Clean Energy Wins: Home Heating, Cooking January 3, 2020

By Barb Gottlieb

Photo: A. Krasner

PSR has rolled up its sleeves to join a significant new battle for the climate:  the campaign to replace appliances that burn gas (a.k.a. methane, a.k.a. fracked gas) with appliances powered with clean energy.

PSR and four of our chapters are promoting the health benefits of electric heat pumps and induction cooktops to take the place of gas-burning furnaces and stoves. Highly efficient heat pumps and electric cooktops are increasingly powered by energy generated from solar, wind, and other health-protective, climate-friendly sources.

On the other hand, combustion of gas in homes and buildings contributes to multiple threats to health: climate destruction, dangerous indoor air pollution, fires and explosions.

Buildings have emerged as a major source of climate pollution in many cities, so this campaign will be an important focus for PSR in 2020. To learn more about how (and why) our chapters in Boston, Philadelphia, Denver and Los Angeles are promoting health-friendly, climate-protective heat pumps and cooktops in their communities, click here.

A wealth of information on heat pumps and induction stovetops is available on the webpages of Greater Boston PSR.

We are proud to join with many allies in this drive to shift our homes and buildings to clean energy. This effort is still young and not as widely known as, say, the drive to install solar panels, but it is clearly on the rise.  An article by the Sierra Club highlights the impressive wins achieved in 2019 in communities from coast to coast. Read that encouraging report here.