My new favorite town board is the Environmental Sustainability Committee and its countless offshoots. The ladies have been busy this summer, meeting 10 times in the months of June and July alone! Such a frenzied pace befits a group tasked with saving the planet.

As the chairwoman called a recent meeting to order, she hoped that the recent “obnoxious heat” was spurring “lots of good climate conversations.” (Helpful reminder: when it’s hot, it’s climate change. When it’s cool, it’s just weather.)

One of the ESC’s most pressing tasks of late has been the creation of a “Climate Plan” for the town.

The plan is in the early stages of development, but ESC members have already identified a number of problematic areas and steps that the town of Wakefield and its citizens will need to take to stave off global climate disaster.

Of course, there is the usual focus on reducing the number of gas-powered automobiles and expanding charging infrastructure for nonexistent electric vehicles. The ESC would also like to expand school busing and switch to electric school buses, although they acknowledge that nobody takes the bus to school anymore. (Anyone who’s seen all the idling SUVs lining the streets around local schools at afternoon pickup time knows that.)

Another measure under discussion is the adoption of “zero emissions zoning.” A zero-emissions zone is an area where only electric vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists are granted unrestricted access. Other vehicles are either prohibited from entering or permitted to enter only if they pay a fee.

If you think that sounds extreme and unlikely to ever happen here, consider that people once thought bike lanes were a wacky concept.

Another idea under consideration is holding neighborhood block parties to inform residents about heat pumps and solar panels. (Sounds like fun. See you there.)

Presumably these neighborhood shindigs would not be held on front lawns, because lawns are also problematic.

“We have a lot of grass and sprinkler systems in this town,” one ESC member lamented. If you have a lawn in front of your house, you are definitely not doing your fair share for the environment. Your lawn will need to be replaced with native, drought-tolerant plants – just so you know.

These meetings bear watching, and not just for the entertainment value. Unelected groups are making recommendations that have a way of becoming town policy at huge expense to the unwitting taxpayer. Two such programs, the “Specialized Energy Code” and “Climate Leader Communities,” were recently adopted by the town at the insistence of the Environmental Sustainability Committee.

A recent study conducted by MIT and Wentworth Institute of Technology looked at the Specialized Energy Code and its impact on housing affordability in Massachusetts. The study found that it could add up to $23,000 to the cost of an average home, leaving as many as 33,000 additional residents priced out of the market at a time when we are being told the state has a housing shortage of crisis proportions.

The “Climate Leader Communities” program that Wakefield recently joined at the behest of the ESC requires Wakefield to, among other things, commit to eliminating fossil fuel use in municipal buildings and operations by 2050 and adopt a zero-emission vehicle policy that will cost taxpayers millions of additional dollars in the coming years for things like electric fire engines, police cruisers, dump trucks and snowplows.

This decarbonization roadmap to ruin can be slowed, but that would require people to start paying attention to what our self-anointed “climate leaders” are up to.

They’re counting on the fact that you won’t.
—
[This column originally appeared in the August 8, 2024 Wakefield Daily Item.]