Among the many significant accomplishments of the federal Democratic trifecta of the past two years, the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) ranks near the top. This landmark legislation offers a critically important opportunity to boost household electrification, since the subsidies and tax credits it offers will enable more and more of us to end our dependency on fossil fuels to heat and cool our homes and cook our food.
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True, we can’t buy our way out of the climate emergency; we need an “do everything at every level” approach. But “roughly 20% of US energy-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions stem from heating, cooling, and powering households,” according to a figure cited in a 2020 study analyzing the carbon footprint of U.S. households, meaning that an effort to retrofit American households would have significant impact. Doing so on the scale we need becomes far more likely with the new supports and incentives contained within the IRA. Also important: keeping in mind “that fixing home energy systems will be cheap compared with doing nothing,” an observation Robert Gebelhoff makes in the Washington Post to promote the widespread adoption of heat pumps.
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For many climate activists, this is the moment they (we) hoped to reach. The critical and yet-unanswered question is whether we can accomplish what we need to do in the short window of time remaining for effective intervention. (See Bill McKibben’s December 27, 2022 New Yorker article, “From Climate Exhortation to Climate Execution,” for an in-depth explanation of the scale, scope, and stakes.)
If you’re like me, though, you have less need of persuasion and more need for information about how to afford the whole household electrification process. Fortunately, there’s an app for us, or pretty close. Rewiring America, a nonprofit organization devoted to #ElectrifyingEverything and described in detail in the McKibben article cited above, is an excellent one-stop shop. Along with news and analysis, it offers fact sheets, a resource guide, and a personal calculator to show what the IRA could provide you in rebates and credits.
The organizational infrastructure to bring about the changes we urgently need is growing every day. Much of it must happen on the state, federal, and international levels. But it is a community-by-community, region-by-region project, too. What do you see happening in your area? Where are you yourself in the #ElectrifyEverything process? What initiatives appeal the most to you? Please fill us in on the progress, or lack of it, where you are, along with your ideas about how we can bring about the transformation we need.