Some of the most significant sources of air pollution might be right inside your home. Robert Howarth, David R. Atkinson Professor of Ecology and Environmental Biology at Cornell, and host Chris Wofford explore the shift from fossil fuels—like the natural gas that powers kitchen stoves—to cost-effective, climate-conscious energy solutions. This podcast is created by eCornell and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
Most greenhouse gas emissions in the United States are generated during the process of burning fossil fuels for heat, electricity and transportation. As concerns about the resulting negative health effects and rapid global warming grow, legislators nationwide are developing plans to change course on energy production.
In this episode, hear from Robert Howarth, David R. Atkinson Professor of Ecology and Environmental Biology at the Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, on tactics for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the ambitious goals of New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.
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Chris Wofford
On today's show, we are joined by professor, scientist and climate policy expert Bob Howarth from Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Bob and I discussed the climate impacts of fossil fuel use in the home, like our guest stoves, our heat, our furnaces and we look at measures we can take as individuals, community members, and citizens to lessen those impacts.
Chris Wofford
We also review recent climate legislation in New York State, which Bob played a key advisory role in shaping. So check out the episode notes for links and resources to learn more about this vital topic. Here's my interview with Cornell's Bob Howarth. Let's talk greenhouse gas emissions, which are the principal causes of global warming, climate disruption. What gases specifically are we talking about?
Robert Howarth
The two major gases we're talking about are carbon dioxide, first and foremost, but also methane. And those two together are driving 85% of climate change.
Chris Wofford
I should mention that we're going to be talking about this, the global issue in the context of recent legislation that was passed here in New York. The issues that we're discussing here are universally applicable, and perhaps some can take some inspiration from what's being done in our state. We've talked about this being the idea or perhaps we have an opportunity to, you know, set the dye for this kind of thing.
Robert Howarth
Yeah, I think New York is setting a great example for other states and other countries as to what we can do.
Chris Wofford
Okay. So let's talk about this legislation that was passed in 2019. You played an advisory role in getting that passed. What are we talking about here?
Robert Howarth
It's the New York Climate Law Schools, CLCPA, Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act was passed in the summer of 2019, is based on legislation that had been passed for several years before that actually going back to 2015 in the state assembly. It's a very progressive law. It calls for things like reducing our greenhouse gas emissions across all economic sectors in New York State by 40% by 2030, by 85% by 2050, calls for having 70% of our electricity being renewables by 2030. Many other targets like that. It also calls for making sure that the historically disadvantaged are brought up to speed and benefited from the policies of the law as well.
Chris Wofford
So what we're kind of focusing on today is eradicating fossil fuel use in the home. Can you talk about how that occurs? How do we generate fossil fuels? Well, just by simply living in our homes that are fueled by gas and electric and?
Robert Howarth
And, you know, if we look at New York, the number one economic sector for greenhouse gas emissions is the energy that's used in our homes and our commercial buildings. It's 35% to 40% of the total greenhouse gas emissions across the entire state, followed by transportation fairly distant second or about 28%. So if we want to meet the targets of this New York climate law, we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in our homes and in our commercial buildings.
Robert Howarth
And that means moving away from fossil fuels. You know, currently we have 6 million single family homes that are heated with fossil fuels in the state, mostly natural gas, but propane and fuel oil as well. We have a huge number of apartment buildings that are heated with fossil fuels as well. We need to move those so they're heated with electricity instead and what we call beneficial electricity.
Robert Howarth
So using high efficiency heat pumps to replace the heat or now generating in the building from fossil fuels.
Chris Wofford
So let's talk about some of the appliances, right? So what are some of the key focal points? Where are the biggest infractions taking place in the home?
Robert Howarth
The first thing is heating our space, our space heating. And so, instead of having a gas furnace or a propane or an oil furnace, we want to have a heat pump. And what you ask is a heat pump. You know, and heat pump is a device that is extracting energy from the environment, either extracting it from air, all the air source heat pump, or it's extracting it from groundwater because those ground source heat pumps and so they run with electricity.
