The world's second largest economy is increasingly being sealed off from the rest of the world. Think back to April twenty twenty, when every newscast was filled with warnings like this.
Health officials cautioning we haven't hit the peak.
The new warnings from survivors now, Brady, thank you from the virus. You don't know how.
It's going to be.
Now.
Imagine you're the mayor of a medium sized town in California, poised to hold a city council meeting with rules about masking and social distancing so everyone feels safe, and you get a letter like this.
If the city council intends to move forward with another reading on a gas van, I can assure you that there will be no social distancing in place, and I strongly urge this city council to kick the can down the road and here to public safety measures. Please don't force my hand in busting in hundreds and hundreds of pissed off people, potentially adding to this pandemic. We will pull permits in close streets and will have a massive protest.
This is not the time to do this. Please tell Mayor Harmon and the rest of the council for the sake of people's health, that their efforts are better focused on how to deal with this pandemic than to stir up the emotions of people losing their jobs. Be smart about this.
That's former mayor of San Luis Obispo, Heidi Harmon. The letter in question was from Eric Hoffman, the leader of one of the unions representing utility workers in California and an outspoken critic of attempts throughout the state to move away from fossil gas. Hoffman did not respond to requests
to speak with us for this series. Harmon says, a letter threatening a large crowd of people outside the council's chambers who refused to mask or social distance at a time when there was no vaccine for COVID and everyone was feeling really panicked. All of that really scared her and the rest of the city council, and ultimately the scare tactic worked. They postponed their vote on a bill
that would have banned gas in new buildings. San Luis Obispo is a pretty little college town on California's central coast. It's got a large agricultural community and also one of the best architecture programs in the country at cal Poly University, downtown Spanish mission style buildings, house craft ice cream shops, hipster cafes, and farm to table restaurants. In other words, it's not the sort of place where you might expect this kind of drama. So what the hell prompted all this?
That's the story we're going to get into today. Welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. This is part two of our three part season on the gas industry. You don't have to listen to Part one, Plastic Pipeline to understand what's happening in this part of the season, but it's worth a listen if you haven't heard it yet. We're calling Part two the new Climate Villains, because the gas industry has really kicked into high gear with its
efforts to block climate policy. Today, the story of what that opposition looked like in one town stay with us. Back in twenty sixteen, Heidi Harmon campaigned to be San LUs Obispo mayor on a platform that included carbon neutrality goals, fossil free buildings, and electric vehicle charging stations.
So I ran for office as mayor with climate action as one of my main priorities.
Some folks told Heidi she'd never win with such a radical platform, but she's not really the type to play politics. A single mom who worked as a maid and homeschooled her kids, Harmon's used to hard work and she's never been afraid to stand out from the pack. Her signature of silver hair is almost always adorned with a red or white flower, and her bright blue eyes are usually sparkling behind a pair of large, statement, black rimmed glasses.
She's been who she is, saying exactly what she thinks for decades, and that wasn't going to change for a campaign. You know.
I always felt like it's about the next generation, not the next election, and if that means that I don't get elected, then so be it.
But she did get elected, and as soon as she took office, Harmon started to put forth exactly the sorts of policies she'd promised in her campaign.
When I had just got elected, all these people wanted to meet with me. Okay, like, I don't know, I'm sure, I'm just meeting with everybody on.
That long list of people wanting to meet with Harmon. Early On was a public relations guy who worked with the gas industry.
So I meet with this guy. I think it was from Socau Gas, and he was trying to tell me about something. He was calling I forget now green maybe renewable natural gas.
Yeah, I mean renewable natural gas. It's a brilliant marketing term that the gas industry has created.
This is Charlie Spatz from the Energy Policy Institute. He's been digging into the gas guys for years.
And essentially they were referring to biomethane. So the capture of methane from landfills or sewage plans, CAFOs can fined agricultural feeding operations.
And sure, why not capture those emissions. But to hear the industry talk, you'd think this was the cleanest energy going right up there with solar or wind, and that there's enough of it to replace fossil gas altogether. Here's a little explainer video put out by SoCal Gas. The gas utility in Harmon's.
California is dedicated to improving air quality and the environment, and sokel Gas is a partner in that vision by supporting the development and use of renewable energy. When many people think of renewable energy, they think of solar, wind and hydropower.
That's right.
Renewable natural gas or RNG is also a clean source of energy. RNG is reliable, it's always available, unlike solar and wind, which are intermittent and dependent upon the weather and time of day with limited storage capability.
Who there's a lot going on here, and I'm not just talking about the girlish giggles and cowmws. So first off, RNG is not an apples to apples comparison to solar. The industry presents it as not just a zero emissions option, but actually a negative emissions option because, according to them, you capture the methane, turn it into gas, and voila, you've avoided all those methane emissions, except they've left out the part where you transport and then burn that fuel,
emitting various greenhouse gases along the way. But anyway, look over here at how reliable ORANG is. In fact, the intermittency and storage issues associated with renewables like solar and wind have largely been addressed in recent years, so this ad is misleading on that front too. This is the sort of solution that the most recent IPCC report called maladaptation.
