So what can we do in our individual and family lives to start changing the weary and destructive story of fossil fuels into one of clean energy, healing, and hope?
Through intentionality.
Fossil fuels remain highly integrated into nearly every aspect of our economies. That is changing – and the change is increasing every day as the switch to clean energy accelerates. However fossil fuel driven processes still remain, in many ways, the “default” or “normal” way of doing things. But “default” and “normal” do not necessarily mean better. And in the case of fossil fuels, this is certainly true. Clean energy technologies are much cheaper, more efficient, heathier for people, healthier for the planet, and have much greater overall capacity. They are just better. The only advantage fossil fuels have on renewables is that we’re used to them – and it’s hard to change patterns we’re used to. But on every other level, a clean energy future is far superior to one mired in the environmentally harmful energy of the past.
We just need to say to ourselves, “Maybe the way I’ve always done things isn’t necessarily the best way available anymore. Maybe my life might benefit from some changes.” Are you able to be open to this? If so, you can start to be intentional about transitioning your household’s life towards a better way of living.
So what are some of the concrete ways we can change? I will highlight some of the major ones in this post, but for a more thorough look, please go to the “Net Zero Household” resource tab on this website: www.cwpeasternus.org/net-zero-household In this resource, I have divided aspects of household change into a number of different categories, and I’ve divided each of these categories into stages. Stage 1 refers to simple and low- or zero-cost changes you can make either immediately or very near term. Stage 2 refers to changes that may be a bit more costly or involved, but which provide a more substantial long-term reward. And stage 3 refers to the most ambitious and costly changes, which in turn result in the most significant long-term gains. One of the main points I make at the top of the resource is that nearly all of the changes you can make to decarbonize your life will benefit you financially (as well as in other ways) – so even if you care nothing about the climate crisis or the collective health and wellbeing of humanity, these decisions will still be in your own immediate and long term self-interest.
So here are some of the main ways you can make intentional changes to improve how your family lives, both for the climate crisis, and for yourselves.
1 - Improve your home energy efficiency. Studies have shown that energy efficiency work alone done to all the buildings in the US could reduce the energy they use (and hence their carbon footprint) by a full 40%(!). Different homes need different work. Some work costs more than other work – but in the end, work done to improve energy efficiency will come back to save you money in the long run. None of us want to using our money to cool the outdoors in the summer, or heat the snow in the winter – we want to use it only for the spaces we’re living in. Energy efficiency helps us not to bleed those dollars out our windows. In addition to this, some of our energy efficiency improvements can come through simple behavioral changes. We ourselves can live more efficiently – by not leaving lights on when we’re not in the room, or washing our clothes in cold water, or keeping our thermostat a little higher in the summer or lower in the winter. There are lots of ways that we can live more efficiently – and a long list can be found on the resource page.
2 - Decarbonize your electricity. There are two main ways to decarbonize your electricity. The first is to pay a third-party clean energy supplier to provide the electricity to your utility. Utilities don’t always offer this, but PECO in Philadelphia does. Doing this essentially disinvests from your utility’s dirty energy mix and instead uses that money to invest in clean power generation. This can sometimes cost a bit more, but it’s usually comparable, and sometimes it’s cheaper – and ultimately it provides peace of mind knowing that you are helping our world accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels and towards a clean energy economy. The much more significant way to invest in clean electricity for your household is to install rooftop solar. There are many good ways to go solar. If you want to do solar leasing, you will typically pay nothing up front, will experience modest savings, and will have a chance to own the panels for free after about 20-25 years. This is a great option for people who want simplicity and/or don’t have the upfront capital to purchase solar. A great company to lease with in the Philadelphia area is Posigen (www.posigen.com), and they will throw in a free home energy efficiency upgrade at the front end. If you decide to go with them, apply through this link. HPCSI, a non-profit running a solar installer training program for low-income Philadelphians, will get a referral bonus that supports their work. If you want to purchase rooftop solar, the upfront cost is more, but the long-term benefits are much more substantial than with leasing. Furthermore, the Inflation Reduction Act provides a 30% savings off the total cost of your installation that you can get back when you do your taxes. When you combine this savings with your home equity increase from the solar, your SREC (solar renewable energy credit) revenue, and your savings over the course of 25 years, your initial investment will come back to you about 350-400%. And your electricity generation will be carbon free. If you’re interested in this, a great Philly-based company is Solar States (www.solar-states.com), and if you want to get solar in a way that supports that same work of HPCSI, go to www.solar-states.com/hpsolar).
