This is part 2 of a two-part series. Read part 1 here.

DC’s gas utility has promised to transition its business model away from selling gas, a necessary step if the District is to achieve its commitment of carbon neutrality by 2050. As we outlined in our earlier post, ending DC’s reliance on methane gas would reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change. It would also improve indoor air quality and public health.

If DC successfully transitioned away from gas for heating, hot water, and cooking, what would that look like in practice?

Gas is polluting your home

Cooking on a gas stovetop means burning fossil fuels and emitting noxious fumes like nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide directly into a home’s air, which contributes to everything from dizziness to asthma to heart disease.

Indoor air pollution from gas combustion frequently exceeds Environmental Protection Agency outdoor air quality standards, but because indoor air is unregulated by the EPA, the toxic fumes are perfectly legal. DC’s high asthma rate—14% of children in the District have asthma—is highly correlated to indoor air pollution.

Getting rid of gas stoves and the associated health problems means cooking with electric or induction stoves, neither of which burn fossil fuels. Induction cooktops work by creating a magnetic field that transfers heat directly to the pot or pan. When heating on a gas stove, only about half the energy is transferred to the pot and the rest warms the air in the kitchen. An induction stove transfers about 90% of the energy directly to the pot.

Cavemen needed fire, we don’t

The share of gas used for cooking is fairly low. The primary use for gas in buildings is heating, either with furnaces or boilers. Electric air-source heat pumps provide heat more efficiently and with less carbon pollution than gas. In recent decades, the efficiency and reliability of heat pumps have dramatically improved, allowing them to provide heat inside even amid frigid temperatures outside.

Heat pumps require only one unit of energy in the form of electricity to generate about three units of energy in the form of heat. The extra, non-electric energy comes from removing heat from the outside air, which is a source of essentially free energy.

Here is how it works. Let’s say the outside air is 25 degrees. To absorb heat from such cold air and transfer it indoors, the heat pump uses a refrigerant fluid. The refrigerant is even colder than the outside air, say 10 degrees, so it absorbs heat from the relatively warmer outdoor air.

The refrigerant is then compressed, which raises the temperature to between 120 and 140 degrees. The now-hot refrigerant is sent indoors through copper pipes, and the heat is transferred to indoor air while the refrigerant is sent back outside. Outdoors again, the pressure of the refrigerant is reduced and its temperature falls below that of the outdoor air, making it again ready to absorb heat from the outside air.

The cycle repeats over and over, providing exceedingly energy-efficient heating. The process requires electricity, but the electricity itself does not produce heat. It only transfers heat from outdoors to indoors. Heat pumps are about three times more efficient than electric baseboard radiators or gas furnaces.

The same heat pump that warms a home in the winter can cool it in the summer, using the same process, but in reverse. Having the same system for heating and cooling can save money and allow buildings to move beyond gas and operate entirely on electricity. Indoor heat pump water heaters use the same technology, eliminating the need for gas-fired water heaters.

Homes not fueled by gas avoid the cost of gas lines, gas servicing, and gas metering. A study by the Rocky Mountain Institute found that using electricity for heating, hot water, and air conditioning reduces homeowner costs in new buildings. Electric retrofits of existing homes can save money for homeowners who would otherwise need to replace both a furnace and an air conditioner. Electric retrofits can also save money for those combining rooftop solar and electrification, according to the study.

Electrification necessitates efficiency

Decreased gas use increases reliance on electricity, and with DC’s electric mix moving toward 100% renewable sources because of the clean energy law going into effect this year, replacing gas with electricity means a substantial drop in greenhouse gas emissions. But electrification alone isn’t enough for DC to meet its climate goals.

Additional electricity demand resulting from switching off gas will require energy efficiency measures such as air-sealing and insulation of homes and other buildings. Increased efficiency will save money for utility ratepayers and keep costly upgrades of the electric distribution system to a minimum. While some costs will be borne by owners, governments should provide subsidies as well.

