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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.
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CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the company’s expanding ambitions in a Threads post on Monday.
Meta is going big to power its ever-expanding artificial intelligence ambitions. It’s not just spending hundreds of millions of dollars luring engineers and executives from other top AI labs (including reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars for one engineer alone), but also investing hundreds of billions of dollars for data centers at the multi-gigawatt scale.
“Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online,” Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s Threads platform Monday, confirming a recent report by the semiconductor and artificial intelligence research service Semianalysis that
That first gigawatt-level project, Semianalysis wrote, will be a data center in New Albany, Ohio, called Prometheus, due to be online in 2026, Ashley Settle, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed to me. Ohio — and New Albany specifically — is the home of several large data center projects, including an existing Meta facility.
At the end of last year, Zuckerberg said that a datacenter project in Northeast Louisiana, now publicly known as Hyperion, would take 2 gigawatts of electricity; in his post on Monday, he said it could eventually be as large as 5 gigawatts. To get a sense of the scale we’re talking about, a new, large nuclear reactor has about a gigawatt of capacity, while a newly built natural gas plant could supply only around 500 megawatts.
As one could perhaps infer from the fact that their size is quoted in gigawatts instead of square feet or number of GPUs, whether or not these data centers get built comes down to the ability to power them.
Citing information from the natural gas company Williams, Semianalysis reported that Meta “went full Elon mode” for the New Albany datacenter, i.e. is installed its own natural gas infrastructure. Specifically, Williams is building two 200-megawatt facilities, according to the gas developer and Semianalysis, for the Ohio project. (Williams did not immediately respond to a Heatmap request for comment.)
Does this mean Meta is violating its commitments to reach net zero? While the data center buildout may make those goals more difficult to achieve, Meta is still investing in new renewables even as it’s also bringing new gas online. Late last month, the company announced that it was procuring almost 800 new megawatts of renewables from projects to be built by Invenergy, including over 400 megawatts of solar in Ohio, roughly matching the on-site generation from the Prometheus project.
But there’s more to a data center’s climate footprint than what a big tech company does — or does not — build on site.
The Louisiana project, Hyperion, will also be served by new natural gas and renewables added to the grid. Entergy, the local utility, has proposed 1.5 gigawatts of natural gas generation near the Meta site and over 2 gigawatts of new natural gas in total, with another plant in the southern part of the state to help balance the addition of significant new load. In December, when the data center was announced, Meta said that it planned to “bring at least 1,500 megawatts of new renewable energy to the grid.” Entergy did not immediately respond to a Heatmap request for comment on its plans for the Hyperion project.
“Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researcher. I'm looking forward to working with the top researchers to advance the frontier!” Zuckerberg wrote.
A new report from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy has some exciting data for anyone attempting to retrofit a multifamily building.
By now there’s plenty of evidence showing why heat pumps are such a promising solution for getting buildings off fossil fuels. But most of that research has focused on single-family homes. Larger apartment buildings with steam or hot water heating systems — i.e. most of the apartment buildings in the Northeast — are more difficult and expensive to retrofit.
A new report from the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, however, assesses a handful of new technologies designed to make that transition easier and finds they have the potential to significantly lower the cost of decarbonizing large buildings.
“Several new options make decarbonizing existing commercial and multifamily buildings much more feasible than a few years ago,” Steven Nadel, ACEEE’s executive director and one of the authors, told me. “The best option may vary from building to building, but there are some exciting new options.”
To date, big, multifamily buildings have generally had two flavors of heat pumps to consider. They can install a large central heat pump system that delivers heating and cooling throughout the structure, or they can go with a series of “mini-split” systems designed to serve each apartment individually. (Yes, there are geothermal heat pumps, too, but those are often even more expensive and complicated to install, especially in urban areas.)
While these options have proven to work, they often require a fair amount of construction work, including upgrading electrical systems, mounting equipment on interior and exterior walls, and running new refrigerant lines throughout the building. That means they cost a lot more than a simple boiler replacement, and that the retrofit process can be disruptive to residents.
In 2022, the New York City Housing Authority launched a contest to try and solve these problems by challenging manufacturers to develop heat pumps that can sit in a window just like an air conditioner. New designs from the two winners, Gradient Comfort and Midea, are just starting to come to market. But another emerging solution, central air-to-water heat pumps, also presents an appealing alternative. These systems avoid major construction because they can integrate with existing radiators or baseboard heaters in buildings that currently use hot water boilers. Instead of burning natural gas or oil to produce hot water, the heat pump warms the water using electricity.
The ACEEE report takes the cost and performance data for these emerging solutions and compares it to results from mini-splits, central heat pumps, geothermal heat pumps, packaged terminal heat pumps — all-in-one devices that sit inside a sleeve in the wall, commonly used in hotels — and traditional boilers fed by biogas or biodiesel.
