When the weather outside is frightful, what can a person do to get some delight indoors? Well, that depends on where and when they live. Throughout history, humans have come up with creative ways to heat and cool their homes, such as built-in floor warmers in Korean houses, and cooling towers called wind catchers in ancient Persia. Nowadays, we have the convenience of thermostats, but this comes with a cost. Heating and cooling homes and commercial buildings account for about 7% of global carbon dioxide emissions each year, which amounts to more than 3.5 billion tons. This is causing the temperature of our planet to increase at an unprecedented rate.
To tackle this issue, we need to rethink how we manage temperatures indoors and make reliable, carbon-free heating and cooling available to everyone. Natural gas is a fossil fuel derived from plants and creatures that lived before the dinosaurs, and it is often used to heat homes and buildings. However, extracting natural gas, particularly through fracking, can have negative environmental impacts such as releasing methane into the atmosphere and contaminating water sources. Despite this, the fracking boom has had some positive impacts. It has helped create 2.8 million jobs and generate trillions of dollars in revenue.
Ultimately, we must find a way to balance the economic benefits of natural gas extraction with its environmental costs. ak
The fracking boom has spread beyond the U.S and is a prime suspect in the whodunit of another problem- methane emissions from fracking wells. Even if they don’t get plugged up, these wells keep releasing methane which costs millions of dollars and doesn’t always happen. To make matters worse, pipelines transporting oil and natural gas from fracking sites leak, threatening nearby communities. For instance, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe protested the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which was built in 2017 and runs directly beneath one of the reservation’s main water sources.
Natural gas is a major and majorly complicated energy source, but it will likely play a big part in decarbonizing energy worldwide. Burning natural gas releases significantly less carbon than burning other fossil fuels, and burning it to generate electricity or heat makes less air pollution than something like coal. It also releases fewer pollutants like nitrogen and sulfur oxides, pollutants that contribute to unhealthy air quality and form smog and acid rain.
However, not everybody has the luxury of clean air and lower pollution energy. Billions of people in low-income countries don’t have access to natural gas, so they depend on high polluting solid fuels to heat their homes and cook dinner, such as coal or biomass (which includes materials such as charcoal, wood, or dung from livestock). These solid fuels release harmful chemicals when burned, including the nitrogen and sulfur oxides that make smog, and they contribute to 4 million indoor air pollution related deaths each year.
Take a wintertime stroll through Ulanbator, the capital city of Mongolia, and you’ll notice the chill doesn’t just nip your nose- it mauls it. With an average January temperature of negative 20 degrees Celsius, a thick smog hangs over the city, trapped at ground level by cold winter air and surrounding mountains. This smog is full of teeny tiny soot particles called PM 2.5, particles that are 30 times smaller in diameter than a single strand of human hair, but pack a mean punch when someone breathes them in. These particles get lodged deep in the lungs and bloodstream, causing pneumonia and bronchitis. Ulanbator’s air can carry 20 times more of these particles than what’s considered safe to breathe.
Coal is to blame here; Mongolia’s main energy source for many households is directly burning coal, the only way to survive winter. Coal fuels 85 percent of the country’s power production, so even electricity runs on it. Ultimately, Ulanbator finds itself in a coal reliance cycle: demand for coal drives more coal mining, which sucks up groundwater and dries grasslands to a crisp. As grasslands disappear, nomads are pushed to the city and there they join the masses dependent on coal to stay warm, which drives more demand for more coal.
Breaking up with coal won’t be easy. Even replacing coal stoves with coal-fueled electricity just pushes the problem farther up the hill, like passing a sizzling ember from one hand to another. When it comes to reducing carbon emissions and making our world a cleaner place for everyone, the situation is messy and heating is no exception. Increasing access to natural gas might help Ulanbator and other cities like it, but it’s still a very complicated solution. As long as electricity runs on coal, bringing electric heaters to more people won’t be enough to see cities like this out of the smog or to see our planet out of rising emissions. Renewable energy like solar or wind power would definitely help with this, but there’s still another side of the equation we haven’t talked about yet: cooling. Besides improving existing air conditioner designs and scaling up carbon-free electricity sources, another option to cool our homes is to ditch AC units altogether and consider other technologies. As a big bonus, these solutions could help us with decarbonizing heating too, and even help us move away from natural gas.
Heat pumps use the same basic mechanism of an air conditioner when it’s warm out. Both heat pumps and AC units use heat absorbing liquids called refrigerants to move heat outside so your bedroom stays cool. But heat pumps can also do the opposite in the winter; they can bring in heat from the cold air outdoors to keep your home warm.
When powered by carbon free electricity, heat pumps emit almost no greenhouse gases, and they can even have a negative green premium - that’s the cost difference between an energy source that releases carbon and one that doesn’t. A negative premium means that in some places it’s already cheaper in the long run to install a heat pump than to run a natural gas furnace.
One barrier to heat pumps is that AC units and natural gas furnaces last a long time. It’s up to individual homeowners and building developers to install heat pumps in the first place, and if my very expensive furnace is still kicking, it would be hard for me to get excited about forking over the cash to replace it with a heat pump. Government tax incentives and loosening building codes could be one way of encouraging more people to make the switch.
But a third path to decarbonization is to work with the systems we’ve got and find new ways of powering them, and for heating in particular, there’s a lot of options. My favorite is trash. Unless you’re me, or a raccoon, it might seem like not much good can come out of a steaming pile of trash. But the trash heaps in our landfills already release gas as they decompose, and that gas can be captured, converted, and become a low emission replacement for natural gas in our existing furnaces.
Renewable drop-in fuels can also help taper off emissions. These are basically fossil fuel substitutes made from renewable materials, and they can step in for natural gas in our heating systems. For example, second generation biofuels can be made from non-edible crops that are already being produced alongside our food, such as straw and corn husks. Meanwhile, electrofuels go a step further by not requiring crops at all. They’re made by capturing carbon dioxide and mixing it with the hydrogen from water molecules to create some of the same molecules found in fossil fuels.
Since electrofuels are made of hydrocarbons just like traditional fossil fuels, burning them would release carbon dioxide, but because that carbon was just captured from the atmosphere or from a fossil fuel power plant, we wouldn’t be adding any new emissions to the atmosphere.
Then there’s the challenge of that pesky green premium. These drop-in fuels can also carry a high upfront cost compared to fossil fuel energy. By offering a renewable alternative, they can help us reduce emissions as we wean our heating systems off the fuels they were built for.
Humans have devised ingenious ways of keeping warm and staying cool everywhere from the Arctic Circle to the Mojave Desert. Unfortunately, some of those energy choices have helped bring us to our current mess - the climate crisis - but that same ingenuity can help us tackle the road ahead. It won’t be easy to make the switch, but with the right incentives, technologies, and investments, we can make our homes more sustainable and more comfortable.