I additionally hope that the publicity town’s effort receives will make a broader viewers conscious of the crucial to search out methods to progressively scale back our dependence on gasoline. It’s profoundly disappointing, for instance, to come across tasks coming earlier than the Boston Planning & Growth Company for overview that also envisage the usage of pure gasoline in buildings but to be constructed. It’s time to get up and odor the espresso, made ideally with water boiled on an electrical induction range.
Martyn Roetter
Boston
Table of Contents
These venerable lamps usually are not as ‘historic’ as you would possibly suppose
In his article on changing gasoline lamps to electrical streetlights, David Abel writes, “Among the many legacies of town’s venerable age . . . are 2,800 gasoline road lights that glint day and night time via ornate lamps from the Again Bay to Charlestown.”
In actuality, as Abel notes, lots of these “legacy” gasoline lamps had been put in within the Sixties and later years by Boston Gasoline, motivated by the tourism trade. These Colonial-style lamps even have been well-liked with residents. Luckily, when the gas-to electrical conversion happens, the present lampposts might be retrofitted, and the distinction between LED lights and gasoline bulbs is barely discernible.
Kudos to the Metropolis of Boston for each its local weather change consciousness (gasoline lamps are accountable for 37 % of emissions from lighting in Boston, and leaked methane, a potent greenhouse gasoline, threatens the well being of individuals and bushes); its budget-consciousness (the LEDs would save substantial taxpayer {dollars} in upkeep prices); and its sensitivity to neighborhood design preferences.
Nan Borod
Boston
Emissions are dangerous to people and bushes
Thanks for highlighting this vital subject. A few of us in Boston, together with many residents of Beacon Hill, are thrilled that town is transferring ahead on this mission.
I reside on Temple Avenue, behind the State Home. In 2019, many of the households on our one-block road signed a petition asking town to transform our lamps from gasoline to LED as a pilot mission. We got here to that place first by smelling leaking gasoline, then by studying that gasoline leaks had been killing our bushes.
Our Temple Avenue lamps had been put in in 1978 (not that historic) together with 16 bushes. Solely 5 of these bushes survive. Research revealed that the extent of methane within the soil of some tree pits was 30 %, successfully suffocating the bushes by depriving them of oxygen.
That native drawback led to deeper research of the methods pure gasoline imperils our local weather. The query can’t be whether or not to transform the lamps however quite how to take action in the very best means.
Betsy Peterson
Boston
Are these oppositionists for actual?
Given all of the individuals around the globe whose houses, neighborhoods, cities, and cities have been broken or destroyed, or quickly might be, by the fires, floods, droughts, famines, hurricanes, tornadoes, and rising sea ranges of local weather change, I discover it virtually unattainable to imagine that any considering grownup could be prepared to go on file as opposing the elimination of gasoline lamps and their carbon dioxide and methane emissions from the intact sidewalks of the privileged territories they inhabit.
Please inform me that reporter David Abel someway mistakenly wrote up a nightmare he had quite than the precise phrases of allegedly accountable residents.
Aesthetics for just a few over the life-or-death struggles of untold tens of millions? That is past shameful.
Bob Binstock
Cambridge
Ah, the vestiges of the previous
Residents of Beacon Hill and different neighborhoods who insist on retaining their historic and polluting gasoline road lamps ought to most positively be allowed to take action, so long as they’re prepared to do away with their cars and return to utilizing chamber pots.
Laura Notman
Arlington