While data on the newer technologies is limited, so far the results are extremely promising. The report found that window heat pumps are the most cost-effective of the bunch to fully decarbonize large apartment buildings, with an average installation cost of $9,300 per apartment. That’s significantly higher than the estimated $1,200 per apartment cost of a new boiler, but much lower than the $14,000 to $20,000 per apartment price tag of the other heat pump variations, although air-to-water heat pumps came in second. The report also found that window heat pumps could turn out to be the cheapest to operate, with a life cycle cost of about $14,500, compared to $22,000 to $30,000 for boilers using biodiesel or biogas or other heat pump options.
As someone who has followed this industry for several years with a keen interest in new solutions for boiler-heated buildings in the Northeast — where I grew up and currently reside — I was especially wowed by how well the new window heat pumps have performed. New York City installed units from both Midea and Gradient in 24 public housing apartments, placing one in each bedroom and living room, and monitored the results for a full heating season.
Preliminary data shows the units performed swimmingly on every metric.
On ease of installation: It took a total of eight days for maintenance workers to install the units in all 24 apartments, compared to about 10 days per apartment when the Housing Authority put split heat pump systems in another building.
On performance: During the winter, while other apartments in the building were baking in 90-degree Fahrenheit heat from the steam system, the window unit-heated apartments maintained a comfortable 75 to 80 degree range, even as outdoor temperatures dropped to as low as 20 degrees.
On energy and cost: The window unit-heated apartments used a whopping 87% less energy than the rest of the building’s steam-heated apartments did, cutting energy costs per household in half.
On customer satisfaction: A survey of 72 residents returned overwhelmingly positive feedback, with 93% reporting that the temperature was “just right” and 100% reporting they were either “neutral” or “satisfied” with the new units.
The Housing Authority found that the units also lowered energy used for cooling in peak summer since they were more efficient than the older window ACs residents had been using. Next, the agency plans to expand the pilot to two full buildings before deploying the units across its portfolio. The pilot was so successful that utilities in Massachusetts, Vermont, and elsewhere are purchasing units to do their own testing.
The ACEEE report looked at a handful of air-to-water heat pump projects in New York and Massachusetts, as well, only two of which have been completed. The average installation cost per apartment was around $13,500, with each of the buildings retaining a natural gas boiler as a backup, but none had published performance data yet.
Air-to-water heat pumps have only recently come to market in the U.S. after having taken off in Europe, and they don’t yet fit seamlessly into the housing stock here. Existing technology can only heat water to 130 to 140 degrees, which is hot enough for the more efficient hot water radiators common in Europe but too cold for the U.S. market, where hot water systems are designed to carry 160- to 180-degree water, or even steam.
These heat pumps can still work in U.S. buildings, but they require either new radiators to be installed or supplemental heat from a conventional boiler or electric resistance unit. The other downside to an air-to-water system is that it can’t provide cooling unless the building is already equipped with compatible air conditioning units.
One strength of these systems over the window units, however, is that they don’t push costs onto tenants in buildings where the landlord has historically paid for heat. They also may be cheaper to operate than more traditional heat pump options, although data is still extremely limited and depends on the use of supplemental heat.
It’s probably too soon to draw any major conclusions about air-to-water systems, anyway, because new, potentially more effective options are on the way. In 2023, New York State launched a contest challenging manufacturers to develop new decarbonized heating solutions for large buildings. Among the finalists announced last year, six companies were developing heat pumps that could generate higher-temperature hot water and/or steam. One of them is now installing its first demonstration system in an apartment building in Harlem, and two others have similar demonstrations in the works.
The ACEEE report also mentions a few other promising new heat pump formats, such as an all-in-one wall-mounted heat pump from Italian company Ephoca. It’s similar to the window heat pump in that it’s contained in a single device rather than split into an indoor and outdoor unit, so it doesn’t require mounting anything to the outside of the building or worrying about refrigerant lines, although it does require drilling two six-inch holes in the wall for vents. These may be a good option for those whose windows won’t accommodate a window heat pump or who don’t like the aesthetics. New York State is also funding product development for better packaged terminal heat pumps that could slot into wall cavities occupied by less-efficient packaged terminal air conditioners and heat pumps today.
Gradient and Midea are not yet selling their cold-climate window heat pumps to the general public. Gradient brought a version of its technology for more moderate climates to market in 2023, which was only suitable for heating at outdoor temperatures of 40 degrees and higher. But the company has discontinued that model and is focusing on an “all-weather” version designed for cold climates, which is the one that has been installed in the New York City apartments. Neither company responded to my inquiry about when their heat pumps would be available to consumers.
One big takeaway is that even the new school heat pumps designed to be easier and cheaper to install have higher capital costs than buying a boiler and air conditioners — a stubborn facet of many climate solutions, even when they save money in the long run. Canary Media previously reported that the Gradient product would start at $3,800 per unit and the Midea at $3,000. Experts expect the cost to come down as adoption and demand pick up, but the ACEEE report recommends that states develop incentives and financing to help with up-front costs.
“These are not just going to happen on their own. We do need some policy support for them,” Nadel said. In addition to incentives and building decarbonization standards, Nadel raised the idea of discounted electric rates for heat pump users, an idea that has started to gain traction among climate advocates that a few utilities have piloted.
