ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Ithaca, N.Y., is learning that getting off fossil fuels is really hard. The U.S. aims to zero out climate warming greenhouse gases by the year 2050, but Ithaca wants to do that 20 years ahead of the rest of the country. Jeff Brady from NPR’s climate desk visited the city to see how it’s going and what the rest of the country can learn from it.

JEFF BRADY, BYLINE: In downtown Ithaca, at a tattoo and piercing shop, a heating and air conditioning crew saws through bright yellow hose.

(SOUNDBITE OF ELECTRIC SAW CUTTING THROUGH PIPE)

LOGAN COLE: That’s him cutting out an old gas line.

BRADY: Logan Cole’s company is doing that a lot these days. The flexible pipes fed gas to a furnace. Natural gas is a fossil fuel made mostly of methane, which is a potent climate warmer. So now crews are removing those gas pipes…

(SOUNDBITE OF PIPES CLANGING)

BRADY: …And piling them on the street, where building owner John Guttridge watches.

JOHN GUTTRIDGE: We have just torn out the very last of the gas appliances in this building, which we have just replaced with all air source heat pumps. So we are going fully electric.

BRADY: In most places, gas utilities fight efforts to remove gas from buildings. But in this liberal college town, it’s different.

PEDRO AZAGRA: We support it 100%. Yes.

BRADY: Pedro Azagra is CEO of the gas utility’s parent company Avangrid. Here, the utility actually subsidized this work. It’s both a gas and electric utility, so it loses gas business and gains electric. But even with the local utility supporting the conversion to all electric, there are challenges. The power grid will need expensive upgrades to handle all that new electricity. And converting just one building can take months. Installer Logan Cole says the tattoo and piercing shop job began last September.

COLE: And then we started on the permit side of things because we needed to have a crane here in order to get the old units off the roof and the new units on the roof.

BRADY: They could only work Mondays, when the shop is closed. Winters are cold in Ithaca, so they needed to keep the heat on, which means those gas lines were removed just last month. That’s only one building. Ithaca wants to have all 6,000 of its buildings converted by 2030 to achieve its climate goals. So where is the city now with greenhouse gas emissions?

REBECCA EVANS: I would suspect that we will be slated to achieve probably about 30% reduction here in the next, probably, year.

BRADY: Rebecca Evans is Ithaca’s director of sustainability. Only about 10 commercial buildings have been converted to electricity so far. The number of homes isn’t clear because not everyone gets a permit. That’s a lesson from Ithaca’s experience. Success can be hard to measure. The city’s goals are in a Green New Deal resolution passed nearly five years ago. There was a lot of early enthusiasm, but Evans says some of it slipped away. The pandemic didn’t help.

EVANS: We had tons of people showing up all the time – city residents, students, longtime residents, business owners. And across the board – not even just sustainability and climate work – it’s really hard to get people to show up now.

BRADY: Evans says the city learned there are other things it can’t control too. Transportation, for example, accounts for 40% of the city’s climate emissions, but half of that comes from cars outside the city’s jurisdiction. For buildings, Ithaca contracted with a company, BlocPower, to help, but it took time for the firm to hire staff and develop its own plans. One of BlocPower’s newest projects involves St. James AME Zion, an historic Black church. Recently, people were gathering to practice music in the sanctuary.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

UNIDENTIFIED CHOIR MEMBER: (Singing) Yeah. I know, I know He will.

UNIDENTIFIED CHOIR: (Singing) Jesus will.

BRADY: There’s a portrait of abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the wall. The stained-glass windows are covered with plastic sheets to block cold air. The sanctuary is not insulated. Downstairs, there’s an old boiler that has a nickname.

TERRANCE KING: She’s The Beast.

BRADY: Oh, wow. It is big.

The Beast breaks down regularly and burns a lot of gas, says Ethan Bodnaruk with BlocPower.

ETHAN BODNARUK: Now they have to turn on The Beast to heat the whole building just to get one room warm.

BRADY: The plan is to replace the boiler with more efficient heat pumps in each room that can be turned on individually. BlocPower connected the church with programs that will pay for and finance the bulk of the upgrades. This is how Ithaca is slowly working on its climate goals – building by building, block by block. There are signs the pace is picking up. Installers say business is brisk.

BRIAN LAMORTE: I’ve kind of earned the nickname The Boiler Killer because I go around taking people’s boilers out.

BRADY: Brian LaMorte says at one point, his company was so busy they booked customers a year out. He says another lesson for the country, make sure you’re prepared when people are ready for change. Ithaca has several worker training programs underway now. Still, it looks unlikely the city will meet its goal to eliminate fossil fuels by 2030. Even if it’s five or 10 years late, that’s still in time to meet the country’s 2050 goal.

Jeff Brady, NPR News, Ithaca, N.Y.