If you've been reading my columns, you may realize I am not a big fan of our new governor's policies.

But if it's true, as Woody Allen once said, that 80 percent of success in life is just showing up, then he's doing much better than his predecessor by that measure.

Chris Christie had a bad habit of going to Disney World or out on the campaign trail as epic storms were bearing down on his state. Worse, he'd yell at the mayors who pointed out how bad things were, even though those mayors were Republicans just like him.

Phil Murphy's been taking a different approach. Though he's a Democrat, Murphy has pleased even the mayors in Republican towns with his visits after the recent spate of storms.

At a press conference Tuesday on an unrelated issue, Murphy showed that he's learned a thing or two by talking with workers from out-of-state electric companies who traveled here to repair lines taken down by trees in recent storms.

"Do we have the right vegetation management program?" he asked. "Some of the out-of-state linemen and women say that we have a different reality than they do in their states."

We do indeed. In other states, the right-of-ways for power lines are kept clear. Here, we let trees grow right next to the lines

I saw the same thing on a recent trip to Puerto Rico in which I reported on the power outages still lingering after Hurricane Maria six months ago.

But there's one big difference: the weather. There, a loss of power means sitting in the dark. Here, a loss of power can mean sitting in the dark in a freezing home.

That tends to make people testy. I imagine the new governor met quite a few of them over the past few weeks. And I'm glad to see he's learned from them about the need to keep power flowing.

Murphy could learn a lot more if he focused his attention on what's been going on this winter in his native state of Massachusetts.

There, environmental extremists prevailed upon state legislators to prevent the construction of pipeline capacity that could give the state access to the cheap and plentiful natural gas from the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania.

A win for the environment? Not exactly. A recent editorial in the Boston Globe noted that instead of using fracked gas from Pennsylvania, some of the utilities switched to liquefied natural gas from Russia that came in on a tanker.

The editorial noted that the production of imported LNG is both more expensive and more carbon-intensive than domestic gas.

"As a result, to a greater extent than anywhere else in the United States, the Commonwealth now expects people in places like Russia, Trinidad and Tobago, and Yemen to shoulder the environmental burdens of providing natural gas that state policy makers have showily rejected here," it said.

Then there were the utilities that replaced the clean-burning gas with oil and coal, both of which are much dirtier. But so what? The anti-pipeline crowd was appeased.

Unfortunately, the anti-pipeline people are Luddites. You can determine that by going to the website of 350.org, the leading anti-pipeline group.

"Stop Fossil Fuels: Build 100% Renewables," it reads.

That may give comfort to the tender-minded, but it's not possible, at least not with current technology. When it comes to outages, solar has an outage every time the sun goes down and wind has an outage whenever the weather turns still.

Those problems may be solved eventually. But at the moment, the grown-ups - by which I mean the people at the federal Energy Information Administration - predict oil and natural gas will still be providing 70 percent of this country's total energy through 2050. (Go to Page 13 on this .pdf file)

In New Jersey, the grown-ups are people like Murphy's fellow Democrat, Senate President Steve Sweeney. Sweeney, who hails from Gloucester County, went against the extremists by supporting a pipeline that will permit the conversion of a power plant in Cape May County from coal to gas.

Sweeney also supports nuclear power, as well as the idea of offshore wind.

I have my doubts about the cost of the latter, but at least the all-of-the-above approach guarantees a reliable power supply.

Making sure that power gets to the customers is a problem that should keep the governor occupied as his administration conducts its study of what went wrong during the recent storms.

As for ending the use of all fossil fuels, the governor of New Jersey would be wise to leave that task to others.

ADD - MORE OUTAGES OCCURRING: I finished this column right before the snow hit hard Wednesday. Since then there are branches and trees down all over the place - and that's just in my front yard.

Meanwhile there are so many outages that nj.com has set up a useful power outage tracker.

I see that as of 9:48 a.m. Thursday there are 84,290 homes without power, mostly in the JCP&L and Atlantic County Electric areas.

That doesn't surprise me. When I look around in my area of the Shore, which is served by JCP&L, the tree maintenance is on a level with what I saw in Puerto Rico.

Downed branches in my yard this morning. They are next to the power lines for my house and my neighbors and I called JCP&L to have them trimmed. They refused.

Time to get working on that vegetation management program, Guv.

Also, I just got back inside after clearing some fallen branches in front of my house near the power line. Several years ago I called JCP&L to tell them that both my power line, and my neighbor's line that runs over my property, were entangled with branches.

They told me it wasn't their problem.

Fortunately none of the branches was big enough to break the lines. But that was not the case in other areas where JCP&L has failed to do line maintenance. A friend of mine who lives in Middletown called to tell me he was driving around because he'd lost power at 4 a.m. At 6 a.m. he called JCP&L and got the usual robot.

The robot asked for his address and cell phone number so he could get updates. By 1 p.m. he still had heard nothing.

That's better than my experience after Hurricane Irene. A line fell down across the street, again because of JCP&L's lax maintenance of trees. The line went to the town recycling center, so a crew showed up the next morning to fix it. I assumed they were competent and would restore service to my home and my two neighbors.

Nope. They just ignored us and left. That meant I had to talk to the robot for 10 days. Worse, the robot called back many times and told me my service was restored. It wasn't.

So forget solar and wind, governor. These guys can't even handle conventional power.