Season 4 | Episode 6

Extreme Home Makeover: Threshold Edition

A lot of the changes needed to keep global heating below 1.5 degrees have to occur at a huge, international level. But nearly a fifth of carbon emissions in the U.S. come from our homes. Are there things we can do at home to help the climate crisis? And how effective are individual actions? 

In this episode, we zoom in to look at what individuals can do to decarbonize their homes, from small town Livingston, Montana, to New York City.

Guests

Read More

• Your Induction Stove Is the First Step Toward Plugging In the Whole House — The New York Times

• Electrify Everything in Your Home — A Guide to Rewiring America

• The net-zero transition: What it would cost, what it could bring — McKinsey Sustainability

• U.K. Government Has Proposed A £600 Million Package To Help Its Steel Companies Go Green - But Is It Enough To Save The Floundering Steel Industry? — Forbes

Credits

Transcript

[00:00] Introduction

NICK: Welcome to Threshold. I’m Nick Mott. Amy’s turning the reins over to me for this episode. Last time, Jim Williams talked about six major things we need to do by 2030 to keep global heating below 1.5 degrees Celsius. One of them is decarbonizing buildings - everything from big, fancy skyscrapers to single-family homes. And I”ve been thinking a lot about this particular pathway to fighting climate change.  Because of something that happened last year.

MUSIC 

NICK: It was the balmy first day of summer in southwest Montana, in a town called Livingston — population about 8,000. My partner, Leah, and I were seated in a very fancy office room, full of leather-bound books. A stranger was guiding us through signing a slew of documents that would change our lives forever. 

REAL ESTATE LADY: Okay, we’re gonna start off with the settlement statement…

SOUND: Signing papers

NICK: We were buying our first home. Leah and I were excited. We both loved our house and the town. But I was also feeling the weight of this new stage in life. 

SOUND: Signing papers

NICK: By the end of the signing, some of the documents started to sound straight-up absurd. 

REAL ESTATE LADY: So this is basically saying you agree to be agreeable….

NICK: So agreeing to agree?

REAL ESTATE LADY: (laughs) Agreeing to agree. Here are your copies.

LEAH: Oh, wow, thank you.

REAL ESTATE LADY: Congratulations!

NICK: We’re… we’re homeowners now?

NICK: We were. And we had a fat packet of papers to prove it. With that packet of papers, we weren’t just responsible for the house - suddenly we were also accountable for all the stuff that comes with home ownership. Property taxes, mowing the lawn… and also a huge chunk of carbon emissions. 

MUSIC

NICK: The U.S. as a whole sent nearly 6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere last year. That’s a number so enormous it’s hard to conceptualize. If you piled up all the people and mammals and lizards and fish — all the animals alive on this planet — and weighed them on some kind of a massive planetary scale, they would still weigh less than the amount of carbon we belched up into the atmosphere last year alone. About a fifth of that six billion tons of carbon came from our homes - as in how we heat them up, cool them down, and keep the lights on. My own little house is a grain of sand in that huge pile. But I am now directly responsible for that grain of sand. So for this story I’m focusing on that sand grain. I’m zooming in on myself, and my home. Because eventually we’ll all confront the climate crisis -  and the place where we’ll most personally feel its effects and grapple with how to respond is at home, with our loved ones, where we let our messy, imperfect selves show. I can't decarbonize the entire economy on my own. But can I at least decarbonize my home? I'm going to take you with me as I try to answer that question in this episode. Along the way, I'm also going to grapple with something that everyone who cares about climate asks themselves at some point: how much does what I do in my own small home, in my own small life, even matter?

MUSIC: THRESHOLD THEME

“The impact of your home on human health is huge.”

“What we're talking about is replacing steam boilers and radiators in buildings with more advanced heat pumps. It's costly, it's disruptive, but we have to figure this out.”

“I don't think we should be naive about sustainability optimism. That's why, for me, it's a journey.”

“Nobody can unilaterally live in a low-carbon society. You can't do it by yourself.”

[03:51] Segment A

NICK: Let me introduce you to our home. Livingston’s about an hour north of Yellowstone National Park, perched just outside the rugged Absaroka Mountains. 

