Maryland’s 2026 legislative session represented a challenging playing field for advancing climate and environmental legislation, marked heavily by the dual considerations of budget shortfalls — driven by the federal government’s abandonment of funding critical programs and sowing chaos among the numerous federal workers who live in Maryland — and uncertainty as to long-term energy reliability and affordability placing a pall on energy planning in the state.
This year, the Center engaged in the legislative session alongside numerous partners and allies who took up the challenge. In particular, we thank those advocates who built upon work related to electric affordability and reliability in the PJM Interconnection footprint — advancing matters such as large load additions (e.g. data centers), grid enhancing and advanced transmission technologies, limiting excessive executive pay for the Maryland utility executives, and the need for targeted investments in clean energy, particularly heat pump installations in the state from the Strategic Energy Investment Fund (SEIF).
The Center joined our partners and allies in advocacy for these issues and approaches in standalone bills, and ultimately in their inclusion in the omnibus energy bill called the Utility Relief Act (HB1532/SB0841). If signed by Gov. Wes Moore, this legislation will reduce energy costs and bolster clean energy deployment.
Upon request from our partners, the Center also joined a community-centered effort to support the CHERISH Our Communities Act. The bill would have given teeth to environmental permitting in Maryland and ensured that disproportionately burdened communities would have greater legal protections from historic and new polluting facilities that contribute to cumulative health impacts on residents. In particular, the Center worked on language that would have given the Maryland Public Service Commission the authority to deny permits for new fossil fuel-fired generating facilities in environmental justice communities — a necessary step in addressing the state’s legacy of disproportionately clustering these facilities in frontline communities.
Although industry pressure undercut the impact of the CHERISH Act to the point of rendering it nonviable for passage this year, we hope to continue to be a partner to support a future version of the bill. We will continue to work with allies to engage in the permitting process for such facilities to ensure common sense protections against cumulative impacts from polluting methods of generating energy.
In addition to supporting good public policy during the 2026 legislative session, the Center pushed back against bills that would have undercut public health, Maryland’s climate goals, and energy affordability for ratepayers. In some instances, these bills were misleadingly presented as though they would improve public outcomes.
For example, a bill (which was temporarily adopted into the Senate version of the Utility Relief Act) to study energy generation costs might seem like a good thing, but the devil is always in the details. Requiring the Maryland Public Service Commission to spend $500,000 of ratepayer dollars to conduct a study on costs based not on traditional electricity generation cost methodologies — e.g. levelized cost of electricity, or similarly vetted cost models — but rather the unvetted and politically charged “levelized full system cost of electricity” model would have been a waste of time and money and could have paved the way for unhelpful and even damaging policy decisions. That model was created to evaluate a hypothetical grid under conditions that heavily favor fossil and nuclear generation and has been utilized by the fossil fuel industry and anti-wind and solar groups to undercut support for actual least-cost generation types, like renewables.
Similarly, seizing on rising costs for electricity and the volatility of PJM’s markets, the Exelon utilities (BGE, Delmarva, and Pepco) supported legislation that would once again allow them to own rate-based generation in the state. This would have allowed them to reap massive profits while placing the risk of cost overruns and stranded assets onto the ratepaying public.
In both instances, the Center worked with allies and submitted testimony delving into the technical underpinnings of these bills to rebut the supposed benefits while highlighting the negative impacts such legislation would inflict. Fortunately, both bills failed to advance.
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Bryan Dunning | April 17, 2026
Maryland’s 2026 legislative session represented a challenging playing field for advancing climate and environmental legislation, marked heavily by the dual considerations of budget shortfalls — driven by the federal government’s abandonment of funding critical programs and sowing chaos among the numerous federal workers who live in Maryland — and uncertainty as to long-term energy reliability and affordability placing a pall on energy planning in the state.
