or more protective pollution controls when scientists identify new risks. But as we have seen for decades in the case of climate in the U.S., at both the state and federal level, efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are often undermined by powerful stakeholder opposition, usually by incumbent fossil fuel and related interests.
Even when we do manage to pass such laws or change regulations, those laws, standing alone, often do not immediately or ever fully yield the desired outcomes – and that is because the existing systems are not designed to produce the result required by the law. Massachusetts passed its Global Warming Solutions Act, which established economy-wide limits on greenhouse gas emissions, in 2008,[12] but it wasn’t fully implemented until after 2016, when the state’s highest court ruled that the relevant environmental agency had to follow the letter of the law.[13] Today, Massachusetts, like most states, does not yet have adequate market signals or the requisite level of investment in necessary infrastructure (e.g., a modernized electric grid, adequate electric vehicle charging infrastructure) to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.[14]
Similarly, when new climate-related circumstances arise, for example, the need to implement innovative nature-based solutions, government agencies may find they must work to overcome institutional barriers and ensure regulatory and policy frameworks are flexible enough to respond effectively.
In The politics of the Anthropocene, the authors describe entrenched systems that impede climate and health protective outcomes as “pathological path dependencies.”[15] How do governments break this cycle in a way that balances other critical needs, for housing, transportation, and employment opportunities that open the door to a better quality of life for all? The ability to step back, observe honestly how and why programs are failing adequately to reduce GHG emissions and enhance resilience, and change course is a critical skill. The authors refer to this capacity as reflexivity, “the self-critical capacity of a structure . . . to change itself after scrutiny of its own failures, or indeed successes.”[16] And that requires the ability to imagine doing things very differently.
This is not a muscle most governments exercise frequently, if at all, and indeed, there is often resistance to such efforts, a dynamic that is discussed in more detail below.[17] Put simply, the wheels of government – the programs, systems, structures – must be recalibrated to produce beneficial path dependence, i.e., outcomes compatible with the imperative to rapidly reduce emissions and build resilience. This is beyond what any single environmental or energy agency – typically responsible for addressing climate change in the past – can do alone. This work of systems re-design must therefore be accomplished by government-as-a-whole as all agencies incorporate mitigation and resilience into their core missions.
Being the Change We Wish to See: The Commonwealth’s Blueprint. Executive Order 604 and Administrative Structure
Her first day in office, Governor Healey signed Executive Order 604 (Order) creating the Office of Climate Innovation and Resilience and establishing the position of Climate Chief, the first state cabinet-level climate officer in the U.S.[18] The Governor’s action – both in timing and substance – signaled to the public and stakeholders that Massachusetts was making climate change a top priority, and that all cabinet secretaries are responsible for integrating climate change into all relevant policy.
Key to the success of this approach is that the executive – here the Governor – must fully empower and adequately resource the responsible climate official. Governor Healey’s Order did that by providing that the Climate Chief is mandated to “marshal all resources and authority available to the Governor and the executive department in support of advancing the Commonwealth’s climate innovation, mitigation, adaptation, and resilience policies,” including those set forth in the state’s Clean Energy and Climate Plan.[19]
The Order ensures a whole-of-government approach by requiring all cabinet secretaries to “appoint a Secretariat Climate Officer (SCO)” responsible for implementing climate guidelines and directives.[20] These SCOs were in place within the early months of the administration and have actively worked with their secretariats and the Climate Office over the past eighteen months to develop agency-specific plans and actions to advance the administration’s climate policies. One of the first actions led by the finance SCOs, for example, was developing a process to ensure climate change was considered in each agency’s capital investment plan for 2023.
The Order directed the Climate Chief to prepare recommendations for the Governor.[21] In consult with the cabinet secretaries, the Climate Chief issued 39 initial recommendations (Report) in October 2023, focusing on seven substantive areas: (1) funding and financing; (2) state capital investment, asset management, grantmaking, procurement and environmental justice; (3) emissions mitigation; (4) public health and resilience; (5) workforce; (6) economic development; and (7) education.[22] Teams responsible for implementing the recommendations meet regularly and update their progress through a software application that allows teams to view each other’s progress.
