You’re Thinking About Home Heating Wrong

If 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. This is a car-oriented country, and a car-oriented time. 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. fossil-fuel-energy use. Electric vehicles get a lot of press, but less than 1 percent of energy used for transportation came from electricity. Personal transportation is a large contributor to carbon emissions in America; it’s also the hardest to give up.

But 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. 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. That requires legislative and regulatory change. Second, use electricity to run as much of your personal life as possible.

That’s where ordinary people like you and me can contribute. At least 7 percent of U.S. fossil-fuel energy is used for something fairly banal: residential space and water heating. 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. If you want to do the most immediate good for the planet, replace your aging gas furnace with a new,