“We deal them the cards based on our policies.”

State Se. Gene Yaw, R-Loyalsock Township, recently sat down with Sun-Gazette newsroom staff and explained the latest developments on a number of issues — one of the most important being energy policy and the power grid that serves our region’s families.

As the Sun-Gazette reported in Thursday’s edition, of particular note was the increasing risks of rolling blackouts affecting families and businesses in Lycoming and surrounding counties.

Yaw recognizes that these increasing risks are driven in large part by our neighboring states’ decisions to emphasize solar and wind power over natural gas.

Unfortunately, as we’ve frequently noted, solar and wind are unreliable.

“It really causes, it has caused and continues to cause problems in Pennsylvania,” Yaw said of renewable-energy-only philosophies that drive policies like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

We hope research in affordable and effective battery capacity continues. We hope that it yields the results necessary to shift our energy portfolio to more solar and wind in the future.

But we also need to be realistic. We don’t know when the research will finally produce the results to make that shift a sensible choice. We need to recognize that we aren’t there yet, and that natural gas remains an important part of powering and heating our homes and communities.

We can be grateful that natural gas consumption remains cleaner than how coal produced electricity, both here in generations past and still today in much of the developing world. We certainly can be grateful that a key component of responsible energy production creates jobs and income right here in our own backyards.

What we can’t do is insist on technologies that aren’t ready yet out of fears rooted in alarmism — fears that fail to acknowledge that gradual improvement is more attainable and realistic. We can’t ignore the resources that can already meet our needs.

It isn’t fair to Pennsylvanians to tie the hands of our power grid’s operators with a bad hand of fantasy cards.