Changing out household appliances can have a huge impact on our carbon footprint. But many of us still use natural gas for water heaters and cooking.
The fumes from normal usage or an unintended leak can not only damage your health and indoor air quality, but also has global implications.
"We can start at the point of the leak. When the gas leaks into soils it will damage street trees. The tree roots need oxygen, and that gas leak displaces the oxygen and damages the street trees, trees in the yard," Dr. Nathan Phillips, professor at Boston University, says. "And then as you go up and scale at the scale of the community, there are air quality degrades because of gas."
Phillips goes on to describe that the methane from natural gas is like carbon dioxide on steroids. Once it’s released into the atmosphere, it forms a blanket that contributes to further warming.
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So why hasn’t California banned the use of natural gas? We just witnessed it last week. When our aging power grid fails in extreme heat waves or other extreme weather events, if we didn’t have natural gas, there would be no backup energy source to fill the gaps.
Watch the full interview about natural gas and it’s environmental impacts in the video above.