It's something that's supposed to reduce emissions but actually locks in fossil fuel use or causes some other type of environmental problem, in this case the many water, soil, and air quality issues associated with industrial agriculture. Not that solar and wind are perfect, mind you, They're just not as unreliable and terrible as so Cal Gas would like you to believe. Gas companies are into renewable natural gas because it allows them to tell a good green story while
locking in gas infrastructure. But by even the most optimistic estimate, RNG could only cover about sixteen percent of current gas use. The rest would be supplied by the usual fossil gas at any rate. Back in twenty sixteen, when Harmon first took office as mayor of San Luis Obispo, Soco Gas was pretty high on its own RNG supply.
And me, not knowing any better, was I was confused for multiple reasons because this immediately sounded like bloony.
Harmon didn't bother to sugarcoat her response to the gas industry guy, because I just.
Turned to him and said, oh, I think, actually we're going to be moving away from natural gas altogether and not using it at all. And I had no idea because, like in my world. That seems obvious, you know what I mean, of course we're not doing natural gasm. Oh, oh, we don't need the renewable because we're not going to be doing any type of it whatsoever. And his face went from like public relations face to don't I can't.
Like the muscles in his face, you could see he was trying to hold it together, but also had not understood that this time had actually already come. I don't think you know they. I think they must have been thinking, oh, we're going to trick him with this renewable whatever the heck, and that I'll stop these changes from happening.
The gas industry really didn't seem to be expecting this at that time. For decades, their product had been thought of as a climate solution, delivering major reductions in CO two emissions. And that's true. But the problem is CO two isn't the only greenhouse gas. As scientists discovered more about the methane emissions associated with gas and the chemicals
associated with fracking, the tide began to turn. Now big changes were looming, and Harmon started making good on her climate action campaign promises in her first years in office.
And so we had made the most ambitious carbon neutrality goal of any city at the United States at that time, which was twenty thirty five, and we've happily been surpassed since that time. We'd committed to community choice energy and we've done a lot of things, and so we're really looking at the landscape of what needed to happen next, and decarbonization and electrification is really becoming really well understood is one of the main ways to get us to less fossil fuels.
Then, in twenty nineteen, the city of Berkeley, California, became the first US city to pass what's called a gas van. Sounds scary, but what it actually means is a policy that bigs energy transition into the building sector. It basically says, we're not going to connect any new buildings to gas lines, because once you wire a building for gas, your fuel
options are pretty limited to well gas, maybe hydrogen. But if you wire a building for electric, you've got a pretty broad portfolio of choices, including renewable sources of electricity. So Harmon learned about this gas ban in Berkeley and wanted to do the same in San Luis Obispo, which, of course was also the local gas industry's nightmare coming true. The band started to make its way toward approval and
then boom, COVID hits. In April twenty twenty, the city council was set to vote on it when Harmon got that letter threatening a protest slash COVID superspreader event.
You can imagine the overwhelm of dealing with the pandemic with and not being sure what was going to happen next, and then having this threatening letter.
Harmon decided to press pause to avoid the public health consequences of a protest. The gas band came up for consideration again and the opposition was still fierce. It included front groups from the gas industry who put out attack ads like this one from a group called the Consumer Energy Alliance, which claims to be a citizen group but is run out of HBW Resources and industry lobbying firm.
Have you heard about the blow the Berkeley, California City Council has landed on consumer choice? The city has banned natural gas in all new low rise residential buildings. That means the new Ritchie rich of Berkeley will have to use an electric stovetop to cook their meals. No natural gas, water heaters, furnaces, clothes dryers, or barbecue grills.
Either that barbecue grills one is a stretch. Most gas grills have their own refillable gas tank. You have to be pretty serious about your barbecue grill to pipe gas to it. Not saying it doesn't happen, but it's not exactly a common scenario. As you heard at the beginning of this story, the Utility Workers Union of America, which represents local utility workers in California, is a major player
opposing the gas ban. Since Harmon considers herself pro labor, she says, it was a weird feeling for her to be at odds with the union and getting threatening letters from a union boss.
So there was a lot of money spent on social media and also robocalls, you know, pushing the classic line that the fossil fuel industry always uses around jobs, you know, which is one that I'm very sensitive to. You know, I brought the first Project Labor Agreement, which is a union support policy in this county's history, to our city.
I'm a huge labor supporter. So it's a really interesting tension to be in, and when you're in a leadership position, wanting to support workers and also wanting to move to a fossil fuel free world, so people are sensitive to that claim around jobs.
The campaign to oppose the gas band relied on another your talking.
Point, choice being taken away, and you know Americans are very sensitive to that. So really trying to tell a story about you know, government coming in to take away your choice about things.
