Commentary, Politics

She Stopped the Pipe. Then She Wrote Washington.

Posted on by Bill McCarthy

On Thursday the governor of Massachusetts asked the president she has spent three years blaming to hurry a natural gas pipeline into her state. The letter went to the energy secretary. The project is a widening of pipe that already runs through Rhode Island into the southeastern corner of the commonwealth. She says it will serve 600,000 customers and cut bills by $40 million a year. She wants the federal review finished in time for gas in 2028.

Four years ago she was bragging that she had stopped two pipelines from coming in at all.

What she said when the cameras were friendly

In April 2022, still attorney general and running for the job she holds now, Maura Healey sat for a radio interview and reminded the room of her record. “Remember, I stopped two gas pipelines from coming into this state.” She said she opposed building more gas infrastructure. It was not a slip. It was the credential.

The stopping had a paper trail. In November 2015 her office released a study arguing Massachusetts could meet reliability needs through 2030 without new gas capacity, and that electric ratepayers should not pay for the lines. She carried that argument against two proposed pipelines, one of them the Access Northeast project and the other a Kinder Morgan line. Courts agreed that the old financing trick, hiding the pipe in electric bills, would not stand. Once the companies learned they would have to pay for the lines themselves, they walked. Her office has used that walk ever since as proof she was only protecting the ratepayer.

The boast was larger than the footnote. She did not tell the 2022 audience she had saved them from a bad financing structure. She told them she had stopped the gas. In December 2023 her administration ordered a transition off natural gas and a carbon-neutral state by 2050. The pipe was the enemy. The calendar was the plan.

What she said when the bills arrived

The story has had three acts, and the third opened this week.

When prices climbed and a reporter asked whether stopping the lines had anything to do with it, she said she had not done that, and pointed at tariffs on Canadian goods. In a December 2025 television interview she changed the line again. She had stopped them. They were a “lousy deal.” Ratepayers should not have footed the bill. The companies should have paid. The environmental victory of 2022 had become a consumer-protection case by Christmas.

On October 1 she wrote the energy secretary. She and he had discussed, “on several occasions,” a mutual desire to get more American natural gas into New England, cut the reliance on higher-cost imported fuel, and lower bills. She asked for clear schedules, coordinated reviews, and enough staff to protect a 2028 in-service date. “Any federal delay,” she wrote, “could put those consumer benefits at risk.” Thorough and timely, she added, are not competing goals.

The project she wants hurried is not the two she killed. It is a $300 million expansion of the Algonquin line, called RARE, about 75 million cubic feet a day, roughly 2 percent of that system’s capacity, mostly wider pipe in existing corridors. The utility signed ten-year contracts. The state approved them in January. The developer pays, not the ratepayer, which is the distinction she is now living on. The savings she cites are $40 million a year, about $400 million over the decade, against imported liquefied gas that comes in by tanker at Everett. The contracts do not even start until November 1, 2029. Federal environmental review opened in February. She wants it faster.

Why the letter went out now

New England is at the end of the pipe. In a cold week the region burns gas for heat and for power, and the lines that feed it are full. What does not come by pipe comes by ship, at a winter price, through a terminal north of Boston. That is not a theory. It is the utility bill.

It is also the campaign. Healey is up for reelection on November 3 against a Republican, Mike Minogue, who has made pipeline capacity a plank and the offshore-wind bet a target. Energy costs are the issue his side is running on. A governor who ordered the state off gas in 2023 cannot walk into October 2026 pretending the meter is someone else’s fault. So she has discovered an all-of-the-above policy that includes gas, and she has discovered that the man in the White House can sign the permit faster than her own allies would have allowed in 2015.

The letter is careful. She does not say she was wrong. She says this pipe is different because the company pays, and because the savings are real, and because she has always stood with the ratepayer. The 2022 sentence does not contain those clauses. “I stopped two gas pipelines from coming into this state” is a complete thought. The women and men paying the winter bill have been living in the space after the period.

What the hurry will not fix

A 2 percent widening of one line, in service in 2028 and under contract in 2029, does not heat a house this January. It does not undo a decade in which the region’s policy was to need the gas and not to build the pipe. It does not replace the imported tanker. It trims the tanker.

The governor is right about the arithmetic she is using this week. More domestic gas, bought by the company and not hidden in the electric bill, is cheaper than liquefied gas off a ship. She was also the attorney general who treated new pipe as something the state did not need. Both sentences are hers. Only one of them was a brag.

A politician is allowed to learn. She is not allowed to pretend the lesson arrived by mail from Washington. The valve she closed is the reason she is writing the man she wanted voters to blame. The election is thirty-two days off. The meter is not waiting on the returns.

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