BY ROBERT GIBSON
Chair
Los Alamos County Board of Public Utililies
My family travelled frequently to my grandparent’s Ohio farm while I was growing up. On colder mornings and evenings, my grandfather would descend to the cellar to shovel coal into the furnace. Quaint though that may seem today, more than half the space heating in the U.S was coal until after WW II. (Much heat in wartime Los Alamos was coal, too.) Stoking a coal furnace was a dirty and physical job. That farmhouse was converted to oil heat in the 1960s.
That was not its first conversion, either. Built in the mid-1800s, it originally had a different kind of central heat. The single fireplace was surrounded by all the normally-occupied rooms, except the kitchen. Cutting, hauling, splitting, and stacking firewood (all by hand except for draft horse hauling) took time, muscle, and tools that had to be kept sharp.
Originally, the kitchen had its own heat source, a wood stove to heat food and water. It, too, was replaced by coal before electricity reached the farm in the 1930s.
Like that farmhouse, our society has gone through two major conversions in how we heat our homes and food – first from wood to coal and then to gas, oil, or electricity. (Some in northern NM skipped the coal stage.) Each conversion made life safer, easier, and cleaner.
Another conversion lies in front of us. Electric appliances are poised to replace our gas furnaces and boilers, water heaters, stoves, and clothes dryers.
Similar to the earlier transitions, it is straightforward to build new homes with modern technologies. Remodeling existing homes is again involved and expensive. (Think of digging out a cellar for a coal bin and furnace and adding ductwork throughout a house to replace a simple fireplace. Wiring an existing home for electricity was a major undertaking and expense, too.)
For most, the largest change is replacing the gas furnace or boiler with a heat pump. Other gas appliances are likely to be most conveniently and economically replaced as they approach the end of their lives.
There are differences from earlier transitions, too. Most obviously, heat pumps cool as well as heat. Separate air conditioners (one-way heat pumps) will disappear. Another difference is that, for better or worse, governments and politics are far more involved.
The biggest difference is that the primary motivation for this conversion is less direct and obvious. We can’t see carbon dioxide or methane rising into the atmosphere to blanket and warm our planet. The causal link to rising temperatures, more extreme weather events, increased wildfires, rising sea levels, etc. is buried in scientific data and analysis. Unlike the sweat and ashes or coal dust from yesteryear’s heat sources, it isn’t visible. It is just as real.
While our individual contributions to climate change are infinitesimal, the collective effect is evident. The same is true for solutions. It will take each of us doing our tiny part to make a global difference.
Like the previous change-overs, this one will span decades. Some folks are moving quickly. More are waiting for more personally opportune times, e.g., when more appliance choices are available, finances permit, or appliances need replacing. Others today resist the idea that anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change is even real and a cause for action at all.
We have done this before. We can do it again.
That old family farmhouse won’t directly experience this next conversion. Like so many traditional farmhouses across the Great Plains and Midwest, it is being replaced. A modern home sits where the chicken coop once did. It is all-electric.