Robert Howarth
But for every unit of electricity you're putting in, you're actually getting more energy out as heat. You're getting two, three up to five times more heat energy in than you're putting in. And so they're hugely efficient. When we convert from using fossil fuels in the home to using these, our energy use statewide is actually going down hugely. Electricity use is going up, but energy use has gone down and greenhouse gas emissions go down immediately.
Robert Howarth
Turns out that, you know, say you're currently heating your home with natural gas and you instead put in one of these high efficiency heat pumps. Even if the electricity for that came 1% from natural gas, your emissions will go down by this conversion because of the heat extraction and the huge efficiencies from that. And of course, we're also moving away from fossil fuels for electricity, so this is what we need to do to move to carbon neutrality.
Chris Wofford
You discussed in our pregame huddle that you replaced your heat pump in your home 15 years ago or something like that?
Robert Howarth
We started the next biggest uses is a domestic hot water.
Chris Wofford
Oh yes. Let's go back to that.
Robert Howarth
Yeah. Cause washing and your, you know, dishwashing etc. And that's roughly about 25% to 30% of people's energy use in a home on average in New York State. So that's what we started with. You know, we own a 1870 farmhouse. We used to heat the house, both the space and the hot water, with oil going back to 15 years ago, we stopped using the oil for the water heating and we put in a high efficiency heat pump just for that.
Robert Howarth
That's a pretty low cost investment of $2,000 installed. We'll get you one of those payback periods is really fast.
Chris Wofford
You said like two years or something.
Robert Howarth
Yeah, exactly.
Chris Wofford
And it's going to last for 15 plus years.
Robert Howarth
Yeah. Yeah. Well, we replaced ours a couple of years ago, so after 12 years, we're still working. But I thought, you know, I wasn't going to replace it. Well, it's still working well. The other thing we did on our house, you know, the other two thirds of average energy use in a home is the space heating.
Robert Howarth
It's the biggest use. And we continued to use oil for that until 2014. At that point, we pulled the oil completely out of the heat and we replaced our ground source heat pump, the payback period for that was longer, but it's paid back by now. It took about six or seven years lower energy costs, lower maintenance costs. It paid itself back.
Robert Howarth
So in our case, you know, it's a substantial upfront capital cost. I don't want to get that wrong, but the savings are immediate and beneficial. Now, it turns out that for New York we have a plan on part of the Climate Action Council that developed the implementation plan for this climate law. And we looked at details as to how to make the conversion and existing homes, what to do with new homes.Turns out for new home construction that's actually cheaper to build a home based on these heat pumps than it is to build one for fossil fuels.
Chris Wofford
How?
Robert Howarth
It's just less expensive from day one. Put heat pumping as opposed to a furnace, particularly if you're also going to have air conditioning. The heat pumps do both. And most homes now have air conditioning.
Robert Howarth
And so it's actually less expensive to just give up on the fossil fuels. But if you have an existing home, the costs are real. Those upfront costs are real, payback periods are reasonable. The trick is to provide low cost or zero cost loans to get people into that upfront cost and pay back then. So that's what our plan calls for.
Chris Wofford
There's a political hot button issue component to this, which is the gas stove. Right. So you made, you made recommendations that we should eradicate gas stoves from the home.
Robert Howarth
Yeah. No, it's more than recommendations. It's actually part of the plan and it's binding after 2030, if you want, for new construction, actually in New York now, by law after 2026, you will not be able to use fossil fuels in your home for heating, cooking of any sort. It'll have to be electrification, beneficial electrification. For existing homes, you can continue to do what you like. But after 2030, under the blueprint that we put in place for the climate law, if your gas stove were to die, you would not be able to replace it. You'd have to do something else, but you want to do something else. The stove is an interesting case. They're not huge energy consumers. So you look at where some of the gas is being used in the home. It's mostly the space heating. Secondarily, it's the water might be a gas-closed dryer. The gas cookstoves a pretty small part of that. There are a bunch of reasons you want to get gas out of a stove for cooking anyway. But let's put that aside for a moment. The discussion we had on our Climate Action Council in developing the implementation plan here was once you get gas out of the home for heating, you cannot in a cost effective way, and a safety way, continue to run a gas distribution pipeline system that's just way too expensive.
