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The story of natural gas taxes and bans this election cycle is far more nuanced than that.
Berkeley, California and Washington State put the transition to all-electric buildings on the ballot last week, and in both cases, it seemed to fail the test. Voters in Berkeley overwhelmingly rejected a proposed tax on natural gas that would raise money for electrification projects. In one fell swoop, voters in Washington State repealed several of their nation-leading policies that encourage electric over gas appliances and barred cities and towns from passing similar policies in the future.
On the face of things, the results appear to show voters retreating from ambitious climate action and rejecting electrification — a concerning signal at a time when federal support for decarbonization is about to evaporate and state and local leadership to cut emissions will become paramount. But the specific circumstances behind each vote suggest that’s not the whole story.
The Berkeley proposal was submitted by a small group of activists who knew it was more ideologically driven than politically feasible, and it proved to be controversial even among diehard climate advocates in the city. The Washington State initiative slid onto the ballot just three months before the election and ultimately passed on a razor thin margin. The two cases offer distinct lessons and takeaways, but to climate advocates, a budding backlash to electrification is not one of them.
The Berkeley proposal, otherwise known as Measure GG, was largely written by one person. Daniel Tahara is a software engineer at Tesla by day, and a climate activist by night with 350 Bay Area, a local chapter of the national climate advocacy group 350.org. For the past few years, he’s been animated by a question that I, too, am frequently asking: How are most people going to afford the steep cost of retrofitting their homes to use electric appliances?
To Tahara, finding an answer became more pressing last year when the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, a regional authority that regulates pollution, approved rules to phase out the sale of gas appliances. Starting in 2027, Berkeley residents will no longer be able to purchase a new gas-fired water heater if their old one fails — they’ll have to go electric. The rule applies to gas-fired furnaces and boilers in 2029. “We've got a lot of old buildings,” Tahara told me. “They would need a lot of electrical work to support new appliances, and people just don't have the money for it.”
His solution was Measure GG, an ordinance that would have imposed a tax of $2.96 per therm of natural gas used by buildings larger than 15,000 square feet. The estimated $26.7 million per year raised by the tax would go into a fund to help everyone else in town pay for electrification retrofits.
Tahara rallied a number of local environmental and community groups around the idea, but he did not have the support of the bigger non-profits and advocacy orgs that work on electrification policy in California, including the Building Decarbonization Coalition, Rewiring America, RMI, the Sierra Club, or the Natural Resources Defense Council.
"Any large blanket tax hike without input from those it would impact, no plans for a managed transition to the new fees, and no analysis on who is most likely to benefit or be burdened is likely to face real challenges with voters,” Alejandra Mejia Cunningham, the senior manager of building decarbonization for the NRDC, told me via email. “It is very important for tax-based policy proposals to be robust and thoroughly socialized."
I also talked to several Berkeley-based electrification supporters who voted no on Measure GG. Tom Graly, who chairs a local electrification working group, told me part of the reason the policy proved so controversial is that it singled out some of the city’s most beloved institutions, such as the Berkeley Bowl supermarket, a local chain, and the Berkeley Repertory Theater. The theater estimated the tax would cost it up to $69,000 per year, while converting off of gas would cost millions. “This well-intentioned ballot measure with its immediate implementation would be very harmful to our struggling organization,” Tom Parrish, the theater’s managing director said in a statement for the “No on GG” campaign.
Tahara based the tax on estimates for what’s called the “social cost of carbon,” or the projected economic damage that every additional ton of carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere will cause. But the number Tahara chose was on the high end — more than double the number the Biden administration uses when it weighs the costs and benefits of new regulations on carbon. If passed, the tax would more than double the cost of using natural gas in large buildings. He said some national groups gave him feedback on the proposal, like phasing in the tax over time and building in more exemptions, which he might consider for a future version. But he and his partners on the measure wanted to preserve their core thesis, which was that climate damages are already happening and are unaccounted for.
“I think part of our responsibility as local activists is to put out new ideas, to push the status quo,” he said. “I don’t think there’s been a lot of that that’s been happening in the last couple years.”
