In a March 2023 Pew Research Center survey, almost half of Americans said they felt that they were doing “too little to help reduce the effects of global climate change.” Part of what is holding people back is they are not sure what to do.

The answer is there are a lot of things you can do to help stop global warming. Some people talk about the problem with their friends. Other people go door-to-door collecting ballot-initiative signatures. There are all sorts of other things to do in between.

Here is a simple step you can commit to today. Saul Griffith, founder of Rewiring America and author of Electrify, came up with this strategy: Buy only electric.  “We need to make sure that the next time every one of those machines is replaced, it’s replaced with a better electric [machine].” The idea is to not buy anything that burns gasoline or natural gas.

Let’s say you replaced your natural gas furnace yesterday. It will last about 25 years. Griffith is saying that when the time comes to replace your gas furnace, replace it with an electric heat pump. He offers this as the least you can do. Maybe your furnace is already 20 years old, and it is getting to be time for a new one. Get an electric heat pump.

Your hot water heater can last a little over 10 years. When the time comes to replace it, get an electric heat-pump hot water heater.

Living with electric heating is not bad. A total of 25% of American homes are all electric right now. You might have grown up in an all-electric home. With its cheap electricity, Washington state has a history of all-electric homes.

You probably have a gasoline-powered car. Most people still do. Griffith is saying you can drive it as far as you want. On average, American cars last about 20 years. If you bought a gasoline-powered car yesterday, you could drive it for the next 20 years. And when it’s time to buy a new one, you buy an electric car.

Not all electric cars are expensive. Right now there are three options for new electric vehicles costing under $30,000: the Chevy Bolt, Nissan Leaf, Hyunai Kona, and Mini Cooper. If you qualify for $7,500 off from the Federal Inflation Reduction Act, you could end up paying less than $20,000. Edmunds.com lists over 86 used electric cars for less than $15,000 within 25 miles of Edmonds. (When I first researched this in April, there were over 200.)

How does buying only electric stop climate change? The Environmental Protection Agency reports that over 80% of the global overheating pollution (greenhouse gasses) from the U.S. comes from extracting, transporting, and burning fossil fuels — gasoline, natural gas, and coal. If you buy only electric, you will no longer be burning fossil fuels in about 20 to 30 years. In about 30 years, the electricity you are using will be generated without fossil fuels too. Fossil fuel power plants are more expensive to build and run than power plants that run on solar and wind. Energy companies are already replacing them. If we all buy only electric, then everyone will have stopped burning fossil fuels by sometime around 2050. By 2050, the utilities will have replaced pretty much all their fossil-fuel powered plants, and global warming pollution will be reduced enough that the climate will pretty much stop changing.

If you want to stop global overheating faster, you don’t need to wait for your car or furnace to wear out. Replace them now. However you do this, now or later, be sure to buy only electric from now on.

What about where we’re going to get all this electricity from?

In Electrify, Saul Griffith shares the results of work that the U.S. Department of Energy commissioned on how to replace all American energy consumption with renewable energy. There are a lot of details. The short version is that we can do it and that we will do it.

All electricity-generating plants have an expected lifetime. They do not last forever. Just like cars and furnaces, they have to be replaced. Power plants were built at different times, so they are going out of commission at different times. Keeping America in electricity requires a constant turnover of shutting down old plants and starting up new ones.

The leading energy industry consultants, Lazard, report the lifetime costs per megawatt hour for different kinds of power plants. These costs include building the plant, running the plant, and shutting it down when it wears out. At a minimum, coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear plants all cost more per megawatt hour than onshore wind and utility-scale solar plants. If a utility is a for-profit organization, this is very compelling. The big idea of business is getting stuff for cheap and selling it for a profit. Lazard says the cheapest electricity is from wind and solar.

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a consortium of 12 states (including Vermont and New Hampshire), has tested this claim. Since 2009, they have been requiring utilities switch over to wind and solar. In the 13 years to 2022, consumer prices fell 4.7% and utility profits rose. Those were years when electricity costs were rising in the rest of the country. That may seem odd:

How do profits rise while the prices charged go down? The answer is they found a cheaper source: wind and solar.

Gasoline and natural gas infrastructure is like power plants: it also wears out and has to be replaced. Saul Griffith is saying that we have to replace the pumps, pipelines and refineries with solar and electric options.

There is what is called the “last 10%” problem. This is what happens on a still night. Different locations will solve that gap in different ways. In Texas, they refused to connect to either of the two electric grids that cover the rest of the continental states. The result is that their electricity is less reliable. This is proving to be a great incentive for homeowners to install home batteries. Other states can tap geothermal, tidal energy, or waterwheels for the last 10%. In Washington state, about two-thirds of our electricity comes from hydroelectric. When we are fully set up with solar and wind, covering 10% of our total electricity demand will require less than what we get from hydroelectric now.

Demand on utilities might not go up. Many families install solar on their rooftops. My family got a heat pump and we drive a plug-in hybrid that covers almost all our miles with electricity. With our solar panels, our total electricity use has gone down in spite of the electric car and an all-electric home. I hear other people have had the same experience.

So where does all this electricity come from? A lot of it comes from replacing worn-out equipment with cleaner options.

— Nick Maxwell is a Climate Reality seminar leader in Edmonds, a Rewiring America local leader, and a climate protection educator at Climate Protection Northwest.