Category: Climate change

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Climate change Cooking Imagine A World

Upgrading from a Gas Stove to Electric Induction

I saw that “gas stove ban” is the topic of this 24-hour news cycle (Terrain has a good recap and analysis) and I realized I hadn’t blogged about ditching my gas stove. It’s an opportunity for to drop some timely #content.

In March 2022 we had a bunch of electrical work done on our house. It was built in 1914 and had knob-and-tube wiring in the walls. Which meant we couldn’t blow insulation into the walls due to the fire risk and paid too much for homeowners insurance. So we got new wiring and insulation, increasing comfort and peace-of-mind and saving money each month on heating/cooling and insurance.

We took advantage of the timing to get a 240V line run to the kitchen and upgraded our stove from a Viking gas range & oven to an electric induction unit. It’s been great. Here are some pros/cons of the change for me. I’m skipping the obvious ones you’d find in general comparisons like, it’s good that my cooking doesn’t involve fossil fuels and the indoor air is cleaner and it was bad to have to buy some new cookware.

Pros

  • Spills/boilovers are easy to clean up. I boiled over oil (!) while deep-frying corn dogs and it was no big deal.
  • My kids can take a more involved role cooking since there’s no flame and less heat.
  • In general there’s less cooking heat in the kitchen. Whereas excess heat from the Viking oven once melted a salad spinner that was sitting nearby.
  • More precise temperature control and more powerful output. I benchmarked flame vs. induction for time to boil 1 quart of water, that could be its own post but induction won.
  • More digital controls in general. Maybe a fancier gas range would have had automated stop-baking times, I dunno, but mine was Viking brand and it didn’t even have a temperature readout on the oven.
  • Visual indicators make it less likely that I leave a burner on low and forget about it.

Cons

  • A bit of a learning curve.
    • On a gas stove I’d turn off a pot of rice or hard-boiled eggs and leave the residual heat to finish the job. I’ve learned that on the induction, I need to leave it on low.
    • And I had perfected stovetop popcorn in my old stockpot, which wasn’t induction-compatible. Now I’m learning the nuances of cooking popcorn in a stainless steel pot.
  • I liked my old range better as a pot-drying rack at the end of the night. There were more nooks and crannies to wedge the pans in and water drops didn’t pool.

Overall, the induction range has been an improvement and I am pleased to be rid of my old stove. Some of the changes involved in decarbonizing our lives and society are uncomfortable, e.g., facing a reduction in air travel. But this one has been a simple upgrade for our kitchen and our lives.

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Climate change Imagine A World

The Unusual Cost Structure of Geothermal Heat Pumps

Since writing my post Planning for a Heat Pump Furnace in Michigan, I’m getting closer to taking the plunge. I’ve learned some interesting things along the way, most of all about geothermal, which was not on my radar at first. This post looks at the near- and long-term costs of geothermal heat pumps and the incentives they create.

Does cost matter? It shouldn’t, but it does. At a societal level, the urgency of electrification is well-established. Humanity must replace fossil-fuel-burning equipment with electric alternatives and the grid that powers them must be converted to running on renewables. The future is grim if these things don’t happen.

In the face of ecological collapse, it shouldn’t much factor into the equation whether electrification costs somewhat more or less than continuing to spew carbon. At least, not at a societal level.

But for individuals faced with replacing an old gas furnace, of course cost is a deciding factor. As I got price estimates and read, I made a spreadsheet for some basic cost comparisons of geothermal vs. high-efficiency gas heat (with electric A/C). The result surprised me.

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Climate change Imagine A World Local reporting Politics ruminations

Regular people having a very unregular thought

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò made this lovely remark on a podcast episode:

A lot of these people that we rightly respect and revere in organizing circles were just regular people who had the very unregular thought that they could do something about the world around them. And who just decided to do it.

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò

And it’s stuck with me, so I’m memorializing it here. It’s dead-on.

