State and local leaders nationwide are beginning to recognize the importance of eliminating fossil fuels in newly constructed buildings. The rationale is clear: gas has an extremely limited place in our clean energy future, and it’s far more difficult, costly, and disruptive to swap out gas-consuming equipment from an existing building than it is to build without gas from the start. However, this long-term view does little to sway the developers, contractors, and housing regulators accustomed to basing their decisions on one question: what does it cost? Advocates have long worked to provide a sufficient answer to this often-complex problem.…

A long time ago, I worked at a dry cleaning shop in St. Louis. It was December, and we had a weeklong bout of super-cold weather. The temperature dropped to 0° F at night, and just got up into the teens during the day. I worked inside where the temperature was always nice and warm, but the delivery guy had to go out in the cold every day. Before the cold front came through, the daytime temperature was in the 30s and 40s Fahrenheit, and he’d go out in just a short sleeve T-shirt, pants, and shoes. When the daytime temperatures…

Natural gas is a versatile fossil fuel that accounts for about a third of U.S. energy use. Although it produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants than coal or oil, natural gas is a major contributor to climate change, an urgent global problem. Reducing emissions from the natural gas system is especially challenging because natural gas is used roughly equally for electricity, heating, and industrial applications. There’s an emerging argument that maybe there could be a direct substitute for fossil natural gas in the form of renewable natural gas (RNG)—a renewable fuel designed to be nearly indistinguishable from fossil…