You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
There is no dearth of advice on the internet about how to lower your personal carbon emissions, but if we had found any of it completely satisfying, we wouldn’t have embarked on this project in the first place.
Our goal with Decarbonize Your Life is to draw your attention to two things — the relative emissions benefits of different actions, as well as the relative structural benefits. (You’ll find everything you need to know about the project here.) For the first, we needed some help. So we shared our vision with WattTime, a nonprofit that builds data-driven tools to help people, companies, and policymakers figure out how to reduce emissions, and lucky for us, they were excited to support the project.
“So many people out there feel helpless when it comes to addressing the climate crisis, but we believe that anyone, anywhere should have the tools and information they need to make a difference,” Henry Richardson, a senior analyst at WattTime, told me as we were wrapping up this project. “So we love the idea of helping average consumers understand which actions actually available to them can meaningfully contribute to reducing climate pollution. We want to help people prioritize those higher-impact activities that can mitigate climate change faster.”
WattTime’s claim to fame is building an API that calculates the emissions impact of using the grid at a given time and place. Users can then shift their energy consumption to times when the grid is cleaner or to build renewables in places where they will reduce emissions the most.
In an ideal world, we would have taken a similar time- and place-based approach in calculating the emissions savings of each energy-related action on our list. Switching to an EV if you live somewhere with very clean power will reduce emissions more than if you live somewhere with lots of coal plants, and likewise, getting rooftop solar if you live somewhere with coal-fired electricity is more effective than in areas with a cleaner grid. But when we started to game it out, we realized that level of exactitude would be, if not exactly impossible, certainly insanity-inducing.
Instead, WattTime helped us calculate the effect of each action if it was undertaken by an “average American household” — that is, one that consumes an average amount of electricity per year, drives an average number of miles in an average car per year, uses an average amount of energy for space heating, et cetera. WattTime also pulled data from publicly available sources like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Energy Information Administration, to estimate the baseline emissions and savings of a given action. We ultimately made two calculations for each action to account for two different ways of estimating the emissions from using the electric grid:
While the first method gives us a picture of how much good each action can do in an immediate sense, the second gives us a picture of how much good it can do over time. For example, using the first method, buying clean power came out on top, with rooftop solar offering the potential to cut CO2 by about 5.7 metric tons per year, while switching to an electric vehicle would cut about 3 metric tons per year. But using the second method, car-related actions won out, showing EVs cutting CO2 by 4.6 metric tons per year, and rooftop solar cutting 1.4 metric tons per year. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
To calculate the emissions savings from dietary changes and food waste management, we turned to two more partners: HowGood, a data platform for food system lifecycle analysis, and ReFED, which collects similar data for food waste. As with energy, we used federal data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to estimate the average American diet and ReFED’s estimates for the average American food waste mix (though note that those are for an individual, not for a household). From there, WattTime helped us determine that, for instance, just by replacing the beef in your diet with chicken, you could save nearly 2.5 metric tons of emissions each year — almost as much as you could save by going vegan.
Because we used averages and sought to simplify our list with actions like “electrify your space heating system,” rather than estimating the impact of every permutation like “switch from a propane furnace in Colorado with X efficiency to a cold climate heat pump with Y efficiency,” our estimates of emissions reductions are rough approximations and not reflective of real-world scenarios.
You’ll see that while these calculations certainly informed our ranking, they were not the sole metric we used to arrange this list. A quantitative analysis alone could not answer our question about the most “high-leverage” actions, so we used our reporting and expertise as climate journalists to fill in that last, crucial gap. Car-related actions and rooftop solar were neck-and-neck by the numbers, but we are confident that getting an EV (if you need to have a car) is more unambiguously necessary for the energy transition than getting rooftop solar. Similarly, while eating less meat can hugely reduce the carbon tied to an individual’s diet, the ripple effect it has on agricultural carbon emissions is less direct and harder to parse than the effect you can have by electrifying all your appliances and shutting down your natural gas account.
Getting an EV:
WattTime — 2.9 mtCO2/yr
Cambium — 4.5 mtCO2/yr
Structural benefits: Destroying demand for oil; increasing demand for charging stations; improving local air quality and chipping away at the social license for operating an internal combustion engine.