The most recent time I thought of it was last week, when catching up with a friend at Workantile. He had organized a group buy of solar panels for his neighbors and, in the process, learned that his subdivision’s homeowners association (HOA) bans solar panels that are visible from the street. The reason? They’re aesthetically unpleasing and will damage property values.

He then had the unregular thought that he could do something about that. So he looked into what it would take to get that rule removed. That led him to power mapping, and in particular, the HOA board of directors. And he found that no one has ever been elected to this HOA board. The member meetings never make quorum, so all board vacancies are filled by appointment. By the board. Pretty unhealthy governance.

Now he’s looking at doing something about that. That’s a bigger challenge and a very boring way to fight climate change. But it’s the right thing to do. And it’s possible, with a big enough dose of unregular thinking.

I send love and solidarity to everyone who sees something that could be better and instead of tolerating it, says, I could do something about that. And just decides to do it.

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How-to Imagine A World Local reporting Making

Success at All Hands Active Repairsday

a pair of hands applying heat-shrink tubing to a cord using a heat gun

This is a love letter to Ann Arbor’s scrappy little downtown makerspace, All Hands Active. In particular, their weekly Repairsday event, which takes place on Thursdays from 6-8pm. And it’s a vignette of how they helped revive a lovely old keyboard/synthesizer.

All Hands Active is a nonprofit. Their mission is educational. I’d argue it’s political, too, though not in the common sense of the word as it relates to electoral politics or parties. Rather, there’s an ethos that you should be free to modify and repair things, that people should help and teach each other, that consumer culture and its quickly-obsolescent, disposable goods are bad, and that knowledge should be free. (Some of that might be me projecting).

So, Repairsday. Any human can bring in an object they’d like to repair. Volunteer AHA members are on hand to help. That can look like advice, diagnosis, or attempting to fix the item together. Sometimes an item can’t be fixed, but that’s okay too. You learn from taking it apart, and for me, knowing that a thing was unfixable – in my case, a toaster that only heated one of its two slots – put me at ease with discarding it.

Last week, AHA Repairsday helped me fix a classic keyboard, rescuing a valuable object from the landfill and giving it a second life.

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Climate change Imagine A World Someday

Planning for a Heat Pump Furnace in Michigan

Our gas furnace has been loud for a while, and getting louder. We got a furnace check-up this fall and the technician said, that noise is your inducer motor. They fail often on these furnaces and your furnace is old. Sounds like yours is on its way out.

I started researching electric replacements for gas furnaces, i.e., heat pumps. That picked up in early January, when my friend George sent me the hot-off-the-press guide from Rewiring America, Electrify Everything In Your Home.

The day after I started reading it, I woke up to a chilly home. The inducer motor had failed.

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Climate change Parenting

Fight climate change, put your kid’s allowance at a credit union

I received this piece of mail from Chase and it reminded me to finish this blog post, which I started on Earth Day 2021:

Devious mail from the world’s dirtiest bank


It’s well-established that one of the best ways to fight climate change is by divesting from the big banks that fund fossil fuel projects. HEATED’s list of “How to Move Beyond Recycling” includes “Divest your personal assets from fossil fuels.” The more money you can move away from them, the better, though every account closure is important. Moving money can be tedious, though, since you need to redo all your bill payment information and do lots of paperwork like an adult.

What you can start and finish in a single afternoon is to get your child off to a good start by opening an account for them at a credit union or other institution that does not fund fossil fuel projects. (The HEATED link above has info about how to find one for you, a credit union near you is a good bet.) Then inertia will be on the side of good: the more banking they do at their first institution, the more likely it is that their future earnings will not be used to finance fossil fuel projects that will make their world more ghastly and unsafe. Big banks are wise to how powerful this move is; that’s why they sent me that mailer, hoping to get their hooks into my kids.

