| (Washington Post illustration; iStock) | | Welcome. This week, French broom is invading and blue whales are back. But first, how to avoid the nightmare of hiring the wrong contractor when electrifying your home. |  | | Laura Cary says after remodeling homes for most of her adult life, she's lived through the nightmare of hiring a bad contractor more than once. One of them, often intoxicated, turned a simple interior design project into a three-year ordeal. Another did such a shoddy job installing wood flooring, it all had to be ripped up. "We finally paid them to go away," says Cary. So when she set out to replace a gas furnace with a heat pump in her Denver home, she embarked on a three-month journey to find the right person for the job, including hours of internet research and requesting bids. The five contractors ultimately delivered five "wildly different" bids. "They ranged from absolutely clueless to really knowing their stuff," says Cary. "There was no correlation between price and how good they were." Home upgrades are rarely easy, but home electrification projects present a novel challenge. The technology inside modern appliances such as heat pumps, water heaters, induction stoves and EV chargers advances quickly. Devices may talk to the electrical grid and each other. Not everyone is prepared to treat the home as a digital, interconnected system, especially for homes that were designed for the fossil-fuel era. But contractors must do that if the United States is going to reach its climate goals. Efficiency retrofits, including installing millions of electric heat pumps for space heating and water heating, are one of the linchpins to reach net zero by 2050, according to an analysis by Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental nonprofit. "Things are getting more complicated," says Stephen Yurek, CEO of the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, another trade association. "But a lot of guys just wanted to work with their hands. Now you've got to be an IT specialist." Whether you're installing an induction stove, solar panels or a heat pump, I asked more than a dozen experts and contractors about how to avoid an electrification contractor debacle. Here are the questions you should be asking (and how to answer them). - What's the state of your home?
- What do you want to electrify?
- Do you need a second opinion?
- Will the contractor give you options?
- How can you tell if your contractor is qualified?
- Does managing a project sound like too much work?
To find out how to answer them, click on the button below. Tell me what you've learned from hiring the wrong contractor at climatecoach@washpost.com. I read all your emails. |  | Field Sample Ornamental plants can be beautiful. But are they invasive? A 2021 study found hundreds of invasives were being sold by more than a 1,000 vendors as ornamental garden plants, including 20 species that are illegal to grow or sell nationwide, according to researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Those nursery-bought invasives include the three below: | | From left, wisteria, yellow toadflax and a Bradford pear tree (Washington Post illustration; iStock; Pictorial Press Ltd./Alamy; Hendersonville Times-News/USA Today Network) | | To avoid them, check online lists of invasives in your area before shopping at a nursery, writes The Post's Allyson Chiu. And keep an eye out for nonnative species described as "self-sowing," "low maintenance" and "fast-growing" — often warning words for invasives. Check out Allyson's piece here, as well as my columns on tidy wildlands, a guide to creating a native habitat in your yard, and on what to plant to avoid the insect apocalypse. | Learning Curve Electric vehicles have become politically polarized: Democrats say they are way more likely than Republicans to buy electric cars, writes The Post's Shannon Osaka. While 61 percent of Democrats reported that they were "seriously considering" or "might consider" buying an EV in the future, according to a Gallup poll this year, only 24 percent of Republicans say the same. A whopping 69 percent of Republicans said they "would not buy" an EV in the future. Only 27 percent of Democrats said the same. |  | | Actual sales are tracking a similar trend. About half of all EVs sold went to the top 10 percent most Democratic counties in the United States, between 2012 and 2022, according to an analysis by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, MIT and HEC Montréal. To change minds, change the message, says John Marshall, the CEO of the Potential Energy Coalition, which uses marketing strategies to boost climate action. Talk of banning gas-powered cars doesn't help. "Mandates, bans and limitations never win," said Marshall. "Whenever one of those three things is mentioned, you lose support pretty significantly." The winning message? How much EVs lower the cost of owning a car and cut pollution. |  | The Second Degree After reading my last column on providing homes for insects, Betsy Peterson wrote in to say she's pushing for a Biodiversity Victory Garden movement. A fellow at the Landscape Architecture Foundation, Peterson hopes to replicate the Victory Gardens movement that championed homegrown food as part of the World War II effort 80 years ago. The key, she says, was simplicity: "They didn't go into the specifics of battle strategies or supply chains," writes Peterson. "They kept the problem simple enough that everyone could understand it, then handed them a concrete way to be a part of the solution." Vicky, who lives in the D.C. area, read the column about the surprising benefits of switching to "lamb mowers" in October. "I wanted to let you know that due to your newsletter, we had Lamb Mowers come to our house in DC the other week," she says. "My young kids loved it and it was definitely a spectacle for neighbors, walkers, and those driving by. I hope to make this an annual tradition to kick off the season." |  |  | | Mike, who lives in the Bay Area, joined a group of "weed warriors" this past month to uproot French broom in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The invasive species forms monocultures that suppress native plants. It spreads by producing thousands of seeds that explode out of pods, landing up to 13 feet from the plant. But each spring, "weed warriors" can easily spot it. "It is in full, yellow bloom right now and the soil is still wet, so it's easy to find," he writes. "Removing it from the local Coyote brush can be quite a wrestling match but it's worth the effort." What invasive species are you wrestling with in your neighborhood? Send me your photos to climatecoach@washpost.com | | Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get The Climate Coach in your inbox every Tuesday. See you next Tuesday, Michael Coren, Climate Coach | | |
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