Getting rooftop solar:
WattTime — 5.7 mtCO2/yr
Cambium — 1.4 mtCO2/yr
Structural benefits: Get clean energy on the grid faster than utility-scale projects; influence neighbors; reduce electric demand in your neighborhood; reduce strain on grid if paired with a battery and part of a “virtual power plant”
Air-sealing and insulation:
WattTime — 1.2 mtCO2/yr
Structural benefits: Reduce strain on grid and need for grid investment; level out electricity demand to avoid the need to activate dirty “peaker” gas plants; prepare your home for cheaper, more even, and efficient heating and cooling
Switching to a heat pump for space heating:
WattTime — 1.4 mtCO2/yr
Cambium — 1.6 mtCO2/yr
Switching from a gas stove to an induction stove:
WattTime — Roughly even
Cambium — 0.1 mtCO/yr
Switching to a heat pump for water heating:
WattTime — 0.8 mtCO2/yr
Cambium — 1.6 mtCO2/yr
Switching from a natural gas-powered dryer to a heat pump dryer:
WattTime — Roughly even
Cambium — 0.1 mtCO/yr
Structural benefits: Increase demand for and reduce price of electric and efficient appliances; build a case for policies that wind down fossil fuel use; if fully electrifying, sends signal to downsize gas system.
Getting rid of your car:
WattTime — 5.17 mtCO/yr
Structural benefits: Supporting public transit and bike lanes, enabling others to use their cars less, too.
Switching from an omnivorous to a vegetarian diet:
WattTime and HowGood — 2.8 mtCO2/yr
Switching from an omnivorous to a vegan diet:
WattTime and HowGood — 2.9 mtCO2/yr
Replacing the beef in an omnivorous diet with chicken:
WattTime and HowGood — 2.5 mtCO2/yr
Structural benefits: Reduce demand for high-emitting food products, which has the double-pump benefit of reducing the amount of land required to cultivate high-emitting products; if replacing beef with chicken, increase demand for more carbon-efficient proteins; add to the business case for developing efficient plant-based proteins.
Cutting food waste in half:
WattTime and ReFED — more than 0.1 mtCO2/yr
Structural benefits: Reduce demand across the food system; send less food waste to landfill, which helps reduce methane emissions.
Composting all food waste:
WattTime and ReFED — 0.03 mtCO2/yr
Structural benefits: Encourages the build-out of municipal composting programs; encourages responsible farming practices by lowering the cost of compost; reduces demand for nitrogen-based fertilizer.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
The decarbonization benefits abound.
Electric vehicles? Really?
Is it really true that Heatmap looked at every way that you can decarbonize your life, meditated upon the politics, did the math, and concluded … that you should buy an EV? Are EVs really that important to fighting climate change?
You’ll find more thorough answers to all those questions throughout Decarbonize Your Life (plus our guide to buying an EV), but the short answer is: Yes. If you really need a car, then switching from a gas car to an electric vehicle (or at least a plug-in hybrid) is the most important step you can take to combat climate change. And it’s not only good for your personal carbon footprint, it’s good for the entire energy system.
Here is why we make that recommendation — and why you should trust us:
The best reason to use an electric vehicle is the most straightforward one: Driving an EV produces fewer greenhouse gases than driving a gasoline- or diesel-burning car. The Department of Energy estimates that the average EV operating in the U.S. produces 2,727 pounds of carbon dioxide pollution each year, while the average gasoline-burning car emits 12,594 pounds of carbon dioxide. Even a conventional hybrid vehicle — like a Toyota Prius — emits 6,800 pounds of CO2, or roughly 2.5 times as much as an EV.
These gains hold almost regardless of how you analyze the question. Even in states where coal makes up a large share of the power grid — such as West Virginia, Wyoming, or Missouri — EVs produce half as much CO2 as gasoline vehicles, according to the DOE. That’s because EVs are much more energy efficiency than internal combustion vehicles. So even though coal is a dirtier energy source than gasoline or diesel, EVs need to far less of it (in the form of electricity) to drive an additional mile.
EVs retain this carbon advantage even when you take into account their full “lifecycle” emissions — the cost of mining minerals, refining them, building a battery, and shipping a vehicle to its final destination. Across the full lifetime of a vehicle, EVs will release 57% to 68% less climate pollution than internal-combustion cars in the United States, according to a landmark analysis from the International Council on Clean Transportation. (As the publication Carbon Brief has shown, many analyses of EVs versus gas cars fail to take into account the full lifecycle emissions of the fossil-fuel system: the carbon pollution produced by extracting, refining, and transporting a gallon of gasoline.)