The District’s Clean Energy DC plan calls for a package of incentives targeting energy use reductions in existing buildings, with the program set up by 2020. If successful, it will pave the way for widespread electrification.

Efficiency efforts are already underway for large buildings. The DC Department of Energy and Environment is starting to set up the Building Energy Performance Standards program, which was created by the clean energy law and requires increased efficiency in buildings over 50,000 square feet beginning in 2021. The efficiency requirements will apply to buildings of 25,000 square feet in 2023 and 10,000 square feet in 2026.

Shutting off the pipeline, from California to Britain

The reliability, efficiency, and economics of heat pumps are fueling the transition off gas. In July, Berkeley, California passed a law prohibiting gas hookups in newly-constructed residential buildings. The local utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, supported the legislation. The ban takes effect on January 1. Fifty other California cities are considering their own gas bans.

In August, the California Public Utilities Commission issued a unanimous decision directing the state’s $1 billion energy efficiency program to start funding gas-to-electricity fuel switching programs. The commission’s order noted that gas is “a barrier to California’s progress on climate and energy goals.”

In March, the Conservative Party-led government in Great Britain announced a prohibition on gas in new residential buildings, moving the country toward heat pumps, increased efficiency and other alternatives to gas.

The Building Decarbonization Coalition concluded in white papers released earlier this year that fuel-switching from gas to electricity “will save consumers billions of dollars compared to other carbon reduction strategies” in part because “electric appliances have lower lifetime costs than fossil fuel appliances, especially considering the avoided costs of gas infrastructure.”

Decisions today, consequences for decades

The lifespan of an in-home furnace is up to 30 or more years, and up to 60 years for large boilers serving apartment and condo buildings. That means most gas boilers and furnaces installed today will still be in place by 2032, when DC has committed to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half. Many will be operating in 2050, the year DC has pledged net zero carbon emissions.

Fossil fuel interests claim ending the addiction to dirty fuels like methane gas is too expensive. In truth, acting now is far cheaper than waiting to address the problem and its devastating consequences in a much warmer future.

Comment on this article

The new print issue of the magazine has a short thought-experiment article by me, on what happened after the fall of the Roman Empire. (As I point out, this concerned the  Western Empire only—the one based in Italy, and the one Edward Gibbon described in The Decline and Fall. The Eastern Empire, based in Constantinople, had many more centuries to run.)

In a first round of reader responses, historians and others reacted (mainly) to the article’s (intentionally overstated) headline, “The End of the Roman Empire Wasn’t That Bad.” And in a second round, a veteran of governance issues named Eric Schnurer argued that a renewed focus on local-level renewal and innovation was proper, since localities were the only places where innovation ever occurred.

Here is another round, on the point I mainly hoped the article would raise: how Americans, ever optimistic about the rebound capacity of their perpetually self-reinventing system, should think about the possibility that “it’s different this time,” and that national-level governance  might finally be strained beyond its rebound abilities. Over to the readers:

1) Civil servants still want to serve. In my article I quoted Philip Zelikow, of the University of Virginia, on the difference between national-level and local officials. At the state, local, and regional level, Zelikow said, elected and career officials had no choice but to work together and actually solve problems. Whereas at the national level, politics was more and more about culture war—“who you like, who you hate, which side you’re on,” as Zelikow put it.

A career official in a national-level agency replies:

In November I will mark 32 years of federal service.

My grandparents came here with nothing. I’m an age of rising tides, my parents had the grit and good fortune to grant me and my brothers and sisters every reasonable opportunity, and then some.

That’s fundamentally why I entered public service, and that’s fundamentally why I remain in public service. I am grateful and feel a responsibility to give back.

Your essay, comparing our federal state to Rome in its age of decline strikes a chord, and in doing so fills me with an undeniable melancholy.

I push back against Zelikow’s “which side are you on” fatalism about national governance, even as I admit I see evidence of it all around me.

