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Environment


AFTER BLOCKING GAS BANS IN RED STATES, FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY EYES NEW JERSEY

A new bill from a Democratic lawmaker would create obstacles to electrification
and give the industry a fresh playbook, advocates say.
By 
Alexander C. Kaufman


Senior Reporter, HuffPost

Jul 12, 2022, 05:45 AM EDT
SAVE
The Phillips 66 oil refinery in Linden, New Jersey, produces home heating oil
for the region.
Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

In July 2019 ― while fires blazed from the Amazon to Alaska during what was, at
the time, the planet’s hottest month ever recorded ― Berkeley, California,
became the first U.S. city to ban newly constructed buildings from using natural
gas for heating and cooking.

Nearly 15% of globe-heating emissions in the U.S. come from buildings, and the
Berkeley ban marked a major step toward reducing the amount of invisible,
disease-causing air pollutants that gas furnaces and stovetops spew into homes
and businesses. Several big cities, including San Francisco, Seattle and New
York, have followed suit.

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But the backlash quickly overtook the bandwagon. As of this month, at least 20
states, virtually all of them under Republican control, have passed laws banning
their cities and towns from prohibiting new gas hookups. Some states even
considered allowing gas utilities to charge customers who terminate their
service a four-figure “exit fee.”

Now Democratic-controlled New Jersey could become the next state to enact
legislation that would make it harder to quit using fossil fuels in buildings.

The proposal to add extra bureaucratic barriers to banning fossil fuel heating
systems comes on the heels of an industry lobbying blitz, and represents what
advocates see as a bid to block electrification long enough for companies to
beat the odds and produce a large supply of low-carbon fuel. With U.S. emissions
soaring and the window to avoid catastrophic global warming closing, a state
where roughly 85% of households depend on gas, fuel oil or propane has little
time to spare.



But the legislation highlights legitimate fears over how the U.S.’ piecemeal
approach to weaning its economy off fossil fuels might pinch ordinary people in
a country where less than half the population can afford a surprise $1,000
expense ― and where millions are bracing for blackouts as the increasingly
fragile electricity grid buckles.

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The bill from state Senate Majority Conference Leader Vin Gopal (D) would
prohibit the state government from adopting a rule or regulation “mandating
electric heating or water heating systems” before the New Jersey Department of
Community Affairs can complete a two-year assessment of what it would cost, and
hold public hearings in every part of the state.

No such rule requiring homeowners and landlords to replace functioning fuel
systems is under consideration, and no major environmental groups are proposing
policies that would force homeowners to make a sudden switch. But the “energy
master plan” that Gov. Phil Murphy (D) released in January 2020 promised to
“incentivize the transition” to electric heating and “develop a transition plan
to a fully electrified building sector.” And his administration’s lone proposed
regulation on heating would force big commercial buildings to start phasing out
fossil-fueled heating after 2025.

“There’s been mixed reports on if electrification is the only way to get to 100%
clean renewables,” Gopal told HuffPost. “I want to make sure we do it in a way
that doesn’t dramatically increase costs on average working-class families.”

Town hall hearings and cost-benefit analyses are already features of the state
rulemaking process. And even if a proposed mandate from a state agency makes it
through months of public comment and expert scrutiny, New Jersey’s Constitution
still gives the bicameral legislature the right to vote by simple majority to
veto any executive branch policy.

“There isn’t anything in this bill that won’t occur already,” said David
Pringle, a consultant who works with the climate advocacy group Empower NJ.
“These legislators have the best of intentions, but they’ve been sold a false
bill of goods.”

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Rather than task the state’s environmental or utility regulators with analyzing
the effects of building decarbonization, the legislation would grant new powers
to an agency that has in the past resisted updating the state building codes to
the newest, most energy-efficient benchmarks and, as recently as March,
challenged new rules intended to curb stormwater flooding.

“The bill really is a solution in search of a problem,” said Eric Miller, the
director of New Jersey policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “What we
really see it as is a naked attempt by the fossil fuel industry to protect their
bottom line by bullying states and cities in an effort to delay the transition
to electrified buildings.”