 SOUND: Creaky gate opening

NICK: Behind our creaky gate lies a creamy yellow one-story house with red trim, built about a century ago. Somebody who was seeing it for the first time might call it ‘quaint.’ Which I think might be code for old, but in a kinda cute way. We love the house and it’s very livable. But — look anywhere and you can find something that needs taking care of. The gutters leak. The furnace makes a sound like a low-flying airplane overhead when it turns on. And just aesthetically - nearly every room could use a serious makeover. But Leah and I were interested in making changes with climate and emissions in mind. Which is why I invited Chris Dorsi over to look at the place. 

NICK: Hey there, Chris.

CHRIS: I’m Chris Dorsey. 

NICK: Hey, nice to meet you. 

NICK: Chris is the head of Montana State University’s Weatherization Training Center. He says the training center is kinda like —

CHRIS: a high school shop class for grownups. Central to our mission is to give them the skills they need to move us a little bit closer to sustainable housing for all. 

NICK: Weatherization means preparing a house for anything nature throws at it. Rain, wind, heat, cold. And weatherizing also keeps your appliances from running on overdrive - cutting down on both utility bills and emissions. Chris and I sit down at the dining room table — and I put him to the test.

NICK: It’s like, you know, pulling up to my house in this neighborhood here. As an example, what do you notice about what probably has to get done here, just knowing, looking at it, seeing probably how old it is and the shape it's in and all that, like, what do you suspect would be the biggest bang for the buck or the stuff that needs to get done here?

CHRIS: OK, well, let's take that as an on the spot case study. You have already in this home the first and best indicator of a low imprint home life, which is size. The place is not big. I’m looking to my left and there’s a wall 18 feet away, I’m looking my right there’s a wall three feet away, I think the front and the back is only one room away in each direction.

NICK: So he says my place is small. Which is a compliment, I guess?

CHRIS: There's no amount of money you can spend on photovoltaic panels and smart home controls and expensive construction and build a 5000 square foot, two million dollar home and call it efficient. It does not exist. They're mutually exclusive terms. So in terms of impact per person, the best thing you can do is build yourself or find and buy or remodel a a modest, a small, a simple home. 

NICK: The science backs this up. Studies show the more floor space you have - as in the bigger your house - the more energy it tends to use. So we’ve got one thing going for us: our house is small. But Chris had a lot of ideas for things we could do to lower emissions from our home. When we bought the place, I was excited about giving the kitchen a big makeover. New countertops, cabinets, the works. But Chris said it’s what’s behind the ugly cabinets I wanted to get rid of that could make all the difference. The spots we don’t normally go or pay any attention to. As in the insulation. The stuff that keeps hot air in in the winter and traps cool air in the summer. Some of these fixes can be relatively small investments that go a long way towards making your house more efficient - and set the stage for bigger upgrades down the road. Things like: crawling around in the attic to spray foam into gaps that could leak air from the main house below, and then blasting more insulation in the attic or in the walls.  

CHRIS: Nobody sits around at a cocktail party and brags about their insulation. It's kind of a non-issue. It's a piece of hidden infrastructure, right? But it’s that hidden stuff which really is most critical in how homes tend to operate. 

MUSIC

NICK: Chris said there’s sort of two categories of changes we could be talking about: tweaking what we already have so it uses less energy - or investing in new stuff, like fancy, efficient appliances. Even things like solar panels. So in simple terms, make what we have use less carbon or buy new stuff that uses less carbon. Or both. He said those changes can make a real difference in quality of life, too. Studies over the last three decades or so suggest Americans spend on average 90 percent of their lives indoors. 

CHRIS: You first hear those numbers, it sounds crazy until you actually sort of calculate where you spent last week and a lot of it was probably right here. 

NICK: And since we spend that much time inside —

CHRIS: The impact of your home on human health is huge. 

NICK: In fact, one recent study said the air in many homes is so toxic, it would be illegal under federal law if it were outside. But there’s no legislation like the Clean Air Act that applies inside your home. And for indoor air quality, natural gas which often powers furnaces and stoves, is a particular source of trouble. Gas stoves, especially, can create air quality comparable to secondhand smoke. Kids are most at risk, and studies show a correlation between cooking with gas stoves and asthma. The same pollutants can make people more vulnerable to viruses, like the coronavirus, and have higher rates of respiratory illness and cardiovascular disease. Luckily, at our home, we’ve got an old electric stove. It’s not necessarily all that efficient – but it is one step above natural gas. But that doesn’t mean we’re necessarily off the hook in terms of indoor air quality.

CHRIS: So among the hidden hazards would be the discussion about, you know, basements and crawlspaces. What the heck is down there and do you really want to breathe that air? Do you really want to be a part of that biological community which is in your basement or crawl space. 