I’m not tossing in the towel, yet.

2) ‘Optimates’ vs. ‘Populares’: The Battle Goes On. From a history professor, of my own Boomer generation:

I have been thinking about that [Roman] period quite a bit lately, as we see the collapse of societal norms and the failure of many central governments to actually govern.

I see the present as actually more in parallel to the fall of the Republic in the first century BCE.  

At that time the empire had begun to take form, with vast amounts of wealth pouring into the center, but mainly enriching the Senatorial oligarchs. The men who had fought the wars were forced off their land, which came to be farmed on vast plantations by slaves. The new global order failed the yeomen, mainly because the rich, who controlled the government, refused to relinquish any of their wealth to help the impoverished citizens.

Seems familiar.

The society broke into two warring parties, Optimates and Populares (the Best and the People). They engaged in wars with each other, mobilizing personal armies, and violence came to be used as a means of government with leaders of each side being killed by mobs, culminating in the death of Julius Caesar. The society had become so divided that in the end the only way to govern was by autocratic rule: Augustus.

I fear that we are near that point, and that a demagogue will arise who has more shrewdness than our current demagogue-wannabe. Trump has blazed the pathway that others can well follow.

Trump’s party represents the Optimates—the wealthy, but we could just as well see a leader representing the Populares come to power. Think if Huey Long had been successful in the 1930s. Populism can cut both ways, call them National Populism and Social Populism ….

We are seeing the breakdown of Liberal Democracy across the world, as happened in the 1930s. It was finally restored after a decade of slaughter. It may not be restored again. At the least, something new has to take form, and that will not come from our generation.

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One interesting parallel to the period that you do discuss in your piece is that the “barbarians” were not invading the Empire to loot and pillage. Mainly they wanted to share in the wealthy and stable Roman society, get a bit of land for their people and be secure from tribes like the Huns on the other side of the border. They knew Rome very well, many of their leaders had been leaders in the Roman armies and many were Roman citizens. The Vandals were not really that vandalous …

In the same way, people are now migrating en masse into Europe and the US in pursuit of better lives, to participate in the wealthy and stable Western societies, to escape poverty and brutality.

Climate change plays a significant role in driving people out of their homelands, and that will only become worse over time. Another factor of course is Western as well as internecine wars (think Iraq and Syria) and Western support of brutal governments (Central America)

But the influx of a mass of outsiders into the Roman Empire (especially the western part) did ultimately lead to the breakdown of the wealth and stability they had come for.

There were many reasons for this, including inter-tribal battling among the newcomers and the disappearance of the Roman legions as a controlling force, but there was a continuing social disintegration and insecurity. The stable Roman civitas crumbled, quickly in some places (Britain) and more slowly in others (Gaul). I am not bringing this up to agree with Trump’s mantra to ‘build the wall’ (which is folly—the Romans tried in some places), but rather to stress that we must have a rational immigration policy and consensus that prevents destabilization. Mass immigration creates nationalist anger which is fuel for nationalist demagogues.

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As the Roman society disintegrated, government did become ever more localized. That worked for awhile in some places (like France), but in time trade shrank, education declined, government services passed away and instability increased.

One could imagine some parts of the US doing quite well for a time without a federal government, but other parts might do very poorly. Infrastructure would fall apart, as it did in post-Roman Europe. More people would flow across unpoliced borders, adding to the disruption and to the reactions. This would not play well in a society as well armed as the US.

No one knew that “Rome had Fallen” when Odoacer brushed aside the grandly named Romulus Augustulus in 476, only that the Germans now ruled Italy in name as they had in fact for the past decades. Even in our own long lives, can we know what history might see as having passed in our lifetimes, perhaps that we are now at the transition from the 500-year Modern Age into what-we-do-not-know (as John Lukacs has written)? Life went on, as for the frog in boiling water whom you have analyzed …

Several hundred years after the fall of Rome new forms and new states began to take shape amid the ruins, and by the 12th century Western Europe was again thriving. But it was a long and difficult time between the fall of the Empire and the rise of Europe. I would not wish that on my children and grandchildren, or on theirs.

