How is it punishing customers? The rest of the article suggests it may improve things

“It speeds up the process at entry and speeds up the process at the checkout,” he said. “That’s what we believe and we’re going to pilot it.”

Geo heat pump install is indeed very high. But air source heat pumps (both heat pump water heaters and heat pumps for heating/cooling) don’t have that issue and have similar performance, except in extreme climates where geo outperforms.

I can see how it’s strange on the surface, but ultimately the carbon emissions wouldn’t be there if the polluting activity was not funded. So to whom would the carbon emissions be attributed otherwise? Just the CEO?

The study’s primary metric appears to include both supplier and producer emissions proportional to income and investments. What alternative do you suggest?

Thanks for putting out what is at least an interesting and engaging graphic for us to comment on! I myself have two of the three reactions you listed

Yeah, this is a pretty appalling graphic that maybe seemed good in theory but is hostile to the reader in practice.

It’s time for this unfortunate headline to go away. I see a variation of this posted in nearly every thread about climate and emissions, a complex topic that the average person understandably doesn’t know much about beyond some headline that stuck with them. Snopes has a good article debunking The Guardian’s grossly misleading headline.

To see the actual sources of GHG emissions, at least in the US, the EPA has good resources. In short, agriculture is 10% (methane from cows fits here), transportation is 28%, electric power generation is 25% (fossil fuel power plants generating electricity), residential and commercial buildings are 13% (in practice, the building sector overall is about a third of emissions after attributing the emissions from the electric power slice. Residential and commercial buildings use 75% of the power generated in the US), and finally industry is 23% (again, a bit more factoring in their share of the electric power emissions. Industry uses about a quarter of all power in the US).

As you can see, emissions, or at least GHG emissions, are spread across the economy. Some industries are heavy polluters (e.g. cement manufacturing), but that’s ultimately to make products for the market, even if they do have plenty of room to improve efficiency and reduce emissions, as do all other areas of the economy, especially buildings.