Thread by @learngineer

I was recently asked,
“What are some gaps in educating people about electrification?”I have a few thoughts.

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1. Our current energy system is incredibly wasteful, and if we #ElectrifyEverything and run it on renewable electricity, we'll only need half the energy we use today.

Right now, half of our energy use is basically just digging carbon (in fossil fuels) out of the ground, burning them, and dumping the carbon into the atmosphere.

It’s just the built-in wastefulness of the heat engines that run our cars and power plants that even in the ideal case can only use half the energy. If people understood this waste, they'd better understand how insane it is.

2. The sun is incredibly powerful. Just 80 minutes worth of sun hitting the earth could power all of humanity for a year. And if we electrified everything and only needed half the energy, just 40 minutes would be enough.

Humanity's energy use is relatively minimal, we just have to spend the money building the solar panels (and other renewables) to harness this solar input.

3. Some news stories still make it seem like recycling and composting will solve climate change. Those are fine things to do, but much more important is to electrify everything in your home!

Rewiring America focuses on the big, one-time changes that happen infrequently — like replacing your furnace with a heat pump, or your gasoline car with an EV — that will GREATLY reduce your emissions, without you having to change your behavior (though that's good too).

Check out our guide, Electrify Everything in Your Home, for help — rewiringamerica.org/electrify-home…

4. This is perhaps less necessary for everyone to understand, but carbon dioxide is only a TINY fraction of our atmosphere. When you hear "400 parts-per-million," it translates to 0.04% of the atmosphere.

It should then be reasonable that because basically everything we do emits carbon into the sky, it's possible that humans really can change the atmosphere. We've been doing it for 200 years!

Unfortunately, carbon dioxide (and other similar gases) are like the Earth's blanket. Ever wake up hot at night and take the blankets off? Well we've basically added a second blanket to the planet, and there's no easy way to take it off. So we should STOP making it worse!

5. If we could see our energy and emissions, we'd treat it a lot different. Richard Alley puts it well: “You fill up a car and it’s a fairly big tank–you’re putting in a hundred pounds of gasoline. If you had to bring it home in gallon jugs it’d be a different world."

"But you drive off with it. And when you burn it — you add oxygen — and that makes CO2, and it goes out the tailpipe and you don’t see that 300 pounds per fill-up."

"Suppose that our transportation system packaged the CO2 in a way we could see it … as horse ploppies…It’s a pound per mile driven for a typical vehicle."

"Our CO2 turned to the density of horse ploppies and spread over the roads of America would cover every road in America an inch deep every year. In a decade … there are no joggers. We’d all be cross-country skiers."

So, yeah. Those are some of the gaps in educating people about why electrification is such a problem. I'd add that people don't (yet) realize how bad it can be if we don't change course quickly — or how good it can be if we do. /fin

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