The long term results of the failure of governance we are living through will be regrettable, though perhaps as necessary as the Dark Ages.

3) The new corporate “nationality.” A Westerner who has lived for years in Japan writes about the local-vs.-national tensions within the United States:

One idea is to reorganize the 50 states into 7 regions that match the baby bells created when AT&T was broken up …. The merits to such a reorganization is to unify many basic services: do we really need 50 DMVs and 50 Medicaid programs and who knows how many other layers of bureaucracy that gets repeated state by state. This could enhance basic services at the sub national level …. on the other hand it may create the equivalent of 7 proconsuls competing among themselves to follow Rome’s decline into empire. …

What seems more likely to me to occur over the next 50 years, and something that I oppose, is a rift, with sovereign-individual stance married to the corporatization of society ….

Instead of citizenship being based on contiguous borders our lives are bounded by what membership card(s) we carry. I can go to an Amazon condominium after buying dinner at Whole Foods paid by my Amazon coins via my Kindle and travel in my Amazon car ad infinitum. And if I am a Sapphire member, better deals as I jump from location to location but stay in the Amazon or Apple or Goggle or Facebook or whatever bubble. When a person uses an “out-of-service” provider, of course rates go up, and pity the people who cannot afford/are rejected in their membership bids. Blade Runner marries Brave New World.

Finally, on the question if this time is different compared to other times due to change! change! change! yes and no. I believe that in past periods starting around 1870, in these early periods, the degree of change was much greater than now. No electricity vs. wifi and rechargeable batteries; no telephones/movies/radios vs watching reality TV on your cell phone, etc., etc.

But the pace of change does seem to be much faster and disconcerting for all generations. This deserves further explanation but who has the time to read, let alone write …

4) Let’s talk about ideology, and class. Another academic writes (in a message I am substantially boiling down):

1.  I have spent the past seven years years studying the Eastern Roman Empire, which is usually called “Byzantium,” and which Gibbon himself dismissed as basically the thousand-year decline of the Roman Empire.

His is a monstrous oversimplification and it has degraded our understanding of ancient/medieval history ever since Gibbon's own day (1776), just as Adam Smith’s dismissal of the timelessness of mercantilism has degraded our English-speaking understanding of ancient/medieval economics ever since the same time (1776).  [JF note: On the Adam Smith point, check out this article by me, from 25+ years ago.]

Given what is already well-known about how the US so-called “founding fathers” (itself an egregious simplification of the revolutionary generation) understood the transition of Republican Rome into the Empire, before we sink our teeth into late antique history, it might be worth remembering that our understanding of the past, especially the more distant past, is ALWAYS (and has always been) subject to the political machinations of the present, and even historians’ own careers aren’t guided so much by how well they interpret the past, but by how well their interpretations suit the sensibilities of the times in which they happen to be writing …

[JF: Leaving out point #2, a long discourse on the difficulty of understanding the real life of peasants in different eras of history.] …

3. Generations are important for understanding deep history. For the past 70 years, young generations of Americans have been told that they ought to be living better than their parents. That was fine for the Boomers and for Gen Xers, but this is clearly not the case for Millennials.

So we were lied to. Big surprise: so were the generations who fought for and against Prohibition, Slavery and Unionization (and for Odoacer as well, arguably). Why else would (according to the 1860 US census) a majority of non-slave-owning Southern Whites sign up to fight for the cause of Confederate slavery at the outbreak of the American Civil War? …

4. Let’s not forget the power of ideology in the present. In the 5th century present, Christianity (and Judaism and the various forms of Paganism) were as much part and parcel of social cornerstones as the ideology of the “American Dream,” “Intersectionality,” and “MAGA” are today ….  

