Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Because we all know how reliable Californian electricity is.
No more fire in the kitchen: Cities are banning natural gas in homes to save the planet
Elizabeth Weise
USA TODAY
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.
For proponents, it’s a change that must be made to fight climate change. For natural gas companies, it’s a threat to their existence. And for some cooks who love to prepare food with flame, it’s an unthinkable loss.
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.
Read more: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/11/10/climate-change-solutions-more-cities-banning-natural-gas-homes/4008346002/
…
When my family lived in a blackout prone area, home gas appliances were a life saver; they meant we could still prepare warm food and drink, or heat the house, even when the power was out. Some gas appliances need electricity to function, but not all.
Given California’s failure in recent months to provide a reliable electricity supply, this insensitive push for all electric houses demonstrates an utter disregard for the safety and convenience of ordinary people.
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Banning natural gas stoves because of climate change should be the wake-up call to the average Joe consumer voter that much of this ‘we have to tackle climate change’ BS is just a virtue signalling insanity cooked up by green zealots who theoretically should make average voters so mad as to vote them all out from the political process. When some people demand that we shoot ourself in the foot because they wield power for a few years on city council or a state/provincial Gov’t, then things have gone much too far. And what difference would it actually make on the climate anyway? Nat Gas is the miracle gas that has transformed North America and Europe as a super efficient clean fuel. So much so, that the USA has reduced its carbon emissions more than any other nation while converting from coal to NG.
They are not just shooting you in the foot they have control of the Government and Big Brother is aiming it at you head.
They intend to kill 6 billion: no heat, no hot water, no water for that matter, no food, no shelter, will make the soviet gulags look like a day in the park, will probably have a nuclear war just to make sure the planet cools off
it is one way to solve their Overpopulation Boogeyman
I am up for all electric homes. Just make sure I have a powerful diesel or gas generator to produce the electricity. You all know that there is no cure for stupid.
I learned that lesson very young. Gas fired stove and furnace throughout my youth made a huge difference. I grew up near Chicago where ice storms frequently brought down power lines and hours long blackouts were common some winters. My mother often found the neighbors (with their fancy new electric appliances) begging to use our oven to cook the Thanksgiving turkey or Christmas dinner when the power went out. I remember one ignorant neighbor asking my mother “How do you light it without power?” My mother showed her a match.
I rented an apartment that was electric. When I bought a home one of the first things I did was convert the kitchen cook-top from electric to gas. Although my oven, due to installation issues, remains electric.
One of the main reasons I remodeled my kitchen was to replace a clunky electric stove with a high end gas cook top. It was one of the best improvements I’ve done.
I’ve also rented ski leases in Tahoe with electric, natural gas and propane heat. I will never rent another that has electric heat. This electric house I’m taking about was constructed as ‘green’ with far more insulation then required by code including an insulated foundation extending well below ground, passive solar, triple pane windows and it was still more expensive to heat than an older propane heated house. In fact, it was so expensive to heat with electricity, we ended up using the wood stove as the primary source of heat. Unintended consequences anyone?
Using electricity solely to produce heat has to be the worse conversion process, bordering on “Rube Goldberg” contraptions.
Like the Tina Fey commercial mocking the “Raisin Rehydrator”, why not just burn the fuel to make the heat where you need it rather than the unnecessary tortured process?
“Nat Gas is the miracle gas that has transformed North America and Europe as a super efficient clean fuel. So much so, that the USA has reduced its carbon emissions more than any other nation while converting from coal to NG.”
And natural gas is more efficient when used in the home, as compared to using it in a gas-fired powerplant. Something like 80 percent versus 50 percent. So using natural gas directly in the home is one of the best uses of it.
But that doesn’t matter to fanatics that are determined to eliminate CO2 production.
😐 this isn’t funny any more… at first I had stressful anxiety about the world (due to news media) But after finding this site, I’ve come to realize that the crack head greens of the 1960/70s have finally won, all due to making as much noise as they can, and using social media.. Imagine greta in the 1960s, she would be a fart in the wind…
I wanted to retire to California, as I love the sun and cars, California has a large car crowd with weekly rallies and meets, But alas, it seems its all a dream.. Australia has heat and a large car crowd, so maybe thats where I take my last breath…
hiya Sunny,
yeah Aus is good for nice roads and good long stretches to give a car a cleanout;-)
but
our petrol unleaded presently is 148 a LITRE and upwards
super is around 1.70 or more
diesels about the same as super
LPG around 99c ltr
depending on the area and state and day of the week you buy it.
rego for a midsized holden 6cyl 3.2? engine is around the 800ish a yr for me and that varies by state
and some states require yearly safety inspections driving costs through the roof also
but then if you have A$ pension youre ahead by quite a bit due to the exchange rate
5 days of no electricity after Hurricane Irma (Yea, I got off easy, I know). Still, without gas there was nothing to cook with. My guess is that eggheads at the top have no clue.
