I hope to make this post short and efficient, so let’s get right to the point:  I’m skeptical of the recent decision by New York State to ban new (2026 or later) residential hookups of natural gas for the sake of climate change.  After a brief look-see of my own, I am left to wonder whether any engineers were called to testify about the net environmental effect of home heating and cooking.  New York State’s new law feels like a political statement to me, not a scientific one.

I’ll start with what I learned in my tedious college thermodynamics class, namely that the efficiency of generating electricity via steam turbine maxes out at 40%.  (Meaning, if you put 100 units of energy into the process, you only get 40 units of electrical energy out.)  Newer combined-cycle turbines are 60% efficient but they are less common.

Overall — and this is my main point — as of today, electricity generation in the U.S. from all sources, coal, gas, uranium, wind, solar, hydro and others, is still barely 40% efficient.  “In 2019, U.S. utility-scale generation facilities consumed 38 quadrillion BTUs (quads) of energy to provide 14 quads of electricity.”  [Italics mine.]

Compare this to the efficiency of natural-gas home heating — 80% (older models) to 95% (newer ones).  Even in old systems, homeowners get more heat per BTU when they burn natural gas in their own furnaces vs. buying utility-generated electric heat.  This means that the typical home natural gas furnace currently creates less, not more, greenhouse gas than if the same heating load were provided by electricity.

This will remain true until all of our traditional fossil-fuel electricity-generating plants are shut down — and specifically, until half of U.S. electricity is generated by zero-emission renewables with the other half generated by combined-cycle natural gas steam turbines.

Currently, only 40% of our electricity is generated by non-fossil-fuel sources and only 35% is generated by combined-cycle natural gas.  So clearly, we have a ways to go until banning natural gas hookups in residences makes sense from a greenhouse gas standpoint.

But what about safety?  There has been a spate of alarmist articles about the dangers of natural gas cooking appliances, some focused on the harmful effects of nitrogen dioxide byproducts and others on the risks of carbon monoxide poisoning.  Certain studies showed associations between gas appliances in the home and asthma symptoms in women, but it is not clear to me that other socio-economic factors (for example, are gas appliances more likely to be found in more polluted cities?) are not in play.

With respect to carbon monoxide (CO):  About 9 deaths in the U.S. a year are attributable to CO leaks from defective natural gas furnaces; 3 from natural gas cooking; and 2 from natural gas water heaters.  For comparison, 90-plus deaths a year are caused by the CO from gasoline-powered generators and engines, but that issue does not seem to energize many interest groups.

In any case, my take is that the political powers-that-be in New York State needed to score some friend-of-the-environment points, and so they got ahead of the game — even though their new law may, perversely, cause a near-term increase in greenhouse gas emissions.  But who, other than an ex-New-Yorker engineer, would bother to point that out?

A year ago here, I posted a “call for contributions” on the topic of shared shorthand.  As I described it then, this is where you and your friend or partner use a word or phrase whose context and meaning only the two of you understand.  Either of you may invoke the phrase to refer to a current situation, and each of you instantly “get” the association.

My call did not elicit many responses, which is why this “revisited” post is so late to press.  Besides the comments from Mary and Guy, I received exactly one other contribution, from a reader named Kevin Miller:

My partner and I were long-distance for the first two years of our relationship. We picked the octopus emoji, basically at random, as a quick text we could send to say “I love you, I’m thinking about you, you’re my person.” To this day (even after moving in together) we send each other octopus-related ephemera from the Internet, and often, just the emoji itself.

This was sweet.  I hope Kevin and his partner are still going strong and exchanging octopi.

But I had promised, in that year-ago post, to share and explain a couple of examples of our own shared shorthand, namely The Ashley Principle and The John Sexton Rule.  So, in the interest of literary closure if nothing else…

The Ashley Principle

My spouse had to fill in my memories of The Ashley Principle’s 1990s origin.  She says: “There was a small china and gift shop in Toronto.  [Whose name is now lost to us both.]  I originally found the Portmeirion Welsh Wildflowers pattern at her shop, but I thought I could buy them cheaper at Ashley’s.  [The William Ashley store on Bloor Street was known for its ‘great wall of china’ and we window-shopped there often.]  So I ordered the china from Ashley’s — but then realized that the price at the smaller shop was actually better.”

Now, my spouse’s plan was to walk into Ashley’s the next morning, inform them that the other shop’s price was lower and ask Ashley’s to meet it.  I asked, but what if they refuse?  My spouse said, I’m not going to go there.  I’ll face that if I have to.

This became known as The Ashley Principle:  Commit to Plan A.  Plan B is a distraction.  Handle one thing at a time, and deal with the outcome of Plan A if and when.

As it happened, the Ashley’s salesperson checked with management and agreed to match the price at the other shop.  So my spouse did not have to resort to Plan B, which is good, because she really didn’t have one.

These days, we invoke The Ashley Principle as shorthand for, this is too much planning, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, let’s see what happens before we spend a lot of energy on alternatives.  I’m usually a planning kind-of-guy but there’s something to be said for this.

The John Sexton Rule

We custom-built our current home almost 20 years ago, our first (and last!) foray into the world of residential construction.  John Sexton was the project manager, our contractor’s right-hand man.  I respected John, as he had just the right combination of perfectionism and pragmatism needed for building a custom home.  And he had also acquired the skills to deal with, fend off and ultimately satisfy the kind of people who want such homes.

But inevitably, there would be a hiccup in our home-building experience: our hardwood floors had numerous visible scratches, due to the flooring contractor’s carelessness with the installation.  This was not obvious to us until the final walk-through, as the floors had been covered with paper after they were installed — to preserve the scratches I guess!

In any event, we reviewed the issue with John and said how noticeable the scratches were whenever we looked down.  John’s initial, not-entirely-tongue-in-cheek response was, “Then don’t look down.”  This became the essence of the John Sexton Rule.

I was floored [ha ha] and said we needed a better solution.  Ultimately, the flooring guys replaced the worst of the damaged boards and John and I spent a couple of hours on our knees rubbing out and filling in the lighter scratches.

Our floors got fixed but the John Sexton Rule lives on in our household.  It gets invoked — mostly by me and usually ironically — to suggest that one approach to a nagging problem is to stop thinking so much about it.  Don’t look down indeed!

• • • 

The floor, if you will, remains open for your shared shorthand contributions.  Thanks.