One of the elements of the Green New Deal which was the most surprising to me was the proposal that we need to electrify the heating of our buildings. This was a complete shock to me: It was something that had genuinely never occurred to me as a part of the effort that we need to work on with regard to climate change. Of course, when you think about it, this makes perfect sense: although I don’t think about it, my house produces carbon not just in the electricity it consumes, but also in the water it heats and the gas it burns to heat the water in my heating pipes.
Creating an electric grid which does not use fossil fuels is an achievable goal. While it would be a significant undertaking, it doesn’t require massive new technical understanding in order to achieve. A combination of renewables and nuclear with a serious investment in hydro-based pumped storage could certainly create a grid which is carbon-free within my lifetime. (Experts seem dubious that this is practical by 2030, the date proposed by the Green New Deal; I think it is the type of thing which is feasible, but unlikely because the Green New Deal won’t get the moonshot-level support it needs to achieve many of its goals, unfortunately.)
Heating accounts for 6% of the carbon generation nationwide. While this doesn’t compare to carbon generation from agriculture, industry, and transportation, investing seriously in converting our heating to be grid based is both necessary and something we can start on today. In some areas of the country, grid-based heating is not only better for carbon, they can be lower cost as well. In Rhode Island, replacing oil-based heating with heat pumps actually reduces costs over the medium term, even if the existing equipment still has a lifetime left: the cost of oil-based heating is simply so relatively expensive as to make it cost-ineffective.
This is one of the areas where I see the most opportunity for trained labor to take a role in a massive infrastructure project, and one I hadn’t conceived of. While I have always believed that the US has underinvested in infrastructure, it is also clear that it is no longer the 1920s, and the amount of manual labor required to complete construction projects is no longer what it once was. (As a friend pointed out, a bulldozer in 2019 can do the work that would have required 100 line workers in 1919; as much as I love the model of the WPA/CCC, some of the tasks they were assigned simply don’t require as many people anymore.) A nationwide project to create a workforce of folks trained to do HVAC installations is well within our reach, and with government funding of installations, you could imagine a program to change over many of the 127 million households in the US to using heat pumps in place of existing heating systems.
From a brief look, heat pump installation seems like it might be around a 1 day project for two skilled workers. If we were to perform one installation like this for every two houses – so 65-million or so households – completing the task in a decade would require a workforce of 52,000 workers… or slightly more than the number of current coal miners.
This would be no cheap job: Costs including installation for heat pumps typically range in the $5000 range currently, so this would be a multi-trillion dollar investment. On the other hand, climate change is currently costing us $240 billion/year, expected to grow to $360 billion over the next decade. Focusing on the short term economic costs of fighting climate change is foolishly shortsighted.