04/23/2025
April 2025 COOL News from STAY COOL for Grandkids
Welcome to Spring, to Earth Day and to our April edition of Stay Cool. I am pleased to announce that the Stay Cool Ocean Climate Science program has been selected as the recipient of the Generosity Sunday donation from the Solana Beach Unitarian Church. You are invited to join us on Sunday, April 27 at 10:00 AM for a special intergenerational “Earth Day” service, including a presentation by Dr. Kaitlyn Lowder, a marine biology expert and Advisory Council Member of Stay Cool. More details, including location, are here.
We are also celebrating the fact that this year, the education program is on track to reach our goal of serving approximately 500 middle school students from January through May 2025. Sincere thanks to the amazing graduate students from Scripps Institution of Oceanography who led the classes, and to the wonderful Stay Cool volunteers who develop the slide show presentations, ensuring adherence to California science education standards, and who also reach out to the schools and organize the classroom events.
In this issue, we have a personal story from Kaitlyn about purchasing a heat pump and applying for the generous rebate program. Now is the time to take advantage of that before the funding is gone. I also wanted to address a comment made by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Administrator Lee Zeldin. You can check your knowledge with the Environmental Degradation Quiz. And lastly, we have a call to action about possible changes to the use of Public Lands.
There are many opportunities to demonstrate what democracy looks like through rallies, marches, calls and postcards to elected officials. Our message is not just about the environmental legacy we are leaving to future generations. A sustainable society needs the financial, social, and environmental pillars to be strong. If you want to know more about how you can help, you might want to check Third Act and many of the other great organizations in your area. Unite, act, and be part of the change you want to see. Stay well and Stay Cool!
Linda
“Heat Pump Rebates: Get ‘Em While They’re Hot” or “HEEHRA is Here Again”
By Dr. Kaitlyn Lowder
6bd98abb-99c5-471d-a83a-02d1d667e23c.jpgThis spring, my husband and I made our first substantial foray into home electrification with the installation of an energy-efficient heat pump, made feasible with a Home Electrification and Appliance Rebate (HEEHRA). This program, funded by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), is implemented on a state-by-state basis. California rolled out its program for single-family home owners in November through TECH Clean California. Depending on household income level, a homeowner can be eligible for either $4,000 or $8,000 off the purchase and installation of a heat pump. This rebate can be stacked on other savings for going electric, such as tax credits.
The process
Getting started happens by submitting income verification to receive pre-approval and selecting a contractor’s quote of a high-efficiency heat pump unit. After that, it’s largely smooth sailing for the homeowner from there; the contractor does the legwork to collect the necessary details during installation (such as documenting serial numbers of new and old units to prove there was indeed a change) and submit for the rebate.
Unfortunately, this program has not escaped the new administration’s affront on climate change mitigation. In February, the program was paused to comply with an Executive Order, “Unleashing American Energy”. As of March, the program is coming back online with a phased approach, although new applications are not yet being accepted. More information and future updates are available here.
Additionally, rebates are only available until funding is depleted. TECH Clean California has an up-to-date table of funding available on its website. For HEERHA heat pumps, look to the rows with Funder “HEERHA” and product type “HP HVAC”, then to the Southern California region. At the time of writing, over $17M of funds for Southern California were still available. While that figure sounds sizable, it amounts to just over 2,100 homes with rebates at the $8,000 level in our region.
Lessons learned
After months of research, dozens of inquiries, a multi-tab spreadsheet to compare options, and even taking a stab at doing our own Manual J load calculation to double-check the appropriate tonnage of the heat pump, we have some anecdotes to pass along. There were plenty of contractors in San Diego County participating in the program. Some are more eager than others; while many quote inquiries went unanswered, some companies specifically advertise that they are participating in the program to drum up more business.
In fact, some contractors urged us to submit the income verification to TECH Clean California with their contact information in the form, even though we hadn’t yet agreed to work with them. I’m glad we did not; a homeowner is allowed to put their own details in that box instead. This meant we could get approved before selecting a contractor, enabling us to move forward more quickly and not go through the process of updating that part of the application when we did so. Plus, we began receiving helpful emails about the status of the program that otherwise would not have come our way. After selecting a contractor, it was simple to forward our approval notice to them.
We heard from multiple contractors that the program is a paperwork headache, resulting in them hiring external companies to manage the collation and submission of their paperwork. While we don’t have hard evidence, it seems likely those increased costs to participate in the program may get added somewhere in the quote total, making the net benefit to the homeowner a little less than a straight $4,000 or $8,000. In addition to the increased documentation costs, some contractors mentioned the risk they take on by offering rebates upfront, as they don’t receive those funds until weeks or months after the install, assuming they’ve done all of their documentation correctly. The TECH Clean California program allows contractors to offer the rebate upfront or reimburse homeowners once they’ve received the funds, so consider when the contractor has agreed to pass along the rebate to you as part of your selection process.
After just over a month with our heat pump, we’re in love. While we haven’t yet had to give the AC setting a whirl or been able to fully evaluate the long-term change in our home energy bill, just knowing we now have a highly efficient unit to make our house a bit comfier, while leaving our wallet a bit less empty, was worth going through the rebate program.
The Environmental Degradation Quiz
Which of the following resulted in the Federal Clean Air Act?