CHRIS: So I think you and I are gonna go down there and look at some of these issues.

NICK: Should we do that now?

CHRIS: Let's do it. Let's do it. 

NICK: Chris opens our cellar door and we walk down the steps. 

SOUND: Footsteps on stairs

NICK: We enter a small, dark room with ceilings just low enough to need to hunch over. 

CHRIS: I think the entire crawlspace was 18 inches high for the first 40 years of its life, so somebody had the guts to dig this out

NICK: I’d crawled around down there a handful of times, but immediately Chris can read details of the house I’d never noticed. 

CHRIS: This house is built in two or three separate pieces. They took the former foundation, cut it out, put some bearing walls underneath it in order to push out the house and make it, you know, six feet wider on that side. So there's a lot of history down here. 

NICK: Fascinating.

NICK: It’s a history that shows how the house has changed over time: a one-room shack built to house a railroad worker — to what it is today. Chris turns his attention to what looks like an ancient, oversized filing cabinet in the corner of our crawlspace: our furnace. About half of homes are heated with natural gas in the U.S., mine included. Keeping houses warm is far and away the largest source of emissions from homes. And in our case —

CHRIS: I don't know how many generations of spiders have lived and died in this thing.

CHRIS: How often do you change your furnace filters? 

NICK: We can't find our furnace filter.  

CHRIS: That’s a trick question then. Let’s look for your furnace filter. 

NICK: We couldn’t find it because the whole device had been seriously jury-rigged to fit our house. There wasn’t even a slot, like in a normal furnace, where a filter belongs. Our whole house had kinda been built that way, a little bit over time, making do with what already existed. But Chris wasn’t deterred by that —

CHRIS: I'm going to pop this cover off and take a look for. 

SOUND: Metal clanging 

CHRIS: There's a sound for radio.

NICK: Just what I was thinking. 

CHRIS: There's your furnace filter right there. 

LEAH: Oh yeah. Not too hard. 

CHRIS: No, it's laid down and it is completely, perfectly, utterly useless. So what this means is that every bit of dirt and crud that gets sucked into the return grills in your house comes down here and gets heated and just pumped back upstairs for you to breathe in.  

NICK: The furnace was installed in the 1960s, so a new machine would be orders of magnitude more efficient. He also notices our water heater.  It’s electric rather than gas — which is a good thing. But also —

CHRIS: It's hilariously oversize. I'm going to guess at the last contractor that was here decided to upsell the owner of the house and some of the biggest water heater he could. Or maybe it's all he had on his truck that day. 

MUSIC

NICK: He said according to the label, that water heater alone probably burns up close to half our annual energy use. And it doesn’t seem like there’s all that much we can do about that particular inefficiency. The water heater is pretty new — so it seems like there’s no way to justify changing it out. It’s one of many things we’re just kinda stuck with. Chris left us with a much better sense of what we could do to start decarbonizing; but figuring out how and when to make those changes, and in what order, was up to us. 

MUSIC

NICK: I wanted to put our little place in the bigger picture nationally, and see if that could help isolate one or two things we might begin with. So I called Leah Stokes, a professor of Political Science at the University of California Santa Barbara. Yes, there are two Leahs in this episode - one’s my partner and the other’s a professor. And in addition to her academic work, this Leah also hosts a podcast, advises a climate action nonprofit …

LEAH STOKES: And I don't know, I probably do 15 other things, but those are the main ones.

NICK: Leah was quick to answer how homes can fit in with the kind of massive, national transition we need to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

LEAH STOKES: So when we think about the carbon emissions all across our economy, right, it can feel really complicated, right, like agriculture and oil and gas, it’s like wow, carbon pollution is everywhere.

NICK: Carbon pollution IS everywhere. It’s in what we eat. How we get around. Where we sleep. Nearly every decision we make. That’s why we have to think at the systems level to decarbonize everything. And Leah says the systems change we need can be boiled down to two things: 

LEAH STOKES: Clean electricity plus electrification.

