As I see it, the difficulty of a moratorium over new customers for natural gas, as is now in place for Berkshire Gas, reflects a conflict of interests between known ways of providing heat and energy for cooking and a known need to find other ways to assure our comfort that do not contribute to the climate chaos that issues in an overall overheating of our world.
The moratorium has been arbitrary in its application, but I do not look at a limit on gas use as a bad thing in principle. The moratorium may be intended to nudge us to build pipelines and promote fracking, which I think is a bad thing; but it can just as well encourage us to seek alternatives to more fossil fuel use.
How to find a way forward that trends away from fossil fuel use is difficult, as it begins to take us into unexplored territory.
I do not see that we have the leadership we need to help get everyone on board with change, and for everyone to work together with the help of engineers to figure out how to proceed.
Of mainstream engineers, we have the ones at ISO-New England, whose documents are available online. To the extent that I have looked at and tried to understand their work, I believe ISO-New England engineers take the role of skeptics as to the difficulty of moving toward energy conservation, efficiency and the use of renewables.
Skeptical insights should be welcome, but we need more than skepticism to find how to address the problems of change and to overcome them.
We do have engaged citizens with dedication and passion to make change happen. We need cooperation and support from a lot more folks to help the body politic shift direction toward different sources and use of energy.
We need to change direction for the sake of life as we know it on our planet.
Mary H. Hall
South Hadley