This is part 3 of an interview with Bruce Mast, who runs Peninsula Climate Comfort, a pilot program to help California residents go from using natural gas appliances to using electric ones. This is often called beneficial electrification. The benefits include more comfort, safer, healthier and helping reduce pollution and climate change. You can read part 1 and part 2 where we went through the background of beneficial electrification and specifically how a heat pump is such a good electric alternative to natural gas.

Here we wrap up our talks with Bruce. He talks about the future of climate change, electrification and shares why he rides the bus. This ain’t your grandma’s bus.

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TRAVIS:  In our previous podcast, Claudia from OhmConnect painted a picture 10 years from now where if you have solar and everything’s electrified, you can be a consumer and producer of electricity in an automated way.

TRAVIS:  Do you see that happening, like electricity become as fluid as money getting a wired around?

BRUCE:  There are people who are working on that and developing a blockchain-based solution, so that you can have these transactions that are all peer-to-peer. You don’t need some central hub to mediate things. We’ll see how that plays out. But absolutely, the idea, especially when we get to the point where energy storage is affordable … If I can store energy ,and I can produce energy, and my neighbor’s produces energy, and we can braid electrons back and forth when one needs and the other one has a surplus … You can start to see how those kinds of grid interactions can become possible.

TRAVIS:  Yeah, if everything is electrified, electricity could flow like money.

BRUCE:  Yeah.

TRAVIS:  Since I have you here now, and you’ve been working on climate change for quite a while, what do you see happening in the next 10 to 20 years as far as climate change?

BRUCE:  Yeah, it could go in a couple of different directions. The worst case scenario, our efforts fall flat, and we failed to get any traction at the higher levels of government. And things get really bad really fast until it really becomes a crisis. More optimistically, which I’m already starting to see, is a real sea-change in people’s attitudes and awareness, and them realizing the urgency here.

BRUCE:  So now the question is how do we do this? When we can come forward with some practical solutions and show people that, then I expect to see some big momentum. I think that in the next 10 years, if we can make a lot of progress in changing out a lot of these gas appliances and more electric cars are on the street, and just keep making progress on solar and wind power, and shutting down some of those coal plants and gas power plants etc., we’ll start to see the needle shift. We’ll start to see those carbon emissions going down, and we’ll start to get things under control.

TRAVIS:  We like to close most of our podcasts asking people this question: are there any life hacks that you personally do that you’d like to share, helping a lot with climate change?

BRUCE:  I ride the bus.

TRAVIS:  Wow that’s a real one, especially for Americans.

BRUCE:  Maybe it’s because I’m in an urban area where this is easier to do, but this is an area where technology has really changed in the last 10 years. Now, I have this little card that gets me on the bus and on the train and on the ferry. This card is good for any transit system I want to use. I’ve got this one card, and I don’t have to fumble with my change anymore.

BRUCE:  Also, I’ve got an app on my phone that tells me when the bus is going to get to the bus stop. I can decide if it is worth it to wait, or will I want to walk a couple of blocks, or do I want to call an Uber? So I’m never stranded, and I can get around just about wherever I want, and I can ride the bus.

TRAVIS:  It’s also a good example of what you were mentioning before how the biggest challenge is just inertia. Riding the bus might seem like a very hard one for most Americans to change, but it’s just inertia.

BRUCE:  One of the things that’s made that easier has been these advances in technology.

TRAVIS:  Well, thank you, Bruce. We’ll provide a link to the pilot program that you’re running: Peninsula Climate Comfort. Thank you very much.

BRUCE:  Thank you, Travis.