Part of the opposition's strategy involved harassing Harmon directly too. She got a lot of nasty voicemails like this.
One, Miss Hidi Herman, I highly encourage you to discourage this ban on natural gas because it is a scourge on the whole community. You are raping the people that have the least amount of money. You are taking things away from people.
No matter what.
This is not a good thing. Reconsider your youthful on utual goods. Thank you.
Some of the attacks against her got personal, too, taking on her physical apearance down to her silver hair and trademark flower pen.
At a city council meeting, after it was clear that things were not going to go in their direction, the president of the union himself said, I'm not resting to that fucking red flower. Corilla de Ville kunt and all those other fucking bitches are voted off that fucking council.
Hoffman said this to a room full of utility and union supporters following the council's vote to move forward with its decarbonization policy. That was a few months before he sent the letter threatening an intentionally unsafe protest if they moved forward with a gas ban.
I just think of what's going on in a wider context with the fossil fuel industry, is really this toxic masculinity just percolating throughout it and what is called maybe petro masculinity. Right as soon as I heard that word, I just thought, this is exactly on some level a
deep thread of what's going on in general. The bullying so was largely men in the union, really threatening the largely predominantly female city council in a way that quite frankly, you know, had there's a violence to the culture that they brought, and you can see it here in their letter,
you know. And then so they could see though that I was committed to this, you know, and on some level I think that's one of the gifts of being in this potential penultimate moment of human existence, you know, I've got kids, So you're going to bust load in hundreds of scary guys with potentially a disease and violence in mind, Okay, because my kids' lives are already at stake,
so bring it on. I mean, I don't want them to do that, obviously, but I'm not going to let that intimidate me into not doing what's right to save my kids' lives. On some level, which is how it feels to me, and on some level is how it is.
Despite all this, the insults and the attack ads. On July tenth, twenty twenty, Harman and the San Lusibispo City Council did pass a modified version of the gas ban. Rather than banning gas in new buildings altogether, it made it more expensive and incentivized electrification. In twenty twenty two, the city council reintroduced the idea of an all out ban. So far, they haven't voted on that proposal yet. Looking back on all she endured along the way.
I just want to state for the record a couple things. One, I was voted in the next election by landslide, and quite frankly, there's really nothing more complimentary than to be called a cunt because there's something stronger and more life affirming, and everybody you know is about it, So thank you. I guess i'd have to say.
San Luis Obispo is the first city in so Cal Gas Is Territory to pass a ban, but it wasn't the last. Pretty soon the utility was playing whack a mole with gas bands all over Southern California. By the end of twenty twenty, there were more than fifty gas bands in California alone. Now they're in Washington, New York, Massachusetts,
even Texas. According to Charlie's spats with the Energy Policy Institute, the rapid growth and mobilization of the Electrify Everything movement, this push over the past few years to electrify buildings and transportation as part of a transition away from fossil fuels, really caught the gas industry off guard at first, especially Sokel.
Gas in Southern California Gas Company or so Cal Gas, which is often trying to market itself as a green and climate champion, and all of a sudden that they are now the new coal and that is something they're still getting used to. And I think that's a shared experience throughout the gas utility industry that all of sudden, they are public enemy number one. They're now big coal. They are passing preemption legislation throughout the United States. They
are a climate villain. And this is a new experience for many of those lobbyists.
But it didn't take them long to adapt. As of early twenty twenty two, nineteen states have passed preemptive laws banning gas vans, Yeah, bans on bans. That aggressive strategy, harm and experienced firsthand, has only intensified. Next time, I'll look at how the industry has adapted to its new role as a climate villain.
We're trying to beat counties and localities from passing bands that then force the hand of governors and state legislators to pass something nationwide.
So we've got two.
Wins on that so far, which is great news. The legislation has been introduced in several other our states, including Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Kansas.
Come back for that. Drilled is an original Critical Frequency production. Our producer is Jules Bradley. Our editor for this season is Jude Joffy. Block. Sound design, mixing, mastering, and original music throughout this episode, including our new theme song by Peter Duff. Our fact checker is wood an Yan. Our First Amendment attorney is James Whitton of the First Amendment Project. Our artwork is drawn by Matt Fleming, and of course the show is reported and created by me Amy Westervelt.
You can follow us on Twitter at we are Drilled or me at Amy Westervelt. Big thanks to our new Patreon supporters. We're now at three hundred supporters. That's so awesome. Thanks you guys, particular thanks to Quinn Emmett, David Urbander, Frank Berg, Jesse Worker, JJ Starr, Michael Constantino, Stephen Kretzman, Mimi one oh one, Claire Kelly, Jesse, Greg Nison, Paul Whitefeld, Abigail Rome, and Julie Getmanis. Thanks very much. We appreciate
the support. If you would like to support more reporting on climate accountability, you can do that at patreon dot com slash drilled, or you can sign up to have bonus episodes and content delivered street to your inbox via Drilled podcast dot com. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.