Climate Office and Guiding Principles for Whole-of-Government Approach
The Report described the purpose of the Climate Office as a catalyst for innovation, emphasizing that effective climate change solutions require systems thinking, and cross-disciplinary problem-solving strategies:
The creation of the Climate Office, and its work, can be thought of as intentionally disruptive. It should break down siloes, align agency action with the Commonwealth’s legislatively mandated emissions reduction requirements and Administration climate policy, and create opportunities for cross-pollination among agencies and with stakeholders and partners, including municipalities, labor, advocates, and the private sector. It should drive collaboration, spur different ways of defining problems and opportunities, lift up innovation and successful models, interrogate conventional wisdom, and, at all times, ensure policy choices are informed by the best available climate science.[23]
The Report presented the following principles for whole-of-government climate action:[24]
- Adopt a systems thinking approach.
- Incorporate climate science and data into decision-making.
- Center equity and environmental justice.
- Consider resilience and adaptation in decision-making.
- Implement comprehensive planning and project management for cross-agency priorities.
- Align discretionary state spending with climate mandates.
- Deploy innovative funding and financing strategies for decarbonization, adaptation, and resilience.
- Focus on multi-solving.
- Enhance transparency.
The report calls for economic analyses, now underway, of the investment needed to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 and key resilience measures. Estimates of the global cost of the net zero transition are in the trillions, and all governments are lagging behind,[25] though recent U.S. legislation has sparked significant investment in both the public and private sectors.[26]
It is critically important to place these numbers in context, however. Potsdam Institute researchers recently estimated that even if carbon dioxide emissions were to be drastically cut starting today, the world economy is already committed to an income reduction of 19 percent until 2050.[27] Their analysis concluded that climate change will cause massive economic damages over the next 25 years, including in highly developed nations, and the cost of ongoing climate damages from past emissions is six times larger than the cost of the mitigation we need to limit global warming to two degrees C.[28] The total damages were estimated to be on the order of $38 trillion U.S. annually by 2050.[29] Governments, working with their private sector partners, urgently need to understand the economics of climate change and identify innovative funding and financing strategies now to reduce the cost of future damages by accelerating mitigation and resilience, in particular, by protecting the economic value of the ecosystem services yielded by natural and working lands, including by forests that, on the East Coast, have recently been found to be cooling land surface 1.8-3.6 degrees F annually.[30]
Climate Cabinet and Cross-Agency Convenings
During the first month of the administration, the Climate Office established a monthly meeting of the full cabinet, focused exclusively on climate. Over the course of the first year, climate cabinet heard presentations from a range of experts on topics including health impacts of climate change, financial market risk, and opportunities for private sector companies to lead on climate. This time is also used for the secretaries to share project updates and work on policy issues at the intersection of housing, economic development, climate and environment.
Climate Office has prioritized opportunities to hear from staff and build cross-agency networks. For example, the Office recently convened multiple secretariats and external stakeholders to discuss the creation of a comprehensive state land use map that will serve to inform policy and deconflict competing land use priorities central to multiple secretariats’ key goals, e.g., siting renewables and grid infrastructure; conservation of forests and wetlands; housing production; and economic development, including climatech.
Communications and Public and Stakeholder Engagement
Administration leadership has prioritized a high level of public and stakeholder engagement on the issue of climate. We are also actively working to develop new ways to partner with the private sector. By convening and supporting these conversations, state government can learn from the private sector, foster learning among the private sector, and help keep climate change front and center.
The Heart of the Matter – Managing Change
This type of change asks people who have done certain things a certain way – and been successful at that – to now do things differently. In The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, the authors observe that the disequilibrium caused by such change “can catalyze everything from conflict, frustration, and panic to confusion, disorientation, and fear of losing something dear,” because “[w]hen you raise a difficult issue or surface a deep value conflict, you take people out of their comfort zone.”[31] Leaders must “live into the disequilibrium” and “help people tolerate the discomfort they are experiencing,” while advancing necessary change.[32]
Government leadership must understand, anticipate, and prepare together for the range of likely responses across their institutions to the types of deep organizational change called for by the climate crisis. A formal structure that communicates that a high value is placed on reflexivity, imaginative capacity or “thinking outside the box,” and codifies leadership’s expectation that climate change will be thoughtfully prioritized across all relevant government policies and actions is essential. Equally essential, however, is the need to foster a shared understanding of these human dynamics of organizational change, and a commitment to continual learning and intentional reflection so that the gravitational force of known, status quo systems does not overwhelm the propulsion of the transformational change necessary to meet the challenge – and realize the opportunity – presented by the climate crisis.
