The Year in Review 2019: San Francisco’s Grassroots Campaign for Rapid and Equitable Building Decarbonization

This post originally appeared on the SF Gas Ban campaign site.

This website was launched as part of a grassroots movement to push San Francisco’s elected officials to ban natural gas in all new San Francisco buildings and to enact legislation to see that all existing buildings are equitably and justly retrofitted to run on low-carbon electricity. These demands are born out of the necessity of confronting gross inaction in the face of a spiraling human-caused climate crisis. Buildings represent a significant share of local, state and national greenhouse emissions gases. 

2019 was a landmark year for the building decarbonization movement in California and beyond. For example:

1. The City of Berkeley led the nation in enacting the first ban on natural gas piping in new buildings. The law went into effect on January 1, 2020. Other cities such as Morgan Hill have enacted their own bans, while San Jose enacted a more limited ban in low-rise residential buildings with discussions about expanding the ban to high-rise buildings at a later date. Seattle, WA is currently considering its own ban, while Brookline, MA passed legislation banning gas subject to the approval of the Massachusetts Attorney General.
2. The California Public Utilities Commission opened up nearly $1 billion in ratepayer funds that utilities and other agencies can leverage to subsidize the substitution costs associated with replacing existing natural gas appliances with all-electric appliances.
3. The California Energy Commission removed significant regulatory barriers stymieing all-electric designs and opened hearings on the California Assembly Bill 3232, a law that asks the Commission to come up with a roadmap to reduce greenhouse emissions by 40% in all California buildings by 2030.
4. Northern California’s gas utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, mired in the consequences of extraordinary criminality, unexpectedly made a shrewd business decision to publicly support local and statewide efforts to ban natural gas in new buildings. 

As encouraging as these developments were, the sobering reality of climate science commands much more aggressive action on buildings and other sectors at the local, state, national and international levels. Nevertheless, in 2019, the City of San Francisco could not even manage to make the most painfully incremental and inadequate progress on new buildings:

April 2019

• After a prolonged effort by a broad coalition of environmental advocates, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and Mayor joined a multitude of neighboring Bay Area cities in unanimously declaring a climate emergency, but not before proceeding to water down the resolution. Perhaps naively, spirits were high that San Francisco’s government might yet take meaningful action to curtail its jurisdiction’s outsized contribution to a boiling climate and inequality.
• Mayor London Breed announced her intention to launch a “public-private ” task force to consider strategies to phase out natural gas from the City’s public and private building stock.

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