Tom in florida
The stupidity is beyond belief with the greens, and the most shocking is that governments are doing as the greens wants, billions if not trillions wasted all for a few votes.
they don’t care, they want you dead
The eggheads at the top are protected from the consequences of their bad decisions. It’s a global phenomenon.
Lets talk EFFICIENCY, shall we? My Natural gas fired furnace is 96% efficient, my tankless WH is 96% efficient, and my gas cooktop heats everything I cook with FAST pinpoint control. And please tell me how efficient each one of those devices will be after I’m FORCED (“for my own good”) to replace them with all-electric versions … AFTER … all the generation and transmission losses?
Have these Co2-loons calculated the staggering inefficiency of their electro-nightmare? You’ll pry the natural gas appliances from my home by crossing my armed barricade, which will only be breached when I am no longer breathing.
It only relates to new home construction in a few areas.
Nat Gas production in Califonis has been gradually declining for the past few decades yet it accounts for about 10% of annual energy demand.
No need to panic – they can’t grandfather the silliness and it just increased the value of homes which use nat gas.
John McClure November 12, 2019 at 7:06 am
they can’t grandfather the silliness and it just increased the value of homes which use nat gas.
Sure they can, an all electric requirement when homes new or previously occupied are sold will be written into the zoning laws.
And as California goes, so goes the nation or so I’ve heard over the years.
And, renovation frequently requires adherence to new codes.
“It only relates to new home construction in a few areas.”
For now.
AOC wants every building in the country refitted, and sheeple are actually listening to her. This is just the thin edge of the wedge, in another few years existing gas stoves will be ordered to be replaced.
All Out Crazy.
Right on Kenji!
I agree wholeheartedly. I live in Canada, and when these lunatics try this here real lives will be at immediate risk (since we DO still know very much what snow is!) and I suspect it wouldn’t be very long before the people hit the streets and the lunacy was stopped.
It would be most unfortunate for many, but in a way I wish the looney left would win out in an area so the world can witness the carnage, a la Germany’s wind fail, but with real people suffering and dying. Somehow I think even the looneys won’t get that far here.
You’re obviously not living in BC Al Miller. It’s my birthplace and that of Greenpeace as well.
Our Minister of Environment and Climate Change Strategy is the former president of Sierra Club in BC. so you know who sets environmental policy and who forges pipeline policy. Add to that the federal government where Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s right hand man Gerald Butts is a past president of WWF Canada and when you let that sink in, you may begin to see what we are actually swimming with. It ain’t pretty
I too have had my hopes up. I was really hoping that Alberta would indeed make good on the threat to cut off the flow of petroleum going into the Trans Mountain pipeline and see how the people of Vancouver BC react to green reality but alas .. no such action took place. Perhaps Jason Kenney will take the hard road and shut off the flow. I can only hope.
Fellow Canadians, I began hoping long before now and now I’m considering what options there are left outside of this country. Canada is in the bag along with Australia, New Zealand and UK who actually invented freedom in the first place.
When Trudeau’s gang actually was returned as the most popular party in the last election by brain-numbed, dyed in the wool, permanent Liberal-no-matter- what-they-do Canadians I knew hope was the wrong reaction .
Jason Kenney! Conservative. In Alberta is bringing in a carbon tax!
“When Trudeau’s gang actually was returned as the most popular party in the last election”
Conservatives were the most popular party with the most votes. Trudeau got the most seats.
That merely proved that secession is the only way out.
The city of Vancouver has already banned gas hook-ups to new construction. Won’t be long until they require retro-fitting to electric on existing buildings.
I hope these new building codes àre more about safety and insurance rates, than climate change.
Some new condos in Calgary don’t allow any combustion inside the units and (gas) hot water heat from a central boiler is included in condo fees. However they only allow gas barbecues on the decks and all the units have hookups.
Asphyxiation deaths and large condo fires have happened from gas appliances inside units, the changes are driven by insurance rates not anything to do with ‘climate change’ politics.
In an earthquake zone I would avoid having gas piping inside my house but available for a backup or cogeneration system.
Sorry Kenji but they won’t take away your gas appliances, they’ll just remove the supply service line to your house and ban deliveries of propane.
