Cascadia's transition to safe, healthy, gas-free homes and businesses is not moving quickly enough, and the region's gas utilities bear much of the blame.

Consider a few recent examples: In 2022 Oregon's gas utilities sued the state over its landmark Climate Protection Program, setting back implementation by at least a year. In 2023 NW Natural funded a campaign in Eugene, Oregon, to repeal the city's ban on gas hookups in new residential buildings. In 2024 Cascade Natural Gas and NW Natural supported ballot initiative 2066 to keep Washington state hooked on gas, including by restricting the state's ability to incentivize electric heat pumps in new construction. The measure may now be headed to the state supreme court, after voters narrowly approved it and then the King County Superior Court overturned it.

Allowing gas utilities to explore new climate-friendly business models such as thermal energy networks (TENs) could soften their stance on decarbonization. But here, too, momentum has been halting. An Oregon bill to establish TENs pilot projects stalled in the Joint Ways and Means committee this year.

The gas sector's slow-walk on climate progress demands more transformative ideas. One that surfaces from time to time among advocates is transferring gas utilities to public ownership. It's a common model in Cascadia for electric utilities, and one that could theoretically speed electrification by removing utilities' profit motive and making companies more accountable to the public.

What we found, though, is that publicly owned gas utilities in the United States aren't moving faster toward decarbonization than their privately owned counterparts. That's likely because they face many of the same misaligned incentives and lax climate policies as their for-profit counterparts. In much of Cascadia, too, public gas utilities (there are a few) do not serve customers that want to shut them down. That's to say nothing of the practical and financial challenges of transferring aging fossil fuel infrastructure to government ownership

The good news, though, is that both those ingredients - the policy context in which they operate and the desires of the public they serve - can change, and they don't depend on first altering gas utility ownership structure. A slew of effective policies is already at work and available to copy-paste from more climate-forward places, namely the Netherlands and Denmark. Those countries do own their gas utilities, but that's not a prerequisite when it comes to decarbonization. Rather, it's their exceptionally strong gas transition policies that can apply to any type of utility, including the investor-owned companies prevalent in Cascadia today.

The takeaway: Cascadians can spare themselves the immensely challenging campaign of trying to take over the region's investor-owned companies and instead focus on pushing the measures that are already succeeding elsewhere. Which of course means a faster path off gas and toward the cleaner, healthier homes and businesses.

Government ownership of utilities is nothing new to Cascadia. More than 110 publicly owned electric utilities dot the region, ranging from the tiny City of Rupert Electric in Idaho, with 3,200 customers, to the gargantuan HydroBC in British Columbia, which serves more than 2.2 million customers (95 percent of provincial residents). Customers of publicly owned electric utilities in the United States tend to enjoy lower rates and more reliable electricity than customers of other types of utilities, according to US Energy Information Agency data analyzed by the American Public Power Association.

For these reasons and more, community members and activists have pushed for public takeover of privately owned electric companies in the Northwest and beyond. Cascadia added two publicly owned electric utilities in the past 25 years: Jefferson County Public Utility District, which split from Puget Sound Energy (PSE) in 2008, in northwest Washington, and Hermiston En...