The point is that we should never underestimate the power of ideology to bind people to a common cause; whether in the 5th century, the 11th century, or the 21st century. Ultimately, we as historians dismiss the significance of religion (and collective conviction) at our own peril.

5. Finally, class. With the rapid adoption of Christian laws and social structures throughout the Roman Empire during and after the 4th century, the rigid laws fossilized a system of land-owners (fief-holders) and land-workers (peasants).

The road to serfdom is something that ever since Hayek, has been capitalized by the likes of Ayn Rand and her disciples, but it truly begins with the rules that one class lives by and another class lives above.

This may sound quite Marxist, but that’s because it is.  Without centralized regulations, we automatically return to system of land-owners and toilers, whether we call them ancient/medieval sharecroppers or modern bartenders. When ideology is co-opted by the elites to perpetuate their children to inherit their elite status (whether we call it aristocracy or meritocracy), we return to the so-called “dark ages.”

This is not simply “Marxism,” it is historical materialism. And it is the only actually reliable guide to studying the past that we have ever truly innovated since the time of Marcus Aurelius.

5) “I believe in America.”  And, finally, quite a different view of the ever-present, ever-reinterpreted past:

As the famous first line in the movie The Godfather reads, “I believe in America.”

While many of us continue to do so, an alarming number of Americans have fallen victim to the in-vogue critique that “woe is me” and things are awful.

For some, this is a reality. I read stories about the homeless problem in major US cities, how drug addiction and tolerance of theft is literally robbing thriving communities of their once proud fortitude of citizenship. I read daily how big tech companies are continuing to mislead the American public about how they monitor and police speech and content their employees regard as offensive, and God knows what with our personal information ….

But what I mostly don’t see now is pride: pride in how fortunate we are to live in this country. It’s called gratitude ….

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Talk to someone middle-aged who grew up in Soviet Eastern Europe, and you’ll find out quickly why they left for America. We now live in a world where we can get anything we want at any time of the day. Nearly all buildings and houses have central air-conditioning. Transportation is readily available for everyone. The economy is currently booming with employment we haven’t seen in three generations. Murder rates are at all-time lows. There hasn’t been a serious threat to the homeland in nineteen years. There’s a new superhero movie out every three months in theaters. Netflix programming has people indulging on their couches more than ever.

Most people who are angry and disheartened have never known a world like the Dark Ages, the Black Plague, Serfdom, Smallpox, the Great Depression or WWII or even the height of the Cold War. And we have room to complain that America sucks?

One of the reasons the Roman Empire fell was not because of physical over-extension by the state (which is true), but by its people taking for granted what the Roman Empire had done for the modern world …

Is it any coincidence many of the Founding era sought to emulate Roman law and antiquity as they established the republican virtues and culture of the 1780s-1820s? And what’s more, many of the Founders warned, much like the scholars of latter day Rome, what would likely be the downfall of the continent and our country: indifference and ingratitude from within for what America meant as an idea ….

The truth, in my opinion, is that 9/11 sapped us of our confidence. And the ensuing years of lies, mismanaged wars and bank bailouts, an incoherent foreign policy over multiple administrations, and now the rise of brash and offensive populism in both ideological camps have Americans feeling more anxious than ever ….

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Perhaps we should be devoting much more to teaching civics again, and appreciating the separation of powers, appreciating why men like James Madison, George Mason, John Adams, Gouverneur Morris, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington matter so much that it is in our individual interest to be informed of who they were and what they did to establish the freedoms we often take for granted.

More so, it’s about time we recognize African American contributions during the Founding era too. In spite of their plight, we should be recognizing Peter Salem, Phyllis Wheatley, James Armistead Lafayette, and James Forten. We should be embracing the fact that the Continental army of 1781 was color-blind; that it stood about 1/5 African American at the Siege of Yorktown is extraordinary. Or that women and some African Americans were voting in New Jersey prior to 1807….

