Fight Forest Fires With Heat Pumps

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Nothing quite drives home the horrors of climate change like forest fires and wildfire smoke. We living on the West Coast have had a couple more years to experience the nightmare that the Midwest and East Coast are experiencing for the second time in 3 years.

I’ll never forget 2017 when the wildfire smoke descended on my city in Oregon for days at a time. We couldn’t go outside and the skies had a frightening, apocalyptic red to them. Clean air, which we all took for granted, was suddenly taken away from us. Ash started raining down on my city and I wrote “HELP” on the top of our car.

Then it happened again in Oregon in 2018. More smoke in the late summer, more checking air quality sites to see when we could go outside. We all bought air purifiers to keep our air breathable indoors.

And then there was 2020, the year of COVID, when wildfires came really close to Portland, and we thought about evacuating. Meanwhile, the air quality in our city was declared to be the worst in the world. I drove to downtown Portland and took this picture.

The nightmarish smoke has continued nearly every summer since. My family back East always felt bad, but couldn’t really relate. This was a West Coast thing. We had forests that were drying and burning. The East got rain.

But now we’re all learning that wildfire smoke is not just a West Coast climate change problem, it’s a scourge upon everyone in North America. I was shocked in 2023 in the summer when I was in Ohio and the Canadian fires were so bad that we had smoke in the Midwest for the first time. In June!! None of us thought the Midwest or East would experience this.

But here we are in 2026, and the smoke is back. And if it’s back in just three years, and the CO2 continues to accumulate in our atmosphere, then this feels like we’ve entered another nightmarish new normal that is only going to get worse. Clean air and smoke-free summers are now another casualty, another penance to be paid for our inaction, not just in the West but everywhere. They are a clear sign and message that we’re not doing enough and not taking this problem seriously enough.

Fighting the fires with heat pumps

I’m a big believer in feeling as fully as possible the pain from wildfires and smoke that have descended on the West Coast for the last 10 years and the East Coast over the last three.

I think we should treat them as major warning signs to our species to prioritize decarbonization, to stop burning fossil fuels. The only way we can really fight the root causes of these fires is to stop taking our air for granted, and stop filling it with heat-trapping pollution.

Which brings me to the title of this editorial. Fight fires and smoke with heat pumps. Heat pumps are a key technology that help solve climate change, which is causing these never-before-seen wildfires and their life-quality-compromising smoke. Switch out your gas furnace and you save 4 to 8 tons of heat-trapping, wildfire-causing CO2 a year. Switch out your water heater and you save another one to two. Electrify your transportation and you are keeping another 5+ tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere. Put solar panels on your house or buy community solar and you’re ensuring that all of your electric appliances are as clean as possible.

These are the things that are within most of our power to do. The world is moving in this direction, just not fast enough. We can help speed it along.

The French author Marcel Proust has a great line, “Illness is the most headed of doctors. To kindness and wisdom we make promises only. To pain we obey.”

These wildfires and their smoke are a clear sign of our climate change illness. The sooner we heed this illness, obey this pain. and do what it takes to decarbonize our lives (through PV, EV, and heat pumps), the faster we can get back to the smoke-free summers of not too long ago.