In Maine, the lack of natural-gas infrastructure made it easy for the state to encourage electrification of home heating. An oil- or gas-fueled furnace (or other backup heat sources) might be required on the coldest days, but on all the others, your heat can be electric. Now some cold-climate heat pumps can transfer heat effectively in subzero temperatures. Heat pumps have been around for decades, but they didn’t used to be very efficient, especially in extremely cold weather. (“Heat pump” is a terrible, confusing name for these gadgets.) But a heat pump can do both, meaning that the same appliance can heat in the winter-even in very cold climates-and cool in the summer. Your fridge and AC unit move heat in only one direction. Both of those devices pump heat in reverse: Warm air is absorbed by the refrigerant coils and pumped out. Instead of heating the air, heat pumps move heat from one place to another by converting a substance called refrigerant between its liquid and gas forms. Every one of these releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when burned.īut boilers and furnaces aren’t your only options. Depending on your geographic location and the age of your home and its systems, those fuels might include distillate fuel oil (mostly still used in the Northeast), propane (common in rural areas), or natural gas (common everywhere else). ![]() Most American homes run these devices by burning fossil fuels. A furnace transfers heat to air, which it then pushes through vents into living spaces. A boiler heats water and cycles it through radiators that heat rooms. If you want to do the most immediate good for the planet, replace your aging gas furnace with a new, electric appliance. Put differently, making relatively smaller, cheaper, and easy changes to home heating in America could reduce fossil-fuel use nearly as much as taking half of all private vehicles off the roads. fossil-fuel energy is used for something fairly banal: residential space and water heating. That’s where ordinary people like you and me can contribute. Second, use electricity to run as much of your personal life as possible. That requires legislative and regulatory change. Decarbonization has two pillars: First, generate electricity from energy that does not emit carbon-renewable sources such as wind, solar, and geothermal instead of fossil fuels. Personal transportation is a large contributor to carbon emissions in America it’s also the hardest to give up.īut trading a gasoline automobile for an electric one (or for a bus or train) isn’t the only way ordinary citizens can contribute to fossil-fuel reduction. Electric vehicles get a lot of press, but less than 1 percent of energy used for transportation came from electricity. But in 2019, the private cars and light trucks that ordinary people drive for work and shopping and leisure were responsible for about 15 percent of U.S. ![]() This is a car-oriented country, and a car-oriented time. I f you’re like me, you know that getting rid of your car is one of the best things you can do for the climate, and also that you will never do it.
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