When we stop paying attention to all of the noise, and when we regain our focus; the fog will begin to clear, and King’s pronouncement of seeking to reach “the promised land” will once again ring loudly for those of us who are yearning for a more perfect union: one of freedom and liberty for all.

Thanks to all for responding to the thought-experiment with thoughts, evidence, and opinions.

Since the climate change townhall is happening, here’s a piece I wrote for Wired about it last month, based on some ideas of Jeff Colgan, Jessica Green and Thomas Hale.
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Last week, CNN announced plans to host a climate crisis town hall with the Democratic presidential candidates on September 4. MSNBC scheduled a multiday climate change forum with the presidential hopefuls later that month.

In both venues, some version of the perpetual question will undoubtedly be raised: “How will you pay for the costs of dealing with climate change?”

Despite its pervasiveness, this is a profoundly wrongheaded line of inquiry. Asking how to pay for the impact of climate change implies that these costs are a matter of choice. The reality is that global warming will impose massive costs, regardless of whether policymakers respond or not. Thus, the real question is not “How would you propose to pay?” but instead “Who is going to pay?” and “How much?”

People are already paying for climate change with their lives. Rising temperatures are killing more than 150,000 people every year. This death toll is estimated to increase to 1.5 million people annually by the turn of the century. Some are confronting the likelihood of failed crops; others have been forced to flee floodplains.

Those currently paying for the effects of climate change are the most vulnerable—people in the developing world, the poor, the sick, the elderly, and the very young. As the world changes, more people are going to suffer the cost of heat waves, rising water, damaged or dying ecosystems, and flooded coastal cities. This will create what political science and public policy experts describe as “existential politics,” in which different groups fight to preserve their entire way of life.

On one side of this existential fight will be those who want things to continue mostly as they are. Oil companies have trillions of dollars worth of petroleum still in the ground. An entire energy infrastructure has been built on the back of fossil fuel extraction. If fossil fuels become “stranded assets”— economic assets that suddenly lose most or all of their value—crucial sectors of today’s economy will be utterly transformed, hurting the interests of the businesses that run them. Unsurprisingly, these businesses are fighting back. So, too, are industrial workers such as coal miners whose way of life is threatened.

Meanwhile, others will suffer the effects of continued inaction. People who live on coasts will face the risks and costs of flooding, while many of those who live inland will have to deal with changing weather patterns, droughts, and unbearable heat waves.

This fight has already started to play out. Fossil fuel interests are rich, politically influential, and well organized. They are able not only to pay for lobbyists in Washington, DC, but to organize an entire political movement at the state level. The Koch-funded “grassroots” organization Americans for Prosperity pushes to protect fossil fuel interests in individual states. The group has become intimately intertwined with the Republican party.

The interests on the other side are broader, less well organized, and less influential. This is in part because everyday Americans don’t really understand that they will be on the hook for many of the costs of climate change unless there is a dramatic change in policy.

If we continue on our current trajectory, the lives of ordinary voters will be fundamentally transformed while fossil fuel companies continue to make vast profits. Any serious policy response to global warming needs to transfer some of the costs from voters to the fossil fuel interests, where they belong.

Some might disagree with this approach, advocating instead for a consensus among all parties. The problem with this rejoinder: The politics of global warming are necessarily divisive, and one side of the divide is already mobilizing to protect its own narrow interests.

To fight global warming, we need to organize a broad public counterweight against the sectoral interests that are trying to block action. Building an effective “Green New Deal” will require financial resources to unite a coalition in favor of climate action, and to split the counter-coalition. Such policy will also need to remake the international political economy to build both cross-national solidarities and domestic alliances.

Yet before all of this can be done, it is crucial to change the terms of debate and acknowledge reality. We are going to have to pay for global warming, one way or another. The key question is who will pay—and how we can distribute those costs fairly.