RECKLESS DELAY OR THOUGHTFUL DELIBERATION?

Gopal, a telegenic son of Indian immigrants, doesn’t resemble a typical champion
of fossil fuels. The Democrat, 37, earned an 89% score on the League of
Conservation Voters’ legislative ranking last year. In 2020, he voted to ban
plastic bags and pass New Jersey’s first-in-the-nation environmental justice
law, setting a new standard for forcing regulators to consider cumulative
pollution effects when deciding whether to renew industrial permits.



State Sen. Vin Gopal (D) is the lead sponsor for New Jersey's
anti-electrification bill.
via Associated Press

But the lawmaker hasn’t totally shunned the industry, either. Leaders from New
Jersey’s largest building-trades unions, which have historically advocated for
the drilling and pipeline businesses that employ their workers, attended Gopal’s
wedding in 2019.

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Last August, Gopal’s reelection campaign accepted a $6,500 donation from the
Fuel Merchants Association of New Jersey, a trade group representing nearly 600
petroleum sellers. In October, as Gopal battled to keep his seat amid a GOP
wave, he received $1,500 from New Jersey Resources, a $4.3 billion gas utility.

Christina Zuk, Gopal’s wife, is a lobbyist at Princeton Public Affairs Group who
works for companies including BP America and pipeline builders Kinder Morgan and
T.C. Energy. Her employer, considered New Jersey’s largest and most influential
lobbying firm, counts among its clients the New Jersey Propane Gas Association.
In 2019, that trade group sent a letter to the New Jersey Board of Public
Utilities opposing the governor’s plan to incentivize the transition to electric
heating and appliances. The letter was submitted by David Smith, Zuk’s colleague
at Princeton Public Affairs Group and another guest at the couple’s wedding.
Smith later submitted a public comment in support of Gopal’s bill. (Smith didn’t
respond to an email requesting comment.)

Gopal told HuffPost he does not know who his wife’s clients are, and scoffed at
the implication that he would legislate on their behalf.

“My wife works for a big firm, and she’s worked there since long before I
entered the legislature,” he said. “People will try to find a $500 donation and
try to throw a conspiracy theory off of it when we all know that’s really not
how politics works.”

If anything, he said, “by their logic I shouldn’t be doing this bill,” since
he’s an active member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, a
union that has supported electrification proposals in New Jersey.

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It was another union that he said stoked his concern. Last year, Gopal said, he
met with workers at UA Local 9, the New Jersey union representing pipe fitters
and plumbers — people who would lose their jobs if the types of rules that
mandate electrification in other states were put in place here. Murphy’s energy
plan was vague, but that ambiguity became a Rorschach test in which opponents of
electrification saw the clear contours of similar regulations.

Chief among them was the Fuel Merchants Association. This trade group spent more
than $1.4 million on a public anti-electrification campaign last year, making it
the state’s third largest lobbying entity in 2021, according to the New Jersey
Election Law Enforcement Commission. The spree marked a 979% increase from the
$132,000 the Fuel Merchants Association spent on lobbying in 2020.



A petroleum pipeline runs through a river near a refinery in northern New
Jersey.
Spencer Platt via Getty Images

The campaign launched an advocacy website and sponsored op-eds in USA Today. But
much of the money went to airing 30-second television advertisements across the
state that warned of a looming “$20,000 heat tax.”

That was a back-of-the-napkin estimate ― almost certainly inflated in most cases
― that was meant to illustrate the cost of swapping a gas- or oil-fired home
heating system for an electric one. Making the switch requires not only buying a
new appliance, but also hiring an electrician to rewire the house.

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Inflated estimates or not, the ads worked. Gopal’s office started receiving
emails from constituents across the district. Stretching from the central Jersey
Shore inland about 15 miles, the 11th legislative district has an aging
population and a growing share of elderly residents living in single-family
homes, according to a 2017 Monmouth County study. Older ratepayers are
especially vulnerable to utility price spikes, particularly if they rely on
Social Security or retirement funds as their sole source of income.

