Something’s afoot in Massachusetts politics. Last week, 74-year-old incumbent Senator Ed Markey trounced his 39-year-old challenger, Representative Joe Kennedy III, in a Democratic primary. Kennedy had youth, a family name, and strong initial polling on his side, which in the aftermath led many to credit Markey’s status as a Green New Deal co-author, and his consequent support from young progressive groups like the Sunrise Movement, as key to his eventual victory. “As Ed Markey’s victory showed, the Green New Deal isn’t actually radical, and 2020, our annus horribilis, has revealed the proposal’s logic and urgency,” Frederick Hewitt wrote for Boston’s WBUR.
 
Then, this week, news broke in a weirdly roundabout way that the state might be about to produce another banner carrier for ambitious climate policy. On Monday, Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh told The Boston Globe that 35-year-old City Councilor Michelle Wu, a fellow Democrat, had informed him of her plans to run for his seat next year.

Think what you will of Walsh leaking this to the press. If what he says is true, then it’s an interesting development. In August, Wu’s office released a remarkably ambitious and detailed climate plan for the city: The Boston Green New Deal and Just Recovery plan doesn’t just include decarbonization targets a full 10 years ahead of Boston’s 2019 Climate Action Plan but also proposals for sea level adaptation, sustainable fishing, renters’ rights, stormwater management (an oft-overlooked component of sustainable planning), and an “Urban Climate Corps” jobs program to retrofit buildings and install green infrastructure. It also proposes aggressively increasing the city’s urban tree canopy to target urban heat islands and expand access to nature. “The history of America’s public lands and spaces has deep roots in the violent dispossession of nature from indigenous tribes and the systematic exclusion of communities of color from green spaces through racist policies like redlining,” the plan reads:

Despite multiple plans and initiatives to increase our urban forest, only 27 percent of land in Boston was covered with tree canopy as recently as 2017—Charlestown, East Boston, and South Boston all have less than ten percent tree canopy. The areas most lacking tree canopy suffer extreme heat during summer, where surface temperatures on asphalt and roofs can reach 140 degrees on a typical summer day, causing a host of health risks.
 
The plan doesn’t break ground in many respects: As proof of concept, it cites other cities that have floated similar policies. “What makes Boston’s plan distinct from other cities’ green plans,” an Inside Climate News writeup on Tuesday suggested, “is its comprehensive inclusion of climate justice.”
 
To phrase it a little differently, it’s an ambitious climate plan with a strong social justice component, in a city with glaring vulnerabilities on both fronts. (Prior proposals to help Boston adapt to climate change included installing a Venice-like network of canals in the wealthy but low-lying, man-made Back Bay neighborhood—self-evidently only a fragment of a solution in a city with sharp and persistent inequality.)
 
Michelle Wu has responded cagily so far to initial reports. If she does indeed run for mayor—and especially if she mounts a better challenge of Walsh than Kennedy managed against Markey—then we may look back at this week as a bellwether for Democratic climate politics nationwide.

—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor