The Maryland Senate passed an extensive climate change bill Monday night that would set the state on track to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2045, partly by requiring large buildings to reduce their energy usage.

The Senate passed the Climate Solutions Now Act of 2022 in a 32-15 party-line vote, with Republicans opposed. The bill is now headed to the House of Delegates, where lawmakers  have introduced their own set of companion bills instead of a single sweeping measure.

The Climate Solutions Now Act would set the statewide greenhouse gas emission reduction goal to 60% below 2006 levels by 2030, expand the state’s electrical vehicle fleet, direct millions of dollars to school systems to build net-zero schools and establish a “green bank” that would invest state funds into private projects that reduce gas emissions, among many other provisions.

Monday’s vote came after a marathon Senate floor session last week, during which Republicans attempted a slew of failed amendments.

During committee deliberations, Sen. Paul G. Pinsky (D-Prince George’s) cut the bill’s most far-reaching provisions, which would have required all new buildings to use electric power, rather than fossil fuels, to provide space and water heating by 2024.

Pinsky, the bill sponsor and chair of the Senate Education, Health and Environmental Affairs Committee, said the amended bill “doesn’t go far enough.”

“But it makes a very important step forward,” he added.

Before the bill passed on Monday, Republicans renewed their claims that the bill would increase energy cost savings, particularly for low- and moderate-income residents who live in multifamily buildings, and not move the needle much on global climate change.

“This is going a bridge too far, but in a way it’s going to a bridge to nowhere because there’s no benefit…to the overall climate crisis,” said Minority Whip Justin Ready (R-Carroll). “It’s just going to raise energy prices.”

Sen. Mary Beth Carozza (R-Lower Shore) asked for climate solutions that do not threaten jobs or energy reliability and affordability for Marylanders.

But Pinsky contended that moving away from fossil fuels will be cheaper for the state in the long-run and highlighted that the Maryland Commission on Climate Change, which includes five Cabinet secretaries from the Hogan administration, approved recommendations for an all-electric construction code in a 24-2 vote.

“We can either be part of this movement or we can stand in the way of this movement — that’s our choice today,” Pinsky said.

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A group of environmental advocates projected “electrify everything now” onto the State House on Monday evening to urge senators to pass the Climate Solutions Now Act. Courtesy by Jamie Demarco of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network.Before the Senate convened on Monday evening, a group of environmental advocates gathered on Lawyers’ Mall and projected the phrase “electrify everything now” with a picture of an electrical plug onto the State House to urge senators to pass the bill.“What do we want?” Victoria Venable, the Maryland director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, asked through a megaphone as senators were walking from the Senate office buildings to the State House.“Climate solutions!” the crowd yelled back.

The bill now requires the Public Service Commission to determine if there is enough capacity within the state’s grid to support an all-electric building code in the future. It also would require buildings of 25,000 square feet or larger to reduce emissions by 30% of 2025 levels by 2035 and to net-zero by 2040. But it exempts private and public schools, agricultural buildings and historic buildings from the new standards.

Pinsky predicted that even if the Public Service Commission concludes after their study that the state’s electrical grid can handle an all-electric building code, utility companies will still oppose sweeping climate legislation.

“The gas industry poisoned the well with disinformation and put their profit margin over the interests of the state,” Pinsky told Maryland Matters.“Now!” the crowd cheered.“When do we want it?” Venable asked.

Josh Tulkin, the director of the Maryland Sierra Club, said that he was disappointed that the Senate passed the bill without an all-electric code for new buildings, which he said was essential for the state to meet its greenhouse gas reduction goals. “We will need to do it, and that delay is not helpful,” he said.

Still, Tulkin praised the bill for maintaining a strong climate goal that begins to take important steps to reduce gas from existing buildings, electrify the state vehicle fleet and center environmental justice in more state programs. Pinsky’s bill would establish a Climate Justice Corps that would employ young people to work on clean energy or climate mitigation projects in communities disproportionately affected by climate change.

As the bill moves to the House of Delegates, Tulkin said he hopes lawmakers will amend the bill so that the Public Service Commission does not rely on analyses made by the utility companies about the state’s grid capacity. Instead, the Public Service Commission should rely on projections from third-party consultants, Tulkin said. “Utility companies should be providing information, answering questions, but not reaching conclusions.”

Emily Scarr, the Maryland director for Maryland Public Interest Research Group, said the bill “moves us in the right direction toward more efficient buildings powered by clean energy.” But she urged lawmakers to not invest any more in the state’s gas distribution network and argued it would be more expensive for Marylanders to rely on fossil fuel in the future.

“Decision-makers need to acknowledge that as Maryland moves away from fossil fuels, utilities will look to customers to cover the stranded costs of a gas infrastructure that will become increasingly useless,” she continued. “If regulators don’t recognize this moment, too many Marylanders will be trapped with the financial burden of ever increasing costs for outdated gas infrastructure.”

