This is the tone-deafness that ruins all efforts to actually convince people to take climate change seriously. It's extremely harmful.
Yes high efficiency heat pumps are getting better. But they aren't readily available. If they are, very few companies install/service them. No one has them in the Midwestern area I live in. They also only work down to say -20F and we do have quite a few days below that so you can't just make natural gas illegal.
Not to mention not everyone can afford it. Maybe let's focus on making them readily available and cheap instead of just banning things outright.
> This is the tone-deafness that ruins all efforts to actually convince people to take climate change seriously. It's extremely harmful.
It doesn't help when critics exaggerate what's being suggested. They're an issue advocacy group pushing for regulatory changes that will of course involve a long, slow transition window when actually enacted by the legislature or EPA.
They're not asking for agents in jackboots to start seizing gas furnaces tomorrow. They're playing a necessary role in getting a slow-moving regulator to start moving forward on a plan that will take a decade to gradually roll out and that will incentivize further competition and innovation in alternative solutions over the course of five years or a decade or whatever.
>> This is the tone-deafness that ruins all efforts to actually convince people to take climate change seriously. It's extremely harmful.
> They're not asking for agents in jackboots to start seizing gas furnaces tomorrow. They're playing a necessary role in getting a slow-moving regulator to start moving forward on a plan that will take a decade to gradually roll out and that will incentivize further competition and innovation in alternative solutions over the course of five years or a decade or whatever.
That's an unhelpful strawman, and it seems like the regulation would be a lot more aggressive than you describe, according to the article:
> The petition’s reading would force the EPA to set NOx standards that would effectively ban the use of natural gas in all new construction within a year after the regulation is implemented.
IMHO, current-day politics mean that any regulation like this will likely be rammed through quickly when one party has control, because a slow rollout will invite repeal by the other party.
> a plan that will ... incentivize further competition and innovation in alternative solutions over the course of five years or a decade or whatever.
Don't be fooled. If the past is any guide, the "innovation in alternative solutions" will still likely still be worse than what we have now (e.g. efficiency guidelines mean my dishwasher now either leaves my dishes either wet or dry-ish and soapy-tasting, because the dryer was crippled, forcing the use of a "rinse agent."
Its just wild that in the last decades of such abundance very little resources are put towards the practical aspects of getting people off fossil fuels - they really just preach from their podium and nothing more - and now in the early months leading into the absolute winter of hell for hundreds of millions in Europe they decide to use this kind of rhetoric at the podium (god help us if anyone or any government takes the rhetoric seriously)
The problem with my experience in the Midwest (Michigan in particular) is that their power grid is so bad that I would lose electricity for an average of 1 week each year (the problem is so widespread that Michigan has laws in place to protect utility companies against customer claims for interruptions less than 5 days[^1]).
If you get a nasty February ice storm that cuts a power line, you can be without electric power in 0F weather for up to 5 days. I guess people can install natural gas generators for that occurrence, but that seems to be a little bit counterintuitive (also, would a gas company provide emergency-only service?). I am not sure if heat pumps can work off regular gas powered portable generators that people usually use for emergency power.
> If you get a nasty February ice storm that cuts a power line, you can be without electric power in 0F weather for up to 5 days. I guess people can install natural gas generators for that occurrence
Why would they? They already have one. They don't have to rip it out just because they get a heat pump. Heat pumps don't go where the furnace is.
> I am not sure if heat pumps can work off regular gas powered portable generators that people usually use for emergency power.
Depends on the generator, although some heat pumps run on 120 V. More often they're like central air conditioners, washing machines, and stoves, and run on split-phase 240 [1]. 240 V generators are not as common as 120 V, but they are still very easy to find: https://www.homedepot.com/p/318061554
[1]: your house gets 2 "hot" (one positive voltage, one negative) wires and 1 neutral, with most things connected between neutral and a hot wire, with a ground to check for shorts. High power (anything over 1.4 kW) appliances get a NEMA connector between the two hot wires, and a ground to check for shorts.
To add to this, there was a major storm last week that knocked out power for significant chunk of the Detroit area for up to three days. That's in August, mostly from wind.