NICK: You heard about this in our last episode. In Leah’s eyes, electrification - meaning converting all the stuff that runs purely on natural gas and other fossil fuels into electric - is a major part of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change. In terms of houses, she means converting almost everything in our homes to run on electricity - especially the big draws like furnaces and hot water heaters. Right now, the grid we plug all that stuff into is pretty dirty — it varies based on where you’re at in the country, but nationally our grid is about 60 percent fossil fuels. So she says at the same time that we’re electrifying everything we can, we need to be quickly increasing the amount of renewable energy on our electric grid. And if we make the changes we need, she says:

LEAH STOKES: It turns out that between clean electricity and electrification, we can cut carbon pollution by probably 75 percent economy wide. So this is a huge pathway to solving the climate problem. It gets us three quarters of the way there. 

MUSIC

NICK: That 75 percent reduction is by 2050, compared to 2005 levels, according to the National Renewable Energy Lab. That same report says that electrification alone could reduce emissions by about 40 percent. Homes are just one small segment of everything that needs to be electrified, but studies show that home electrification can make or break our climate goals overall - as in, without electrifying the places we eat and sleep, we may not be able to keep warming below 1.5 degrees. Leah’s actually working on electrifying her own home right now — and she told me that spurred her to ask all kinds of questions about what she should replace and when she should do it.

LEAH: And, you know, I was curious, like, is it more efficient? Is it better from a climate perspective if I'm pulling electricity from the grid, which includes fossil gas versus burning fossil gas in my home.

NICK: I get this concern - like, should I be converting everything to electric now, even when the grid’s still so dirty? When we have such a long way to go? Here’s what Leah said:

LEAH: And again, it turns out based on research from the Rocky Mountain Institute, that it makes sense to switch to electric appliances pretty much everywhere at this point in time. 

NICK: That research shows that converting everything in homes to run on electricity substantially reduces carbon emissions, even if those homes are connected to grids powered by fossil fuels. And in most cases, electrification leads to lower utility bills, too. Leah mentioned a couple all-electric technologies that can be key here to replace their gas counterparts: induction stoves, which use electricity and magnetism to get your food cooking, and heat pumps - which are kind of like air conditioners that also run in reverse, extracting heat from outside, condensing it, and bringing it inside.

NICK: It's interesting to me to hear that you're, you know, trying to electrify your own home. Do you wait till the end of life to replace stuff like what do you replace first? I'm also personally grappling with this. Like we just bought a house and it's very old … where do you start? 

LEAH: Well, Rewiring America, which is this great organization that does a lot of thinking on this, they say, you know, you definitely want to do it at end of life. 

NICK: So, when stuff’s about to go out on its own. No point in getting rid of a brand new furnace or car just because you want new stuff — but when your old item has run its course, she says, replace it with electric when you can. I immediately thought of my own, aging home and appliances. Our spider-filled furnace was more than 50 years old.

LEAH: New efficient electric does definitely save you money, so if you're in that kind of situation, it's a no brainer. You want to switch to electric appliances, do not put in new gas. Every time I watch home reno-television show, which I do a fair amount, is kind of like a mental break. And they put in a new gas stove. I'm just like, oh my God. And they put like 20 burners and I'm like, Dude, man, you know why? It's really tragic. 

NICK: It’s tragic because at least here in America there seems to be a kind of love affair with gas in the kitchen. And that love affair has been carefully engineered.

VIDEO GUY: In a survey conducted of professional chefs, most selected gas as their choice for superior cooking, and for many good reasons, natural gas cooking provides even deep, precise temperature control and instant on and off capability with just the turn of a dial.

NICK: This promotional video wasn’t made by a cooking show. It was created by a utilities provider in Kentucky, West Virginia and Pennsylvania that wants to sell its customers more gas. Natural gas providers have worked aggressively with state legislatures to block legislation that would provide cleaner, electric-based building codes and have waged war on local electrification initiatives all over the country. That sort of lobbying is a real barrier to getting us where we need to be. One study suggests that we need to replace 80 million appliances in 50 million households over the next ten years. So, I thought — my house, with its ancient, ratty, ready-to-fail appliances, is also sort of an opportunity. I’m going to have to change things out anyway - and as I do, I can try to decarbonize and electrify every step of the way. But making those changes, it turned out, was much easier in theory than in practice.

MUSIC

SOUND: Furnace banging 

NICK: So I’m down in the crawlspace because the leaves are changing color, it’s getting cooler outside, and we’re soon gonna have to use our furnace but we haven’t figured out what we’re gonna do with it yet. Because it’s so. Damn. Expensive!

NICK: I figured a solid intermediate step to making a Big Decision about our furnace was MacGuyvering in a new, clean furnace filter - since the old one was laying there useless and covered in, as Chris Dorsi put it, spiders and gradoo.