Robert Howarth
You're not consuming enough product to sell it. And so you really need to declassify the whole system as a matter of economics and safety. You know, 30 years out, when no one's using gas to heat your homes, it would be insane to have gas lines just that small amount for the stove. So it's the real largest. And yeah, but on top of that, you know, gas stoves really are bad for one's health.
Robert Howarth
People don't understand that. They burn, they admit within the home, even if you have your exhaust fan running all the time, which most people don't, they're not terribly effective all of the time. They produce a variety of toxic air pollutants in the home. And the latest evidence of close to 20% of children who have asthma in the state of New York have it in part because of gas stoves in their homes. 20 percent.
Chris Wofford
What does that actually do to the pulmonary system?
Robert Howarth
That makes it hard to breathe. It makes it hard to participate in sports. It makes it hard to go outside. It makes it hard to go to school. You're in the hospital unnecessarily. You're losing school days as an adult. You're losing work days. The health costs of fossil fuels are really high, and part of that's the indoor health cost.
Robert Howarth
Part of it's the outdoor air pollution from other ways we use fossil fuels. But part of the plan that we developed for the Climate Action Council show that the costs of converting our state away from fossil fuels are real to real money, billions of dollars over 30 years. But the cost savings are greater and they're substantially greater. And a large part of those are the health cost savings. People will be healthier, they will be in the hospital less, they'll be happier, they'll miss less school, they'll miss less work.
Chris Wofford
So there'll be presumably and you had alluded to this earlier incentivization in order to bring this about, what does that look like in New York?
Robert Howarth
Well, for new construction, it's very little is needed because, as I said, the costs are actually less to build it out so that this will simply be a matter of the code and people will get used to and accept it, it will seem normal. For retrofitting homes, you know, we need to provide incentives for those upfront costs for people replacing their gas stoves.
Chris Wofford
How much money are we talking about? What do you think it might be?
Robert Howarth
If we look at heating, which is where we did the most analysis behind the Climate Action Council? It depends on the home, but the average home conversion would be in terms of gross costs, it's about $25,000 per home. Some homes are more. My home conversion was more than that, some will be less if you have a smaller home.
Robert Howarth
But $25,000 on average, that's the upfront costs. Again, the energy use immediately goes down, your maintenance costs go down. So you start making that back right away. But if you don't have $25,000, then we need to provide $25,000. For those who are reasonably well off economically, I think we do provide low cost loans to zero interest loans that'll take care of it.
Robert Howarth
There are some people who are still going to be a hardship for and there could be a matter of grants. And the nice thing is that the Inflation Reduction Act Congress passed, Federal Government passed in 2022, will provide substantial incentives for heat pumps in homes, and New York is actually in a great position to take advantage of that law because we have our own law and we've set up this implementation plan.
Robert Howarth
So, you know, the federal government is still working out the details on that. And we'll see exactly how it plays out. But the draft language I've seen is that if your family income is, say, at the median level for your community, you'll probably get the heat pump for free. And if you were at 1.2 times the median income for your community, you might have to pay half of the heat pump cost upfront.
Robert Howarth
But again, that's a low interest loan and you pay it back. So this could be a really big economic boon for people. And another way to look at it, I mean, it's good for the climate. That's what the law is about. It's also good for public health. But it's good for the energy security, the economic planning of individual homeowners and individual communities.
Robert Howarth
Over the last two years, the price of natural gas more than doubled, you know, last winter. That's a huge whammy if you're heating your home with natural gas and you didn’t expect it right?
Chris Wofford
So many New Yorkers.
Robert Howarth
Yeah. And you know, those sort of price volatilities in fossil fuels are only going to get worse as we move into the future. Once you have your own heat pump, the electric prices, they bounced around some too, more than I would have liked to have seen, partly because of the natural gas price. But in, you know, the eventual world we have of 1% fossil fuel free energy for electricity, the price stability becomes very predictable.
Robert Howarth
The energy security is a lot higher.
Chris Wofford
Hey, I have a question from viewer Nick who asks, what is your response to the fact that air source heat pumps lose most of their efficiency in cold climates like we see in most of the New York state? It's pretty chilly here.
