Our Goleta Valley neighborhood is just one of many developed in the early 1960s to meet the demands of a rapidly growing community.

One of the original, highly publicized features of these developments was the “all-electric home.” Pushed heavily by the energy industry and supported by government interventions, utilities promised that electricity would eventually become “too cheap to meter.”

Instead, the economics of the era turned these houses into a severe financial burden for homeowners in less than a decade.

By the 1990s, our neighborhood formed a cooperative to fund the costly transition to natural gas. We navigated local permits, tore up public streets and laid underground piping, and then individually connected our houses to new appliances.

For the last three decades, the efficiencies and cost-savings of natural gas have far exceeded our initial transition costs.

Now, history is repeating itself.

Today’s decision-makers are fiercely advocating for mandatory building electrification, intending to eliminate fossil fuels entirely.

In Santa Barbara County, natural gas has been labeled enemy No. 1. Once again, citizens are being told that eliminating gas will seamlessly save the planet and the next step is permitting 16,000 acres for solar plants.

But before we spend billions of dollars forcing homeowners to convert, we need to pause and better understand actual science and economics.

The policy mandates driving local laws rely almost entirely on the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Synthesis Reports.

Yet, the deep scientific data compiled by the underlying atmospheric scientists reveal a far more nuanced picture than political summaries suggest.

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies have developed climate models that parse out both natural and human-driven agents altering Earth’s energy balance. (The findings are measured in watts per square meters for the globe, but have been converted to square feet.)

The results indicate for natural forcing a value equal of two 100-watt light bulbs in a room 11 square feet averaged over the entire globe. This is the heat energy average that’s radiated back to earth because of the greenhouse effect.

The most interesting result is the ability to parse all the human factors of emissions: energy greenhouse gases, aerosols, agriculture farming, deforestation, etc. This calculation equates to 1% of the natural flow!

Mainstream consensus acknowledges that human influences account for only about 1% of the total energy flowing through our climate system.

However, they argue this tiny fraction acts like a “clogged drain.” Because Earth’s natural systems are overloaded and cannot release this extra heat, that 1% continuously accumulates, driving global temperature shifts.

However, prominent scientific dissenters view the system as far more stable. Physicist Steven Koonin points out that such a small human influence sets a remarkably high bar for confidently predicting catastrophe.

Furthermore, physicist William Happer, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, and meteorologist Richard Lindzen, an emeritus professor at MIT, argue that because the core infrared absorption bands of these emissions are already largely saturated, future greenhouse gases operate on a curve of diminishing returns.

Moving from 400 to 600 ppm will not trigger runaway warming, they argue, because the atmosphere’s heat-trapping window is already mostly painted black — i.e. another coat of black paint doesn’t make it blacker.

Furthermore, 2022 Nobel laureate John Clauser criticizes these climate models as “black boxes” that oversimplify cloud physics, arguing that natural cloud cover acts as a dominant, stabilizing thermostat that makes human-driven forcing negligible.

These scientific nuance arguments also apply to natural gas.

While methane is a potent greenhouse gas, it only accounts for ~2.0 parts per million in our atmosphere and breaks down roughly every 12 years.

Because it is short-lived, holding emissions steady — which the United States has effectively done over the last two decades by making the transition from coal to cleaner natural gas — does not cause runaway, cumulative warming.

A foundational rule of good governance is ensuring that the benefits of a policy significantly exceed the costs of pursuit.

Eliminating natural gas as a regional energy source will impose a massive conversion cost on the citizens of Santa Barbara County.

Individual families will face devastating out-of-pocket conversion burdens ranging from $15,000 to more than $30,000 to convert main electrical panels, buy expensive heat pumps and replace perfectly functional appliances.

Fully building out 16,000 acres of solar, battery backing and grid hookups also carries a staggering price tag of ~$6.5 billion.

Divided among Santa Barbara County’s households, that is more than $40,000 per family, clawed back permanently through higher delivery fees on our monthly electric bills.

Time and public energy should be devoted to solutions that represent our true common good.

Before we force our community into a costly, mandatory echo of the failed 1960s all-electric experiment, we deserve a transparent, robust debate on the actual facts and data.