The cost of installing electric heating is not set in stone. States provide a
range of rebates, with Massachusetts offering residents up to $10,000 to go
electric. New federal legislation targeting heat pump manufacturers could slash
the price and increase the availability of the machines.

Likewise, the long-term operating costs of electric and fossil heating systems
are not static. Northeastern states have some of the highest electricity prices
in the country. Their per-unit price of natural gas, by contrast, tends to be
closer in line with the national average than that of power. That would suggest
an electricity bill that includes heating would cost more than the combined sum
of separate gas and electric services.

In all but two of the 15 cities examined in a recently published government
study, ratepayers who went fully electric and avoided fixed charges for gas
service saved up to almost $700 per year.

A misstep by New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection seemed to lend
credence to the argument that electric costs more. When the agency proposed its
rule to stop permitting new fossil fuel heating appliances in buildings with
systems at least 10 times larger than the average home, the regulators initially
projected the operational costs of an electric boiler to be between 4.2% and
4.9% higher than the average gas unit. As it happened, though, this was an error
— the regulators later amended the estimate, saying the costs would actually be
4.2 to 4.9 times higher.

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The Fuel Merchants Association seized on the mistake as proof that electric
heating mandates would quintuple utility bills. But this was a flawed argument,
because the Department of Environmental Protection based its comparison on
electric resistance boilers, which are more expensive to operate ― not on heat
pump systems, which are much more efficient than both electric-resistance and
fuel-fired boilers. The agency also used 2018 data that didn’t reflect the
recent significant spike in gas costs compared to electricity prices.

Natural gas prices surged to a 14-year high last month alone, as a result of
policies that failed to account for how the pandemic and the war in Ukraine
would shape supply and demand. As the planet grows hotter, the resulting
political and economic upheaval is likely to send even more shock waves through
the global fossil fuel market.

Because electric heating is far more efficient, it’s less sensitive on average
to fossil fuel price spikes, even though the U.S. grid is still powered
primarily by gas and coal. Last fall, federal energy researchers released a
study finding that U.S. households heating primarily with natural gas would
spend at least 30% more than the previous winter’s average. Homes with oil
heating were on track to spend 43% more, and propane customers were looking at a
54% price spike.

By contrast, households heating primarily with electricity only faced a 6% cost
increase last winter. Once the U.S. grid depends less on fossil fuels, electric
heating prices should, in theory, be even steadier. Ratepayers who used
all-electric heating in Quebec, where vast hydroelectric dams power one of
Canada’s lowest-carbon electric grids, enjoyed some of the biggest annual cost
savings, the government study found.

> “What we really see it as is a naked attempt by the fossil fuel industry to
> protect their bottom line by bullying states and cities in an effort to delay
> the transition to electrified buildings.”
> 
> - Eric Miller, New Jersey policy director at the Natural Resources Defense
> Council

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Looming over these scenarios, however, is the question of how a systemic shift
away from gas might affect the availability and prices of fuel during the
transition. Fixing pipelines, inking new supply deals, maintaining a fleet of
tanker trucks ― these things all cost money, and if companies cannot expect to
recoup it under policies that aim to depress demand for fuel in the long run,
there is little incentive to make those investments.

Absent some tool for centrally coordinating the transition, ensuring that
efficiency increases and clean alternatives grow at a faster rate than dirty
infrastructure comes offline, there may be little reason, by the market’s logic,
to have gas supplies ready when other systems fail.

“You think the natural gas company is going to maintain the gas distribution
lines simply for when the power goes out?” said Eric DeGesero, the Fuel
Merchants Association’s executive vice president.


CAN ELECTRICITY KEEP JERSEY WARM IN THE WINTER?

Cost wasn’t the only concern the Fuel Merchants Association’s ads stoked. The
clip claimed that electric heat pumps “will not keep your home warm or
comfortable when temperatures drop below freezing during our New Jersey
winters.”

Electric heat pumps are among the most popular ways to heat buildings without
relying on fuel. There are also electric boilers, which use power instead of
fuel to heat and circulate water.