Robert Howarth
Yeah, no, that's a great question. And then there are two answers to it. One, three, actually. But one, we spend an incredible amount of effort developing this implementation plan through the Climate Action Council. And let me just start by saying I was one of 22 members on this council. We're not some radical group. 12 of the members are established by nature of the law. The rest of us are appointed by the governor or by the Assembly or Senate.
Chris Wofford
What are the titles of some of the other people that are on the council?
Robert Howarth
The Commissioner of Environmental Conservation, the Commissioner of Labor, the Commissioner of Transportation, the President of Long Island power authority, the President of the New York Power Authority, the President of the Energy Research and Development Authority. Those are 12 of the people. And then there are ten of us who are appointed. Of the 22 of us all together, 19 of us voted for this plan, including all 12 of the people who are the commissioners, etc.
Robert Howarth
Of the three people who voted against it, two of them were appointed by Republican interests and they both represent and work for the fossil fuel industry, quite frankly. So this is not some hot headed radical thing. This is, you know, coming out of the establishment of the state. We spent three years working on it. We came up with draft plans.
Robert Howarth
We took a huge amount of public input from panels and from consultants. We put it out for public review. We had hearings. We had to learn 11 public hearings, comments from over 1,000 people. We took written comments. There were written comments from over 3,000 people. We went through all of those and we paid attention to it. So that's an aside.
Robert Howarth
But let's go back to the heat pump. That heat pump question reminded me that I've heard this question before among the 30,0 comments we've seen. So if you go to the old fashioned heat pumps that you might have, your father might have put in his house 30 years ago, they're terribly inefficient. When the temperature gets below freezing. Modern air source heat pumps are quite efficient.
Robert Howarth
The temperatures down to about zero degree Fahrenheit or so. They're not as efficient as zero as they are at the freezing point, but they're still somewhat efficient. Below that, their efficiency drops really quickly. And so you're forced to use just street resistance, electric heating for that time, but you still heat your home. You're just using somewhat more energy than you would if it weren't quite so cold.
Robert Howarth
That's not ideal. You're still using a lot less energy than if you're using fossil fuels.
Chris Wofford
So inner basement temps are 55 degrees, right?
Robert Howarth
Yeah. But that's for the air source heat pump. For my home. I use the ground source heat pump. Think about the ground source heat pump is the efficiency is the same year round, no matter what the outside air temperature is because it's based on the ground water temperature, which is about 50 to 55 degrees year round. So they're more efficient all the time than an air source heat pump, and particularly when they're coal.
Robert Howarth
And one of the things we discussed at some length on the Climate Action Council is from, you know, from a homeowner standpoint, if you're looking just at those upfront costs, they are source heat pumps are less than the ground source heat pumps. I'm going to go that way from day one. Once you install it, your energy costs are higher for the air source.
Robert Howarth
Maintenance costs are higher. So maybe you would have one to go for the ground source heat pump, which is what I did. But from the statewide standpoint, if we can encourage more and more people to use the ground source heat pumps, it means a lot less electric consumption on those peak cold days. If everyone goes for air source, heat pumps are, you know, currently with the New York grid peaks on the hot summer days.
Robert Howarth
Winter's easy to meet. If we reverse and everyone uses air source heat pumps, then those cold January days are going to be our peak days. And we need to build capacity to provide electricity for those days, which is a challenge to go with ground source heat pumps. It gets rid of that challenge. It's much, much easier to produce the electricity we need.
Robert Howarth
And so from the standpoint of the society, the state as a whole, it's actually cheaper. Even if on an individual home basis there might be a little bit more costs. So we need to build that into the, you know, the structure of system of who pays for what.
Chris Wofford
I have a question related to this from Albert, who asks, how can we possibly eliminate fossil fuels in our homes? When we're using electricity, which is often made from fossil fuels like coal and gas power generators? What are your thoughts about nuclear energy, fusion energy as bridges to replace fossil fuels? This is constant.
