Maryland must embrace its electric future

For several years, some parts of the country, beginning in California, have been restricting new residential construction from having gas appliances, ranging from water heaters to furnaces to stoves. And the all-electric new home movement has been growing. Why? Because methane, the main component of natural gas, can worsen climate change just as badly as other fossil fuels. While burning natural gas surely creates less harmful emissions than burning coal, which is still a major fuel for power plants, producing and transporting natural gas results in the release of huge amounts of methane, and that’s worse for global warming than the carbon dioxide released by coal.