Weatherization: Paying More for Less

Sunday's New York Times included an article called Stimulus Funds Spent to Keep Sunbelt Cool. In it, writer Michael Cooper described how $5 billion in weatherization funds will be allocated differently than weatherization money of the past: more will go to air-conditioning-dominant states and less to heating-dominant states.

This change is the result of a political compromise from 1995, when Sun Belt representatives and senators managed to win access to more weatherization money for their states in years the federal government spends more than $233 million for that purpose. Years like this one.

At the time, then-Senator J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.) argued that more people die from heat than cold, and that it was an "equity proposal" for "public health."

Excuse me, Mr. Johnston, but that's just stupid. Weatherization doesn't lower the temperature of anyone's house enough to save lives -- people who die from heat don't have air conditioning in the first place, so weatherizing their homes isn't going to save them. Unless weatherization suddenly includes installing air conditioning, which I doubt.

On top of that idiocy is the fact that it's not even clear that weatherizing homes in warm climates saves energy during air conditioning season. An Oak Ridge National Laboratory study of weatherization in Texas found that it did not save significant money spent on cooling. It did help with heating during times when that was needed, but obviously, when it comes to carbon emissions, a lot more savings can be had by weatherizing homes that use heat for longer periods than they do in Texas.

According to the Times article, of nine Florida homes that were recently weatherized with stimulus money,

A couple of [electricity] bills were halved, with monthly savings of up to $178; most customers saved $13 to $44 a month, and one customer saw her electric bill rise as she consumed more electricity after her house had been weatherized.

Huh. That sounds like a mixed bag.

And it's not even correct to think that decreasing the need for heating and air conditioning are equal to start with, from a carbon emissions standpoint. According to Wired magazine, air conditioning takes significantly less energy in the first place, for several reasons:

When it's 0 degrees outside, you've got to raise the indoor thermometer to 70 degrees. In 110-degree weather, you need to change the temperature by only 40 degrees to achieve the same comfort level. Since air-conditioning is inherently more efficient than heating (that is, it takes less energy to cool a given space by 1 degree than to heat it by the same amount), the difference has big implications for greenhouse gases.

In the Northeast, a typical house heated by fuel oil emits 13,000 pounds of CO2 annually. Cooling a similar dwelling in Phoenix produces only 900 pounds of CO2 a year... Salving the summer swelter in the US produces 110 million metric tons of CO2 annually. Heating the country releases nearly eight times more carbon over the same period.

So we're spending 31 percent of the $5 billion ($1.55 billion) to decrease 110 million metric tons of CO2 a year, and 69 percent ($3.45 billion) of it to decrease 880 million metric tons. Pound for pound that's not a very good deal -- we're paying $14 per ton of decrease in the south, vs. $3.92 per ton of decrease in the north.

Sometimes I really wish we could base policy on science and rational thought instead of political expediency.