I got that mail because I used to bank at Chase and haven’t yet closed my account. JP Morgan Chase is “by far the worst banker of fossil fuels and fossil fuel expansion” (Forbes concurs). I’ve been moving my money away from Chase for years now. In my case, I’ve moved my checking and savings to Lake Trust Credit Union. I’ve also given up my Capital One rewards card for a Lake Trust credit card, and when I refinanced my mortgage I moved from a private bank to Mortgage Center, which is owned by credit unions including Lake Trust.

Lake Trust does not have investors, it does not make a profit, and it does not fund fossil fuel infrastructure (in response to my inquiry, they replied, “The Lake Trust investment portfolio does not hold any corporate bonds in fossil fuel companies.”)

Doing all of that paperwork and changing all of my billing information has been tedious and slow. I got the idea to change banks during Occupy Wall Street, which began ten years ago this month, and I still need to finish closing my mostly-unused Chase and Capital One accounts.

But opening accounts for my kids at my local credit union? Easy. The kids biked over there, poured a bunch of change into the coin counting machine, and were given stickers and hot chocolate. Now I manage their allowances and purchases through transfers in the Lake Trust app. This was much easier than moving my own money has been, and climate-wise should be a great return on my time.

Open an account for your kid at a credit union now, even if you haven’t moved your own money over yet. That will put inertia on the side of good, while also normalizing for them that they should belong to a credit union. And if you need to open an account for yourself to do so? Bonus! You’ve taken the first step on your own longer but important journey.

(Standard disclaimer that individual actions will not solve the climate crisis on their own, we need systemic change, etc. – of course. This is part of a mass divestment movement and this blog post, my action, and your action are all part of that.)

Update October 2021: I finished divesting from my Capital One credit card and closed it today!

I won’t be bought for 1.5% cash back
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Climate change Local reporting Politics

It’s time to hit pause on proposed I-94 Operational Improvements

The Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) is considering possible improvements to I-94, south of Ann Arbor. The timing is lucky: they were still in the study phase when the impact of COVID-19 emerged and there’s time to hit the pause button. For fiscal and environmental reasons, and to meet its stated goals, the state should indefinitely halt any investments in this stretch of highway.

Background

This project would add capacity to the stretch between Ann Arbor-Saline Road and US-23 pictured here:

Source: MDOT

MDOT’s objectives for this stretch include accommodating an increased volume of traffic. They seek to “reduce recurring peak period congestion along the corridor and improve travel time reliability” as well as “provide reasonable capacity to address existing and 20-year forecasted 2045 traffic demand along the corridor.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended the case for spending millions to improve traffic flow on this stretch. We can no longer afford this project, but luckily, we also no longer need it.

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Books Climate change ruminations

On Timefulness

I enjoyed and was moved by the book Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World, by Marcia Bjornerud. This post is a review & reflection I’m finishing many months after reading it.

“Rates of technological progress far outstrip the rate at which human wisdom matures (in the same way that environmental changes outpace evolutionary adaptation in mass extinction events).” – Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness

The book has a few threads going at once but the bulk of it is a geological history of the world, in a more layperson-friendly format than a textbook. It’s heavy on the science and I learned a great deal of earth science. For instance:

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Biking Climate change Parenting

Motherload, a movie about people and cargo bikes

I saw the documentary “Motherload” in September and meant to write a review.  I wish I had done it fresh, but I keep thinking about it, so better late than never.

Motherload connected with me on an emotional level.  I teared up as it captured on film and described feelings and moments I’ve had biking with my kids that I’ve never heard anyone articulate.  People know I’m the crazy guy on the bike with his kids; this film told my story, our story.  In this post I’ll remark on a few parts that stuck with me.  Here’s the trailer:

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Books Climate change

The Overstory: “You have been spared from death to do a most important thing”

I recently read and enjoyed The Overstory, by Richard Powers. I often miss connections in books & movies that are obvious to others; here I wrestle with one particular line near the end that I noticed is a callback to an earlier chapter.

This post contains spoilers.  If you haven’t read the book, you’re better off reading it than this post.

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