Several examples exist, and Cascadian policymakers can encourage shifts while setting guardrails to protect customers.

Between 2003 and 2018, about 55 percent of adults in the United States abandoned their landline telephones in favor of wireless ones. Phone companies that rode the wave of innovation and diversification reaped financial rewards, while those that stuck with the outmoded landline strategy faced demise.

Like landline telephones, Cascadia's gas utilities' main business is quickly becoming obsolete. Gas companies are reckoning with disruption from all angles: consumers are buying electric heat pumps instead of gas furnaces, federal laws are boosting electric appliances, and new regulation is constraining gas customer growth. To survive, gas utilities will need to transform into enterprises that advance, rather than obstruct, the clean energy transition.

The decarbonization solutions of hydrogen and renewable natural gas (RNG) that most gas utilities favor are unrealistic, dangerous, and expensive, and only in a few cases can they compete economically with electrification. But a few gas companies are experimenting with novel, climate-friendly ventures, including clean heat and electrification products and services.

Some of these ideas, namely infrastructure-intensive heating investments like GeoNetworks and district energy, meet the traditional criteria for regulated utility businesses and merit active support from lawmakers and regulators. Indeed, leaders might do well to even require that utilities pilot them. Many other ideas do not meet these criteria, but they are still worth exploring for their potential to speed climate progress and to interrupt utilities' continuing climate obstructionism. Policymakers considering the gas industry's nontraditional reinvention proposals will need to take care to protect ratepayers, which will include extracting concessions from gas companies to shrink the gas system, and to shield smaller market competitors from economic injury.

Why keep gas companies in business?

For climate hawks, putting gas utilities out of business might seem like a top priority. However, it may be worthwhile to keep the industry solvent---in a reimagined, climate-friendly form---not only both during the decarbonization transition and well into the future.

Here are four reasons gas business diversification is even worth considering:

Preventing climate obstructionism. With dimming prospects, gas utilities have been using their clout in policy and regulatory forums to mislead the public and forecast doomsday scenarios about a world without gas. For example, NW Natural, Oregon's largest gas utility, has been bankrolling a referendum campaign to reverse Eugene's gas ban in new homes and has pumped more than $1 million into a front group fighting the city's policy. If gas utilities could reinvent themselves as decarbonization enterprises that earn lucrative returns, not only might they stop fighting against climate action but they might also begin fighting for it.

Leveraging scale. Decarbonization solutions will have a tough time scaling up fast enough without some coordinated roll-out across blocks, neighborhoods, and cities. Gas utilities might be up to the task. They already operate across large territories, with thousands of miles of pipes snaking under Cascadia's cities and towns. Today these utilities count more than 4 million gas customers in the region. Leveraging gas utilities' broad reach and expertise in the energy sector to advance building electrification could speed climate action.

Protecting retirees' savings. Utilities provide a steady income for millions of investors, most of whom are institutional investors focused in part on dependable returns for retirees. For example, investors in Puget Sound Energy, Washington's largest utility, include four large Canadian pension holding companies charged with managing the pensions for public sector employees in Canada, and institutional investors ho...