> If you get a nasty February ice storm that cuts a power line, you can be without electric power in 0F weather for up to 5 days
I live in Indiana and we've had power outages like this during both winter and summer. What sucks is that newer (last 25 years) gas furnaces have fancy-dancy blower motors (power vent) and if I lose electricity, I also can't run the furnace because the power vent won't work. My gas water heater was the same way. Last time it failed (they only last 10 years these days), I switched to electric because the power vent on the gas water heater was so noisy you could hear it throughout the entire house.
My house is somewhat livable in the summer heat with a power outage because I have a basement, but in winter, forget it.
Having said that, I'm not so keen on spending $10-15K to convert two gas furnaces to heat pumps.
There also isn’t a low temperature heat pump solution that works for radiators. I’m actually really interested in heat pumps as my boiler is a few years away from end of life. But I really resent being forced to do something drastic and end up buying some shitty first generation product because some advocate in a California coastal climate says so.
If this comes to my state, I’ll hold my nose while doing it, but I’ll vote republican to stop it.
> There also isn’t a low temperature heat pump solution that works for radiators.
There are. Here's one [1] that works down to -26 Celsius (47 F below freezing!!) and connects to radiators. In practice it will also work below -26 C, since multi-zone pumps can use other rooms to balance out reliance on the external radiator.
It's also crazy efficient: at -13 C/5 F it still moves 12078.98 BTUs of heat per kWh of electricity consumed. At 10.42 cents/kWh that's nearly half the price of natural gas.
Sure there are. My father recently replaced his oil boiler with an air-source heat pump (from Mitsubishi). It plugs into the same hot water pipework for the radiators that the oil boiler was connected to, output temperature is around 60C. Efficiency obviously drops with temperature, but even at -20C it has a COP of around 2, finally shutting down and switching to resistive heating elements at -30C.
In large parts of New England they use heating oil, which is similar to diesel and pollutes the air more than natural gas. There are many things they could be taking on, but natural gas isn't the worst of them.
I agree with your take. This is my honest followup question: can eliminating gas alternatives from the equation help make electric heat pumps more cheep/available?
It seems like in the short-term it could make things tricky, but long term it feels like competition in the heat pump market should result in better products and lower prices... I am not so naive as to think that government interference in a market will inevitably cause a good result, but it seems like properly targeted regulation can help trigger a market shift that is ultimately beneficial to the environment and to consumers...
Elimination of competition usually has the opposite effect. Subsidies can have the effect you describe. Heat pumps have been subsidized for some time and they have simultaneously improved leaps and bounds over a short period. This subsidy is expanded under a law just signed into effect by the president.
Even without these subsidies, heat pumps are more cost effective than natural gas in most cases. There is in fact almost no good reason to ban gas appliances at this point as they are going to decline rapidly without a ban.
The Sierra Club in general is made up of out of touch rich people. This is 100% them letting their privellege flag fly.
Edit: One thing I should've noted is that besides green house gas emissions there is a credible concern around the pollution produced by gas burning appliances. Several studies have shown a link between premature cardiovascular deaths and residential gas burning equipment. The issues are particularly pronounced among individuals with asthma. We should probably cease to use residential gas appliances in the near future but the way the market is going, a ban seems unnecessary and the imposition of such a ban would place serious burdens on the poor.
> The Sierra Club opposes the licensing, construction and operation of new nuclear reactors utilizing the fission process, pending:
> The dangers posed by the probable releases of tritium used by fusion plants, the problems with decommissioning these plants, and their high costs lead the Sierra Club to believe that the development of fusion reactors to generate electricity should not be pursued at this time.
The Sierra Club has always had an anti-human feel to it, starting with John Muir and his despicable racism toward the indigenous people.
It's hard to take them seriously with their policy prescriptions[1]. They mention that they oppose: coal power, nuclear power, hydroelectric power, and certain applications of solar power. Ok sierra club, please explain how we are going to generate power?
I see this from activists alot. They recommend some bananas policy prescription, and when the experts in that field say "that's not possible" the reply is always: "well you're the expert, just figure it out".
Muir was a racist yes, but also he just really didn't like anyone. He was generally just a mercurial and unlikeable person. I read a biography of him, A Passion For Nature, a few years ago. I knew nothing about Muir going into the book and by the end I was ready for him to croak so I could finish the book and never think about him again.
