Overview:
Heat pumps, which efficiently warm or cool air, have become staples in new home construction. But manufacturers, who tend to use centuries-old heating technology, have been slow to adopt heat pumps, which are not only cost-effective but could pay dividends in public health and environmental quality improvements.
In recent years, heat pumps — an air conditioning technology that efficiently produces warm or cool air and distributes it evenly through a home — have become a common element in everyday life, appearing in a growing number of houses and apartments.
The technology, however, can be applied in other settings too — namely, manufacturing that doesn’t require high levels of heat, like food processing, paper milling, and the production of chemicals. And a new report finds that if heat pumps became as common in manufacturing as in home construction it would pay dividends in public health improvements.
According to the American Lung Association, use of industrial heat-pump boilers could significantly reduce both emissions and pollution as well as create a host of positive effects that would significantly benefit Black and brown communities.
“By shifting to zero-emissions technologies that aren’t burning fuel — but they’re producing the same heat, steam, and boiling water that’s needed to fulfill these manufacturing needs — we can see these massive public health benefits,” Will Barrett, assistant vice president for nationwide clean air policy at the ALA, told Grist.
The report looked at the potential benefits of replacing 33,500 boilers that burn some form of fossil fuel with zero-emission heat-pump boilers. Researchers found that the shift would stave off 33 million asthma attacks, prevent 200,000 cases of asthma from developing altogether by 2050, and avoid 77,200 premature deaths.
The switch would also save $1.1 trillion in health care costs and prevent $351 billion in damages from future storms and other climate change-related extreme weather.
While all communities would benefit from those public-health improvements, Black neighborhoods in particular would benefit majority-minority communities. Black people suffer from asthma at nearly 1.5 times the rate than whites.
A variety of factors cause the rates to be much higher, but redlining Black people into neighborhoods alongside transportation infrastructure like highways and freeways, or that sit alongside industrial areas, are an original sin.
Black Americans are 75% more likely to live in so-called fence-line communities, making the polluted air from factories, power plants and other sources more difficult to escape.
According to the American Lung Association report, the “staggering” findings are driven “by major health benefits seen in states with populations that reside in close proximity to industrial sources where the emission reductions are occurring.”
The five states with the largest Black populations in the country — Texas, Georgia, Florida, New York, and California — are all included in the report’s list of the top 15 states that would enjoy the most cumulative health benefits, with Florida at the top of the list.
Texas, which has the nation’s largest Black population in the country, would avoid 16,300 new asthma cases, the most of any state.