We're from the Government, and we're here to Save The Planet.
SAN FRANCISCO – Fix global warming or cook dinner on a gas stove?
That’s the choice for people in 13 cities and one county in California that have enacted new zoning codes encouraging or requiring all-electric new construction.
The codes, most of them passed since June, are meant to keep builders from running natural gas lines to new homes and apartments, with an eye toward creating fewer legacy gas hookups as the nation shifts to carbon-neutral energy sources.
Natural gas is a fossil fuel, mostly methane, and produces 33% of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas causing climate change.
Some of the cities ban natural gas hookups to new construction.
Wrong on a number of levels: natural gas is not derived from dead dinosaurs and dead plants; it's formed by heat and pressure. It is also not the primary driver of global warming/global cooling/climate change. Contrary to widespread belief, our planet doesn't maintain a circular orbit around the sun - it's elliptical. This means that the Earth warms during periods of closer approach, and cools as we reach the elliptical perihelion. Obviously, human activities exert no impact upon the planetary orbit.
Moreover, CO2 is not the primary greenhouse gas on our planet; that distinction goes to water vapor. And as our planet is largely bathed in water, it produces a lot of water vapor. Again, human activities exert no effect upon the natural process. Nor will bans on the use of natural gas for activities such as home heating and cooking.
But it's a great bogyman to use in order to impose ever more controls upon your life.
It's interesting that governments are moving to essentially require you to depend upon electricity, when as noted above, much of that electricity is generated by natural gas-fed power plants. And given California's most recent experiences with widespread power outages and conflagrations sparked by downed power lines, it seems a bit ironic to force people to rely upon electricity. Oddly, for some reason, natural gas lines were unaffected.
No word regarding the amount of CO2 and particulates resulting from the wildfires. How curious.