Exactly. In fact, I am SHOCKED that the State of CA hasn’t made me TEAR OUT my 1948 masonry, wood burning fireplace (since they’re not allowed in new homes). So, instead, they issue “spare the air” days when nobody can burn. And if you do!? Big Fines. The CA Air Resources Board actually hires “sniffers” and “spotters” to find scofflaws.
I am currently waiting for the State to BAN my propane BBQ … and ban all BBQ’s … because a) they’re fired with fossil fuels, and b) meat is baaaaad mmmmmkay?
Our current “cancel culture” is starting to piss me off.
Don’t Even…I just got a new Propane BBQ
…and to think….it wasn’t that long ago that all the rage was talking about how vulnerable our grid is to hacking
Don’t forget the ultimate weapon at the barricade – the Swedish Hand Grenade, also known as the SVEA 123 SteamPunk camp stove: https://yacf.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=79712.0
Mine works flawlessly after 50 years.
I moved from Netherlands to Sweden in 2005. I bought the house in Sweden just a month before I moved there. When I broke up from Netherlands and hauled all my stuff with me to my new house in rural Sweden, it was like coming to North Korea. Whhy? Because there had just been a raging storm named Gudrun (not Greta) and made millions of trees horizontal and blacked out all electricity in a massive area, in which my hose was in the very middle of. The blackout lasted many weeks, some places a whole month, the temperature varied between -15 and -25°C and the snow cover was about a meter.
No severe problem for me. Despite having electric stove, I also had one of these super old fashioned firewood burning stoves in the cellar. The central heating had three sources to choose from: Heating oil, Electricity or firewood.
However, I only had a small 1200W gasoline generator, which made everything a bit unpractical. Therefore I later went to an auction and bought a 3 phase 5.5kW diesel generator and attached it via a selector switch to the mains inlet.
Since this blackout, there were many shorter lived blackouts as those in California.
Being dependent on one source for everything is not smart, in particular when this source is centralized, sensitive and interrupted without compensation and penalty to the supplier.
I saw a guy on the news the other day complaining that the California electric company was responsible for his house burning down. His house wasn’t located in a major burn area, it just happened to catch on fire and the guy said his water came from a well on his property powered by an electric pump and when the electric company cut off his electricity that left him with no water to put out his house fire. I wondered to myself why this guy didn’t have an emergency generator on hand. It’s pretty cheap insurance. I guess some people just don’t think ahead far enough.
I’ve heard combined heat and power plants are quite handy. Now even with hydrogen which you can produce yourself via power2gas and solar panels.
Try to get out of this unreliable system if you can afford it.
LENR also sounds very promising. Professor Parkhomov has suceeded in keeping a reaction running for several months while producing thousands of MJs of excessive heat.
My home is all electric because I live in a rural Manitoba area where we have abundant and cheap hydro electricity. We also have a gas generator and a wood stove back up in case of long power outages. And we just came through a very bad winter storm where power was out for 36 hours for us and for some of our neighbours as much as two weeks. All electric homes are perfectly doable. Even with our cheap abundant electricity, my hydro bill in winter gets up in the hundreds of dollars.
Yes, you can insulate a home such that it will stay warm just with the body heat of the occupants. I have seen wildly different figures for how much extra that construction costs.
I’ve had the chance to use an induction cook top extensively. It has many of the advantages of natural gas and is quite a bit safer. At least when you leave home you don’t have to worry about whether you left a burner on.
On the other hand, with crappy old construction, electric heating is non-viable. Retrofitting is so expensive that you might as well tear the house down and start again.
But that isn’t the point. The Greenies want to outlaw all fossil fuels. The only point that you made was that having multiple sources of energy is a good thing. Now, if you live in Alberta, which does not have cheap, abundant and reliable hydroelectric electricity, nat gas heating makes sense both for heat and electrical generation.
The question that Greenies need to answer is that what number of deaths would they find acceptable in the full on outlaw of fossil fuels? Bear in mind that 0.01% of the people ( the large scale farmers) in North America produce 80% of the food in Canada and the US using fossil fueled equipment and with that, feed not only North America but a good part of the world. The other 99.99% of us live our lives in comfortable ignorance of their work.
Or maybe the Greenies foresee a Khmer Rouge-like back to the land movement, forcing billions of people to till soil to raise a few vegetables while they slowly starve?
Without fossil fuels our food production would crash immediately and starvation deaths would begin in a few weeks. So what is the acceptable number of deaths? A few million? Tens of millions? A few billion? With removal of fossil fuels the number would hit billions within a year or so.
Greenie views of the world are child-like expressions of the world; they see only the part that they want to see and ignore the parts that make them uncomfortable.
The Malthusian lefties want to get rid of billions of people.
