Although Biden’s various electric vehicle (EV) mandates and subsidies tend to get more press than his other half-brained attempts to reduce carbon dioxide, the administration’s push for electric heat pumps could prove to be even more of a disaster.
Heat pumps are a novel innovation for electric heat that are presented as innocuous but are arguably the most ill-advised of consumer products. In addition to concerns about cost, functionality, net pollution, and disposal, the elephant in the heat pump living room is grid dependency. If the electric grid fails even temporarily, homeowners in cold regions reliant solely on electric heat face life-threatening consequences. Consumers may want to hold off disconnecting their woodstoves in blind trust of such a fragile technological reed.
Heat pumps are extolled as climate-saving alternatives to traditional energy sources such as gas, oil, and firewood. The Biden administration announced $169 million of manufacturing subsidies for heat pumps as part of his “Investing in America” agenda, which his National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi claimed was “using his wartime emergency powers under the Defense Production Act to turbocharge U.S. manufacturing of clean technologies to strengthen our energy security…”
Americans are justified in seeing that they are the targets in Biden’s war, using EPA regulations to compel EVs over gas-powered vehicles, and unfairly “turbocharging” (favoring) an elitist industry that itself is drawing ever more energy from the grid, does not deliver on “clean” promises, and cannot compete in the free market even after subsidies and regulatory favoritism. But the
