S&P Global Platts, an energy analytics company, reports that a Boston suburb is the latest municipal jurisdiction to ban natural gas in new buildings.
Brookline is the first Massachusetts community to outlaw not only natural gas lines but also heating oil pipes in those new buildings deemed to be “major construction,” The Boston Herald reports.
Supporters insist the ban, for both new construction and major rehab projects, will help curb “climate change” and hopes it will be a model for area cities and towns, the newspaper reports.
More’s the pity. And here’s the kicker: The ban requires all those new buildings and rehabs to go electric.
That would be electricity that is produced more and more by natural gas-fired power-generating stations, a trend not likely to decline anytime soon.
Speaking of natural gas, researchers are wailing that shale gas development, which has revolutionized the domestic energy production sector and lowered energy costs for consumers, has supposedly “stymied” efforts to combat climate change.
As the Post-Gazette reports it, a senior investigator at the Geisinger Health Research Center, laments, in the P-G’s words, that “the planned buildout of the shale gas industry will make it more difficult, if not impossible, to meet fossil fuel use reduction goals needed to mitigate climate change.”
Never mind should the “Ban Shale Gas!” proclivities of Crowd Green destroy the economy and astronomically raise the prices of powering and heating just about everything with hardly reliable (but heavily taxpayer subsidized) solar and wind power.
And while we’re on the topic of “climate change,” The Washington Times reports how that petition signed by 11,258 “world scientists” from 153 countries declaring a “climate emergency” included some pretty interesting signatories.
There was “Mouse, Mickey” from the “Mickey Mouse Institute for the Blind, Nambia,” “Albus Dumbledore” from the fictional “University of Neasden” and so-called “world scientists” who were not climate scientists at all, The Times reports.
The newspaper notes that none of the really big “kahunas” of the climate change industry signed the “emergency” declaration. But it notes how the biggest name that did is a rather embarrassing character.
That would be, The Times says, “Stanford biology professor Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 doomsday book, ‘The Population Bomb.’”
That tome, a bestseller, no less, predicted “hundreds of millions of people (would) starve to death” in the 1970s due to global overpopulation.
We don’t recall that headline. Do you?
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