But they never take the lead to show us how it’s done.
That’s because they want everyone else (the “little people”) to make the sacrifices, never themselves.
“what number of deaths would they find acceptable in the full on outlaw of fossil fuels?”
The acceptable number to me would be the count of all the morons in the blue states who push this crap.
“…fewer legacy gas hookups as the nation shifts to carbon-neutral energy sources.” – article
Hmmmm…. glad I do not live in sunny California.
Some modern gas stoves require electricity to serve the burner igniter, which starts the gas flame. My stove is a 1998 model, and because of its age, I can light the stovetop with kitchen matches if the power goes out, as it did at the end of last November.
On my stove, the gas valves will open even if the power is out. On current models, many of them will not open the gas valves if the power goes out, which is a good reason to avoid more modern models. I’m sticking to my old stove for the time being. I will add that, in many ways, I would rather have a stove with a pilot light than these newer stoves.
These electricity addicts must enjoy their dream world. If they got caught in a real doozy of a predicament….
I live in hurricane area so blackouts can occur. My five year old Thermador cooktop has 2 burners that I can light when there is no power. Yay! I have stovetop coffee pots to use, too. I will not be deprived as long as these types do not bring this insanity to Texas.
I have one of those 2002 model stoves. I can still light the burner with a lighter but the oven is useless due to the electric thermostat.
Same for the central heat, Gas sourced heat but electric thermostat
As an owner of a similar propane stove, with an electric oven igniter, I’d say a valve similar to the stove-top ones (control gas-flow by simple throttling) could be installed in the oven to make it independent of electricity, tho it would require some gas-line reconstruction. I doubt this could be a feature on retail stoves anymore as you’d have to (heaven forbid) get down close to the oven burner to light it when the power went out.
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 blackouts to prevent wildfires didn’t occur in San Francisco and other lefty-loony cities, so of course they see nothing wrong with all-electric. It didn’t affect them. Ask the rural folk, who had to live with the blackouts, how good an idea this is
The majority of city folk, their local Governments, and Sacramento don’t care what the country folk think.
Indeed.
“Carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas causing climate change.”
Another ridiculous clown.
CO2 is the CAUSE of the bushfires here in Australia now. Well, that is what a lot of people are saying now.
Patrick,
Anyone who blames the awful, but natural, bushfires in Eastern Australia as somehow related to CO2 is either pushing an agenda, or displaying woeful ignorance.
It is insensitive beyond belief that some twats might even think about blaming normal old CO2 (not a pollutant remember, just plant food – the main GHG being water vapour) for the tragedy that is happening.
A bit of history-reading would remind anyone that serious bushfires have been a challenging factor there since people have kept written records.
The facts are well understood: eucalyptus bush, uncleared undergrowth, along with hot, dry, windy conditions equals fires….the debates over climate change etc are irrelevant in this case.
The final and disgusting thing about these fires is that a number of them, it turns out, were likely to have been deliberately lit.
“And for some cooks who love to prepare food with flame, it’s an unthinkable loss.”
There’s always propane camp stoves and some gas grills come with a couple of stove top type burners.
Fight fire with fire. Bust the dams on the Columbia River and terminate the Bonneville Power Authority to save the river ecosystem. The central committees of SF, Portland, and Seattle need to do without Bonneville Power.
Before windmills and solar panels circa 1967 all-electric homes were pushed with discount rates in south Louisiana. Powered by hydrocarbon power plants. Didn’t last. Neither did most of the next decade windmills and solar panels installed elsewhere, never would have worked in Louisiana anyway. Nuclear did.
Using electricity instead of natural gas for heating purposes is wasteful and counterproductive. The extra electricity will be met mostly by generators fueled by natural gas until after there is enough electricity from renewables to meet the demand that already exists, and that’s going to be quite a few decades. Electricity from natural gas generators is produced and delivered with a combined generation, transmission and distribution efficiency of about 40%, with hope of that number increasing to about 50% for the latest and greatest new natural gas generating stations and using the lower heating value of natural gas for determining efficiency calculations. It looks like natural gas hookup bans are going to increase natural gas consumption for decades to come.
If natural gas is a fossil fuel, mostly methane, and produces 33% of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation how does converting to electric cooking and heating change anything? Here in Colorado Teslas are coal powered cars.
Unless you receive electricity via 100% hydro or nuclear cooking and heating by electricity is crazy because your source of electricity involves the following energy conversions:
Chemical Energy –> Heat energy –> Mechanical energy –> Electrical energy –> heat energy. Regardless of efficiency each transition involves a loss of useful energy.
