Go Zero and Go Home

Southern California’s air regulators voted today to expand the region’s highly successful Go Zero program. The program provides incentives for families and businesses in Southern California to kick their polluting appliances to the curb in exchange for modern and non-polluting ones.

In the initial phase, the South Coast Air Quality Management District Governing Board allocated $21 million. And, the program was so popular that some categories of Go Zero funding  — like the funds for apartment buildings — were fully subscribed within a couple weeks as people hustled to adopt heat pumps and induction stoves

Now, the agency will allocate an additional $60.2 million to expand the program based on immense appetite from Southern Californians hoping to ditch their antiquated and polluting appliances for modern and truly clean ones. It is estimated these funds could help replace more than 36,000 appliances with better non-polluting technology.

In the big picture, the politics of the big switch from polluting appliances to modern technology like heat pumps and induction stoves won’t be easy. Wealthy polluting corporations will fight to keep us at a standstill. We’ve already seen SoCalGas and other interests leverage immense sums of money to fight clean air protections — like when SoCalGas was caught charging customers $36 million for the utility’s lobbying campaign against clean appliance measures.

Bots don’t breathe but Angelenos do

Perhaps the greatest trick the gas industry and its allies played on us last year was convincing people that breathers in the nation’s smog capital didn’t want the upgrade to non-polluting appliances.

Smog covers Los Angeles.
(Photo courtesy of Ben Amstutz)

The opponents of clean appliances even used powerful AI tools as they mounted an aggressive effort to make decision-makers believe that people in the region had a fondness for making sure they burn methane to take a hot shower or get a little heat on cold day.

To counteract the flurry of bot-driven activity, real residents (you know, who actually have to breathe the air in the region), have since been showing up to board hearings in droves to show that they care about what kind of air is in our lungs.

What Go Zero has shown us is that people want non-polluting appliances in places like Los Angeles, the Inland Empire, and Orange County.

Over the last year, the Governing Board of the South Coast Air Quality Management District listened. The agency unanimously and in a bipartisan way expanded the program. The year of action from actual breathers in community groups, public health advocates, and proponents of clean air made a compelling case to these leaders.

Moving forward, we need to find a permanent funding source for this program. And, with millions of polluting appliances in the region, we will need to identify commonsense approaches to scale this effort helping Southern Californians adopt heat pumps and induction stoves. But that’s a project for another today — today, we’re celebrating millions of dollars going to families so they can kick 36,000 polluting appliances to the curb and welcome clean, efficient, and simply better options into their homes.