There are approximately one hundred and forty million households in the United States. Two-thirds, or about eighty-five million, of them are detached single-family homes; the others are apartments or trailers. This is what American prosperity looks like: since the end of the Second World War, our extraordinary wealth has been devoted, above all, to the project of building houses bigger and further apart. The vast majority of them are heated with natural gas or fuel oil, and parked in their garages and driveways or on nearby streets, some two hundred and ninety million vehicles, of which about ninety-nine percent in August were running on gasoline. It took centuries to build all these houses of wood, brick, steel and concrete, but if we are to seriously tackle the climate crisis, we only have a few years to rebuild them.
So far, the climate debate has been mostly in people’s heads and hearts. It took thirty years for elected leaders to take this seriously: first, just to get them to say the planet was getting warmer, then to admit that humans were the cause. But this year, Congress finally passed some serious legislation — the Inflation Reduction Act — that earmarks hundreds of billions of dollars for the task of transforming the nation to burn far less fossil fuels. So now the battle is moving from hearts and heads to homes. “Emissions come from physical things,” Tom Steyer, the businessman and director of the investment firm, which after a presidential race in 2020, is focused on investing in climate solutions, told me. . “Emissions come from buildings, power plants, cars, things you can touch. It’s not like information technology, which is infinitely repeatable. It’s one item at a time.
So the big question is: how do you move from exhortation and demonstration to execution and deployment? Engineers have provided relatively cheap and incredibly elegant technology: the most cost-effective way to generate electricity is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. The federal government is providing the largest capital injection of clean money in its history. But can it actually be done? Or is it simply too much of a task, especially in the face of continued opposition from the fossil fuel industry?
“A lot of us are tired,” Leah Stokes, an energy expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told me. Stokes was an architect of the key elements of the IRA during its tortured twenty-month journey through the Senate; at one point, she found herself writing a bill while in a neonatal intensive care unit, with her newborn twins. “But we are at an inflection point in the fight against dirty energy. We can solve the climate crisis.
“Now is the time for doers, performers, people willing to roll up their sleeves and dig in,” said Donnel Baird, founder and CEO of heat pump startup BlocPower. Even before the passage of the IRA, Baird, the son of Guyanese immigrants who once heated their home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, by turning on the gas oven and leaving the door open, had raised one hundred million dollars to work to the electrification of entire communities across the country. “If we can green a building, we can green a block,” he told me. “If we can green a block, we can green a neighborhood and a city. So we should do it and show everyone that it can be done.
“We’re in headlong deployment mode,” Billy Parish told me last month. Parish runs a company, Mosaic, which has raised half a billion dollars in funding to become one of the nation’s largest lenders to solar projects; it’s one of the companies, along with Airbnb and real estate broker Redfin, that last month joined the White House in announcing plans to educate landlords on how to access IRA money. “There is so much clean energy that wants to be built,” he said.
These people have been working on the climate crisis for years. (I first met Parish a few years after I left Yale, in 2002, to start the Energy Action Coalition, one of the first major campus climate action groups in this country; Steyer and I long been involved in campaigns against pipelines and investing in fossil fuels.) But, for all their enthusiasm, they are worried. “If we don’t get it implemented right, then that’s a disaster for carbon, and it also teaches politicians that it’s not a win-win issue,” Stokes told me. Baird advised the Department of Energy on green job creation under the Obama administration, which also earmarked funds – albeit considerably less – for renewable energy. “The part I worked on was greening buildings, and we had $6.5 billion, and that attracted another ninety billion dollars in capital from the private sector,” he told me. he said. “And, even with that, we couldn’t really pull it off. We have not been able to invest the private capital. There’s still a ton of work to be done to implement the IRA, and if we don’t do it well politicians will say, ‘We tried, it didn’t work and we don’t know why. And it will be two or three times more difficult next time. Parish warned: “There is now a more coordinated effort against clean energy. It’s still very popular, but it’s increasingly polarized.
The fear is not that nothing will be done; it’s that we won’t do enough, because taking up the climate challenge essentially means changing everything. And in America, that includes changing one hundred and forty million homes. This basically means replacing furnaces, gas burners and internal combustion engines with heat pumps, induction cooktops and electric cars. “We estimate there are a billion machines in American homes that need to be turned off,” Ari Matusiak, CEO of Rewiring America, a nonprofit that educates communities about electrification funds, told me. available to them through the IRA. Success depends on ensuring that these machines are clean. “The market won’t do it on its own, because the market for goods and labor – the market for machines – is a market for fossil fuels,” Matusiak said. “My house has gas lines. If my furnace goes out, or if my water heater goes out, the contractor is not going to sell me a heat pump, even if it’s better. They will sell me a replacement for what I already have.
The scale of the task somehow seems more daunting the closer you get to the ground. Consider Boston, the hometown of Varshini Prakash, the executive director of the Sunrise movement, whose push for the Green New Deal was instrumental in passing the IRA, and the city whose mayor, Michelle Wu, Been as outspoken an advocate of politics as any civic leader in the country. And, starting next month, Massachusetts’ governor will be Maura Healey, who made a name for herself, in part, as state attorney general by suing the fossil fuel industry for misleading the public. wrong about climate change. In 2020, Massachusetts voted for Biden by more than two to one; Boston went almost five to one. But Boston has nearly three hundred thousand dwellings, and Massachusetts altogether has three million. And even get New building to go electric is a lawsuit—as attorney general, Healey had no choice but to declare that state law prohibited municipal ordinances from prohibiting gas hookups in new buildings. And getting homeowners (and homeowners) to turn gas-powered devices off is only part of the problem. You also need to find a flow of clean electricity – solar panels, wind turbines and batteries – to power the new electrics.
A Massachusetts-based renewable energy engineer pointed out to me that his state needed nearly ten gigawatts of electricity to meet current demand. Construction of the state’s first major offshore wind farm, Vineyard Wind, has only just begun, after a decade of bureaucratic battles, and when complete it will provide less than half a gigawatt of electricity. “Can Massachusetts Really Build the Twenty-Five Offshore Wind Farms Needed in a Decade?” He asked. At least Massachusetts has Something. Sam Evans-Brown, who runs Clean Energy New Hampshire, says his state has just 5% of Massachusetts’ installed solar capacity. “Renewable energy is cheap and everyone wants it, but there are big gaps in our ability to achieve it,” he told me.
Some of these shortcomings are the kind that accompany any new big industry challenge. For example, Rewiring America estimates that the country needs a million new electricians just to do the new wiring that will be needed. According to Evans-Brown, New Hampshire’s largest solar company “took their whole marketing team and said, ‘Stop selling solar panels, they’re selling themselves.’ Instead, the entire marketing team is now dedicated to recruiting electricians. It shouldn’t be an impossible task. Evans-Brown said that the previous weekend he and his wife, Aubrey Nelson, had traveled upstate, where she spoke “with a group of kids from a technical high school, working on a house being remodeled. They were doing blower door tests, pulling out the thermal cameras to see where the house was leaking. And the professor was saying, “These guys are going to be able to do six-figure builds. That’s an achievement.” , but it’s not spreading enough. Eugene Kirpichov, who heads a new nonprofit called Work on Climate, points out the scale of the challenge. “Compare that to a traditional industry like software,” he said. said “Every school teaches it, everyone knows who the main employers are and thinks it’s cool. There are thousands of bootcamps, tens of thousands of recruitment agencies. At the moment, he says, “there are tens of thousands of people in our climate jobs community, when we need millions.”
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