Then ban laying gas lines in the road/opening the road for gas companies.
Cant get gas to houses when you can’t build it on public property!
Yes, it’s going to take doing things another way and with different justification.
NYC has an emissions-based rule which might stand up to legal scrutiny, since it doesn’t actually ban gas in new construction, but makes it very expensive to do.
You could also put a gigantic emissions tax on gas in general, would also help getting existing house owners to switch.
That’s politically tough. What you’ll get is the wealthy households switching, and the poor paying a big tax.
I like he block-by-block decommissioning that Ithaca, NY is doing, where they make sure everybody can get off gas.
You could use the tax to subsidize Switching. Block by block sounds to slow.
Block by block is going to get it done by 2030, and allow decommissioning of parts of the distribution system to save money in the meantime. Faster and fairer than just tossing out a subsidy.
They did this in Canada, sort of, and it was still wildly politically unpopular.
Consumption taxes are inherently very regressive. Doing progressive things with regressive proceeds only alleviates that, but the original sin is still there.
The right approach is to address it in the residential building codes. Berkley’s mistake was targeting commercial as well. CRA would not have had standing to sue if the Berkley city council hadn’t made that fairly obvious blunder.
And statewide rules would not be victim to the same bullshit suits either way, I don’t think.
You can make an argument for banning natural gas in residential buildings without even mentioning the word climate – nearly everywhere, gas appliances are more expensive and worse-performing for consumers over their lifecycles. Plus you know, fires and explosions. And yes, that includes cookers. As someone who cooks at least 2 meals a day… even modern electric ceramic ranges are better than gas ranges in essentially all use cases. And for ovens there’s no contest, electric is just better in all metrics. The only real exception to this is for commercial applications where you simply can’t get enough amps to run a commercial kitchen into a building with current tech.
