Healey’s ‘Energy Emergency’ Follows The Classic Democrat Playbook

Democratic Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey’s recent declaration of an “energy emergency,” issued less than a month before Election Day, is less a genuine response to crisis than a familiar and cynical political maneuver.

It follows a well-worn Democratic pattern on energy: 

First, enact policies that deliberately raise consumer costs to suppress demand, consistent with the party’s fealty to climate alarmism.

Second, when those costs become politically toxic, declare an emergency and blame Republicans.

Massachusetts residents already pay among the highest electricity rates in the nation — roughly 30 cents per kilowatt-hour, about 65 to 70 percent above the national average of around 18 cents. These prices are not the result of geography or market forces alone. For years, state policy — often led by Healey herself — has constrained natural gas infrastructure, opposed new pipelines, and layered renewable mandates and surcharges onto ratepayers in a cold-climate state. The result is heavy reliance on imported liquefied natural gas, including from overseas sources, even as abundant domestic supply sits just over the border in Pennsylvania.

Healey actively opposed pipeline expansions while serving as the state’s attorney general. She cited a specious, short-sighted 2015 study claiming no additional gas capacity was needed and later sued ExxonMobil over climate claims. Those choices helped lock the region into higher-cost LNG and oil backups during peak winter demand. Now, facing reelection, she has asked the Trump administration to expedite Project RARE, an Algonquin pipeline expansion that could displace a portion of the far more expensive LNG and save ratepayers an estimated $40 million annually.

Healey’s sudden shift is convenient, tailored to help meet her party’s needs in the run-up to the midterm elections. But the underlying policy framework that produced the high consumer and ratepayer costs to begin with remains largely intact.

The emergency order itself is temporary theater. It expands heating assistance to roughly 50,000 middle-income households (up to $680 for oil users), adds low-income aid, and temporarily strips a solar energy surcharge from electric bills. These steps may shave millions of dollars from winter costs, but they do not reverse the renewable portfolio standards, carbon reduction mandates, or infrastructure opposition that drive structural price elevation. Temporary removal of a surcharge is a political move to attract votes on Nov. 3, not an abandonment of the premise that the economic pain of higher prices is an acceptable tool for reducing consumption.

Healey’s tactics match the approach Governor Gavin Newsom has taken in California on gasoline. There, years of unique fuel specifications, drilling restrictions, and forcing refinery closures helped push pump prices well above the national average. When this year’s spikes occurred, Newsom tried to convince Californians to forget decades of bad policy actions by Democrats and blame their higher prices on a bogeyman – President Donald Trump. 

Healey’s messaging follows the same script. Her public statements have attributed elevated costs to the war with Iran and actions associated with the Trump administration, even as Massachusetts’s self-imposed constraints on pipelines and baseload generation long predate those events. Natural gas still supplies roughly half of New England’s power; blocking cheaper pipeline access while pursuing aggressive emissions reductions was always going to produce higher bills. Declaring an emergency does not change that arithmetic; nor does it eliminate the clear cause-and-effect.

Democrat party energy policy in blue states has long rested on the idea that elevating the price of energy reduces use and thereby cuts emissions. That proposition is in fact a core philosophy of the global climate alarm movement. Whenever the political calendar demands relief, the same officials who designed the cost increases offer temporary subsidies and point fingers elsewhere.

Real solutions would involve expanding pipeline capacity – like supporting the proposed Constitution Pipeline to bring Marcellus Shale Gas into the New England states — preserving and expanding real baseload generation and ending the practice of treating higher consumer prices as an emissions-reduction tool. 

Project RARE and similar infrastructure are fine, but they only help on the margin and provide temporary relief unless the broader policy direction changes. Until then, residents of Massachusetts and similar states should expect the cycle to repeat: Deliberate cost increases, followed by election-year emergencies and blame directed at anyone but the policymakers whose stupid policy actions created the conditions to begin with. Like Maura Healey.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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