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Those are hardly the only options. Geothermal heating systems, which circulate
warmth from underground, are growing quickly on the East Coast. States like New
York are set to start experimenting with European-style district heating, where
heat, like electricity, is generated centrally and piped into homes. It’s
unclear what range of options New Jersey might pursue under the Murphy
administration’s energy master plan.

It’s true that heat pumps have, historically, struggled in freezing
temperatures, when there’s less warm air to pull in from outside. That’s partly
why the appliances are most widely used in the Western and Southeastern U.S.,
where housing stock is newer and winters are milder.

But heat pump technology has improved significantly in recent years. A program
at the Department of Energy aimed at pushing manufacturers to develop more
reliable cold-weather heat pumps has already borne fruit. Last month, the agency
named the appliance maker Lennox as the first to meet its new standards. Some of
Europe’s coldest countries ― Norway, Estonia, Finland, Sweden and Denmark ― now
have, in that order, the highest rates of heat pump adoption in the region.
Maine, which gives residents up to $1,200 to install a heat pump, has an even
higher adoption rate than Norway.



Workers from Solaris Energy install a Vaillant Arotherm air source heat pump
unit in a 1930s-built house in Folkestone, U.K., in September 2021. The U.K. has
heavily incentivized heat pumps.
Andrew Aitchison via Getty Images

“It’s an often repeated myth about heat pumps that they don’t work in cold
weather,” said Kevin Kircher, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering
at Purdue University who researches heat pumps. “Not every heat pump is going to
perform 100% of the time in every place, but it’s not hard to find a heat pump
that will. It’s reaching the point where even the mainstream heat pumps
developed by U.S. manufacturers can perform year round anywhere in the U.S.,
except maybe Alaska.”

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INDUSTRY CHARTS ITS OWN PATH

The business of refining, selling and delivering combustible fuels will likely
never go away. But where those fuels come from, and what they are used for, is
hotly debated. The industry sees a profitable future where selling burnable
methane and hydrogen produces minimal emissions.

Renewable natural gas ― a fuel harvested from waste such as livestock manure,
rotting garbage or sewage sludge ― adds relatively little heat-trapping gas to
the atmosphere and functions just like fossil gas from deep underground. The
same is true of synthetic natural gas, a fuel made from captured carbon dioxide
and hydrogen produced with renewably powered electrolyzers. Like the globally
traded commodity liquefied natural gas, these nascent fuels are known in the
industry by acronyms: RNG and SNG, respectively.

These fuels are available today. But they are expensive and in extremely short
supply. No clear evidence exists that those industries could provide nearly
enough fuel to match current residential demand for pipeline gas at any point in
the next few decades. Even the gas industry’s own optimistic numbers show
low-carbon methane fuels barely seizing a double-digit percentage of demand for
pipeline gas.

Two separate studies released in 2020 suggest that gas made from diverted waste
should be treated as precious and reserved for things that can’t be easily
electrified, like aviation or manufacturing. One came from the Rocky Mountain
Institute, a widely respected environmentalist organization. The other came from
the Energy Transition Commission, a corporate advocacy group that includes top
executives from oil and gas giants Royal Dutch Shell and BP.

And that says nothing about the climate risks of increasing dependence on a gas
that leaks twice as much as fossil gas, and ends up trapping 27 times more heat
in the atmosphere over a 25-year period than carbon dioxide.

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All of which points to electrification needing to do the vast share of the work
of slashing emissions from buildings in the near term.

In New Jersey, that task is especially daunting. More than 75% of the state’s
households heat with natural gas, and 7.4% do so with fuel oil ― far above the
national averages, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data.
About 2% of households rely on propane, roughly half the national average. Less
than 14% use electricity for heat, nearly three times below the national
average.

Still, as industry groups pushed Gopal’s bill, they promoted another piece of
legislation to boost renewable natural gas, in what advocates saw as the second
part of a two-pronged legislative strategy to keep the gas business alive in New
Jersey.