Even if you only care about emissions math, two more important reasons justify switching to an EV.
First, when you switch to an EV, you cut down enormously on the marginal environmental cost of driving an additional mile. Most of an EV’s environmental harm is “front-loaded” in its lifetime; that is, it is associated with the cost of producing and selling that vehicle. (Most electronics, including smartphones and laptops, have a similarly front-loaded carbon cost.)
But the carbon emissions of driving an additional mile are relatively low. In other words, converting an additional kilowatt of electricity into a mile on the road is relatively benign for the climate.
That’s not the case for an internal combustion vehicle. In a conventional gasoline- or diesel-powered car, every additional mile you drive requires you to burn more fossil fuels.
Don’t overthink it: There is no way to operate a gasoline or diesel car without burning more fossil fuels. Conventional ICE cars are machines that turn fossil fuels into (1) miles on the road and (2) greenhouse gas pollution. This means that — importantly — using an internal combustion vehicle, or even a conventional hybrid vehicle, will never be climate-friendly.
That’s why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that switching to an electrified transportation system — in other words, switching from gas cars to EVs — is “likely crucial” for cutting climate pollution and meeting the Paris Agreement goals. As the International Council on Clean Transportation concluded recently, “There is no realistic pathway for deep decarbonization of combustion engine vehicles.”
This calculus is likely to improve over time. Over the past decade, the U.S. power grid’s climate pollution has plunged while emissions from the transportation sector have slightly risen; we anticipate that, over the next decade, the U.S. power grid’s greenhouse gas emissions are likely to decline at least moderately. Energy experts also expect more renewables to get built, and that natural gas will continue to drive coal off of the grid. These changes mean that the per-mile cost of driving an EV will likely fall. (If you’re in the market for an EV, Heatmap is here to guide you.)
When you switch to an EV, you do something else, too — something that may sound self-evident but is actually quite important: You increase demand for EVs and for the EV ecosystem.
To be painfully direct about why this is important, this means that you stop spending so much money into the gasoline-powered driving system — the network of car dealers, gas stations, and oil companies that subsist on fossil fuels — and begin paying for products and services from the car dealerships, charging stations, and automakers who have invested in the new, low-carbon future.
This is more important than it may seem at first. In the United States, automakers have struggled to ramp up their EV production in part because consumers haven’t been buying their EVs. EVs are a manufactured good, and the world is betting on their continued technological improvement. The more EVs get made at a company or industry level, the cheaper they should get. When you buy an EV, you prime the pump for further improvements in that manufacturing chain.
Under the Biden administration, the Environmental Protection Agency has adopted rules that could make EVs more than half of all new cars sold by 2032. But those rules are somewhat flexible — automakers could also meet them by selling a lot of conventional and plug-in hybrids — and they are under legal threat. If Donald Trump wins this year’s presidential election, then he will almost certainly roll them back, much as hereversed the Obama administration’s less ambitious car rules. And even if Kamala Harris wins, then the zealously conservative Supreme Court could easily throw out the rules.
Under most future scenarios, in other words, American consumers will have considerable power over how rapidly the country switches to electric vehicles. Even in a world where the federal government keeps subsidizing EV manufacturing and offers a $7,500 tax credit for EV buyers, the country’s transition to EVs will still depend on ordinary American families deciding to make a change and buy the cars.
So if you want to decarbonize your life, switching to an EV — provided that you drive enough for it to make sense — is one of the most important steps that you can take.
When you switch to an electric vehicle, you are doing several things. First, you are cutting off a source of demand for the oil industry. Second, you are creating a new source of demand for the EV industry. Third, you are generating new demand for the companies and infrastructure — such as charging stations — that will be needed for the entire transition.
Buying an EV is a climate decision that makes sense if you want to cut your carbon footprint and if you want to change the American energy system. That’s why it’s Heatmap’s No. 1 recommendation for how to decarbonize your life.
Whatever your motivation for buying an electric vehicle, here’s the thing: The first day you own one, you’re going to love it.