SOUND: Furnace banging and noises of frustration

NICK: Since our furnace had been installed in such a weird way, putting in a new filter meant getting down on my hands and knees, shoving my head into the belly of the gas-powered beast, folding the filter ever-so-carefully, and violently shoving it up roughly to where it belongs. 

SOUND: frustration noises

NICK: It was not going great. This half-a-century old furnace had become the center of our home improvement woes. We had a slew of contractors look at it, and each told us more or less the same thing: it’s functional, but it’s old. It could go out tomorrow, or it could limp along for another decade. We could either wait for it to break — which could leave us shivering mid-winter. Or we could be a little forward-looking, and replace the thing. It’s more than five decades old. Its useful life is over. And if we did replace it, I was all about the idea of electrifying. The furnace was our only draw of natural gas in the house. I wanted to replace it with an electric heat pump, like Leah Stokes suggested Heat pumps can dramatically reduce emissions from homes. And in addition to heating your house in the winter, they can cool it in the summer. For a long time, heat pumps made the most sense in moderate climates since they couldn’t keep up with extreme cold. But nowadays, they can run efficiently in sub-zero temps. Heat pumps are already pretty common all over Scandinavia - a pretty cold place in the winter. They’re absolutely possible in Montana. But there’s a gap between the possibility and the education and skills required to get them installed. When we told our local contractors we wanted a heat pump, they looked at us like we were a little nuts. This is Montana, they told us. It gets cold here. They can probably do it, they told us. But it’s gonna cost us. A lot. They bid us numbers about twice as high as the cost of replacing our furnace with a brand new, gas-powered device.

SOUND: Nick working in furnance

NICK: There was no obvious way forward. And it was more than just the furnace -  and since our house is so old and strapped together we realized just about every task would be as frustrating as this one, tiny furnace filter. One contractor, put it bluntly: the way he sees it, anything we do is pretty much just polishing a turd. But the thing is, we love our turd. It’s a turd with a ton of potential. So I’m still gonna polish away. Like down in the crawlspace, with the furnace filter.

NICK: Boom. We have a filter sort of covering you that’s clean. Woo!

NICK: But staring at our furnace, I knew we still had to answer: what are we gonna do with this thing in the long run? I felt a little like Ned Stark in Game of Thrones. I knew: Winter is Coming. So we gotta figure this out soon. 

NICK: This winter stuff is like super freakin’ me out because it’s getting colder. So it’s really, really getting to me right now. But - I got that furnace filter to work. Kind of. So small victories - woo!

MUSIC

NICK: And I also felt adrift: I seemed alone in this quest to make my house a little more climate friendly. Weatherization expert Chris Dorsi said Montana has woefully few incentives and helpful programs to assist folks like me with making the changes they need. So I was curious: What  if I lived somewhere else — say, a place totally unlike rural Montana? Would the ways I approach decarbonizing my home look different there? That’s after the break.

Break

[23:16] Segment B

NICK: Welcome back to Threshold, I’m Nick Mott. I’ve been telling you about my house in rural Montana, and the frustrations of trying to decarbonize as much as I can. I wanted to find someone else who’d actually done some of the work I was thinking about - in a totally different part of the country, and see what I can learn from them about fixing up my own place. And that led me to Patrick and Simone Nicolas. They live on Long Island in New York. Just past where the skyscrapers of the city give way to the suburbs. 

SIMONE: C'mon in, make yourself comfortable, you can take your shoes off. 

PATRICK: This is your first time in New York? 

NICK: It is actually my first time in New York, yeah. 

PATRICK: I hope New Yorkers have made a good impression on you. 

NICK: So far, it really has been a great great couple of days. 

NICK: And they wanted to make sure that impression stuck. When I got there, they’d just gotten back from the grocery store; they laid out a smorgasbord of sweets to snack on while we chatted in their dining room. While I stuffed myself with cookies, they told me about their home: They have a beautiful, single-family, split level home that’s about 50 years old. They moved into the house about 18 years ago. Changes were in the works since day one.

SIMONE: We started with, you know, trying to get the house better insulated. We changed the window. So little by little, we did things to improve the house to help with the insulation so that we can reduce our usage of oil during the winter. 

NICK: Yes, oil. There’s no natural gas available in their area, so the heat for their house is powered by fuel oil - which is distilled from petroleum. That used to be pretty common all across the country; these days, fuel oil-heated households are somewhat common in the northeast, but they make up only a few percentage points of the housing stock nationally. 