1948- A thick smog, caused by industrial emissions and a weather inversion, blanketed Donora, Pennsylvania, for several days, resulting in the deaths of about 20 people and widespread illness.
1953 — New York smog incident kills between 170 and 260 people in November.
1965 — Smog plus a weather inversion creates four-day air pollution incident in New York City; 80 people die.
All of the above
Which of the following resulted in what we now refer to as the Federal Clean Water Act?
On the morning of June 22, 1969, an oil slick on the Cuyahoga River south of Cleveland caught on fire. As it turned out, this was not even the first time that the river had caught fire—it was at least the tenth.
In 1968, pollution in the Chesapeake Bay cost fishermen millions of dollars in revenue.
In 1969, 26 million fish were killed in a Florida lake due to pollution.
All of the above
The answer to both questions is…. all of the above! It is safe to say that these problems were significantly minimized after Congress enacted laws and President Nixon established the Federal Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. Perhaps we have taken for granted how much cleaner the environment is now, and have forgotten that the laws, regulations, and enforcement by federal, state, and local agencies made the difference. With the recent demolition of the EPA, I think it is important to remind your friends and family that there were very important reasons that this agency was established, and there may be very severe consequences from the recent changes.
The Climate Change Religion
“By overhauling massive rules on the endangerment the social cost of carbon and similar issues, we are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age. These actions will roll back trillions of dollars in regulatory costs and hidden taxes.” Administrator Zeldin in the Wall Street Journal: “EPA Ends the Green New Deal;” Mar 17, 2025
The climate-change religion? Is that like the gravity religion? Without getting into detail about my personal views, I know that there is a difference between science and religion. One requires faith and one requires data. I am outraged that the data-driven one is being discredited by people who know better.
What would you say to those who claim that climate science is a belief? Perhaps we can begin a conversation by focusing on what everyone can observe. If we only count the weather and climate disasters in the USA where each event resulted in the overall damage costing at least $1 billion, then since 1980 there have been 403 events. The total cost exceeds $2.92 trillion. If we narrow the time frame to just 2023-2024, the total cost is $278 billion. This is the reference. Here are the stats for 2023-2024.
More frequent and extreme storms:
36 severe storms -$103 billion; 151 deaths
7 tropical cyclones- $132 billion; 321 deaths
3 winter storms- $5 billion; 62 deaths
Severe drought and wildfires:
2-year drought- $20 billion; estimated 380 deaths
2 wildfires- $8 billion; 102 deaths
Flooding:
5 events; $10 billion; 41 deaths
Who else, besides scientists, are worried about these changes?
Farmers- “71% of farmers say that climate change already has a large impact on their farm, and even more are worried about the impact this will have in the future. 73% have experienced increasing pest and disease pressure. On average farmers estimate that their incomes had reduced by 15.7% due to climate change in the past two years. One in six farmers even identifies income losses of over 25% during this period.” Read more here.
Insurance companies – “A recent report by First Street Foundation, a non-profit focusing on climate risk research, found 23.9 million properties in the US are at risk from damaging winds, 4.4 million properties at risk from wildfire, and an additional 12 million properties have a significant risk of flooding. Private insurance companies are effectively labelling areas as uninsurable," the report found. Read more here.
City planners- “Even if the planet’s warming is limited to 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels, most of lower Manhattan’s streets would resemble rivers, according to the projections. At 4 degrees, the water would reach up to midtown — even farther north along the Hudson and East rivers. The story is the same for other major U.S. cities, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco among them. ‘Urban planning is critical to climate change mitigation, but then also the majority of climate impacts are really going to be experienced at a local level,’ said Sara Meerow, an assistant professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. Read more here.
And with that, may we dispel the words “believe” and “religion” when discussing the climate crisis, rather than dispelling the science?
Protect Our Public Lands
The Public Lands Support Letter:
Public lands are a major driver for our economy. Arecent report from the National Park Service found that visitor spending in communities near national parks resulted in a record hih $55.6 billion benefit to the nation’s economy and supported 415,400 jobs last year. A 2020 study of communities near 14 monuments designated between 1991 and 2014 demonstrated that boosts in new businesses and jobs were associated with new monuments. Protected public lands, including national monuments, create jobs, enhance communities, and help boost local outdoor recreation economies which contributed 2.3 percent ($639.5 billion) of current-dollar gross domestic product (GDP) for the nation in 2023.
Protected public lands have overwhelming support from both the public and local elected officials. According to a 2023 Conservation in the West Poll, 84% of Westerners - including 71% of Republicans - are more likely to support presidents who use their power to protect existing public lands. Similarly, the 2024 poll found that 85 percent support creating new national parks, national monuments, national wildlife refuges and Tribal protected areas to protect historic sites or areas for outdoor recreation.
More than 300 current and former Western local elected officials, including mayors, county commissioners, and city council members, sent aletter to the Trump Administration and Congressional offices on March 26, 2025 urgently calling for a more balanced approach to the management of our public lands; calling on them to oppose the sale of public lands in the Budget Reconciliation Package; and asking them to reject any attempts to change the Antiquities Act or reduce the size of our national monuments.
The Call to Action is to advocate for the protection of public lands. Call and send postcards to your congressional representatives and Department of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. The main phone line is (202) 208-3100, and the address is Department of the Interior, 1849 C Street, N.W., Washington DC 20240.
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