Forget the fears that come with a new technology, the negativity that stems from the politicization of EVs ownership, or the dead-and-buried stereotype that EVs are slow and boring rides for greenies only. Electric cars are zippy and fun because, unlike gas cars, they can produce a ton of torque from a resting stop. After a lifetime of listening to a car rattle and roar, I can say from experience that you’ll find driving in electric silence to be a revelation. An EV owner wakes up every morning with the equivalent of a full tank of gas because their home is their gas station.
Want a piece of this bliss? If so, then read on.
Brian Moody, an executive editor at Cox Automotive (which owns Kelly Blue Book) and an author specializing in transportation, automotive, and electric cars.
Joseph Yoon, consumer insights analyst for the automotive agency Edmunds.
Loren McDonald, CEO of EVAdoption, which provides data analysis and insights about the electrification of the car industry.
“That’s who the PHEV is for,” Moody told me. “You can do your errands around town with 30 to 40 miles, and when the battery runs out, you just keep driving.”
Ask nearly any EV expert and you’ll hear the same thing: “People don’t drive nearly as far as they think they do,” Moody said. Most of us put the vast majority of miles on our cars within a few dozen miles of our homes, running kids around town or driving to work. You’ll use up a small amount of your battery by the time you get home, plug in, and wake up the next day fully charged. Road trips may seem daunting to the uninitiated, but the interstates are now lined with fast-chargers and the number of them is growing quickly.
Building an EV generates more carbon emissions than building a gas car, a difference that’s due to mining and creating materials for the battery. But that’s just manufacturing a vehicle; once it’s built, it has a decade or two of driving ahead of it. A combustion car constantly spews carbon as it burns fossil fuels, which dwarfs the amount it takes to make an EV. Don’t forget: An electric car gets greener as the grid gets greener. The more clean energy is added to the world’s electrical supply, the better EVs get in comparison to gas cars. You’d need to live in a state with an especially dirty energy grid, such as Wyoming or West Virginia, for an EV not to be a much better option than driving around on gasoline. Furthermore, McDonald said, you can forget the propaganda that suggests EV batteries wind up stacked in a landfill somewhere when the cars meet their end. A growing number of companies are ready to recycle EV batteries and retrieve the precious metals therein, while it’s likely that lots of batteries will find a second life in applications such as grid storage.
It’s true that price has long been one of the biggest barriers to EV adoption. Even though tax incentives — together with savings on fuel and maintenance — make many electrics cost-competitive with their gas counterparts in the long term, their high sticker price keeps many people away. But more electric models are beginning to creep down toward the cost of entry-level gasoline cars.
As with buying an old-fashioned gas-guzzler, going to the dealership to get an EV means dealing with pushy salespeople, confusing specs, and haggling over the price. The process can be doubly frustrating for the EV shopper given the relative unavailability of some electric models and reports of some car salespeople who know frustratingly little about the very EVs they hock.
If you live in a market where EVs have taken hold, like the San Francisco Bay Area, expect knowledgeable salespeople who can walk you through the EV buying process. If you live someplace where few electrics are sold, then the experience may be hit-or-miss. Do your own research, and prepare to be your own advocate.
For a long time, things were simple: If you bought an electric vehicle, then you could take a $7,500 credit on your taxes for that year. But things have gotten murkier in the past year or two — in a bid to protect domestic manufacturing, Congress passed new rules stating that a certain amount of the car and its components had to be made in the U.S. to qualify, leaving a confusing, shifting picture of which EVs qualify and which don’t. (To wit: Many Teslas qualify, Hyundais and Kias don’t, while Rivians receive only half the credit because they’re so expensive.) The upside of the changed rules is that buyers are now allowed to get tax credits on leasing an EV, or to receive the credit as an up-front discount on their new EV. Many states have generous incentives, too. Washington, for example, will give up to $9,000 in rebates for buying an EV. “There are enormous discounts on basically every EV on the market, even before we count the $7,500 with the federal tax credit,” Yoon told me.
Before you take the plunge, take a moment and really think about how you drive — because lots of people overestimate what they need. Maybe even keep notes and check your mileage every day for a week or two to find out how much you really use the car versus how much you think you do. If you find that you could get around town on a few dozen miles of charge but road trip every other weekend, then you might consider a plug-in hybrid. If you’ve already got a gas car or hybrid to handle longer trips and are shopping for a second vehicle, there’s no reason not to go for an EV, assuming you can afford one. If you just need basic transportation to take you a few miles to work, hate the idea of ever buying gas again, and want to spend as little as possible … maybe you should get an e-bike.
