Maryland should phase out natural gas in buildings to protect its residents
By Ruth White, Advocacy Lead, Howard County Climate Action
Last month, Baltimore saw the devastating impacts of natural gas when two people were killed and seven were injured in a gas explosion.
My community deserves better. We should be able to heat our homes and cook our food safely and cleanly. To protect our families and our neighbors, we need all electric homes, with electric heating systems and appliances. This switch should be standard in all new housing construction. Additionally, we need a plan to transition existing buildings and houses to all electric over time.
This fight for me is personal. I’ve seen the danger of gas firsthand.
I live in Columbia, 30 minutes southwest of Baltimore. On August 25, 2019, a little over a mile from where I live, a gas explosion destroyed an office complex. Miraculously, no one was injured or killed, but it brought lasting hurt to our community. In the aftermath of the explosion, I saw more than just the roped off rubble of the complex I once frequented, I witnessed the economic and human impacts of the explosion on our community.
For example, one of the businesses destroyed in the explosion was Mango Grove, a delicious Indian restaurant. Some of the employees were our neighbors, and the explosion cost them their livelihoods and ruined a popular small business.
Here in Maryland, the state’s Commission on Climate Change’s Mitigation Working Group has a subcommittee tasked with assessing whether the state should make it a policy for all new construction to be fully electric. I want the committee members to know decarbonizing and electrifying our buildings is important to keeping our fellow Marylanders healthy and safe. We can’t leave that to chance.
The explosions in Columbia last year and Baltimore in August don’t come as a surprise. A few weeks after the incident in my neighborhood, it came out that the city was plagued by increasingly leaky and unsafe natural gas system.
As its dilapidated infrastructure continues to endanger lives, the gas industry has touted billions of dollars in safety investments and improvements across the country, like Washington Gas’ STRIDE program, replacing gas infrastructure and passing the costs along to customers.
Despite these investments, dangerous gas accidents keep happening. In the last decade, gas-related safety incidents have been occurring with increasing frequency nationwide, according to the Pipeline Safety Trust, reversing a 30-year decrease in incidents.
Since 2010, more than 1,400 significant gas incidents across the country have been reported to the federal Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. More than 100 people have been killed and more than 600 people injured. Numerous others have lost their homes and businesses. Communities have been devastated.
This month alone marks the anniversaries of two of the country’s most destructive incidents, in San Bruno, California, in 2010 and Merrimack Valley, Mass., two years ago. Between those accidents, nine people were killed and more than 75 injured.
Not only is gas an immediate safety risk, it’s a large contributor to climate change, which poses a worldwide threat in the coming decades.
Natural gas is made up of methane, a greenhouse gas with more than 80 times the potency of carbon dioxide. Methane is released when gas is fracked at the drilling site, in pipelines during transmission and distribution, and as it flows through compressor stations to its destination. There is leakage at each stage, from drilling it out of the ground to our stovetops.
In most U.S. states, clean energy sources, like wind and solar, are cheaper to produce than gas from fracking. It doesn’t make sense, then, for Governor Hogan to insist on subsidizing and promoting gas in his proposed climate plan — especially when our safety is at stake.
Here in Baltimore and Columbia, and in too many other cities, the risks of gas have become dangerously obvious. Maryland needs to leave gas in its past. We owe it to our communities, our neighbors, and our families to do the right thing and switch to all-electric homes and appliances.