In Tahara’s view, the measure failed because the opposition campaign had a lot more money, and because even though Berkeley is often called the birthplace of the electrify everything movement, there’s still a lot of people in town who are completely unaware of the harm natural gas causes to the climate and to public health. On that, Graly agreed. “There's a huge education gap,” he said. “People just don't think about hot water. They turn on the faucet and the water is hot, and they're happy.”
Initiative 2066 in Washington State was a wide-ranging proposal to both roll back existing policies and preempt future ones. It was so wide-ranging, in fact, that its opponents believe it’s illegal under the state’s “single subject” rule for ballot measures, and they plan to fight it in court.
If the measure stands, it will invalidate the state’s nation-leading residential and commercial energy codes that strongly incentivize builders to forego gas hookups. It will remove a provision in state statute that requires Washington’s energy codes to gradually tighten toward zero-emissions new construction by 2031. It will repeal key parts of a law the state legislature passed earlier this year that require Washington’s biggest utility, Puget Sound Energy, to consider alternatives to replacing aging gas infrastructure or building new gas pipelines. And it will ban cities and towns from passing any local ordinances that “prohibit, penalize, or discourage” the use of gas in buildings.
The initiative was one of four put on the ballot by Let’s Go Washington, a group bankrolled by hedge fund manager and multimillionaire Brian Heywood, and had the Building Industry Association of Washington as its primary sponsor, alongside a number of other pro-gas, pro-business, and realty groups.
There’s no doubt 2066 is a significant setback in the state’s progress toward cutting carbon emissions. But when I asked climate advocates in Washington how they were interpreting the outcome, they pointed to a handful of reasons why they weren’t too concerned about public sentiment around decarbonization.
First, the vote was incredibly close, with just over 51% of voters checking “yes.” Second, another initiative Let’s Go Washington put on the ballot — 2117, which would have repealed the state’s big umbrella climate law that puts a declining cap on emissions — unambiguously failed, with 62% voting “no.” Third, they argue the split reflects confusion about what 2066 would do.
The “yes on 2066” campaign sold it as a measure to “protect energy choice” and “stop the gas ban,” warning that otherwise utility rates would increase and the state would force homeowners to pay tens of thousands of dollars to retrofit their homes. There are kernels of truth to the messaging — the state’s building codes seriously limit developers’ ability to put gas hookups in new construction without outright banning them. The new law affecting Puget Sound Energy is primarily a planning policy that requires the utility to consider alternatives to gas infrastructure, but it doesn’t force anyone to get off gas, and regulators are likely to approve only those alternatives that save ratepayers money.
“I think voters were responding to a lot of misinformation and fear-mongering,” said Leah Missik, the Washington deputy policy director for Climate Solutions, a regional nonprofit that helped spearhead the “no on 2066” campaign. She emphasized that it was put on the ballot in July, giving groups like hers only a few months to drum up their response to it, whereas they knew about 2117 for over a year, and thus had a lot more time to educate voters on what that initiative would do.
The confusion probably also wasn’t helped by the fact that the policies 2066 repealed were incredibly wonky, dealing with building codes and utility planning.
“I think that given all of those headwinds, the fact that about half of Washingtonians still voted against initiative 2066 is a testament to how popular climate action is in the state,” Emily Moore, the director of the climate and energy program at the Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based think tank, told me.
Sightline didn’t campaign for or against the measure, but Moore had some takeaways from the vote. She said environmental groups spent a lot of their energy countering the narrative that there was a gas ban, which may have inadvertently reinforced the idea. One lesson for the future might be to put more emphasis on the benefits of electrification, like the fact that heat pumps provide both heating and cooling and half of the state doesn’t currently have air conditioning. The other anti-climate measure, 2117, may have failed so decisively because Washington’s emission cap policy has raised more then $2 billion in funding for projects that people are already seeing the benefits of, like free transit passes.
“Likely a no vote on that one felt like getting to keep good things,” she told me. “I think we have more to do to show that getting off of gas means getting good things too.”
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.