Robert Howarth
Yeah, there are a couple of questions in there. And again, these are things that we debated hugely in the Council and I've actually worked on as an academic as well for quite some time. To begin with in New York, we have two grids in New York, essentially an upstate grid which encompasses all the states except for New York City, Westchester County and Long Island.
Robert Howarth
Our upstate grid right now is 90% fossil fuel free. People don't know that. It's about 40% nuclear and the rest is hydro with a little bit of other renewable, but it's not fossil fuel. So we actually upstate New York is about the cleanest grid in the entire country right now. So that's a good starting point. Downstate it’s about two thirds natural gas, it's a much higher emitter.
Robert Howarth
And of course we're one state. We need to work that. So we need to move particularly downstate to renewable energy or fossil fuel energy. And as we go, the beneficial electrification of heating and also transportation. We haven't talked about electric cars. Electric trucks are overall energy use will go down, but our electricity use will go up and we need to plan for that.
Robert Howarth
The state is planning for that. The Climate Action Council's plan for that. We can do that and we debated on the Council extensively the relative rules of wind, solar, hydro versus nuclear. And what we decided in the end and I support this, 19 of us do, is to not prematurely phase out the nuclear plants we have currently operating.
Chris Wofford
How many are there in New York?
Robert Howarth
Five, I believe. Yeah. Let them run through their current licensing periods, not work to replace them and not build new ones either to, to augment because the electricity we can generate from hydro, solar and wind is cheaper, far cheaper to deploy, faster to deploy. And we can do it more cost effectively than by building more nuclear. But we won't premature early retire the nuclear plants we have.
Chris Wofford
I want to shift gears a little bit. I want to be conscious of time here and also I want to discuss the manufacturing opportunity that comes with outfitting new homes. I found this part fascinating. Tell me a little bit about what the opportunity is.
Robert Howarth
We're talking a little bit before we can start it here. Yeah, you know, let's go back to these 6 million single individual homes we have in New York. We want to convert those to heat pumps. The plan calls for doing about a quarter of a million new heat pump conversions in the existing housing stock every year. That's a lot of heat pumps.
Robert Howarth
That's about ten times more than historically we've been installing in the state. Other countries in the world are ramping up, too. You look across Europe, particularly because of Ukraine war, heat pumps are surging. So there's there's an incredible global demand for heat pumps. So the supply chain issue is going to creep up here.
Chris Wofford
What are they made right now mostly?
Robert Howarth
For the air source heat pumps, the most effective companies are Japanese, and they're mostly coming from Asia. Some of them have started to operate in Europe and they're starting to manufacture in some of the United States, too, but not yet in New York. We ought to be encouraging, you know, those companies, Mitsubishi, Fujitsu, that's the most efficient air source, heat pumps. Let's get them to build some of them here in New York. Right. New York jobs as well as the heat pumps we need. The ground source heat pumps are mostly American made. The one I have is water furnace that I believe is made in Ohio. But again, let's you know, let's get them to open up the plant here in New York, too.
Robert Howarth
Given the demand that this law will push, it's a huge opportunity for the state to sort of rebuild our economy. And I think of all these Rust Belt cities we've had in Rochester, Kodak has gone right, etc. Let's replace it with the manufacturing. We need to make this plant work.
Chris Wofford
Nick is sounds like he's ready to install one. He wants to know how much space is required to install ground source.
Robert Howarth
Well, ground source heat pumps, you have a fairly large need to exchange the heat with the ground and you have two choices. You can have lateral loops which run out, you know, horizontally, and it's pretty space intensive. The other possibility is to put in wells. And actually, you know, I own 100 acres of land. I went with wells even though I have the land, because they're more efficient, slightly more expensive, but they're more efficient over time.
Robert Howarth
And with wells that, you know, if you have 1, 2 square feet in your yard, you have enough space to put in wells to support these things. Then in new homes, you can put them under the foundation as you build it.
Chris Wofford
How does New York's policy, the legislation, the acts that are put in place, how do they stack up nationally with California doing toward this end? Was there a model that you were working off of? Is there any European countries that, you know, set a template for what you were doing trying to do here?
