Thursday night I went to my first online meeting of the local 350 Mass group. They reported on some stuff they'd been doing about contacting legislators, and then somebody from a different local group who was visiting gave a spiel about action to take on No Kings Day. It took a bit for me to warm up to the idea of doing this, but that's why I joined the group, right?
What we did was ask people to call their Massachusetts legislators about the current energy bill which is in reconciliation because the House and Senate versions are different. (I don't know if they call it reconciliation when it's the state legislature; that's what they call it for U.S. Congress. Anyway it's the same idea.) There are some provisions that are different between the bills that 350 Mass cares about and wants to make sure the right one gets into the final bill. So they want us to call our legislators even if they are not on the committee, because they talk to each other, and maybe if there's a whole grassroots swell, the committee will be convinced to do the right thing.
Specifically we want to "save Mass Save" and "cut GSEP". Mass Save is a program to help homeowners and some renters to make their home energy use more efficient, with a bunch of different individual programs. They started out just giving us fluorescent light bulbs decades ago, but they do more than just that; they help get contractors to insulate, they have loan programs for energy efficiency, upgrading to heat pumps, etc. Anyway, it's a fairly useful and efficient program and they should not cut it.
GSEP is something that sounds good on paper, because it's to help replace leaky gas pipes, but the way it's written the gas company is incentivized to replace in times when they could repair, and the replacement is a lot more expensive, and the incentive is some huge percentage of the total cost as profit to the gas company, so it costs the ratepayers a fair bit more. The gas company is required to fix leaky gas pipes, so cutting GSEP won't take that requirement away, it will just stop incentivizing replacement over repair.
I had been kind of worried about going up to strangers and launching into some spiel about this, but it turns out that going to a No Kings protest gives you a very receptive audience, and so everybody was happy to listen to me. I took about 20 pieces of paper with the proposed script for "what to say to your legislator on the phone". Some of them were just straight from the organization which has a QR code pointing to the "find your legislator" page at the state website, but some of them I had edited to have the actual information for my local town's reps. The organizer said to ask people to whip out their phones and make the call right then from the protest, but nobody did. A few people took photos of my flyer, and 10-15 took actual flyers. I was there for about an hour, but it takes about five minutes to explain this fairly detailed request, especially because nobody's ever heard of GSEP. Most of them had heard of Mass Save, because they have a big outreach thing trying to get people to participate. In fact, when we got our heat pumps we started with some Mass Save energy audits and so forth. Many of the people to whom I said "have you heard of Mass Save" said "oh yes, they were very helpful when we upgraded this and that".
I only went to the one "No Kings Vote Early" thing in my town, where there were about 50-100 people standing on the street corner in the center of town, and then marching one block to the town hall, where some people went into vote, and others stood on that street corner for a while. Some of the 350 Mass people were planning to go to multiple events, and one of the people I talked to said it was his first stop and he planned to go to multiple as well.
When I got home, I put my money where my mouth is and I made my call.
If you live in Massachusetts, you could play too:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1auFCGDeMhZvBlGRw--0f3HDWEwsyiua313Lu-mbOzOwhttps://malegislature.gov/Search/FindMyLegislatorThey expect this whole process to take quite a while, so while the push is for today, the message will be relevant for several weeks. So if you forget today, call next week.
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solarbird
