We all deserve clean and healthy homes
by J.R. Tolbert
The average American spends over 90 percent of their time inside, mostly in homes, businesses, and schools. This means that we spend more than 90 percent of our days breathing indoor air — a direct product of the infrastructure, technologies, appliances, and fuels that we use to power our lives. These staples of the modern building, such as furnaces, water heaters, clothes dryers, and ovens and stoves, have had a big (though largely invisible) impact on our health, our comfort, and our wallets for decades.
When we burn natural gas indoors — a fossil fuel known to warm the planet 25x more than carbon dioxide — we produce toxic particulates that irritate our lungs, exacerbate cardiovascular conditions, and increase our children’s risk of asthma. We also expose ourselves to volatile monthly bills that can double overnight depending on far-away markets, global wars, and profit-motivated oil and gas companies. But for a long time, we only had two choices — old-school and inefficient electric resistance heating or “natural” gas furnaces that openly combust a fossil fuel in our homes.
Fortunately, home appliances are undergoing a clean and consumer-centric revolution, following in the footsteps of rooftop solar and electric cars. To heat and cool the air, electric heat pumps are almost magical. These two-in-one appliances move more hot or cool than they consume, which makes them the gold standard for energy efficiency in the HVAC world. No longer an emerging technology made only for mild climates, heat pumps are ready for prime time and all-weather extremes, providing stable heat down to — and sometimes below — negative 15°F. In fact, heat pumps are rapidly growing in popularity in cold locations worldwide including Alaska, Maine, Norway, and Canada. Water heaters and clothes dryers also come in heat pump varieties to the same clean, highly efficient effect.
Induction stovetops are the next big thing in cooking, providing precise and even temperature control while boiling water in a fraction of the time when compared to other options on the market today. Importantly — they do not produce dangerous pollutants from the combustion of a fossil fuel long associated with negative health impacts. Now we’re cooking with magnets, as they say.
Because these high-efficiency electric appliances are so cutting-edge, their markets are still growing in the United States. This means that for now, they come with a higher sticker price than their ubiquitous and old-school counterparts. But there’s never been a better time to make the switch, because the Inflation Reduction Act (2022) offers generous tax credits and rebates that can save consumers of all incomes thousands of dollars off of the purchase price of the equipment, the installation, and related electrical and efficiency upgrades.
This electric future is all but inevitable, but that doesn’t mean that the transition will be easy or smooth. The incumbent gas industry has every incentive to slow down this trend toward cleaner and healthier buildings that no longer use their product. With their relative political advantage — built upon decades of advertising to brand gas as clean — they are rapidly accelerating investment in a network of over two million miles of pipelines beneath our feet in a last ditch attempt to lock themselves into our futures. But it’s not their investors who pay for those pipelines — it’s all of us, each time we pay a gas utility bill. To make matters worse, as those infrastructure costs grow and more customers electrify, our gas bills will only spiral up.
Today, we stand at a critical juncture — will we double down on an expensive and dirty future, or commit to a safer, more affordable, and healthier indoor environment? At Counterspark, we’re all in on clean buildings. We hope that you’ll join us and urge your governor, state legislature, and state utility regulators to: 1) Take action to slow down spending of our own dollars on a soon-to-be obsolete fossil fuel system; and 2) Support a growing heat pump market and thriving workforce that allows everyone to choose an electric home.