James Goodwin | April 16, 2026
In early April, The Washington Post published an op-ed trashing state and local efforts to hold Big Oil and Gas accountable under the law for the lies they told about their products’ connections to climate change and damages they inflict on people and the planet. I submitted a letter to the editor presenting counterpoints to the op-ed’s claims, which included the absurd notion that insulating some of the biggest companies on earth from even a small measure of justice is somehow a vital “national security” interest. The Post chose not to run that letter, so I’m sharing it with readers here.
James Goodwin | April 15, 2026
Two congressional hearings this week will put President Donald Trump’s budget proposal under the microscope, but the real story should be the administration official sent to defend it: Russell Vought. His rare appearance before Congress will give committee members a unique opportunity to confront the administration on the full range of its anti-constitutional, illegal, and otherwise harmful actions — provided they seize it.
Evan George | April 14, 2026
This Earth Day, environmental advocates are looking backward as well as forward. With the U.S. federal government so dramatically overhauling environmental policy, history shows how American social movements of the 19th and 20th centuries overcame seemingly insurmountable odds to preserve public lands and pass laws protecting human health. “I’ve been trying to look through the history of the United States to understand how we’ve gotten where we are,” said Alejandro Camacho, a Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law and co-author of Lessons for a Warming Planet: A Vital History of U.S. Environmental Law, which comes out on Earth Day, April 22, 2026. “Prior generations did meet the moment and at least partially addressed some of the major problems that were in front of them.” Camacho discusses the book in this lightly edited transcript.
Sophie Loeb | April 8, 2026
In 2025, North Carolina saw an effective repeal of its carbon plan, and the state is now on track to approve over 100 data center projects. This will further imperil the state’s 2050 decarbonization goal while creating a new slew of environmental and public health concerns and electricity affordability problems. The state is charting a harmful path and should change course before its policies hurt more people and communities.
Robert Verchick | March 30, 2026
A fan of place-based education, every year I haul my students to Louisiana’s Maurepas Wildlife Management Area to paddle the swamps and learn about coastal law. This semester, I had ten students with me, each paddling a kayak on the swamp’s shimmering water. Bits of salvinia, a free-floating aquatic fern, eased downstream at an almost imperceptible rate. Stories on the bayou are always changing. This year, the narrative wrestled with a choice the state is making about what the Maurepas Swamp will become — an ecological jewel or a carbon-capture dump. The community is torn.
Hannah Wiseman, Matthew McHale | March 23, 2026
In the past five years, the United States began experiencing a rapid increase in electricity demand, fueled primarily by data centers for artificial intelligence. A single data center can use the amount of electricity consumed by a city of approximately 80,000 people. Most data center companies seek electricity from the same utilities that provide electricity to retail and commercial customers (including all of us). And these utilities are building massive amounts of transmission and generation to meet data centers’ growing demands.
Robert Verchick | March 19, 2026
I was writing in a New Orleans coffee house last spring when another customer noticed the ocean stickers on my laptop and offered me a new one in support of a regional cause: the Rice’s whale, a species that had only recently been identified and is listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). That’s because only about 50 of these creatures exist. And they all live full-time in the Gulf of Mexico. I’ve seen many species of whales, but never this one. I’m told they have very distinct vocalization patterns and a unique diving pattern. Unlike many whales that feed near the surface, Rice's whales make deep dives toward the seafloor during the day to feed on fish and spend their nights sleeping within 50 feet of the surface. The Trump administration apparently wants them gone.
Brian Gumm, Bryan Dunning, Catalina Gonzalez, Federico Holm, James Goodwin, Rachel Mayo, Sophie Loeb, Spencer Green, Tara Quinonez | March 12, 2026
We mourn the lives of all Iranian civilians and U.S. service members lost in the illegal preemptive strike on Iran, and that of all civilians killed and hurt in subsequent strikes in the region. This war is continuing to fuel broader conflict and instability in the region and around the world. We join every American who objects to this war. Our planet can be a beautiful place, and stewarding and protecting all of its inhabitants and its natural resources is our noblest calling.