Some Perspective on one of the President's Executive Orders on the Environment

Friends, it's been a rough month! We hope you are finding small glimmers of hope where you can, and giving yourself moments of rest and regeneration. It can be hard to focus on specific topics in the onslaught of sweeping federal changes in the early days of Trump's second term as President, so we're going to break down a few of the big ones for climate and the environment.

As part of his executive order (EO) Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity, President Trump rescinded the Clinton-era EO 12898, Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations. The Clinton-era EO required all government agencies to integrate achieving environmental justice into their mission “to the greatest extent practicable.” As reported by Morgan Lewis, "This has resulted in the inclusion of environmental impact analyses in federal agency decision-making."

Luckily for us in Massachusetts, in November 2024 Governor Healey signed into law "An Act promoting a clean energy grid, advancing equity, and protecting ratepayers." Among other notable climate opportunities, this bill included the first ever update to the 1956 charter for Massport, Massachusetts’ Port Authority. Massport owns and operates three airports, Logan International Airport, Hanscom Field, and Worcester Regional Airport, and public terminals in the Port of Boston.

This historic charter update requires Massport to address greenhouse gas emissions from aviation. Specifically, the revised charter requires the agency to promote "environmental protection and resilience, reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and environmental justice principles" in its decision-making. Before Governor Healey signed it, the legislation passed by wide margins in the state Senate with a 38 to 2 vote and House vote of 128 to 17.

XR Boston has long supported the fight of our neighbors in Logan Airport-adjacent communities who have been negatively affected by the airport's air and noise pollution, development sprawl, and related car traffic. These neighborhoods are populated by largely black and brown communities, precisely the kind who were purportedly protected by the Federal Executive Order 12898. Despite children in East Boston being 4 times more likely to exhibit signs of asthma compared with children in other areas, that now-dead federal order did not sway Massport to pursue environmental justice in the past. However, there is hope that this new Massport charter update will make it much harder for the agency to avoid the consequences of their heretofore unlimited growth. It provides legal leverage to community advocates at a state level to insist that Massport install air purifiers in schools and daycares, among other demands.

Will President Trump rescinding EO 12898 work against the new Massport charter update? Very possibly it will embolden some at Massport to disregard plans for actual environmental justice improvement, under the guise of following federal mandate. However, Bay State politicians seem eager to distance themselves from Trump and it's likely that an obvious move away from environmental justice policies will leave Massport open to criticism from the public.

What can we do, to hold Massport accountable?

If the federal government has relinquished their responsibility, the public must hold Massport accountable for the charter change. Readers of this newsletter likely remember that 21 rebels were arrested in April 2024 for protesting the proposed expansion of Hanscom Field, a Massport environmental and climate disaster in the making. That protest took place during the public comment period for the Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR), submitted from the developers to the Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act Office (MEPA). With the international media reach of this action and the efforts of our friends at Stop Private Jet Expansion at Hanscom or Anywhere (SPJE), the state was flooded with over 1,500 public comments from individuals, as well as from federal, state and local government officials and agencies. Faced with overwhelming public pressure, MEPA required that the developers submit a supplemental DEIR to answer for the glaring deficiencies in their original report, before the project could continue.

This bought us almost a year so far, in which time the state passed the Massport charter update. As May approaches again, we expect that the Hanscom developers will likely release their supplemental DEIR as quietly as possible, so that the comment period goes unnoticed and they are able to push the expansion through. To put this into perspective, if the proposed expansion goes forward, private jet emissions from Hanscom alone could cancel up to 70% of the climate benefits from all the solar PV ever installed in Massachusetts.

We at XR Boston (along with our friends at SPJE), are watching for this public comment period and we will alert our community as soon as we know the timeline. During the upcoming public comment period for the proposed Hanscom expansion, we encourage you to take direct action to communicate to Massport that we will hold the line for environmental and climate justice in Massachusetts.