“To oversimplify,” Nadel said, “in many jurisdictions, heat pumps subsidize other customers, and that probably needs to change if this is going to be viable.”
Current conditions: Two people are missing after torrential rains in Catalonia • The daily high will be over 115 degrees Fahrenheit every day this week in Baghdad, Iraq • The search for victims of the Texas floods is paused due to a new round of rains and flooding in the Hill Country.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem defended the Federal Emergency Management Agency after The New York Times reported it failed to answer nearly two-thirds of the calls placed to its disaster assistance line by victims of the Central Texas floods. Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Noem repudiated reports by the Times and Reuters that her requirement that she personally approve expenses over $100,000, as well as the deployment of other critical resources, created bottlenecks during the crucial hours after the floodwaters receded. “Those claims are absolutely false,” she said.
Noem additionally denied reports that FEMA’s failure to renew the contracts of call-center contractors created a slowdown at the agency. Per the Times’ reporting, FEMA allowed its call center contract extension to expire on the night of July 5, in the midst of the unfolding disaster. During the day on July 5, FEMA answered the calls of 99.7% of survivors seeking one-time assistance for their immediate needs, the Times’ reporting shows; after FEMA failed to renew the contracts and hundreds of contractors were fired, the answer rate dropped to just 35.8% on July 6, and 15.9% on July 7. “Those contracts were in place, no employees were off of work,” Noem told Meet the Press. (Reuters reports that an internal FEMA document shows Noem approved the call center contracts as of July 10.)
At least 120 people died in the flash floods in Texas’ Hill Country over the Fourth of July weekend, with more than 160 people still missing. FEMA has fired or bought out at least 2,000 full-time employees since the start of the year, though since the floods, the Trump administration has reframed its push to “abolish” FEMA as “rebranding” FEMA, instead.
The Trump administration last week fired the final handful of employees who worked at the Office of Global Change, the division of the State Department that focused on global climate negotiations. Per The Washington Post, the employees were the final group at the department working on issues of international climate policy, and were part of bigger cuts to the agency that will see nearly 3,000 staffers out of work. “The Department is undertaking a significant and historic reorganization to better align our workforce activities and programs with the America First foreign policy priorities,” the State Department told the Post in a statement about the shuttering of the office.
Grand Canyon Lodge employees pictured on July 20, 1930. NPS/George Grant
The historic Grand Canyon Lodge burned down in the nearly 6,000-acre Dragon Bravo Fire in Arizona over the weekend. The rustic lodge, located on the Canyon’s remote North Rim, had stood since 1937, when it was rebuilt after a kitchen fire, and was the only hotel located inside the boundaries of the national park.
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs called for an investigation into the National Park Service’s handling of the fire, which destroyed an additional 50 to 80 structures on the park’s North Rim. “An incident of this magnitude demands intense oversight and scrutiny into the federal government’s emergency response,” she said, adding that “Arizonans deserve answers for how this fire was allowed to decimate the Grand Canyon National Park.” The Dragon Bravo Fire is one of two wildfires burning on the park’s north side and began after a lightning strike on July 4. The famous Phantom Ranch, located inside the canyon, and popular Bright Angel Trail and Havasupai Gardens, were also closed to hikers as of Sunday due to the fires.
Late last week, the local government of Nantucket reached a settlement with GE Vernova for $10.5 million to compensate for the tourism and business losses that resulted from the July 2024 turbine failure at Vineyard Wind 1. The town will use the money to establish a Community Claims Fund to provide compensation to affected parties.
The incident involved a 350-foot blade from a GE Vernova turbine that split off and fell into the water during construction of Vineyard Wind. Debris washed up onshore, temporarily closing some of the Massachusetts island’s iconic beaches during the height of tourist season. “The backlash was swift,” my colleague Emily Pontecorvo reported at the time. “Nantucket residents immediately wrote to Nantucket’s Select Board to ask the town to stop the construction of any additional offshore wind turbines.” Though significant errors like blade failures are incredibly rare, as my colleague Jael Holzman has also reported, the disaster could not have come at a worse time for Vineyard Wind, which subsequently saw its expansion efforts stymied by the Trump administration.
Nineteen states and the territory of Guam moved last week to intervene in a May lawsuit claiming the Trump administration has violated young people’s right to good health and a stable environment. The original complaint was filed in May by 22 plaintiffs represented by Our Children’s Trust — the same Oregon group that brought Held v. Montana, which successfully argued that the state violated young people’s constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment, as well as the groundbreaking climate case Juliana v. United States, which the Supreme Court declined to hear this spring.
In the new Montana-led move, the coalition of states represented by their respective attorneys general is seeking to join the lawsuit as defendants. Per Our Children’s Trust, the plaintiffs will file a formal response to the motion to intervene in the coming weeks.
More than half of all the soybean oil produced in the United States next year will be used to make biofuel, according to a new outlook by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the current state of the youth climate lawsuit.