This is actually great for SF! People will be scouting the sidewalks for dung, in which to burn for cooking!
Just think of the virtue signaling with that, living and cooking like our ancestors used too.
Once lived in northern lower Michigan in Petoskey, which was comfortable (~65F) in summer and probably averaged about 15 degrees F in the winter. Our home was built in 1914. We cooked with electricity; heated water with a combination of electricity and a coil in the coal furnace; and heated the house with a stoker-fed coal furnace. We occasionally had city-wide power outages in the dead of winter, but thanks to our coal furnace — which I could stoke by hand — we had a warm house and hot water. We cooked using our Coleman gas camp stove. Our neighbors with modern gas furnaces which required electricity were out of luck.
Im going the other direction:
http://hearthstonestoves.com/wood-cook-stoves/4594646626
Oohh nooo! Small communities in Marxistfornia aren’t going to use natural gas, presenting an existential threat to natural gas producers! I guess we’ll just have to rely on the increased natural gas demand to keep those renewable energy programs going.
Yes, they’ve really tapped into that progressive obsessiveness – where nothing else matters except their own myopic cause.
Kind of reminds me of Asimov’s ‘I Robot’.
California is on the right tract. They have a growing population of people that have found that they don’t need a home at all and can therefore forgo NG and electricity altogether. These people are the vanguard of the new California lifestyle and should be considered a model for many other cities. Their new moto is: Save the Planet, Go Homeless!”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/04/los-angeles-homeless-population-city-county
So how long will it be before Californians are cooking with dung like they do in the third-world?
At the rate they are now regressing, probably sooner than they think.
well, the good news is that they’ve got plenty of dung in the streets of their big cities, so there will be no shortage of dung for cooking with. a win-win for the residents of Commiefornia.
“cooking with dung” not possible in Peoples Republic Of California as it is evil to the climate to have CO₂ burping animals and your own pooh is not the right quality and quantity. Please read IPCC’s Little Red!
Quality of human feces may not be top notch, but there’s no shortage in the quantity department. Just walk down the streets of San Francisco and you’ll find more than you want or could possibly need.
And hey, they even have an app for that
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SnapCrap-app-San-Francisco-poop-feces-dirty-street-13281837.php
Most of California has a mild climate so for most people lack of heating isn’t life or death but damn it can feel really cold when the house temperature drops into the 50’s. If these people want to subject themselves unnecessarily to intermittent stress, food going bad in freezers and not being able to plug in their electric lawnmowers, Roombas and especially their electric cars who am I to say no?
As they convert to all solar/wind, night falls and the wind dies everything can just go black until the Sun inevitably rises the next day.
Well other places/countries have much, much more reliable grids than California – Germany in particular has what is widely claimed to be the world’s most reliable grid.
And a lot of other places/countries have much, much worse grid reliability than California…. your point is?
other than at the top of his head, he doesn’t have a point. just mindless cheer-leading of wind/solar regardless of the actual facts.
Griff, please try to pay attention. The power outages in California are not a result of reliability problems – they are intentional, to try to protect against electric-power-line-induced fires.
And how is that Energiewende going in your beloved Bundesrepublik?
griff, it’s not the reliability of Commifornia’s grid that’s causing the blackouts. The blackouts were pre-meditated to (supposedly) prevent fires.
But hey, let’s go with your idea that Commiefornia’s grid is unreliable. Why might that be? Commiefornia leads the nation in electricity generation from non-hydroelectric renewable energy sources and has some of the most aggressive renewable energy goals in the United States. coincidence?
Germany’s grid is reliable because their renewable power farms are backed up by Scandinavian Hydro, French nuclear, and German coal.
SR
Yes, thanks.
I wonder what the public will say when the Demo/Progs demand we retrofit existing homes. Most ranges and stoves require 220vac with 30 to 50 amps. Most older homes are wired for 20 amp service needing 12 gauge wire. 30 amp service requires 10 gauge along with different receptacles. So I foresee electrical contractors making tons of money and the general public paying through the nose. Not to mention all the city, county, and state permit charges and the months of waiting for the inspectors to approve the new install.
Excellent point. When our original range began to die a couple years back, we looked into a dual-source unit. I pulled the existing unit away from the wall, just to be sure that there was a 220 volt outlet, and, of course, the builder had saved a few bucks by not installing one. But then, when talking with an electrician about putting one in, my concerns were confirmed – we’d need an upgraded service panel and upgraded service from the electric company. That was going to cost about $6500 for the panel and 6 months for the new service approval. We bought a gas range. But now I have to check if it is one of those that shut off the gas valve if there is no electricity.
We of course have a natural gas furnace and water heater.