If you were an American homeowner in the 1940s, there’s a good chance you received a weekly coal delivery to your basement coal bin. At that time, dirty, polluting coal heated more than 50 percent of American households.

According to the National Cancer Institute, heating a home with coal releases a dangerous cocktail of particulate matter and gas emissions that can include a number of harmful chemicals, such as benzene, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, formaldehyde, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

But between 1940 and 1970, the number of American households using coal as heating fuel dropped to almost zero.

We should breathe easier knowing that within 30 years, coal was nearly completely replaced as a home fuel source. That gives us an achievable roadmap for how we can also remove fossil fuels from American homes.

Even though the majority of American households no longer heat their homes with coal, many of those same toxic chemicals — like benzene and carbon dioxide — still unfortunately circulate in our homes, leaked into the air we breathe by the gas stoves and the gas-powered furnaces we still use to cook and heat our spaces. 

Today, 60 percent of American households use dirty, polluting fossil fuels (gas, propane, and fuel oil) to heat their homes. That use of fossil fuels leads to poor health, and adds to the carbon emissions that contribute to the climate crisis.

How will we decarbonize all those buildings? Together.

At Rewiring America, we have big goals to rid our homes of these dangerous chemicals produced by gas appliances. According to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will yield cumulative global economic benefits from reduced greenhouse gas pollution of over $5 trillion from the present to 2050. The U.S. Department of Energy has set 2050 as a benchmark for decarbonizing U.S. buildings as part of a national strategy for aggressively reducing greenhouse gas emissions from buildings while delivering equity, affordability, and resilience benefits to communities.

The work of Rewiring America is to help all households in America convert their homes and rentals from fossil fuels to electricity. 

Trying to convince all 129 million households around the U.S. to go electric by 2050 may sometimes feel like a daunting task. But just remember — we’ve ditched dirty fuels before, and we can do it again!