PATRICK: When we first got here, they were doing that. It was always a shocker because they would fill up the tank and you know, they charge you per gallon and the tank would be like, you know, like two hundred seventy five gallons. And by the time you finished, you know them like, you know, five or six hundred dollars for the month, you know, I mean, one time the bills at least eight hundred dollars in one month. 

MUSIC

PATRICK: I guess like anything, you gotta learn how to figure it out.

NICK: That was Patrick’s style; he’s a problem solver. So when their oil tank sprung a leak a couple years ago, he and Simone took it as an opportunity to find new options to heat their house. Patrick’s into tech stuff. He read some news articles about heat pumps, and a company he found inspiring called Bloc Power - 

PATRICK: To me it was kind of like a play on Black Power, Bloc Power

NICK: They were able to offer some creative financing to make a heat pump affordable for the Nicholases. Patrick, who is so into tech, was psyched. But Simone? Not so much. 

SIMONE: I was not on board, because I prefer more traditional methods. 

NICK: You know - your standard furnace situation. To her, Heat pumps sounded untested and risky. But eventually, Simone caved. she figured why not take a leap of faith? The two went for it. I told them about my own misadventures figuring this out for my place in Montana. They said they could relate; the heat-pump thing seemed new for their contractors, too. It took some time to get them on board and get the systems all figured out. But, when I visited, the work was done. Their house was heated and cooled by heat pumps. They took me on a tour to show me the equipment. The heat pumps are big boxes outside their house, connected to relatively small, white boxes inside that  breathe out hot air in the winter and cool air in the summer. Some heat pumps take heat from the ground - but those are a little more expensive. These are air source heat pumps. It sounds kinda bonkers to me - but even on the coldest winter days, air has a certain amount of heat contained in it. This technology works by using refrigerant to absorb that warmth from the outside air, condensing it, and moving that heat inside. They took me into their crawlspace to see the hidden part of their system.

SOUND: Walking through the crawlspace

PATRICK: As you can see the pipes for the heat pumps runnin through this wall here, the one we saw in the basement, this goes out the other side of the wall —

NICK: Instead of going through ducts - which heat and cool my house and probably yours too - the heat pumps system at the Nicholases is connected by tiny pipes that snake through their crawlspace, pushing the refrigerant that transfers the heat or cool air to and fro.

PATRICK: And uh that’s pretty much it.

NICK: Cool - I’m super nerdy about this stuff right now so it’s very cool to see actually. (laughs)

NICK: But even though they put in a heat pump, their house is by no means totally carbon-free. They still rely on New York City’s grid, which is exceptionally dirty. I was kinda amazed to learn that New York state actually has two grids: upstate, it’s nearly 90 percent carbon-free. But there’s currently no way to transmit all that clean energy to the city - so there, where the Nicolases live, the grid is about 85 percent fossil fuels. The Nicolases are thinking about where their energy comes from; they’re contemplating getting solar panels down the road. But they do still have oil as a backup.They told me, though, they’re comfortable living with that imperfection.

SIMONE: It's just, you know, I think, important for me to do whatever little I can to help contribute. And if everybody feels that way, then hopefully we can delay the flooding or the, you know, the ice caps melting and you know, that sort of stuff so that we don't have to move to higher ground.

NICK: For Patrick, the decision to go down the heat pump road wasn’t initially all that much about the climate. It was a financial decision. He said he was happy to make these kinds of investments in his house, but if natural gas had been available in their area, their decision might have been different. And when Patrick reflects on his own journey to make the change to a heat pump, and what might help others swap out appliances in their own homes too, he says two things are critical: making the technology affordable, and having information about how this technology works. In order for heat pumps to become any sort of a new normal in homes across the country, he said government and groups like utility providers need to step up to make this transition easier. 

PATRICK: So I think the system has to help as well. It has to be more accessible. That has to be the direction that we're going in. 

NICK: Spending time with the Nicolases, I realized: even if we were both to create the decarbonized, energy efficient homes of our dreams — solar arrays gleaming in the sun, heat pumps breathing comfortable air into our insulated, weatherized homes — we’re just two families. With a very small impact. But - while I was in New York, I spent a lot of time walking around the city, doing the tourist things just taking the place in. 

