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Home My WebLink About2/1/2022 Item 7a, Bradshaw Delgado, Adriana From:Justin Bradshaw <justin@maccog.com> Sent:Tuesday, February To:E-mail Council Website Subject:Natural Gas doesn't belong in homes This message is from an External Source. Use caution when deciding to open attachments, click links, or respond. Hello SLO Council, I’m writing you today about improving the Clean Energy Choice for New Buildings Program. As you know, it hasn’t been as effective as we’d hoped and now is our chance to fix it. Many other cities in CA and across the country have adopted full bans on NEW natural gas hookups. For many reasons, this is the right policy for SLO right now. It’s safer for residents because of Nitrogen Oxide from cooking and methane in the home due to gas leaks but it’s also a good way to move to the next step of our plan to make SLO carbon neutral by 2035. This is a critical component of that plan. Homes built with gas now will have that option for decades to come. We can’t get there without it… not without loads of carbon sequestration (and we’ll need plenty of that in any case, so let’s stop digging the hole and start filling it up!) The political reality is that the Gas Company opposition has waned in recent years and you’re more free from outside influence to do what you know is best for your community. They won’t be here to bully us this time! The industry reality is that builders will continue to do what they THINK the customer wants, even if it’s really a tiny fraction of people who actually feel strongly about this. When people discover induction cooking, they usually change their mind about gas stoves. And heating and cooling space and water? Nobody cares whether they’re using a gas furnace or a heat pump. They just want it to work, and heat pumps work GREAT. When you think about it logically and maybe from a perspective of someone, in 2050 looking back on this time, it’s bananas that we are intentionally pumping a noxious fossil fuel into our homes where our kids and grandparents live just to heat things that can be heated (more efficiently) in other ways! Let’s take the next step into the future and reclaim our status as a climate leading community on this topic! Please accept staff recommendation to remove the gas pathway for new buildings. Thanks for your time. If you have a little more, there are some great resources linked below that go into more detail about the health and climate effects of natural gas. Justin Bradshaw 1 San Luis Obispo Why is induction cooking better? Ask a chef: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooNzRrHA9VY&t=180s How do we make this transition equitably? https://twitter.com/tdichristopher/status/1481701375134285827 A climate hawk who used to be skeptical of the focus on natural gas in homes because of their low % of overall home carbon emissions, now finds eliminating them to be imperative for human health reasons: https://twitter.com/curious_founder/status/1481746460378992641 A new study by Stanford raises new alarms. Our gas stoves are always leaking, even when not in use! "The advantage to electric or induction cooking is two-fold: “It not only cuts greenhouse gases, it makes indoor air safer to breathe.”" NYTimes: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/27/climate/gas-stoves-methane-emissions.html VOX: https://www.vox.com/2022/1/27/22902490/gas-stoves-methane-climate-pollution-health-off "in a small kitchen it only took a few minutes of usage for stoves (without range hoods) to generate levels above national health standards." Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/01/27/gas-stoves-kitchens-pose-risk-public-health- planet-research-finds/ j Justin Bradshaw justin@maccog.com iPhone: 805-720-9276 www.maccog.com  Consultants Network 2