Another BIG Way To Tackle Climate Change

by Jeff Rubin | June 18, 2018

Another BIG Way To Tackle Climate Change

reduce your contribution to climate change
Why is heating is the forgotten green energy? It is (almost) the biggest way to reduce your individual contribution to climate change.

A big thank you to phys.org for their excellent post on how the best ways for individuals to tackle climate change! It is no surprise that they missed wood pellet Furnaces—people just don’t know about Sustainable Heating so we added the bit about pellet boilers to their excellent graphic.

“For most Americans living in the northern United States, heating produces more household carbon emissions than any other activity. Out of the 20 tons of carbon that the average American emits each year, five to 10 tons can be from heating.1″ Replacing your oil boiler or furnace with one that runs on local, renewable wood pellet fuel is the single biggest contribution you can make to reducing greenhouse gas emissions (short of having fewer children.) Check out the data behind the analysis on the carbon savings.

But Sustainable Heating is not just about new, amazing green-heating technology, it’s also about preserving forests. Contrary to popular belief most forests in the US are not protected. About a third are tree farms, and the reduction in use of paper in the digital age has decimated markets for secondary timber. Those tree farmers are going to sell their lands for development if they can no longer make a living by sustainably harvesting and replanting their woodlots. Land owners and forest industry players don’t get paid for sequestering carbon, and preserving wildlife habitat but that is an important byproduct of the working forest economy. Once those lands have been developed they are gone forever! We only have a short window of time to bring back markets for secondary timber.

You can tackle climate change!

Sustainable Heating could be a vital market driver—if only we can get the word out (and big oil doesn’t want us to!) Those of us who care about the climate we are leaving for the next generation need to make sure that Sustainable Heating is as widely known as solar and wind.

Footnotes: 1. Alliance For Green Heat, http://www.forgreenheat.org/issues/cooling_climate_change.html

Heat Loss

The two variables of of heat loss are a) geographic location, and b) building performance. Together they will determine the quantity of heat needed to maintain comfort.

Geographic location drives the building's “design day." Your design day is the difference in temperature between the inside and outside of your house on the theoretical coldest day of the year; so in the northeast we calculate a day that is -10ºf outside and comfortable 68ºf inside. This is referred to as the “delta-T” value. A typical delta-T for the northeast is 78º.

Building performance is the big one because there’s nothing we can do about geographic location. Today we can build a really tight thermal envelope, but most of our heating pollution comes from the millions of homes built over the last 100-150 years. We are getting better at buttoning-up those old buildings with insulation and weather sealing but weatherization is still  never going to be enough to overcome the heat loss from a 78º delta-T. That means we need heating systems that can quickly put a whole lot of heat back into those old houses on the days that are really cold.