At an industry expo at the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut in May, Rich
Carrione, a public relations consultant, warned the audience gathered for a
panel on “the heating industry’s response to electrification” that most states’
decarbonization goals were “not going to be possible with petroleum products.”
Instead, he said that renewable natural gas and biodiesel, a fuel made from
plant or animal fats, offered “attractive alternatives.”

“Make no mistake. I’m still hearing people think that this is all going to go
away, it’s a political movement, it’s a liberal agenda, with the next election
we’re not going to be facing this issue anymore,” Carrione said, according to
audio of the talk obtained by HuffPost. “That is not true. These issues are
real, and they’re not going away. So we are at a crossroads where we have to
embrace low-carbon heating to carve out a place in the future.”

Advertisement



Manure from hog farms is a major potential source of renewable natural gas.
via Associated Press

But the Fuel Merchants Association expressed a more hawkish view later at the
event. DeGesero, the group’s leader, compared the battle against building
electrification to the Allies’ campaign against Nazi Germany. Casting
family-owned fuel businesses as outgunned heroes in this looming struggle, he
urged the audience to join the fight and get political by supporting bills like
Gopal’s, paying dues to regional trade groups and mustering grassroots
opposition to electrification.

“Maybe, as Churchill said, this isn’t the beginning of the end, but rather, the
end of the beginning ― the beginning of the next three generations of the
business that Great-grandpa started three generations ago,” DeGesero said.
“Either way, Great-grandpa is proud. You are fighting with all of your abilities
to sustain what he started all those generations ago. Good luck. Godspeed.”

In what he described as an unusual step, DeGesero admitted at the conference
that his group worked with gas utilities on this campaign.


ONE FRONT IN A NATIONWIDE WAR

Gopal’s bill may have passed overwhelmingly last year, but senators approved it
knowing there was no matching legislation in the New Jersey Assembly. The vote
was largely symbolic.

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This year, the Assembly has a version of the bill that was introduced by state
Assemblyman Paul Moriarty, a Democrat from the state’s southwestern region.

“It is the first time I’ve seen a state legislature try to rein in a governor’s
authority in the building electrification context,” said Amy Turner, a senior
fellow at Columbia University’s Sabin Center on Climate Change Law who
researches building-sector emissions.

Advocates doubt it will become law in its present form. Even Gopal admitted the
bill is largely to make a statement.

“Let’s be realistic here. This bill is all about a conversation. The governor is
never going to sign it. This is a bill that’s never going to go anywhere,” Gopal
said. “We need to limit gas long-term. Let’s just do it in a responsible way.”

But Miller, the state policy director at the NRDC, said advancing the bill would
send a signal that the playbook the fossil fuel industry has used in red states
can be replicated in a subtler form in states like New Jersey.

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With their product spurring an unprecedented public health crisis and their
rivals offering attractive benefits, gas utilities have sought to leverage their
incumbency and political might to wage war on virtually any government policy
that makes electrification more appealing.

In Colorado, an industry-run nonprofit backed by the nation’s largest gas-only
utility campaigned to block a proposal to eliminate state subsidies for new gas
lines. In Austin, Texas, a gas utility ran interference on a proposal to boost
electrification, sending legislators line-by-line revisions and marshaling
customers to oppose the city’s effort. In Oklahoma, regulators last fall weighed
allowing the state’s biggest natural gas utility to charge customers who quit
service to go electric an “exit fee” of up to $1,400.

> “When I walk into a bakery and I want chocolate cake, I don’t tell the baker
> how to make the chocolate cake. When the governor wants net-zero carbon
> energy, just tell us you want net-zero carbon energy, don’t tell us how to get
> there.”
> 
> - Eric DeGesero, Fuel Merchants Association of New Jersey executive vice
> president

There’s a certain irony in opposing New Jersey’s efforts to dangle carrots that
incentivize electric heating over fuel, according to Pringle, the consultant who
works with Empower NJ. Decarbonizing the state’s existing buildings ― plus all
the new homes, businesses and schools still being built with fossil heating ―
will only require more drastic policy measures down the road.

