Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey told voters her state needs more natural gas, after years of bragging she stopped the pipelines that would deliver it.
In the candidates’ final debate before the Nov. 3 election, Democratic Gov. Maura Healey said Massachusetts needs more gas and that she supports it. Republican challenger Mike Minogue pressed her record of blocking the pipelines that would bring that fuel in.
The exchange, hosted by WCVB with WBUR and The Boston Globe, put Healey’s past pipeline fights against her new message on energy bills and climate targets. Daily Caller News Foundation reported the clash as the race headed into its closing stretch.
Healey did not hedge.
"But we need more gas. We need more gas. We need all forms of energy,"
she said. She repeated the point.
"I support gas. I support gas,"
and added that backing clean energy “doesn’t mean that we stop what we’re doing with gas.” She also said gas “is a cleaner form of energy anyways.”
Minogue went straight at the contradiction. “She stopped the natural gas pipelines coming in,” he said. He argued Pennsylvania holds “massive natural resources of natural gas that we need to bring in that Attorney General Maura Healey stopped.”
Healey answered with a cost argument from years earlier. “There was a pipeline developer who wanted to build a pipeline into Massachusetts, but he wanted the ratepayers and not the developer, not the company, to pay for it,” she said.
That framing sits uneasily next to her own words from April 2022. At a WBUR forum, then-Attorney General Healey said she “stopped two gas pipelines from coming into this state.”
The paper trail goes further back. In a November 2015 press release as attorney general, Healey highlighted a study and stated:
"This study demonstrates that we do not need increased gas capacity to meet electric reliability needs, and that electric ratepayers shouldn’t foot the bill for additional pipelines,"
That was the official line when she fought new capacity. Now the same politician says the state needs more gas.
Healey told the debate audience she has asked the federal government for permission to expand existing pipelines. On Oct. 1 she wrote Energy Secretary Chris Wright and urged the Trump administration to bring a “sense of urgency” to its review of a planned expansion of the existing Algonquin gas pipeline system.
So the sequence is clear. As attorney general she celebrated stopping pipelines and published findings that extra gas capacity was unnecessary. As governor she now says Massachusetts needs more gas, supports gas, and wants faster federal action on expanding an existing system.
WBUR’s Tiziana Dearing pressed her for a yes-or-no answer on whether the state should roll back its “aggressive climate goals.” Healey refused a rollback. “We shouldn’t roll back climate goals, but goals are goals. What matters is what are you doing today to operationalize something,” she said.
In other words: keep the targets on paper, and keep the gas flowing in practice.
Massachusetts residents have lived with the energy politics Healey helped shape. She spent years treating new pipeline capacity as something ratepayers should not fund and something the state did not need. She took public credit for stopping two projects. Then, with an election days away and bills and reliability on the table, she told a statewide audience the state needs more gas and must continue with it.
Her campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The debate was the last scheduled head-to-head before Nov. 3. Healey’s own record supplied the sharpest contrast of the night: the attorney general who blocked pipelines, and the governor who now says the fuel those lines would carry is essential.
Blue-state energy policy cannot run forever on press releases and climate slogans while the lights and the heat still depend on the gas those same leaders spent years trying to keep out.