By Elizabeth Shwe

It’s hard to come together over oysters in Maryland. Two years ago, seeking to get past seemingly endless conflicts between environmentalists and watermen, Maryland lawmakers ordered fisheries managers to try a more consensus-based approach to managing the state’s oyster population.

In a bill passed over Gov. Larry Hogan’s veto, the General Assembly directed the state Department of Natural Resources to work with scientists and help the DNR’s oyster advisory commission come up with ideas for rebuilding the oyster population while maintaining a sustainable harvest. Any recommendation would have to be supported by 75% of the panel’s members.

After meeting more than two dozen times, the DNR panel reported Dec. 1 that it had agreed on 19 recommendations — only one of which called for doing anything different about oyster management. That one urged the state to invest $2 million a year over the next 25 years to restore oysters in Eastern Bay, once a source of bountiful harvests, but which hasn’t been productive for the last two decades. The other recommendations called mostly for more shell or substrate to restore or replenish reefs, plus more research, data collection and evaluation of existing management practices.

“I think everybody was hoping for a little more consensus,” said Anne Arundel County Sen. Sarah Elfreth, a chief sponsor of the oyster management law and a member of the DNR advisory panel.

Hogan, in vetoing the bill, had argued that it would interfere with the oyster management plan the DNR had updated in 2019 and foil progress made in bridging disagreements. But the approach lawmakers spelled out in the 2020 law followed the format of more limited negotiations that had forged an agreement between watermen and environmentalists over oyster management in the Choptank and Little Choptank rivers on the Eastern Shore.

That effort, called Oyster Futures, produced a series of recommendations, some calling for changes in harvest rules and others proposing new restoration initiatives.

But the DNR commission’s oyster policy review was handicapped, participants agreed, by having to hold most of its meetings virtually. Some members, particularly watermen in rural areas of the Eastern Shore and Southern Maryland, had difficulty getting online or being able to participate.

“I was really disappointed in the process,” said Ann Swanson, executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission and member of the advisory panel. “We never got to the point where we could ever truly give and take — give on some harvest advancements in exchange for some ecological gain.”

The lack of in-person meetings prevented commission members from getting to know each other and understanding other points of view.

“We never ate together. We never chatted together,” Swanson said. “We’d come into a supercharged three-hour meeting, and so the conversations that you have that instill trust didn’t happen.”

The commission had plenty to talk about. A team of scientists from the DNR and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science analyzed the likely results of more than 70 different options for adjusting oyster management and restoration policies and practices.

Michael Wilberg, a member of the UMCES team, said computer modeling of various scenarios had helped the Oyster Futures group work through their differences. But the statewide review was hampered, he said, by the meeting handicaps and a fixed deadline for delivering recommendations to the governor and legislature.

“One of the important parts of this process is for people to propose new ideas and see us go out and try them and bring them back to the group,” he said. “That gets people talking to each other rather than trying to go around each other.

“I don’t feel we got quite to that level,” he added. “The group was just trying to get there, but we just ran out of time.”

Even so, Allison Colden, fisheries scientist with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said the computer modeling identified at least a couple of “win-win” scenarios that she thought could be the basis for agreement. But, she said, “we ended up with a result where we really didn’t come to consensus on anything with regard to making forward progress on oysters.”

A couple of the policy scenarios run through the computer model did project increases in oyster abundance and harvests alike, with more shells available to replenish worn-down reefs, Wilberg said.

“The problem I think people had … was how expensive they were,” he said. To achieve that modeled result, the state would need to invest about $20 million a year, he said, or 10 times what it spends now, to replenish reefs with recycled oyster shells and hatchery-spawned juvenile oysters.

Watermen likewise expressed frustration.

“I’m not real happy, but we’re moving,” said Robert Brown, Sr., president of the Maryland Watermen’s Association. He and others had argued that all the state needed to do was return to its longstanding practice of replenishing reefs with oyster shells and allowing watermen to transfer juvenile “seed” oysters from the Lower to the Upper Bay. Computer analysis didn’t support that, though.

Despite the commission’s near gridlock, watermen said the oyster population appears to be rebounding on its own, after two summers of good natural reproduction.

Wilberg agreed that there are signs that after decades of ups and mostly downs, the oyster population could be starting to stage a strong recovery. But oyster reproduction is uneven in Maryland’s portion of the Bay, he noted, and the ability to rebuild the stock is limited by the loss of many of the reefs that used to sustain the population.

“It’s possible that the future looks really rosy,” he said. But the model indicates that if current management practices continue unchanged, he added, “it looks like we should expect a slow decrease in the future, mainly because of the loss of [reef] habitat.”

As the last commission meeting ended, DNR Secretary Jeannie Haddaway-Riccio, who two years ago had called the legislature’s action “misguided,” strove to put the outcome in a positive light.

“I think that they did better than we expected,” she said, adding that members had worked through “incredibly hard circumstances.”

“We still have a lot of work to do,” she concluded, “but the fact that they were able to agree on some things is a great start.”