Modern ones work, like you said, down to -20F. One important caveat however is that they don't not-work below -20F, they just fall back to "emergency heat" aka resistive coils. While of course emergency-heat uses far more power that power can still be green.
The biggest problem remaining is cost, $20k+ for a 24 SEER heat pump is just bonkers.
The part that really annoys me is after these people wear out their welcome and get sufficiently marginalized the adults will have decades less with which to tackle the problems. The opportunity costs of pretending extremists like this have workable plans worthy of consideration is large.
I tried to get a heat pump this summer when I got AC installed. The AC systems all worked with my existing furnace, but the dealer didn't have any heat pumps that could supplement my existing furnace. It was a sad moment for me when I had to give up on that.
I actually disagree, but only because I'm reading between the lines. The place for carefully outlined policy with explicit exceptions, or funding associated with grid improvements or the like go through Congress and they know that. My take is that the Sierra Club is essentially making a very public opening bid in their bargain to reduce gas heating as much as possible. In a negotiation, you don't start with what you'd settle for. You start with the most extreme position you can plausibly stake out, then give up ground inch by inch to land at something reasonable. They'll get the chance to put their evidence on the record, maybe drag some witnesses to speak on the record, score some discovery wins, force a few rulings to set some precedent. And also they can fundraise like hell off of it. It's gamemanship for sure, but I support that they're pushing in the right direction.
In the US, use of residential natural gas has stayed nearly constant for decades. Natural gas use for electricity generation on the other hand has nearly gone up by 4 times in the past 40 years:
Restricting or eliminating home usage of natural gas seems identical in its relative ineffectiveness as restricting home water use while ignoring large agricultural users.
Actually it makes a lot more sense than may appear at first glance.
Heat pumps are incredibly efficient. So much so that burning natural gas to generate electricity to power a heat pump is more efficient than burning the gas directly to create heat.
So even if we were to discount renewables entirely and change all natural gas furnaces to heat pumped powered by natural gas on the grid, we'd still come out ahead.
These are very different because of the end goal. A world where we don't drive our food and eventually ourselves extinct is a world with vastly less gas use, to the point where the uses you highlighted (both electricity generation and home heating) are both eliminated entirely while I assure you we're not going to stop using water. We need to change how it's assigned, who gets access and to how much, but we're not going to eliminate it.
So then the question is, if we're eliminating all gas usage, why do A before B rather than B before A and the answer to that is very simple. Electricity is fungible, and it's much harder to change all the millions of individual home and small business installations, so you should begin with that first or you'll never get done.
This makes all of zero sense, especially for a forum populated by engineer-types who are familiar with turning abstract ideas into tangible and highly scalable applications.
A subset of users who use a ton in % terms, and can be targeted cleanly and clearly to change use, translates into a large % decrease with the minimal amount of work.
You are suggesting a waterfall-style approach. Toil for years because it’s harder?
You're proving the parent's point. Electricity is fungible so it will be easier to replace natural gas used for electricity than the millions of homes heated by it.
I am all for heat pumps, but this seems a bit extreme. They want this to be enacted within one year? They want a gas stove to be regulated the same way as a power plant?
At a time when we _badly_ need to build more housing that people can actually afford, artificially raising the cost of building new homes also seems problematic. The rhetoric used by the republican lawmakers opposed to it does sound like the usual anti-regulation talking points, but I have to agree with them in this case. This would make life a lot harder and more expensive for a lot of people and I don't think "a few environmental groups" is enough consensus for the entire country.
Would it actually raise the cost? Yes, a heat pump is more expensive than a gas furnace, but for an all-electric home you save the cost of a gas hookup. Hell, when building new neighborhoods, can save infrastructure costs by not building out gas infrastructure. Also, depending on what kind of heat pump you install it can also function as an AC unit, so you don't need to install separate AC.
Besides, if you're concerned about affordable housing, wouldn't (in the US at least) the first priority be to kill single-family zoning?
They're starting off by stating their ultimate goal (ban natural gas), but will end up walking it back as a "compromise" in order to seem not as extreme.
Like other commenters, I wouldn't support this ban.
With that said...