SOUND: Train station

NICK: I wandered around Times Square. I got mildly lost on the subway. I took the ferry to Wall Street. And nearly the whole time, I was looking up. One thing that struck me was the scale of this place. 

NICK: It feels like I'm in a canyon here, but the walls are made of buildings and not like rock and cliffs and natural stuff like a regular canyon. 

NICK: I felt a sort of awe. Wonder. Specifically - at what humans are capable of creating. Any one house — mine, the Nicholases, seemed so small compared to everything around me. If you want to tackle climate change in single-family homes, you by definition have to address it singly — one-by-one. But tens of millions of people live in multi-family residences.In fact, 

JOHN: 60 percent of the space of the floor area is residential. We have very large multifamily residential buildings in New York. It's actually the large multi-family buildings that are the majority of our space. 

NICK: That’s John Mandyck. He’s CEO of an organization called Urban Green Council. They focus on decarbonizing buildings in New York City. The city has about 8 times as many people as the whole state of Montana - because it's so big and dense and so many New Yorkers rely on public transportation, burning fossil fuels for heat and hot water is city’s biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions. And John’s organization helped shape a law that’s an attempt to turn a one-by-one approach to greening buildings on its head. It’s called Local Law 97.

JOHN: we try to use scale for our advantage in New York.

NICK: Local Law 97 is the centerpiece of a suite of bills, all passed by New York’s City Council in 2019, tackling climate change in the city. It places a carbon cap - or limit on the amount of carbon a building can emit - on buildings over 25 thousand square feet. So only the biggest buildings in the city. That cap starts in 2024, and gets stricter over time. If buildings go over that cap - if they emit too much carbon - they’re hit with huge fines. So those fines are meant to force building owners to do the work it takes to make their buildings more efficient and sustainable. 

JOHN: What we're talking about is replacing steam boilers and radiators in buildings , where more advanced heat pumps. We have to do it. It's complicated in the sense that it's costly, it's disruptive.  But we have to figure this out.

NICK: The logic goes—fixing up the buildings is cheaper than shelling out the cash to cover those fines. With local law 97 in effect, If you’re living in any of those giant buildings, whether you own your apartment or you’re a renter, those big sources of carbon could just… go away. It doesn’t matter if you believe in climate change. It doesn’t matter if you want cheaper utility bills. You don’t have to find a friendly contractor who wants to help you polish your turd of a house and put in a heat pump. If you’re one person living in one of those big buildings, this stuff will just happen. Because the owners of those buildings are mandated to do the work. And because of the size of the city, the sheer amount of floorspace getting heated and cooled and lit up in those big buildings, John says that if local law 97 goes according to plan, over the next few decades:

JOHN: The law will deliver the largest carbon reduction of any city in the world.

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NICK: I flew back to Montana and started settling in to my own place - the weather was cooling down and the antique furnace had started kicking on. I was feeling guilt about the flight. And about a bunch of other stuff, too. I drive way too much. I get plastic bags at the grocery store when I forget totes. Sometimes I eat meat from factory farms and fruit and veggies trucked in from halfway around the world. But also: I try to do my part. We have a garden. Most of the meat we eat at home is hunted by leah and on occasion fished by me. I only shower once or twice a week - but to be honest that’s not really about conserving energy or anything, more just me being me. Point is: I was still wondering: What’s my role in bringing about meaningful climate action? Just about everyone I talked with for this story had something to say about this. Like Leah Stokes, political science professor at UC Santa Barbara.

LEAH: Like I take plastic take out. I still feel shitty about it, sometimes. 

NICK: She was able to contextualize just how one person’s actions might fit in with the bigger picture in a way I found really helpful. 

LEAH: But, you know, I know that that decision in that moment is way less impactful than my decision to work on federal climate policy like 24/7 for six months straight. And so, you know, we just have to forgive ourselves for being imperfect beings and notice that these litmus tests of perfection that none of us will ever pass are ways of splitting the movement are ways of reducing our power. And we have to reject that framing. 

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NICK: Leah says the daily decisions we make, the options available to us, are shaped by bigger forces. Namely, in large part by the economic system we’re in - and the industries and interests that system caters to. And the individual can only do so much within that system.

LEAH: Nobody can unilaterally live in a low carbon society. You can't do it by yourself.