[1] Haraway, D. Staying with the Trouble, Making Kin in the Chthulucene 1-4 (Duke Univ. Press 2016).
[2] Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care of Our Common Home, Encyclical Letter 11-14; 17-43 (2015).
[3] See, e.g., Milkoreit, M. Imaginary politics: Climate change and making the future. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 5:62 (Univ. Cal. Press 2017). https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.249 (“Imagination lies at the heart of social change, . . . the ability of individuals and groups to envision possible, likely, and desirable futures that can guide decision-making and direct social change in collectively determined directions is an essential capacity for securing social well-being and prosperity in times of rapid and often unpredictable global change. . .”) (internal citations omitted) (emphasis supplied).
[4] Id.
[5] Id.
[6] Id.
[7] Kazzaz, Y. The Lens of Profound Knowledge. Global J. Qual. Safe Healthcare 6(3), 96-98 (2023). 10.36401/JQSH-23-X3
[8] See, e.g., Neeley, C. How Do Economists Think About the Environment and Climate Change. Fed. Res. Bank of St. Louis (2022). https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/2022/dec/economists-environmental-issues-climate-change#:~:text=Climate%20Change%20as%20an%20Externality,the%20world%20through%20climate%20change
[9] U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Report on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases: Estimates Incorporating Recent Scientific Advances 1 (2023). https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-12/epa_scghg_2023_report_final.pdf.
[10] Id., 4 & Table ES-1.
[11] Dryzek, J. & Pickering, J. The politics of the Anthropocene 23 (Oxford Univ. Press 2019).
[12] An Act Establishing the Global Warming Solutions Act, Chapter 298 of the Acts of 2008.
[13] Kain v. Department of Environmental Protection, 474 Mass. 278 (2016).
[14] Massachusetts Climate Report Card (Dec. 2023). https://www.mass.gov/report/massachusetts-climate-report-card
[15] Dryzek & Pickering, 23.
[16] Id., 35.
[17] See generally, Heifetz, R., Grashow, A., & Linsky, M. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership 22 (Harvard Bus. Rev. Press 2009).
[18] Governor Healey, Executive Order 604 (Jan. 2023). https://www.mass.gov/executive-orders/no-604-establishing-the-office-of-climate-innovation-and-resilience-within-the-office-of-the-governor
[19] Id. § 1 (a) & (f).
[20] Id. § 4.
[21] Id. § 3.
[22] Hoffer, M. Recommendations of the Climate Chief Pursuant to Section 3(b) of Executive Order 604 (Oct. 2023). https://www.mass.gov/files/documents/2023/10/24/CLIMATE%20REPORT.pdf
[23] Id., 8.
[24] Id., 8-11.
[25] Golden, J. Dynamic Sustainability: Implications for Policy, Markets, and National Security, 201 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2024).
[26] For example, the Center for American Progress estimates that, over the first three quarters of 2023, the Inflation Reduction Act spurred $178 billion in clean energy and transportation investment. CAP, The Inflation Reduction Act Still Reduces the Deficit (June 2024). https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-inflation-reduction-act-still-reduces-the-deficit/
[27] Kotz, M., Levermann, A., & Wenz, L. The economic commitment of climate change. Nature 628, 551-557 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07219-0
[28] Id.
[29] Id.
[30] Barnes, M.L., Zhang, Q., Robeson, S.M., Young, L., Burakowski, E.A., Oishi, A.C., et al. A century of reforestation reduced anthropogenic warming in the Eastern United States. Earth’s Future 12, e2023EF003663 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1029/2023EF003663
[31] Heifetz et al., 28-29.
[32] Id., 29. Change leaders must have large reserves of patience and persistence and be able to anticipate and respond effectively to the ways in which resistance to change may manifest. Id., 31.