Environment & Energy

I think you are trying to generally loop back to the "tragedy of the commons" which is that a situation where everyone can prosper if nobody is greedy is ruined because individuals start taking as much as they can for themselves without consideration of the overall welfare. Unfortunately, the only real solution we have come up with to this is to legislate what must be done and enforce those laws. As things stand, it simply does not make sense for most individuals to upgrade to heat pumps if they have a working central conventional climate control system. And there are dozens if not hundreds of similar things (see: electric vehicles) where our entire society is structured to encourage individual autonomy and self-interest over the common good. Michael Moore said it as plainly as I've ever seen in his movie Sicko; they (countries with non nightmare health care systems) seem to have a "we" mentality instead of a "me" mentality. That is something far more fundamental than what kind of power plant we should be building to power all these electric cars and heat pumps.