Residential and commercial real estate is directly responsible for 13% of the
U.S.’ greenhouse gas output, thanks largely to fuel-based heating and cooking
systems. Counting the portion of power plant emissions linked to buildings’
energy use brings that number closer to 40%.

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“At some point, we are going to have to do more than voluntary incentives,”
Pringle said.

Existing buildings can cost over six times more to retrofit for electrification
than if the structures had been wired for electric heating and appliances in the
first place, according to a HuffPost analysis of California cost data. Yet the
largest trade groups representing homebuilders have worked alongside gas
utilities to stave off efforts to make electric-ready circuitry the U.S.
standard.

“We’re opposed to electric-only as the only manner of achieving the objective of
net-zero carbon energy,” DeGesero said. “When I walk into a bakery and I want
chocolate cake, I don’t tell the baker how to make the chocolate cake. When the
governor wants net-zero carbon energy, just tell us you want net-zero carbon
energy, don’t tell us how to get there.”

The fossil fuel industry he represents, however, has guarded what kind of
ingredients make it into the recipe ― and who gets to write the cookbook. And
just last year, it tightened its grip on how U.S. buildings are constructed.

Building codes are set on the state and local level, meaning the federal
government has little control. But to create some uniformity, all 50 states
outsource the highly technical work of code-writing to the International Code
Council, a nonprofit consortium of building industry groups, gas utilities and
municipal governments.

Every three years, the ICC convenes its members, updates the codes and gives
delegates representing local governments the final say in a vote. In turn, every
state, and some countries in the Caribbean and Asia, codify those generic codes
into law. It’s usually a pretty sleepy, uneventful affair.

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In 2019, however, cities fed up with how slowly the energy-related building
codes were increasing efficiency and cutting emissions organized to vote for the
most ambitious round of codes in years. In response, gas utilities challenged
key measures to the ICC’s appeals board, arguing that requiring homebuilders to
include the circuitry for electric heating, appliances and vehicle charging in
new construction was a step too far.

The ICC, which has for years given industry groups special treatment, agreed
with the gas companies, and yanked those code requirements. Then, in a surprise
move, the ICC proposed eliminating local governments’ right to vote on energy
codes altogether. Despite outcry from the Biden administration,
environmentalists and dozens of cities, the ICC made the change permanent last
year. Under the new code-writing procedure, which only applies to energy-related
codes, industry groups get equal representation with governments on the
committees designing the next set round of codes.

Even by the standards of the new system, some delegates helping to write the
latest codes fear that corporate interests are once again wielding undue
influence over the process, after a single email secretly sent from a gas
utility nearly torpedoed a new proposal on electric vehicle charging.

Industry control over the country’s generic codes makes state-level policies
that much more important for slashing U.S. emissions to the extent scientists
say it will take to avoid catastrophic global warming, said Jeff Tittel, the
retired director of New Jersey’s Sierra Club chapter. As if to emphasize that
point, the Supreme Court last month limited federal regulators’ authority under
the Clean Air Act to regulate power plant emissions, raising the stakes even
higher for states. The country’s emissions, which spiked in 2021, are on track
to rise again this year.

“If we end up at 100% electric, I’m fine with that,” Gopal said. “Let’s just do
it in an organized way, a way where we understand the workers that are affected
that have good union paying jobs, and how that affects their lifestyle, how that
affects the cost on middle-class families that have to switch their heating oil.
None of this is laid out in the energy master plan.”

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But Tittel said Gopal’s bill sends the message that New Jersey is “going to stay
on natural gas and burn fossil fuels even if it means more fracking, more
pipelines, and more indoor air pollution.”

“The problem I see with this bill is it’s basically saying the state of New
Jersey is on record stopping or slowing down alternative ways to heat and cool
your home that may be greener and, long-term, cheaper,” he said. “This is there
to slow progress.”


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See Gallery


ALEXANDER C. KAUFMAN


Senior Reporter, HuffPost

Suggest a correction
More:
Climate ChangeNew Jerseyfossil fuelsnatural gaselectrification


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