Forty+ years ago I bought a big old house in a Victorian village located between Albany and Saratoga.

Natural gas was unavailable, so we heated with oil. Every year the burner had to be carefully tuned for maximum efficiency. Whenever it started we’d get a tiny whiff of oil. When it was delivered, the house smelled of oil for the rest of the day.

It was noisy – you always knew when the heater was running.

Once, a piece of the furnace cracked, just a little, and the house was filled with oily black smoke. It stuck to everything. We hired professional cleaners, and although they did a good job we were still finding soot in various nooks and crannies for years.

The stove and hot water heater were electric, and the electric bill was high.

The village’s water and sewer systems were becoming impossible to repair. The ancient pipes would crumble when someone tried to fix them. The entire system was replaced, a years-long project that tore up every road and lawn in the village. Since they were already digging everything up, they decided to install gas lines as well.

We switched to a gas furnace and a gas hot water heater as soon as we could. It made a huge difference.

I’ve always taken long showers, and when the electric water heater was depleted it took at least a half hour for the water to get hot again. The gas water heater took about ten, maybe fifteen minutes. We were never out of hot water again.

The gas furnace was very quiet, and heated the house faster and more evenly than the oil furnace did, with no smell.

The best result, though, was the bills. Switching to gas saved us a noticeable amount of money. I never got around to replacing our electric stove, but any chef will tell you gas is a superior way to cook.

We sold the house and moved into an apartment. It features a gas fireplace that throws enough heat to keep the whole place warm and costs very little to run. Last winter we only had to turn the furnace on a few times.

In a few more years repairing or replacing it will be illegal.

New York State’s governor Kathy Hochul has made reducing the state’s carbon footprint one of her primary missions. She’s outlawing clean, safe, gas stoves, hot water heaters, and furnaces. This is not theoretical – the law is in place, and restrictions will gradually become more draconian year by year. She’s forcing everyone to switch to electric appliances, which cost considerably more to run, don’t work nearly as well, and depend on the increasingly unreliable electrical grid.

She’s also tossing around billions of dollars on various clean energy projects, mostly wind and solar, which have a horrible record and a miserable ROI. Nuclear plants could drastically reduce our carbon footprint without destroying our economy, but they’re not even mentioned in her breathless exclamations about how much of our money she’s spending.

How much difference could it make if NYS reduced its carbon footprint? Let’s do a little math.

Worldwide, 50 billion metric tons of greenhouse gasses (GHG) are released each year. New York State’s output is 344,850,000 metric tons.

We could reduce New York’s GHG production to zero, simply by shutting down the entire state. We’d close all the power plants and grocery stores and gas stations and hospitals and shopping centers. First, we’d close New York City, Buffalo, Syracuse, and Albany, then every other city and town. We’d need to shut down every farm and slaughter all the farm animals. We’d destroy every wood stove and propane tank and backup generator. New Yorkers would only have two choices: leave the state or starve to death in the dark.

If we did all of that – completely destroyed any possibility of living here and returned everything to the wild, the total reduction in world GHG emissions would be {insert drum roll and cymbal crash} 0.6897%. Zero point six eight percent. That would reduce global temperatures by. . . nothing. That’s less than a rounding error.

I could end this with a plea to Kathy to stop wasting money we don’t have on things we can’t afford and don’t need, and to just leave us alone, but that would imply I think she gives a damn about the people who live here, and I know better.