A refresher: When you buy a car, you typically put a downpayment on the vehicle, and then borrow enough money from the bank to pay off the rest of its price (plus interest and sales tax) in monthly payments over the course of four, five, or even more years. Leasing is like renting an apartment. You put down a deposit and then pay monthly over the course of the lease, typically three years. But like your rent, those payments don't go toward owning the car. At the end of the lease, you give it back. With EVs especially, there are some serious advantages and drawbacks to each approach you should keep in mind.
If you live in a century-old house that would need to have significant rewiring done to accommodate an EV charger, then installing a Level 2 charger might be too expensive, so you might want to stick to a plug-in hybrid. (Again, more on charging below.) Does your office have a charger? If you live in an apartment, does the parking lot have chargers?
“How you refuel your EV is similar to how you charge your smartphone — you do it either throughout the day or at night before you go to bed. You plug in, you wake up, and it's full,” McDonald said.
“The first thing I tell people? You should probably get a Tesla,” Moody told me. Still, Elon Musk’s electric car company isn’t the darling it once was. Tesla has squandered a huge lead in the EV market by focusing on vanity projects like the Cybertruck and lost a chunk of public goodwill through Musk’s misadventures in politics and social media. But the company still has an ace up its sleeve with the Supercharger network, which is better and more reliable than the competition. This will change in the coming years, as the other automakers have adopted Tesla’s plug and their future cars will be able to use Superchargers. But for now, it’s a major advantage that makes owning a Tesla a lot less stressful than trying to get by with a competitor’s EV, especially if you make road trips. For this reason, Tesla’s Model Y — the best-selling car in the world in 2023, and the best-selling EV in America — remains a compelling choice for anyone who wants an EV to be their only car and have it go nearly anywhere.
Don’t want Musk to get your money? Fret not. EV offerings from legacy car companies and new automakers are leaps and bounds better than they were five years ago when Tesla took over the industry. Hyundai and its subsidiary Kia, in particular, have outpaced other carmakers in offering fun and practical EVs. The new Kia EV9 is the best choice for buyers who want a true EV with three rows so they can accommodate six or seven passengers, and it’s a sleek-looking vehicle for its size. Its $57,000 starting price is not cheap, but it’s probably the best deal you can get for a true three-row electric vehicle right now.
The Ioniq 5 is a quirky mashup of a crossover and a hatchback. It’s got enough space to be practical as a family vehicle, but its dimensions aren’t quite like anything else on the market. In the EV-laden part of Los Angeles where I live, it’s the most common non-Tesla electric I come across.
Introduced in 2021, the F-150 Lightning’s game-changing feature is two-way, or “bidirectional,” charging — you can plug into your house and use the energy stored in the truck’s battery to back up your home’s power supply in case of a blackout. Chevy is following suit by putting this tech into the Silverado EV. But even if you’re just driving and not powering your home, the Lightning is impressive — its standard battery produces 452 horsepower, but that number can climb to 580 on more expensive versions, and both offer a ton of torque.
Today’s Rivians are luxury lifestyle vehicles, but they offer a lot for all that cash. The R1 vehicles are spacious and well-appointed on the interior while offering lots of power and range for the off-road lifestyle the brand projects — the high-end version of the SUV gets 410 miles of range with 665 horsepower. Other excellent luxury EVs at the top end of the market include the Lucid Air and Mercedes EQS, but the Air has the space limitations of a sedan (though it is a large one) and the Benz is likely to cost more than $100,000. Rivians are pricey, but they’re not that pricey.
The people’s affordable EV champion, the Chevy Bolt, got the ax last year, but GM has promised to bring it back for people who want a smallish EV that doesn’t cost a fortune. In the meantime, the “SE” version of the Hyundai Kona EV, a small SUV, starts around $36,000 and gets 261 miles of range. (There’s an even cheaper version with 200 miles of range, but trust me: Don’t buy any new EV with less than 250 miles of range — e.g. the Nissan Leaf, Fiat 500, Mini Cooper, or Subaru Solterra — unless you really, really like it.) Chevy finally electrified its huge-selling SUV and rolled out the Equinox EV; while it starts at $41,000 now, GM promises a $35,000 version soon to come.