Robert Howarth
There are a lot of the states and countries that have tried to set targets. I actually think that the New York climate law at the time and passed four years ago was the most progressive among all the states. Washington state is doing some things, you know as well a better than we are, California perhaps as well Denmark is always in a leadership position in this area.
Robert Howarth
Right. But the New York law certainly stood out as of four years ago. And there's still some aspects of it that I think are truly outstanding. One is that we account for greenhouse gases unlike any other state than we actually fully account for the latest science, telling us the importance of methane accounting. No other state does that. They're using science that's, you know, 30, 40 years out of date.
Robert Howarth
Methane is responsible for much, much more warming than we used to think. Most states ignore that. It's important to recognize that when you think about using natural gas, you know, as we were discussing earlier, New York banned fracking back in 2014. Our use of natural gas in the state has risen faster than that of any other state. In the time we've banned fracking.
Robert Howarth
We don't produce most of that gas. It's coming from Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia. The methane emissions from it there are huge. Historically would have said, that's that's in Pennsylvania. That's their problem. But under this law we go know if that methane is being emitted because of the natural gas that's being produced to serve us, we need to take responsibility for that. How else can you, you know, do the cost benefit analysis of seeing what the real costs are? That's a truly unique aspect. State of Maryland is now following us. I think other states will start to. But that's no other, California, other states have not yet come around to that viewpoint. The other thing that our law does is is put equal weight across all economic sectors from the start. It lets us to data drive what's going on in New York. Our buildings are our major emitters. You know, most other states predetermine that we're going to focus on our electricity. Okay. Got to focus on electricity or transportation. You've got to do transportation. But New York is really out in front in dealing with what it means in terms of buildings and in order to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions in this state in any substantial way, you cannot do so without buildings.
Robert Howarth
Now, you know, we have a bigger challenge than California because it's colder here. You know, cars and trucks are the issue in California, and they're important here in New York. But heating our buildings is our real issue here.
Chris Wofford
So where do you see the future, legislatively or otherwise or policy? Where do you see things going? Because we've just discussed what's going to be happening with new construction, retrofitting homes. What's the next frontier for the work that you do?
Robert Howarth
In terms of what's going on with the New York plan and all, tere's still, the state is still working the details of how to provide some of the incentives and how to pay for it. And one of the things we came up with out of the Climate Action Council is called a cap and invest program. So it caps fossil fuel emissions sector by sector, on under the law, they're already capped, but it sort of says what those will be year by year, and then it will essentially charge the energy wholesalers, the gas distributors, for example, a fee to push to make sure that cap is met.
Robert Howarth
We recommended that, we did so knowing full well that there are a lot of complications in there. You need to be really careful that the economically unable are not going to be hit and that you want to do it. So there's not some backlash against the law. A lot of details to work on, and we didn't work out what those details are.
Robert Howarth
So, you know, what we said is the state should do it. And the Department of Environmental Conservation is working on that this year. They've had a series of public hearings. They're supposed to promulgate draft regulations by the end of this year as to how to do it. You know, people should be paying attention to the detail there, because I think this could be a really good thing, but it could also be done in a hurtful, dangerous way. We need to pay attention to that.
Chris Wofford
And possibly done in the Hochul administration. If things go.
Robert Howarth
The Hochul administration is working on it now. And the Assembly and Senate took it up for debate as well. That's binding under our Climate Action Council plan because of the climate law. But the Assembly and Senate could put it faster or slower than we done or they could countermand it and, you know, change the law. Basically, they debated it some and they too agreed that we should push ahead with this.
Robert Howarth
But, you know, they also punted some on the detail. So, to me, that's one of the most interesting areas to watch. That's one of the most important things for people to be paying attention to.
Chris Wofford
Howarth it’s been a pleasure having you in the studio today. I learned so much every time I talk to you. It's been so much.
Robert Howarth
Great time being with you. Thank you.
Chris Wofford
Have a great day, everyone. We'll see you next time. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed today's show. Check out the episode notes for links to the New York State Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act and also a companion keynote to today's podcast called Sustaining People and Planet, Bending the Warming Curve through Methane Mitigation, featuring Bob and other Cornell climate experts.
Chris Wofford
Thank you for listening to Keynotes. We'll see you next time.