I was pleased yesterday to hear some positive news on NPR. New York, which is the largest city in the United States, has banned natural gas in all new buildings. This means that gas stoves and heat pumps will not be allowed. This is a baby step in our move away from our dependence on fossil fuels, but it is significant. About 40% of carbon emissions come from buildings.
Before I learned about the terrible practice of fracking, I preferred cooking on a gas stove. All electric homes and apartments are more expensive to heat. With the occasional outages that happen due to storms, I was comforted knowing that even if the electricity went out, I could still heat water on my gas stovetop. Propane gas is a cleaner burning gas than natural gas, but it still requires fracking to be extracted. What I now know is that replacing fossil fuels, and also our electric dependency, with solar, is the smartest thing we can do. It is what we should have been doing all along, rather than raping the earth and wreaking havoc on every other living inhabitant in the process. Our sun was provided for us along with this planet; and the gift of life has been granted to each of us. Early man worshipped the sun – with good reason. Our lives depend on it.
Now that New York has set the example, I hope the rest of the country soon follows in its footsteps. I am anxious for electric cars to become the norm, rather than the exception. I am hopeful that we can begin to repair our damaged planet and that sometime in the very new future, we will look back at the past century and say, “What were we thinking?!”