There are a wide variety of PHEVs that are worth a look, but an especially compelling option is the Toyota Prius Prime. The entire Prius family of hybrids and plug-in hybrids just got a facelift for 2023 that is miles ahead of the frumpy, aging look the car previously had. And where the previous Prius Prime was limited to a puny 25 miles of electric range, today’s will do 44 — enough for lots of people to do their daily city driving without burning any gas.
Some vocabulary to get you started:
Since charging at home is the make-or-break feature that will make your electrified life more convenient than your gas-burning days, your first order of business is getting a Level 2 charger installed. You’re going to need an electrician for this one, since it requires stepping up the voltage (and might require installing a new breaker panel or running new wiring, depending upon your home). Be sure to get multiple quotes so you can compare work estimates and prices.
“When you buy from an EV dealer or Tesla or whomever, they might refer you to an electrician or an installer. There are companies that have services and websites where they do all the work for you. You plug in your address and information, and they'll recommend and refer you to an installer,” McDonald said.
How much this’ll cost you varies by where you live and how much work it’ll take to set up your home, but the national average is $1,200 to $1,500, McDonald says. The exception could be older houses that were not set up for anything close to the electrical load it takes to charge a car, so if you own a hundred-year-old home in New England with lots of original wiring, you might be in for a shock. Don’t forget, however, that lots of incentives are available for setting up EV infrastructure at your home. You might be eligible for a tax credit equal to 30 percent of the cost up to $1,000.
As far as charging away from home? Most EVs automatically show nearby charging stations on their touchscreen navigation systems and will route you to the necessary stops along a long drive. Teslas will even show you how many stalls are available at a given Supercharger and how many other cars are en route. As an EV driver, you’ll get to know the fast-chargers in your neighborhood and along your familiar highways, but you’ll also get to know sites like Plugshare that will display every charger of every speed and every plug throughout that country — invaluable for planning a journey.
As you get comfortable with your own driving habits, you’ll figure out whether you need to expand your choices by purchasing adapters or dongles that let your car charge at different kinds of plugs. For example, today’s non-Tesla EVs eventually will be able to charge at Tesla superchargers, but because they are still being built with the competing CCS standard, you’d need an adapter to allow today’s Ford Mustang Mach-E to use a Tesla plug. I have an adapter in my Tesla Model 3 to use the “J1772” plugs you find on the Level 2 charger at the grocery store, and I bought one for the NEMA 14-50 plugs common at an RV campsite — just in case I really get into trouble out there.
When a car brakes to slow down, energy is lost. But in an EV, some of it can be recaptured via regenerative braking, a system that captures the energy from waste heat and puts it back into the battery. This allows for an experience unavailable to the gasoline motorist called one-pedal driving: Take your foot off the accelerator and the car immediately slows itself down via the regenerative braking system. When I drive my Tesla Model 3, I only hit the brake pedal when I need to slow down in a big hurry; otherwise, I let off the accelerator and let the car coast to a stop. This system can add several miles of range back onto the battery if you’re coasting out of the mountains on a steep downgrade.
A word of warning: Many people don’t like regenerative braking, at least at first, because it feels jerky to have the car instantly slow itself down when you let off the accelerator. But trust me, you’ll get better and better at letting off the pedal slowly so you don’t make your passengers nauseous. It’s also possible in many vehicles to turn down the regen so it’s less aggressive.
For starters, think of all the car vocabulary you won’t need anymore. An EV’s power output can be measured in torque and horsepower, but say goodbye to combustion-specific vernacular like spark plugs, cylinders, pistons, or liters as a measure of engine size (unless you get a plug-in hybrid). No more mufflers, no exhaust or timing belts. An EV has no use for miles per gallon, though carmakers and the EPA try to measure an electric car’s efficiency in miles per gallon equivalent as a way to compare them with gas cars.
As the months and years go by, you’ll appreciate a number of differences in the EV owner’s lifestyle. Drivers needn’t bother with remembering the pesky oil change every 3,000 miles, nor with worrying about the lifespans of thousands of moving parts that come with internal combustion. (On the other hand, today’s EVs burn through tires faster than gas cars do because of their weight and their performance.)