I went to the Pickathon music festival last month (near Portland). The festival requires that all food from vendors be served in a reusable wide/shallow plastic bowl. Put the dirty bowl in a bin, and get a token for the next food purchase. Same idea with a tin cup, but attendees hold onto the cup (it comes with a carabiner). No single-use plastic allowed. Friends and I found the system easy and pleasant. A festival founder said in an interview that he hasn't heard complaints. He said other festivals have tried making this an option, but it didn't get traction.
The point is... sometimes it's easier for people to adjust to a new hard requirement, vs. swimming up-stream in a society that's very slow to adapt (because we're overwhelmed and status quo is known and relatively safe).
The difference here is that the festival made it harder for the vendors, not the consumers. People can still get their food. To make it analogous to banning natural gas, imagine if the festival banned plastic utensils and told everyone they had to buy their own, and they had to be a very specific kind that was expensive.
I’m all in favor of what the festival did though. I hate how much trash large gatherings can produce.
I agree. A successful natural-gas ban would require impeccable execution (with huge public investment). I wouldn't trust federal gov't or state gov'ts to pull that off.
Please explain to me how an electric heat pump - even one designed to be highly efficient in a cold climate - is supposed to keep me from freezing to death when my power goes out every winter from an ice storm taking down trees (which take down my power lines) when it's -17F outside. If I didn't have a propane furnace I'd have to fly to Florida every winter.
Mine also uses electricity but a very small amount. When the power goes out I use a car battery, with a mini generator or my car to recharge. Also use it for my well water pump. (Afaik I'd need substantially more power for an electric heat pump for 2 weeks)
Doesn't the heating system need electricity as well, for the electronics, fans/pumps etc.? Or is it more like a gas stove with a simple valve to open the gas line, and manual lighting?
> If I didn't have a propane furnace I'd have to fly to Florida every winter.
Keep the propane. Use it 5 days every year. You still have 95% of the reduction in CO2 and pollution that a heat pump brings, and reliable heat. Nobody is saying you have to be totally reliant on the heat pump. They don't even work the same way.
This is like refusing to get an air conditioner because you'll have to get rid of your heater. KEEP BOTH! You aren't even really replacing your heating, you're replacing your air conditioner, because a heat pump is an air conditioner. It just also happens to be incredibly good at keeping your home warm as well as cool.
> Please explain to me how an electric heat pump - even one designed to be highly efficient in a cold climate - is supposed to keep me from freezing to death when my power goes out every winter from an ice storm taking down trees
The warm fuzzy feeling you get inside from knowing you're saving the planet should keep you warm enough. /s
If this petition was to ban the general cutting and burning of wood for cooking and heating, we would all laugh because the downsides of powering our lifestyles that way are so obvious to us today.
Some people do use wood for heating (in a wood-burning stove for example) but those are rare exceptions that either make sense contextually (a cabin far from infrastructure) or as a sort of aesthetic experience, like playing your favorite album on vinyl instead of Spotify.
But we all know why we should not heat, say, every house in Chicago primarily by cutting and burning trees.
I think folks in the future will feel the same way about pulling a bunch of gas out of the ground and individually burning that in our basements, closets, or kitchens. Furnaces are, let’s face it, very old school, dirty and poorly optimized technologies. I can literally see the blue flames through gaps in the metal when my furnace is on, and it’s a nice new high-efficiency model that is less than a decade old. I have carbon monoxide alarms in my bedrooms. Great.
Sure, this petition is a blunt instrument that would cause havoc if implemented as written. But the thing about transitions is that you have to start somewhere or it will never happen. Can we agree that phasing out gas makes sense? Even if this specific petition is flawed.
As far as I know, nobody banned wood stoves in the US in order to transition to gas. People transitioned to the better option of gas themselves. As it is now, gas is a better option than electric not just for heat but for other appliances too (cooking, drying, hot water). This is why you want to ban gas. When/if electric appliances become better than gas people will switch to them naturally, without any need for regulation. The same way they switched from horses to cars and from burning wood to burning gas.
Yeah, you’re right that there is not a national blanket ban on burning wood for heat. But there were (and still are) a lot of regulations that made gas and electric more attractive than wood for heating.
There are national emissions standards for residential wood burning appliances, and in some cases state as well. In addition many localities have restrictions on wood burning and can issue temporary blanket bans based on air quality measurements.
The development of this regulation went hand-in-hand with a broader cultural awareness of the importance of air quality (indoor and outdoor)—and a desire to not cut down all the nice forests around the country. So wood has suffered from a source restriction as well.
