I am pleased the Seattle City Council is considering an ordinance that will ensure all new residential and commercial buildings are heated and powered by our carbon-free electricity grid, and not climate-wrecking, health-damaging fossil fuels. The use of fracked gas in our homes is bad for our health, frequently resulting in air pollution levels that would be illegal outside, according to the EPA .

Gas pipelines also are known to explode. We all remember the Greenwood explosion a few years back, right? And what  do we think will happen to those gas pipelines should “the Big One”  hit? But there is one reason more than any other that this policy makes sense: We are living in a time of climate emergency. As I write this letter, people are literally counting the dead in the Bahamas as a result of a hurricane that was made stronger and wetter by global warming. To keep on adding fossil fuels to our new buildings at such a moment in history would be extraordinarily myopic.

Alec Connon, Seattle