There’s a lot more to learn, of course. Just remember: The first time you bypass the gas station — with its stinky fumes and pesky commercials screaming at you — to refuel your car in the comfort of your home, you’ll wonder why you waited so long.
Time is not our friend when it comes to climate change. The value of lowering greenhouse gas emissions today is greater than doing it in five years because every molecule of carbon we emit between now and then will accumulate in the atmosphere. You, as an individual, can’t make your utility build or buy more solar power more quickly. But you can start generating carbon-free kilowatts at home in a matter of weeks. (For more on that, check out our guide to getting rooftop solar.)
There is a heated debate among clean energy experts about the value of rooftop solar in the climate fight. Heatmap contributor and Princeton professor Jesse Jenkins argues that because big utility-scale solar installations are so much cheaper to build, rooftop solar rarely does little more than crowd out these projects, making our future clean energy system more expensive.
But as Eric O’Shaughnessy, a renewable energy market research analyst, told me, we don’t have a central planner who can wave a wand and manifest the most cost effective system. And in the real world, economics isn't the only factor determining what we build. Although the U.S. is now building more renewable energy than it has in the past, and the cost is now on par with — if not lower than — new fossil fuel generation, the clean energy industry is battling serious headwinds. A stubborn trifecta of inflation, supply chain constraints, and high interest rates has slowed utility-scale development compared to what it might have looked like. Community opposition to clean energy projects has increased and will likely worsen as the least-controversial sites for development get used up. And we simply do not have enough power lines to accommodate new clean generation — solar and wind projects are waiting years to get approval to connect to the transmission system.
All of this is becoming a problem for our climate goals. A recent Rhodium Group report found that the pace of clean energy deployment has lagged projections of what programs under the Inflation Reduction Act could be achieving — projections that already fall short of how much we should be building to meet our emissions targets. Though some of the challenges may ease — for example, the Federal Reserve just cut interest rates, which had become a significant obstacle for clean energy deployment — others are likely to take longer to resolve.
Homeowners, by contrast, can avoid land-use conflicts and act comparatively swiftly. “This is a space that's not being used,” O’Shaughnessy said. “Most people don't ever go to their roof. There’s no site acquisition. You don’t have to worry about an endangered turtle.”
The immediate emissions benefits of installing solar really depend on where you live and how dirty your local grid is, among other factors. But the reason we still put rooftop solar in the number two slot is that it’s such a high leverage climate action in other ways. For example, having a solar array can help you afford future investments in other climate solutions like heat pumps and EVs, because it mitigates against electric bill increases. It can also reduce overall electricity demand in your neighborhood, which may help your utility avoid costly grid upgrades and keep rates lower in your area.
If you pair your solar array with a battery, you may be able to join a utility program that synchronizes thousands of these systems in your region to decrease strain on the grid, avoid blackouts, and preempt the need to deploy fossil fueled “peaker” plants in periods of especially high demand. Various estimates from the Department of Energy and private research firms have found that such “virtual power plants” have the potential to save billions of dollars over the next decade. These programs will typically pay you to participate, too.
Researchers have also found that rooftop solar is “contagious” — one new installation in a neighborhood can cascade into several. “If you install solar, you are going to go through a process that most people have not,” O’Shaughnessy told me. “In doing that, you are going up this learning curve, and all of that is something that you can share with your friends, neighbors, family after the fact.”
If you’re a renter, or if you aren’t able to get rooftop solar today for some other reason, subscribing to a community solar project is another way to help speed up solar deployment in your region and reap some of the benefits that homeowners have access to. Community solar arrays are usually small installations on warehouse roofs, parking lots, or beside highways. Subscribers sign up for a portion of the electricity produced, and receive credits on their electric bills the same way they would with a rooftop system. These projects aren’t available everywhere, though. Solar United Neighbors, who we consulted for our rooftop solar guide, has more background reading and a directory of projects you can subscribe to.
(A brief note on a third option: choosing a “green” retail electricity provider. This is a much more indirect way to support the energy transition, and experts are split on whether it’s worth doing at all. In theory, it sends a demand signal for renewables and helps new projects get built, but there’s no way to really know how far your money is going. Because the benefits are not guaranteed, we are not including this option in this package.)
Getting rooftop solar can be a big, confusing project, and our guide on the subject will walk you through everything you need to know to feel prepared to tackle it.