> We are facing the worst energy crisis since Jimmy Carter, yet these inflation-loving leftists are more worried about how to take away Americans’ reliable heating than they are about creating viable solutions.
It is pretty insane how debating a hot topic is now impossible. They are not even able to consider that an opposing political force might have different priorities or might simply be misguided. They just want to steal heating from americans because they are evil.
"The petition, if implemented by the EPA, would require homeowners to replace gas appliances when they break down or must be replaced with expensive new heat pump technology."
Assuming a heat pump lasts about 10 years, Has there been any analysis of the supply chain dependencies or repairability of heat pumps? I've asked this elsewhere and have had trouble figuring this out.
Saying this as someone currently fixing an old house, made haphazard 'kotatsu' heating setups, seen plenty of videos and articles evangelizing heat pumps, yet feel like there's little asked about the long term resilience or repairability of a given tech despite the greater efficiency.
Residential heat pumps are estimated to last 20-25 years; with typical services being capacitor changes, electromechanical contactors, and coil cleaning.
Digital thermostats from 15 years ago prevent the most common compressor issues. Smart thermostats can now detect symptoms proactively.
In the last 15 years, we've seen technological advances in compressor, gas, and electronics (as well as air to ground and air to water). And better calculations for sizing and air quality.
I think they last a lot longer than 10 years. I am not in the US but have been looking at air to water heat pumps and several of them are sold with 15 years warranty.
Readit News
Yes high efficiency heat pumps are getting better. But they aren't readily available. If they are, very few companies install/service them. No one has them in the Midwestern area I live in. They also only work down to say -20F and we do have quite a few days below that so you can't just make natural gas illegal.
Not to mention not everyone can afford it. Maybe let's focus on making them readily available and cheap instead of just banning things outright.
It doesn't help when critics exaggerate what's being suggested. They're an issue advocacy group pushing for regulatory changes that will of course involve a long, slow transition window when actually enacted by the legislature or EPA.
They're not asking for agents in jackboots to start seizing gas furnaces tomorrow. They're playing a necessary role in getting a slow-moving regulator to start moving forward on a plan that will take a decade to gradually roll out and that will incentivize further competition and innovation in alternative solutions over the course of five years or a decade or whatever.
> They're not asking for agents in jackboots to start seizing gas furnaces tomorrow. They're playing a necessary role in getting a slow-moving regulator to start moving forward on a plan that will take a decade to gradually roll out and that will incentivize further competition and innovation in alternative solutions over the course of five years or a decade or whatever.
That's an unhelpful strawman, and it seems like the regulation would be a lot more aggressive than you describe, according to the article:
> The petition’s reading would force the EPA to set NOx standards that would effectively ban the use of natural gas in all new construction within a year after the regulation is implemented.
IMHO, current-day politics mean that any regulation like this will likely be rammed through quickly when one party has control, because a slow rollout will invite repeal by the other party.
> a plan that will ... incentivize further competition and innovation in alternative solutions over the course of five years or a decade or whatever.
Don't be fooled. If the past is any guide, the "innovation in alternative solutions" will still likely still be worse than what we have now (e.g. efficiency guidelines mean my dishwasher now either leaves my dishes either wet or dry-ish and soapy-tasting, because the dryer was crippled, forcing the use of a "rinse agent."
If you get a nasty February ice storm that cuts a power line, you can be without electric power in 0F weather for up to 5 days. I guess people can install natural gas generators for that occurrence, but that seems to be a little bit counterintuitive (also, would a gas company provide emergency-only service?). I am not sure if heat pumps can work off regular gas powered portable generators that people usually use for emergency power.
[1]: https://www.michigan.gov/-/media/Project/Websites/mpsc/consu...
Why would they? They already have one. They don't have to rip it out just because they get a heat pump. Heat pumps don't go where the furnace is.
> I am not sure if heat pumps can work off regular gas powered portable generators that people usually use for emergency power.
Depends on the generator, although some heat pumps run on 120 V. More often they're like central air conditioners, washing machines, and stoves, and run on split-phase 240 [1]. 240 V generators are not as common as 120 V, but they are still very easy to find: https://www.homedepot.com/p/318061554
[1]: your house gets 2 "hot" (one positive voltage, one negative) wires and 1 neutral, with most things connected between neutral and a hot wire, with a ground to check for shorts. High power (anything over 1.4 kW) appliances get a NEMA connector between the two hot wires, and a ground to check for shorts.
