[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Energy.]
By Ben Lieberman
Real Clear Energy
Like all massive bills, the Senate’s 2,700 page, trillion dollar-plus monstrosity of an infrastructure package is filled with several regrettable big ticket items, including ones that will cost us dearly in the name of fighting climate change. Even worse, buried deep in the bill are a great many relatively smaller provisions that are bad enough in their own right. This includes measures allowing more federal control over state and local building codes that can further the Biden Administration goal of “appliance electrification” by discouraging the use of natural gas in homes and businesses.
Climate activists and their allies in the Biden administration have declared war on natural gas. Although it is clean-burning, affordable, and domestically plentiful, these ideologues are targeting natural gas for extinction because of its greenhouse gas emissions. Biden has already imposed heavy-handed regulations like the suspension of natural gas leasing on federal lands and in federal waters, and procedural hurdles like a tougher approval process for new natural gas pipelines. He also supports measures aimed at discouraging or outright preventing home and business owners from choosing natural gas, thus forcing these end-users to rely entirely on electricity.
At the local level, a number of “progressive” cities, starting with Berkeley, California in 2019, outlawed natural gas hookups for new homes and businesses. This is bad news. Not only are natural gas furnaces, water heaters, stoves, and other appliances generally cheaper to purchase and operate than their electric counterparts, they also have qualitative advantages. Most notably, restaurant owners (and amateur chefs) will tell you that natural gas cooking is vastly superior to electric. Yet, these measures would take away the option of natural gas for those who prefer it.
At the same time, a coerced shift away from natural gas would place even greater dependence on an electricity system already under climate policy-induced strain thanks to retirements of reliable, coal-fired generation and replacement with much-less-reliable wind and solar.
If the infrastructure bill passes, the federal government will be able to influence state and local building codes so as to disfavor natural gas. The bill doesn’t do this explicitly, but through carrots – it authorizes $225,000,000 in grant money for the purpose of “assisting standards-setting bodies.” The language may sound innocent enough, for example grants to “enable sustained cost-effective implementation of updated building energy codes,” but in practice this means the only recipients will be those who play ball with the Biden climate agenda targeting natural gas.
Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) has recognized the threat. He offered an amendment to the building code provisions, under which “no money can be used to prohibit natural gas hookups,” adding “let’s let the people make some decisions for themselves.” The amendment failed.
From here, Biden Administration climate policies only get worse. The worrisome provisions in the infrastructure bill will look tame compared with the promised reconciliation package that Congressional Democrats believe they can pass without a single Republican vote. Expect it to include additional measures targeting natural gas, and in so doing taking away the rights of homeowners and business owners to choose for themselves. Many Americans are not going to appreciate the Biden Administration taking away their freedom to choose abundant and clean-burning natural gas.
Ben Lieberman is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank.
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Energy.]
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