House Ways and Means Chair Aaron Michlewitz and Majority Leader Mike Moran typically hold forth in that grand, 230-year-old building at the top of Beacon Hill.
But on Tuesday, two of the most powerful members of the House of Representatives will speak in a building that’s more than twice as old as the Massachusetts State House, and arguably more grand: Casino Pio IV, home to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.
They’re heading to the Vatican, with UMass Chancellor Marcelo Suárez-Orozco as their guide, to tell delegates from around the world how to use the nuts and bolts of legislation to help the environment and improve resilience to climate change.
The fact Michlewitz and Moran have been invited to the Vatican underscores how extensive the Legislature’s climate efforts have been. (A UMass Boston spokesperson said they will pay for the travel from their campaign accounts.) In every two-year session, it seems lawmakers will serve up a major omnibus climate-and-energy bill. The sausage-making isn’t pretty and doesn’t always go as planned. But the reality is: They’re making progress — even if it’s in fits and starts.
This delegation to the Vatican, which also includes public health expert Ashish Jha, underscores something else: the rising prominence of UMass Boston under Suárez-Orozco’s direction. He’s a renowned immigration scholar who arrived at the Dorchester campus, at age 63, amid some leadership and financial turmoil there six years ago.
Suárez-Orozco, who speaks with an Argentinian accent and comes armed with more quotes than a Bartlett’s, quickly set about building bridges to Boston’s business community. One obvious goal: to help cultivate career opportunities for many of the 12,000 undergraduates at UMass Boston, long considered a commuter school. These connections lead to internships, jobs, and mentorship.
Sometimes they lead to important donations, too, like gifts from New Balance owner Jim Davis and tech entrepreneur Paul English to establish UMass Boston centers to study sports business and artificial intelligence, respectively.
Suárez-Orozco’s work in the pontifical academy, where he has served on its council since 2019, ensures some ideas from Massachusetts appear on a world stage. He helped bring Governor Maura Healey and Mayor Michelle Wu to a climate summit at the Vatican in 2024, and another Massachusetts delegation to discuss AI there a year ago.
This time, the topic will be climate legislation. For Moran and Michlewitz, it really starts with the Global Warming Solutions Act, in 2008; that bill made Massachusetts one of the first states in the country with aggressive goals to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050. That same year, the Legislature passed the Green Communities Act, which helped spur more renewable energy and a new home efficiency program known as Mass Save.
That set the stage for a 2016 clean-energy law establishing a state-overseen competition to secure contracts that could finance a giant power line to draw hydroelectricity here from Quebec and an offshore wind farm south of Martha’s Vineyard.
No one expected either project to take this long. But we are talking about New England. While the projects turned into epics, for various reasons, they have reached completion this year. The NECEC line was charged up in January, delivering the equivalent of up to 20 percent of Massachusetts’ electricity, and the Vineyard Wind project is essentially done and sending electricity to the shore, with some punch list items and payment issues to work through.
Meanwhile, Mass Save is back in the Beacon Hill debate. House leaders recently took some heat for a provision in their latest energy bill that calls for a reduction in the program budget, to make it more sustainable while giving constituents a break on their utility bills. Senate leaders, expected to be more supportive of Mass Save funding, have not yet released their version.
It’s partly the messy back-and-forth that makes this matter of interest to the Vatican, which has a keen interest in government models that can be replicated around the world. Michlewitz says the past two decades of legislation have proven that pursuing a climate resiliency agenda can also be good for the local economy. He says the papal academy’s invite offers an opportunity to elevate this work to a constituency in size and scope that’s well beyond what he could have imagined.
This will be the latest session on the urgency of climate change that the papal academy has held in various locations during the past two years, including one at the UMass Boston campus last year. The aim is assembling a list of best practices at the Vatican next year.
Suárez-Orozco plays down his role in all of this. He’s just a modest convener, or so he would say, a scholar at heart, albeit one who is quick to cite Einstein or Eliot in everyday conversation. He gets excited when he can get back to his research, like a presentation he’s giving next month on how climate change has forced the migration of vulnerable populations.
He also likes to say that climate change is coming to a neighborhood near you — something he can witness from his perch on UMass Boston’s coastal campus — regardless of whether the federal government recognizes it.
Massachusetts, in the grand scheme, is relatively small, with far fewer people than the Los Angeles metro area, where Suárez-Orozco previously worked. But the ideas that we produce? They’re worth sharing, especially when confronting an issue as broadly challenging as this one.
Jon Chesto can be reached at jon.chesto@globe.com. Follow him @jonchesto.