I live in Indiana and we've had power outages like this during both winter and summer. What sucks is that newer (last 25 years) gas furnaces have fancy-dancy blower motors (power vent) and if I lose electricity, I also can't run the furnace because the power vent won't work. My gas water heater was the same way. Last time it failed (they only last 10 years these days), I switched to electric because the power vent on the gas water heater was so noisy you could hear it throughout the entire house.
My house is somewhat livable in the summer heat with a power outage because I have a basement, but in winter, forget it.
Having said that, I'm not so keen on spending $10-15K to convert two gas furnaces to heat pumps.
Deleted Comment
There also isn’t a low temperature heat pump solution that works for radiators. I’m actually really interested in heat pumps as my boiler is a few years away from end of life. But I really resent being forced to do something drastic and end up buying some shitty first generation product because some advocate in a California coastal climate says so.
If this comes to my state, I’ll hold my nose while doing it, but I’ll vote republican to stop it.
There are. Here's one [1] that works down to -26 Celsius (47 F below freezing!!) and connects to radiators. In practice it will also work below -26 C, since multi-zone pumps can use other rooms to balance out reliance on the external radiator.
It's also crazy efficient: at -13 C/5 F it still moves 12078.98 BTUs of heat per kWh of electricity consumed. At 10.42 cents/kWh that's nearly half the price of natural gas.
[1]: https://www.fujitsu-general.com/us/products/vrf/j4/aou60rlav...
https://group.vattenfall.com/uk/newsroom/pressreleases/2022/...
Can't you use a heat pump to warm water in a boiler, and then pump hot water through a baseboard radiator heating system?
Of course, most houses aren't set up for this. Just curious if it's a workable solution, or if I'm overlooking some problem.
It seems like in the short-term it could make things tricky, but long term it feels like competition in the heat pump market should result in better products and lower prices... I am not so naive as to think that government interference in a market will inevitably cause a good result, but it seems like properly targeted regulation can help trigger a market shift that is ultimately beneficial to the environment and to consumers...
Even without these subsidies, heat pumps are more cost effective than natural gas in most cases. There is in fact almost no good reason to ban gas appliances at this point as they are going to decline rapidly without a ban.
The Sierra Club in general is made up of out of touch rich people. This is 100% them letting their privellege flag fly.
Edit: One thing I should've noted is that besides green house gas emissions there is a credible concern around the pollution produced by gas burning appliances. Several studies have shown a link between premature cardiovascular deaths and residential gas burning equipment. The issues are particularly pronounced among individuals with asthma. We should probably cease to use residential gas appliances in the near future but the way the market is going, a ban seems unnecessary and the imposition of such a ban would place serious burdens on the poor.
> The Sierra Club opposes the licensing, construction and operation of new nuclear reactors utilizing the fission process, pending:
> The dangers posed by the probable releases of tritium used by fusion plants, the problems with decommissioning these plants, and their high costs lead the Sierra Club to believe that the development of fusion reactors to generate electricity should not be pursued at this time.
The Sierra Club has always had an anti-human feel to it, starting with John Muir and his despicable racism toward the indigenous people.
I see this from activists alot. They recommend some bananas policy prescription, and when the experts in that field say "that's not possible" the reply is always: "well you're the expert, just figure it out".
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Club
The biggest problem remaining is cost, $20k+ for a 24 SEER heat pump is just bonkers.
Dead Comment
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/use-of-natur...
Restricting or eliminating home usage of natural gas seems identical in its relative ineffectiveness as restricting home water use while ignoring large agricultural users.
Heat pumps are incredibly efficient. So much so that burning natural gas to generate electricity to power a heat pump is more efficient than burning the gas directly to create heat.
So even if we were to discount renewables entirely and change all natural gas furnaces to heat pumped powered by natural gas on the grid, we'd still come out ahead.
So then the question is, if we're eliminating all gas usage, why do A before B rather than B before A and the answer to that is very simple. Electricity is fungible, and it's much harder to change all the millions of individual home and small business installations, so you should begin with that first or you'll never get done.
