Decarbonizing Streets with a Travel Offset
California is working to decommission its natural gas system, street by street, to reduce emissions. Other states will follow. The question is how to pay to retrofit whole streets of buildings so they use only electricity (replacing gas appliances, upgrading the electric panel, etc.).
Many customers won’t be able to afford the retrofits, and there won’t be enough government rebates and incentives to pay for it all.
Thus HEETlabs is piloting a program to pay for the remaining cost through a carbon-emissions offset fund for airplane travel.
If you fly to Hawaii, you could donate to the fund to offset your emissions. You’d get a postcard with a photo of the street you helped move permanently off of fossil fuels. There’d be information about the emissions savings, the health impacts and the percent of low income residents in the area. Once there is enough data, large companies could begin to use it as a verified offset.
Fertilizers that Sequester Carbon
Up to 5% of the world’s gas is used to create artificial fertilizers. So much of our food is produced using these fertilizers that half the nitrogen in our bodies comes from it.
Reliance on this artificial fertilizer depletes our soil and causes nutrient blooms in our rivers and seas, killing aquatic life.
HEETlabs is examining methods of transitioning from artificial fertilizers to nutrient-enriched biochar. Biochar (organic waste combusted with limited oxygen) increases soil fertility, eliminates nutrient blooms and sequesters carbon in the soil.
Reducing Refrigerant Leakage
Refrigerants are gasses used in refrigeration and in heat pumps.
We are using more refrigerants every year, since heat pumps are now outselling gas furnaces nationally.
Refrigerants, however, if leaked into the atmosphere, are extraordinarily potent global warming gasses. Some are thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide.
HEETlabs is examining methods to ensure the refrigerants are retained, recaptured and re-used rather than leaked out.
(Check back. More projects will come along soon.)