3 - Decarbonize your heating and cooling. Many homes use traditional AC to cool during the summers, and natural gas or oil to heat in the winters. A better alternative by far – particularly when combined with either rooftop solar or a clean energy provider – is a heat pump system. Heat pumps are a highly efficient electric technology that uses heat transfer to both cool and heat your home. There are multiple ways to retrofit your home – they can be added to your existing central air system, or they can be installed as wall units. I have wall units and I do all my cooling and heating for the year in Philadelphia with them – I don’t turn on my gas radiator heat at all. Finally, if you are a renter, there are actually really good heat pump window units that are starting to make their way into the market and are worth looking into (click here for one that’s gotten some press). Heat pumps, especially when combined with rooftop solar, can save you money steadily even as they clean your energy production as well as your home environment. Natural gas, it turns out, is not healthy to have burning in your home – whether through your furnace, your water heater, or your gas stove. So the more you can reduce it, the better.
4 - Reduce your household waste. There are so many ways to reduce our waste. There is a long and detailed list in the resource page. Wasting excessively is bad enough as it is, but what we often don’t think about is how waste also has a carbon footprint. Carbon is typically burned to produce and transport products. The more we waste, the more extra products have to be produced, and the greater the carbon footprint will be. Also, how we deal with our waste is significant. Trash goes into a landfill, where everything is buried. Buried trash decomposes through anaerobic respiration processes, which produces methane (aka natural gas). Methane is 80X(!) more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. When items are recycled, they are not put into the landfill, and they are reused for new products, reducing the carbon that would go into making a new product from scratch. And when food scraps and other organic material are composted, rather than trashed, they decompose through aerobic respiration processes, which produce carbon dioxide, rather than the much more potent methane. (They also create great soil if you like to garden.) So it is important to both recycle and compost as much of your waste as you can. But the holy grail of reducing your waste is reducing your buying – trying to buy as few single use things as possible and repairing and reusing everything you can. Buying fewer new clothes helps counteract the destructive trends of fast fashion. Buying reusable and plastics-free household items from companies like Blueland can significantly reduce your waste. Buying less food at a time and organizing your fridge so food doesn’t go bad helps with food waste (Americans waste 33%(!) of the food produced). There are so many ways to live less wastefully – take a look at the resource for more ideas.
5 - Be conscious of where you invest and bank. Did you ever think of your savings as a form of investment? When you put money in a savings account with a bank, that bank is using your money for all sorts of things you may not be aware of. When you put your money in a retirement account, those funds are being invested in a lot of different businesses doing a lot of different things. Do you know what your money is being used to do in the world? One of the great ironies is that many of our retirement funds are being invested in fossil fuel (and other) companies that are literally destroying the world we are hoping to retire into one day. Our savings, retirement, and investments are, for many of us, our largest concentrations of financial power. It’s important that we be putting that power in companies that, as they build our savings for us, are building it out of good and sustainable work. The normalization of fossil fuel investments needs to end. It needed to end back in the 1980s – but now is the next best time. A few years ago, I transferred all my retirement over to an ESG investment firm called Parnassus. They have strong sustainability guidelines for what they invest in, and they’ve brought me a great return over the years. Another great place to invest is Calvert Impact Capital – they do really amazing mission driven work and offer investment notes with guaranteed rates of return over time. Take a look at the resource for more information on this.