A subset of users who use a ton in % terms, and can be targeted cleanly and clearly to change use, translates into a large % decrease with the minimal amount of work.
You are suggesting a waterfall-style approach. Toil for years because it’s harder?
At a time when we _badly_ need to build more housing that people can actually afford, artificially raising the cost of building new homes also seems problematic. The rhetoric used by the republican lawmakers opposed to it does sound like the usual anti-regulation talking points, but I have to agree with them in this case. This would make life a lot harder and more expensive for a lot of people and I don't think "a few environmental groups" is enough consensus for the entire country.
Besides, if you're concerned about affordable housing, wouldn't (in the US at least) the first priority be to kill single-family zoning?
With that said...
I went to the Pickathon music festival last month (near Portland). The festival requires that all food from vendors be served in a reusable wide/shallow plastic bowl. Put the dirty bowl in a bin, and get a token for the next food purchase. Same idea with a tin cup, but attendees hold onto the cup (it comes with a carabiner). No single-use plastic allowed. Friends and I found the system easy and pleasant. A festival founder said in an interview that he hasn't heard complaints. He said other festivals have tried making this an option, but it didn't get traction.
The point is... sometimes it's easier for people to adjust to a new hard requirement, vs. swimming up-stream in a society that's very slow to adapt (because we're overwhelmed and status quo is known and relatively safe).
I’m all in favor of what the festival did though. I hate how much trash large gatherings can produce.
Keep the propane. Use it 5 days every year. You still have 95% of the reduction in CO2 and pollution that a heat pump brings, and reliable heat. Nobody is saying you have to be totally reliant on the heat pump. They don't even work the same way.
This is like refusing to get an air conditioner because you'll have to get rid of your heater. KEEP BOTH! You aren't even really replacing your heating, you're replacing your air conditioner, because a heat pump is an air conditioner. It just also happens to be incredibly good at keeping your home warm as well as cool.
The warm fuzzy feeling you get inside from knowing you're saving the planet should keep you warm enough. /s
Some people do use wood for heating (in a wood-burning stove for example) but those are rare exceptions that either make sense contextually (a cabin far from infrastructure) or as a sort of aesthetic experience, like playing your favorite album on vinyl instead of Spotify.
But we all know why we should not heat, say, every house in Chicago primarily by cutting and burning trees.
I think folks in the future will feel the same way about pulling a bunch of gas out of the ground and individually burning that in our basements, closets, or kitchens. Furnaces are, let’s face it, very old school, dirty and poorly optimized technologies. I can literally see the blue flames through gaps in the metal when my furnace is on, and it’s a nice new high-efficiency model that is less than a decade old. I have carbon monoxide alarms in my bedrooms. Great.
Sure, this petition is a blunt instrument that would cause havoc if implemented as written. But the thing about transitions is that you have to start somewhere or it will never happen. Can we agree that phasing out gas makes sense? Even if this specific petition is flawed.
There are national emissions standards for residential wood burning appliances, and in some cases state as well. In addition many localities have restrictions on wood burning and can issue temporary blanket bans based on air quality measurements.
The development of this regulation went hand-in-hand with a broader cultural awareness of the importance of air quality (indoor and outdoor)—and a desire to not cut down all the nice forests around the country. So wood has suffered from a source restriction as well.
It is pretty insane how debating a hot topic is now impossible. They are not even able to consider that an opposing political force might have different priorities or might simply be misguided. They just want to steal heating from americans because they are evil.
Assuming a heat pump lasts about 10 years, Has there been any analysis of the supply chain dependencies or repairability of heat pumps? I've asked this elsewhere and have had trouble figuring this out.
Saying this as someone currently fixing an old house, made haphazard 'kotatsu' heating setups, seen plenty of videos and articles evangelizing heat pumps, yet feel like there's little asked about the long term resilience or repairability of a given tech despite the greater efficiency.
Residential heat pumps are estimated to last 20-25 years; with typical services being capacitor changes, electromechanical contactors, and coil cleaning.
Digital thermostats from 15 years ago prevent the most common compressor issues. Smart thermostats can now detect symptoms proactively.
In the last 15 years, we've seen technological advances in compressor, gas, and electronics (as well as air to ground and air to water). And better calculations for sizing and air quality.