Decarbonization 101: Save Money, Live Healthy
When I got serious about facing climate change in 2016, only a few tools were available. It was a journey to learn all the things I needed to know. Along the way, I stumbled on the ancillary benefits to my health and bank account.
These days I hear people lamenting spending several hundred dollars a month on gas, electricity and driving. We’ve learned that indoor air pollution is a significant health hazard and the cause, gas stoves, can’t be made safe for indoor use. Having a gas stove is as dangerous for children as living with a smoker. But we’ve made many changes in our lives. After decarbonizing, we spend about $7 a month year-round to heat and cool our Colorado house and charge our EV, which we drive about 10,000 miles a year. Our home is free of fossil fuels.
Am I a genius? No, I just started taking the necessary steps in 2017 and things got worse for the world way faster than we expected.
Decarbonizing your life involves more planning than you might think. We know that carbon footprints and consumer choice aren’t enough to confront the scale of the problem but it is a great place to start. (Here’s one carbon footprint calculator). Now you have a few categories to explore. Home, transportation and lifestyle are the big ticket items.
Decarbonizing your transportation is a lot easier than it used to be. Federal and state governments are tripping over themselves to get you to buy an EV. I’m pretty cheap. I have only ever bought used cars. But we bought our first new car, a 2019 Nissan Leaf, for about $15,000 after tax rebates and it’s my favorite car ever. Even in Colorado winters. It’s wildly fun to drive. It is charged to 100% every morning I wake up. It quickly became our primary car. We still have an old ICE car but it mostly sits around, rarely getting unused. We put well less than 5,000 miles a year on it.
Decarbonizing your lifestyle gets harder. We’re mostly vegan/vegetarian at this point. Growing up in the Midwest, I was raised on beef and pork. It was an adjustment to give up meat. Once I tried it, though, I realized that most of our life choices are a function of the culture we live in. Being vegetarian can be challenging but mostly because everyone else is actively making it hard. Restaurants add meat and cheese to EVERYTHING. Why? Massive subsidies to agriculture have made meat and cheese overabundant. The government and corporations literally want to cram it down your throat. Whose idea was stuffed crust pizza? The US government!
Being a vegetarian has excellent health benefits. It’s a diet loaded with antioxidants and fiber. We pass our annual physicals with flying colors. We don’t need daily medications to mitigate the damage a meat-heavy diet causes. You don’t have to become vegan or vegetarian, though. Just cut back. Replace a few meat-centric meals with vegetarian ones to your regular diet. At the very least, cut out preserved meats like bacon and salami that are associated with colon cancer.
Decarbonizing your home is the really tricky part. Homes in the US are built as cheaply as possible to keep the upfront price down. Insulation is poor. They have to be drafty. Otherwise, gas appliances make them unsafe to live in. Various ventilation pipes puncture the roof, making it difficult to put solar panels on south-facing roofs. We knew all this during the oil crisis in the 1970s. Many intelligent people then said we should change building codes to account for this. Alas, it was never done.
When I wanted to retrofit our old house to be electrified, I discovered it would be challenging. The wiring to the garage was insufficient to charge an EV. If we wanted to add the necessary wiring, we would have to upgrade the electrical panel because it was cheap, small and old. The solar panels I added previously maxed out the utility panel. Replacing the air conditioning with a heat pump was theoretically possible but boy howdy were HVAC professionals scared of that idea. And we would still have a gas furnace and gas hot water heater — that require a drafty building envelope to not poison the residents. Ugh.
In the end, my wife found a new development nearby where the houses were being built with Passive House design. Passive house is a series of building principles developed at the National Renewable Energy Laboratories in the US that have been implemented in places like Germany and disregarded by industry in the US. Our house is fully electric with a ground source heat pump. The roof was designed to maximize the use of solar panels that subsequently produce more electricity than we can use. Highly efficient south-facing windows let the sun warm the house in the winter. Small awnings over the windows block the summer sun and keep the house cool.
Decarbonizing is an excellent project for anyone. It’s a ton easier now that the federal government has passed a bunch of tax breaks to make it cheaper. Businesses are starting to catch on. Now HVAC companies are beginning to realize replacing gas appliances with electric ones is good for business. There are more new models of EVs than I can count. It may feel daunting to start, but I’m jealous of how much easier it will be for you than it was for us.
