Is Healey’s climate change messaging working?

Sabrina Shankman outlines a legitimate dilemma facing Governor Maura Healey (“A hefty bill for climate change, on the Q.T.,” Page A1, Feb. 15). Energy costs are high, and the public is demanding relief — now.

Yet, as the planet inexorably warms, the damage and subsequent costs associated with climate change also increase. Sadly, because many of these costs will come due tomorrow, and not necessarily today, the public is not as loud in demanding relief and is less willing to foot the cost of preparing. Yet how can a responsible politician ignore the predictable disasters that are looming?

Healey appears to be quietly addressing the climate risks while loudly addressing energy costs — a reasonable strategy.

It would be better, though, if more of the public shared her understanding of the dilemma.

Susan Donaldson

Northampton

The Globe’s reporting on Governor Maura Healey’s buried climate adaptation report reveals a troubling political calculation. Her administration quietly documents that Massachusetts needs $90 billion to $130 billion to protect itself from climate impacts, but she can’t say so out loud.

The Trump administration can take credit for making the word “climate” politically toxic. Federal denialism hasn’t convinced many people that climate change is fake, but it has made any spending rooted in climate change vulnerable to culture war attacks. Politicians who accept the science still can’t talk about it.

Clean energy has found an escape hatch: It can rationally be reframed as affordability, jobs, and energy independence. Mitigation policy survives by shedding its climate vocabulary, but adaptation has no such back door.

You can’t explain why Massachusetts needs six to eight times the cost of the Big Dig worth of seawalls and flood protections without saying the word.

Healey should be more forthright. Massachusetts will pay for climate adaptation whether we talk about it or not, and the longer we delay, the higher the bill. The political landscape created by federal denial is no excuse for state-level silence.

Frederick Hewett

Cambridge

While the costs of resilience measures may be high, as noted in the ResilientMass Finance Strategy report, the alternative of taking no action is much worse.

Adaptation can also be done cost effectively if investments are staged over time as infrastructure naturally ages and if adaptive management is used to make investments over time as the climate changes.

Also, this wise investment in infrastructure can result in a more people-friendly built environment due to the possible co-benefits of smart planning. For example, rather than just concrete seawalls, elevated parks with ecosystems on the coastal side could be built.

Or, at a minimum, “living seawall” tiles could be added to concrete walls. These are investments that should be made anyway.

Finally, the public costs could be lower if the private sector would invest in regional adaptation plans alongside the Commonwealth and municipalities; this sector certainly benefits from regional actions and should contribute.

Costs will also go down, of course, if greenhouse gas emissions are significantly lowered.

Paul Kirshen

Concord

The writer is a professor in the School for the Environment at UMass Boston and visiting professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Tufts University.