We have previously reported, several times, on how wealthy New Englanders, people with the money to do what they want, choose to heat their homes and cook their food, and just enjoy the good life, even though the climate activists don’t want people to have that choice. Today’s left appear to be pro-choice on exactly one thing.

Well, it’s one thing when the activists don’t believe that people should have the choices most wish to take, but something else entirely when someone with governing power thinks that way.

‘Barrier To Entry’: Dem Mayor Bans Fossil Fuel Use In New City Buildings, Eyes Residential Buildings Next

Story by Nick Pope • Tuesday, August 1, 2023 • 7:13 PM

Democratic Boston Mayor Michelle Wu signed an executive order Monday banning new construction or renovations of municipal buildings that would use fossil fuels, according to the Boston Herald.

Monday’s executive order is part of Wu’s broader efforts to implement a similar ban on fossil fuel use in new residential buildings, according to the Boston Herald. Wu stated that “Boston will continue using every possible tool” to counter climate change, according to a Monday press release, but a de facto ban on fossil fuel use in new residential developments could impose higher costs, Greg Vasil, CEO of the Greater Boston Real Estate Board, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The potential ban on fossil fuel hookups in the city’s new residential buildings “is going to be a real barrier to entry” for developers “to build what they want to build in Boston” if enacted, Vasil told the DCNF. “It would definitely drive up costs,” Vasil continued, adding that “there’s a desire to satisfy campaign promises without understanding the economic situation.”

And that’s the main point, “a desire to satisfy campaign promises without understanding the economic situation.” Michelle Pewarski^[1]Mrs Pewarski, like so many leftist women, does not respect her husband enough to have taken his name, but we at The First Street Journal do not show the same disrespect, and always refer to married … Continue reading is an activist, who understands what she wants to do, but hasn’t the first clue about reality.

Wu won the mayor’s election in November 2021, in part by running on a promise to deliver Boston a “green new deal.” Her administration intends to apply for a Massachusetts state program that will permit ten communities in the state to prohibit gas hookups in new buildings, according to the Boston Herald.

In April, Boston’s city council approved an ordinance which requires new residential buildings in the city to feature electrical wiring that will allow for future conversion to electricity and to connect to solar power, according to the Boston Herald. Wu’s office estimates that around 70% of the city’s overall emissions are attributable to buildings, according to the Monday press release announcing the signing of the executive order.

The latter paragraph notes a policy that makes some sense. It is far less expensive to add the additional wiring to allow a future owner to convert from gas heat, ranges, and water heaters to electric appliances during the construction phase, than to have to add the wiring later during a remodel. When we had a propane — there is no natural gas service this far out in the countryside — water heater installed to replace the on-its-last-legs electric one in 2018, I left the 10-2 wiring for the old water heater in place, though I did disconnect it from the circuit breaker panel. I did remove the wiring for the old electric range, but I did that because it was poorly installed, not because I objected to it being there.

But Mayor Pewarski, like so many other of the activists, has no idea what she is doing. The only region of the country in which electricity is the predominant method of heating homes is the southeast, for two reasons:

1. 

   The propane fireplace that is our secondary heat source.

   With many rural residents living outside of areas served by natural gas, it is far easier and less expensive to get electricity to a house than it is natural gas.

2. The southeast has generally milder winters, in which electric heat pumps have a better chance of keeping up with heating demand.

In my travels around eastern Kentucky, especially since we added propane to our formerly all-electric home, I notice other homes which have propane tanks, and there are a lot of them. I do not know how many of those houses primarily heat their homes using propane, or how many are like us, using a propane appliance, in our case a propane fireplace, as supplemental heat for really cold days, or backup heat for those times when the power fails.

A cheery fire in our wood stove in Jim Thorpe.

We learned our lesson the hard way! On Christmas Day of 2002, a heavy, wet snow at our house in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, knocked out electric service, and our fuel-oil powered steam boiler, which supplied the radiators, would not work without electricity. Power was restored in approximately 30 hours, but on that cold, snowy day, we couldn’t cook, couldn’t bathe, and it got down to 50º F inside our 1890 Victorian home. We later added a nice wood stove, which did not require electricity to operate, but it sure would have been nice to have had that before we lost sparktricity!

It was early Monday morning, March 12, 2018, when we received five inches of heavy, wet snow, as well as ice, at our farm in Estill County, Kentucky, and we lost electricity, in our all-electric home, sometime before 4:30 AM. No, I’m not relying on memory; I’m actually kind of obsessive about recording things in my At-A-Glance Daily Diary, and I have a whole shelf of them, dating back to 1986, missing only 2001’s, which was lost somehow.

Fortunately, it was 42º F and sunny outside by afternoon, which helped some, but it still got down to 52º F inside the house. My wife, having to work the following day, drove to Lexington to stay at our daughter’s apartment, so she could do something really radical like take a shower in the morning. There was just enough sort-of warm water in the water heater for me to take a quick shower on Tuesday morning. While my wife could leave, I had to stay at home to care for the critters.

Our remodeled kitchen, including the propane range! All of the work except the red quartz countertops was done by my family and me. Click to enlarge.

To make a long story short, we finally got sparktricity back at 4:54 PM on Thursday, March 15^th. It had gotten as cool as 37º F inside the house, though warmer in my bedroom, which I heated with sunshine through the window and my own body heat. The high for that day was 58º F, so that helped some. I wonder how bad things would have gotten if we had lost power for 4½ days in mid-January.

We had planned on remodeling all along, because our house was a fixer-upper when we bought it, and Mrs Pico had stated, early on, that she wanted a gas range, but we hadn’t begun the remodel quite yet. That end-of-winter power loss was enough to persuade us that we needed supplemental heat here as well.

We are not wealthy, nor even well-to-do, but at least we are not as poor as many people in eastern Kentucky. Had someone like Mayor Pewarski been in governing authority around here, we would not have had the choice of installing propane utilities to keep us warm in the winter when the temperature gets too low for the heat pump to keep up, or the power knocked out, which can happen for days at a time in rural areas like ours.

The liberals in Boston gave Mrs Pewarski 64% of their votes, and she had made no secret of her support for the cockamamie ‘green new deal,’ so it’s difficult to argue against the notion that they have gotten exactly what they deserve. Perhaps they didn’t know the specifics, didn’t understand that she would use government power to ban future natural gas hookups, but anyone who looks has to know that today’s left are all about force, are all about trying to impose their choices on other people. That this has happened in Boston, the cradle of our liberty, and the area in which our American Revolution began, is just an added insult to the American dream.