6 - Decarbonize your transportation as much as possible. There are so many ways to decarbonize your travel. Get into biking – your body and mind will grow healthier, you’ll be happier, and you’ll be travelling cleanly. Use public transit as much as possible – public transit burns far less carbon per person than individual gas-powered vehicles. Make your next car an electric vehicle (EV). I have a 2013 Chevy Volt which has an electric engine that runs 30 miles on a full charge and gets me everywhere I need to be in Philly. It has a gas tank for extended travel, which is helpful – but the Volt is an old hybrid EV. Today’s full EVs typically will get you 350 miles on a full charge, and the charging infrastructure is spreading all over the place and getting faster and faster. I charge my Volt on the side of my house, using solar power from my roof – and I fill the gas tank of my car maybe 4 times a year, depending on how often I use it for long trips. EVs save a ton of money on gas, they’re cleaner, they perform better, and the infrastructure is steadily building itself out to a place where people aren’t going to be worrying about range anxiety any more. As more people buy EVs, gas companies will have fewer and fewer customers, the prices will be subject to volatility, and more and more gas stations will start closing (or transitioning to being EV charging stations). EVs are very comparable in cost to gas cars these days, and there are tons of used EVs. It doesn’t make sense to put another gas powered vehicle on the road – make your next vehicle an EV.
7 - Carbon offset what you can’t change. Despite all our best efforts, there are still many aspects of our lives that will remain carbon-infused until our broader systems change more completely. One of these is air travel. There is a great deal of work being done on cleaner fuels and EV aircraft, but for the near term, flying burns carbon intensively. In fact, you can change tons of the household systems mentioned above and greatly reduce your household carbon footprint for a year, but then go on one long flight and essentially eliminate all the savings you made. So with flights in particular, it is important to offset your carbon. Carbon offsetting is investing in legitimate and accountable organizations that can take your dollar, invest it in carbon reduction projects they are doing, and confirm that your dollar will remove a certain amount of carbon from the atmosphere through their program. In this way, you can pay for an offset company to remove the amount of carbon you were responsible for by participating in a flight. There are some illegitimate companies out there claiming offsets, but there are also some very good ones. For flight carbon calculations and offsets, I highly recommend Atmosfair, a German company that is doing great carbon reduction work around the world that not only reduces emissions, but is meaningfully impacting people’s lives. I use them whenever I go on flights. They add cost to the overall flight, but the way to think of this is that this is the true cost of flying. Flying without offsetting is exporting the unpaid climate costs of your flight to future generations. In addition to flying, there are also some of the daily and unavoidable carbon realities of living in a fossil fuel infused economy, buying fossil fuel infused products, and travelling on fossil fuel powered systems. Many of these simply cannot be avoided, and so a way to address them is through a more general monthly carbon offset payment meant to cover the estimated emissions you can’t cover. A great company that does this through simple monthly subscriptions is Terrapass, and as a US company, these offsets are (I believe) tax-deductible. Take a look at them and see what you think – they are a legitimate company doing good carbon reduction work at scale, and your monthly payment to offset what you can’t through personal changes may surprise you by how low it is. It’s worth it.
8 - Advocate for systemic change. This final topic will lead us into the next post. The burning of fossil fuels to power our economy is a systemic and global problem. Because of this, individual actions can only take us so far. We need collective changes, changes in cultural mindset, changes in Church mindset, and changes in our laws to empower and accelerate the transitions we and our world so desperately need. Our next post will focus on how we can work together to reduce the use of fossil fuels in the ever expanding collective circles beyond our own households.
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At the end of the day, transitioning our lives away from fossil fuels and towards cleaner and more sustainable systems will not only participate in the global effort to reduce emissions and fight climate change – it will also provide us and our families with systems that are better for our budgets, our health, and our overall well-being. We just need to be open to shifting away from “what we’ve always done” and towards the many new (and sometimes old) options that are, simply, better.
RESOURCE:
“Net Zero Household” Resource Page - https://www.cwpeasternus.org/net-zero-household
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