New York's Farcical Gas Ban

As I said a few months ago, "Who needs to ban gas stoves when the entire left is working overtime to ban the use of fossil fuels?"

Of course they're not taking away stoves in New York, but such reassurances risk distracting from the real danger and stupidity going on, as one can quickly see.

The Democrat-dominated Empire State appears to be close to imposing a statewide ban on natural gas hookups in new buildings. This is despite concerns that the electric grid in some areas might not be up to the task of supplying all the energy needs of some new buildings -- and an admission (in the form of an exemption) that this mature but newly-demonized technology ensures reliability:

Image by Tony, via Wikimedia Commons, license.

[Governor's spokeswoman Katy] Zielinski said the measure would also allow exemptions for facilities that may need to use fossil fuels for emergency backup power, including hospitals and laboratories. And she said the governor's office was still "figuring out" how the measure will be applied to new construction in areas where the electrical grid may not be up to the task.

"We are looking at reliability issues still, meaning if there is a proposal to build a new building after 2025 but there is a lack of electric capacity in that region, how will we handle that?" she said. "We don't want to build new buildings if the local grid does not have the energy to be able to power them."

That last sentence is rich coming from the same people who just closed the perfectly good nuclear power plant pictured above.

But the icing on the cake comes when one realizes that the ban is absolutely farcical in light of that recent history: The Indian Point plant has been replaced by natural gas and oil power generation.

Perhaps a functionary of that particular nanny state can explain to us how electricity generated from natural gas (with extra thrown in to make up for transmission losses) will "save the planet" more effectively that just ... using natural gas locally...

We'd love to hear that enough to set aside for the moment the small matter of whether it's the proper purpose of government to dictate maters of trade, whatever its allegedly noble purpose for doing so.

-- CAV