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NICK: To get where we need to go, we need systems change. And some people and companies are very much opposed to that. In particular, oil companies. Those companies have spent billions lobbying against climate action. But another tactic of theirs is less overt. They’ve pushed to shift the blame for climate change towards our individual, daily habits. As an example of that, she said to look at the company BP - which created the idea of a carbon footprint. You’ve probably heard of this - I remember calculating mine (which was very high) back in high school. That’s a figure that points to how much carbon you, as an individual emit in your daily life. Let me be clear: there is value in looking at at emissions in this small, personal scale. But focusing on your individual footprint suggests that ONLY individuals - and not government or policy or industry - are responsible for getting us out of the climate crisis. And that shift - away from the structure and towards the individual - matters. If it’s just us - as in individuals - that got us here, then it’s not up to industry or government to get us out. It’s up to hundreds of millions of single human beings and their daily choices. This, Leah says, is the wrong way to conceptualize climate action.

LEAH: If we buy into the message that there’s nothing we can do, that it’s all about our individual behavior change, that we’re small atomistic people who just live by ourselves and it’s all about the individual, then we can’t make the biggest impact possible, and we can’t fight systems of oppression.

NICK: American society and culture celebrate the individual over the collective. And what I hear from Leah is that pushing back against climate change requires challenging those ideas. Finding a future requires finding it, together. Leah suggests one, clear way forward:

LEAH: You want to actually look for structural change even on the individual level.

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NICK: She says focus on just a small number of really important decisions - decisions that make a huge impact.

LEAH: And something like swapping out appliances in your home is a structural change, even though it's an individual change 

NICK: She said, take changing out an old furnace with a heat pump as an example. You do that once, and all your heating needs are electrified, for decades. If you sell the house, those decisions live on for the next homeowner, too. 

LEAH: Taking these one time bigger changes that live beyond you, those are really important actions.

NICK: Part of the answer, Leah says, is yes - take individual actions where you can. But don’t stop there. Look bigger. To your neighborhood. Your city. Your state. Connect with others. Don’t just focus on yourself. The tension between Individual action and deep, systemic change doesn’t have to be either/or. It doesn’t have to be a tension at all. It can be both/and. The deeper question is: how do individual actions have the highest impact in the bigger context?

LEAH: We have to think of ourselves as more powerful. We have to believe we can change institutions and policies and structures in society, whether that’s at the local city council or at the congress. And if we believe in that power, if we work with others through organizations, through collective movements, we can be more powerful. 

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LEAH: So the more we can work together with others, the bigger changes we can get, the more structural change that we can get. And climate change is ultimately a structural problem. 

NICK: So, to return to my little place in Montana. When we bought this house, and I started digging into how to decarbonize - or at least reduce my impact here - the information I was able to unearth seemed overwhelming. I didn’t know where to start and I felt lost at sea. Alone. As I’m finishing up this episode, winter’s almost over and we’ve still only made some really small upgrades. Some new windows, sealing up the attic. We have a quote on a heat pump that might work - but it’s a lot of money, and we’re hesitating to take the plunge. So that old, inefficient, natural gas furnace is blasting this very moment.

SOUND: Furnace running 

NICK: I’ve since gotten some good advice, but it’s hard to know what to do, and when. I’m still overwhelmed; and there are lots of things I haven’t even broached yet - like solar and energy storage. 

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NICK: But I’ve also been talking with people all over the country about this stuff. Experts and contractors. And also regular folks: friends, coworkers,outright strangers. People caught up in the same confusion and indecision that I am, but dedicated to figuring it out. I can’t say my house is a lot more efficient or that I’m a lot less frustrated, I do feel a lot less alone. 

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NICK: Next time on Threshold, Reporter Shola Lawal visits two communities in Nigeria that are dealing with climate change in very different ways. 

SHOLA: It's raining like crazy today in Lagos and everywhere is flooded.

Credits

NICK: This episode of Threshold was produced and reported by me, Nick Mott, with help from Amy Martin and Erika Janik. The music is by Todd Sickafoose. The rest of the Threshold team is Caysi Simpson, Deneen Wiske, Eva Kalea, Sam Moore, and Shola Lawal. Our intern is Emery Veilleux. Thanks to Sara Sneath, Sally Deng, Maggy Contreras, Hana Carey, Dan Carreno, Luca Borghese, Julia Barry, Kara Cromwell, Katie deFusco, Caroline Kurtz, and Gabby Piamonte. Special thanks to Donnel Baird, Elizabeth Yeampierre, Katherine Janda, Joanne Huang, Shamim Graff, and Rebekah Morris.