The city will officially ban fossil fuel connections in new construction by 2030, a major step toward phasing out a reliance on gas and oil that other liberal cities have pursued across the nation.
Mayor Bill de Blasio will announce the new policy, reviewed in advance by POLITICO, during his State of the City address on Thursday. The city will first establish intermediate goals for the policy in the short term and work to ensure the ban doesn’t negatively impact renters and low-income homeowners.
De Blasio last year pledged to ban natural gas and other fossil fuels in large building systems by 2040 and to block any new fossil infrastructure, like pipelines, in the city. But it was unclear at the time how he would achieve those lofty goals as cities are mostly beholden to the state or federal government when it comes to new energy infrastructure — from siting new power plants to building offshore wind farms.
But banning gas hookups in new or renovated buildings is one of the few ways cities can exert local authority to cut greenhouse gas emissions — and New York will now pursue the measure.
His pain was transfixing, a case study in a fundamental climate riddle: How do you confront the truth of climate change when the very act of letting it in risked toppling your sanity? There is too much grief, too much suffering to bear. So we intellectualize. We rationalize. And too often, without even allowing ourselves to know we’re doing it, we turn away. At virtually every level — personal, political, policy, corporate — we repeat this pattern. We fail, or don’t even try, to rise to the challenge. Yes, there are the behemoth forces of power and money reinforcing the status quo. But even those of us who firmly believe we care very often fail to translate that caring into much action. We make polite, perhaps even impassioned conversation. We say smart climate things in the boardroom or classroom or kitchen or on the campaign trail. And then … there’s a gap, a great nothingness and inertia. What happens if a human — or to be precise, a climate scientist, both privileged and cursed to understand the depth of the problem — lets the full catastrophe in?
Why worry about the smell of the burning brakes on the steep hill as the truck only speeds up, when you got Sam Cooke's Twisting the Night Away, on the radio. Everybody, let's singing along ...
They're twistin', twistin'
Everybody's feelin' great
They're twistin', twistin'
They're twistin' the night away
President Biden on Monday pledged to replace vehicles owned by the federal government with U.S.-made electric vehicles, doubling down on a similar campaign pledge.
“The federal government also owns an enormous fleet of vehicles which we're going to replace with clean, electric vehicles made right here in America by American workers,” he said while?discussing an executive order?aimed at increasing federal procurement of products made in the U.S.
Though mixing different solar panels is not recommended, it’s not forbidden and things would be ok as long as each panel’s electrical parameters (voltage, wattage, amps) are carefully considered.
When you intend to wire two panels produced by different vendors, the vendors are not the problem.
The problem is in different electrical characteristics of the panels, together with different performance degradation.
We put solar panels together to increase the solar-generated power.
In an effort to slow the nation's contribution to climate change, President Biden is expected to begin halting oil and gas leasing on federal lands and waters.
The much-anticipated move is one of several executive actions the president is scheduled to make Wednesday to address the worsening climate crisis and the broader decline of the natural world, but it won't come without pushback.
“I think we’ve got to find a better way to do it, because I think net metering is going to result in a pushback against residential solar,Θ said Richard Schmalensee, economics professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, on the sidelines of the report launch in Washington, .C.