Healey names new climate chief after Hoffer’s departure

GOV. MAURA HEALEY didn’t wind up looking far for her next climate czar, elevating a top deputy to a role she created on her first day in office in 2023 to marshal a whole-of-government response to climate change.

Aladdine Joroff, who has been serving as the deputy climate chief since 2024, will take over as climate chief, Healey announced Tuesday. She replaces Melissa Hoffer, who started in the role as the nation’s first ever Cabinet-level climate chief when Healey took office nearly four years ago.

Hoffer is set to become president of Vermont Law and Graduate School in December, leaving just days after a midterm election that saw a decisive reelection victory for Healey and a nationwide blue wave that catapulted Democrats back to power in Congress.

“I’m excited to continue the transformative work Chief Hoffer has led to implement the Healey-Driscoll administration’s vision of a government wide approach to climate change,” Joroff said in a statement.

Joroff, an attorney who has held roles teaching at Harvard and served as Boston’s climate policy director, assumes the post as Healey heads into a second term fraught with complicated climate and energy issues.

Bay Staters are grappling with an energy affordability crisis that has left lawmakers frozen as a legislative remedy stalls, and the state is barreling toward a legal requirement to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 from 1990 levels. Plus, Massachusetts has been hit hard by President Trump’s cancellation of new offshore wind projects that were poised to deliver a jolt of clean power.

The federal hostility paired with soaring energy costs has raised fresh questions about whether the state can meet its targets or should slow its green transition.

Healey has embraced natural gas as part of her all-of-the-above approach to bring in more energy supply, slow the growth of skyrocketing utility bills, and meet growing power demand.

She highlighted that support on the debate stage last month with GOP challenger Mike Minogue.

She also urged the Trump administration to speed up federal approvals of one planned gas expansion that she supports — and opened the door to a potentially much larger one in the works.

Hoffer, though, appeared to back away from that position in a “farewell address” she gave Monday to environmental advocates when an attendee asked what her “magic wand” change would be.

“We should be putting in place a hard stop on natural gas infrastructure,” said Hoffer, who previously served as a top lawyer at the US Environmental Protection Agency under President Biden, worked with Healey at the state attorney general’s office, and held top roles at Conservation Law Foundation. “It should be phased out by 2050. That is the rational thing to do.”

In a wide-ranging interview with CommonWealth Beacon earlier this year, Hoffer, who has known the governor since their Northeastern law school days and ascent up Mt. Washington in the 1990s, praised the pace of the Healey administration’s climate agenda.

At the time, Hoffer defended the climate chief role and ticked off accomplishments, from compelling hospitals track their emissions to establishing nation-leading biodiversity goals.

Yet in the face of skepticism from some advocates and energy industry and public officials, she acknowledged the structural challenges she faced in getting a sprawling state bureaucracy to collaborate with someone who isn’t in their direct chain of command and has no regulatory authority and a modest budget.

“We are asking people to do things differently, and that can be quite threatening sometimes,” Hoffer said in June.

With Hoffer’s last day on Monday, it will now be Joroff making that entreaty.