When I write, I try to keep my political and social leanings to myself. It's no great secret that I tend to be conservative in my thoughts and life style. While change is inevitable, I am a strong believer in evolution over revolution. This has certainly been clearly evidenced by my experiences of the last few days. Last Friday, we discovered that we had a gas leak in our house. At 5:15 Friday afternoon, as we approached the holiday weekend, PSE&G shut off our gas. We were "red flagged" until we could get a plumber in t fix the problem. It was, as I said, a holiday weekend. Any plumber would regard this as an "emergency" call and charge accordingly , if we could even get them to come out. In any case, PSE&G would not be able to turn us back on until Late Monday at the earliest. We chose to wait out the holiday weekend and get a plumber in on Monday. Without boring you with the details of the how's and why's of this ordeal, we were without heat, hot water ,a stove or an oven for 6 days. No heat, no showers, no cooked food. Being Passover, eating out of course was not an option. The bottom line take away for me was that while I am a big proponent of renewable energy sources and certainly am always in support of caring for the environment, we as a society, are just not ready to live without gas. Obviously for a one week period, switching all of my appliances over to electric would not have been feasible. However, even in the long run, the cost to upgrade my existing home would conservatively be in the 10's of thousands of dollars. No one I know can afford that kind of an investment. Evolution, not revolution. A sound reliable plan, not The Green New Deal. Incremental changes are monumental changes. If we have learned anything this weekend, or over the last 2 years, we just can't turn off the gas and expect to lead the lives we have worked so hard to build for ourselves. | 
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