Getting rid of your car is one of the best things you can do for the climate, and also that you will never do it. This is a car-oriented country, and a car-oriented time. But in 2019, the private cars and light trucks that ordinary people drive for work and shopping and leisure were responsible for about 15 percent of U.S. fossil-fuel-energy use. Depending on your geographic location and the age of your home and its systems, those fuels might include distillate fuel oil (mostly still used in the Northeast), propane (common in rural areas), or natural gas (common everywhere else). Every one of these releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when burned. At least 7 percent of U.S. fossil-fuel energy is used for something fairly banal: residential space and water heating. Put differently, making relatively smaller, cheaper, and easy changes to home heating in America could reduce fossil-fuel use nearly as much as taking half of all private vehicles off the roads. If you want to do the most immediate good for the planet, replace your aging gas furnace with a new, electric appliance. You can heat a building in many ways. A boiler heats water and cycles it through radiators that heat rooms. A furnace transfers heat to air, which it then pushes through vents into living spaces…
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