What if you could draw a line from where you are today to a home that runs entirely on solar power? No natural gas bill. No stops at the gas pump. No propane deliveries. Just electricity—from everlasting sunshine—powering everything you need. You can bring that future closer with a step that takes just a few minutes. This week, we’re exploring the Energy pathway together. This route to sustainability focuses on using energy wisely and transitioning to electricity generated by solar power. The step to take? Make a commitment and plan to become fossil fuel-free. You don’t need to buy anything. You don’t need to call a contractor (yet). Just walk through your home and ask one question.

Gift giving illustration

Where Does Fire Burn?

Here’s your move: sometime this week, take a careful pass through your house and notice every place where fossil fuel combusts. (If you’ve already achieved freedom from fossil fuel in your own home, your step is more advanced: walk through another home or a workplace, church, school, or other organization that hasn’t yet become fossil fuel-free.) Write it down and promise to stop it one day.

Maybe it’s in the basement, where a furnace or boiler runs. Maybe it’s in the garage, where your car waits with its tank of fuel. Maybe it’s in the kitchen, where blue flames lick the bottom of your pans. Maybe it’s in a closet, where a water heater burns to keep a tank at 120 degrees.

Each of those fires represents a future choice for a world that works better for everyone. Not today, necessarily—but eventually. When you’re ready to replace each appliance or vehicle, you (or the next homeowner) will face a decision: buy another combustion machine that burns explosive, polluting fuel, or choose equipment that can be powered by clean electricity generated, nearby or far away, from the free energy our sun sends our way every day.

Where do fires burn in your home that you can put out?

Why This Matters So Much

You may already be considering climate change. Perhaps you’ve purchased carbon offsets for a flight, or you buy from companies that declare themselves “carbon neutral.” That’s genuinely helpful—the offsets fund projects like forest preservation and methane capture. They’re a pragmatic way to account for emissions (like pollution from air travel) that are impossible for you to eliminate with today’s technology or to atone for pollution that isn’t under your direct control.

But here’s something important to understand: carbon-neutral and fossil-fuel-free are different destinations on the journey to sustainability. Being carbon-neutral is a voluntary detour, not the direct path to a sustainable energy future. Carbon-neutral doesn’t mean you’re preventing pollution. It just means the carbon footprint math balances out in theory—pollution you emit is offset by promised reductions somewhere else by someone else. You can be carbon-neutral and still burn fossil fuel forever.

Being fossil-fuel-free, on the other hand, does mean you are reducing pollution. Your furnace doesn’t combust gas or your oil burner doesn’t burn oil, your stove doesn’t have a flame, and your car doesn’t have a tailpipe. When you electrify your own systems and power them with solar electricity (whether generated on site or from a remote solar farm), you’ve made a permanent change that’s more than just an entry in a financial ledger. It’s a down-to-earth improvement for clear skies you can see and clean air you can breathe.

Smart Sequence

This week’s step is to plan how you’ll electrify. Once you’ve done that, then you can plan how to solarize.

Electrify means replacing each combustion appliance with its electric equivalent. Out with fuel-burning furnaces, in with electric heat pumps. Remove gas water heaters and install heat pump water heaters. Swap out gas stoves with induction ranges. Trade in your gas-guzzling car for a battery electric vehicle. Make your plan now so you’re ready to act when you have the money and motivation to upgrade. Solarize means tapping into electricity generated by sunlight, either by installing modules on your property or by subscribing to a community solar farm and receiving electricity from the public power grid. Once your home runs entirely on electricity, every kilowatt-hour of solar electricity you add powers your life without pollution.

Your Fifteen-Minute High-Level Planning Session

This week’s step is simple. Take that tour through your home or organization. Note each place where combustion happens—write it down in your sustainability journal and promise to solve it.

If it’s your furnace and you live in a cold climate, you could install a cold-climate heat pump rated for your region. If it’s your water heater, you could upgrade to a heat pump water heater. If it’s your stove, you could go for an induction range.

You’re not buying anything yet. You’re preparing for when the old machine dies—probably at the worst possible moment, as they always do—so you don’t default to a like-for-like replacement. You’ll be ready to take your next step on the pathway to a sustainable energy future for our planet.

Your plan might include doing further research or calling a few contractors if you’re not quite sure how to electrify a system. But don’t get bogged down in details just yet. The most important thing is to make a commitment and start planning, not to have a perfect plan from the outset. Your step this week is to make sure that you’ve identified and spent at least a couple of minutes thinking about every reason you’re buying and burning fossil fuel now in your own home. Confirm that you have made the commitment to solve that serious problem, one step at a time.

It used to make sense for some people to burn fossil fuel in their homes. With today’s technology, it’s no longer a good idea for anyone to burn any fossil fuel in any residential building on Earth. Reliable cold-climate heat pumps, efficient induction stoves, and capable electric vehicles are now available. Burning fossil fuel is now more of a choice and less of a necessity; you can make a commitment to invest your time and money in ways that eliminate harmful emissions from your home or organization.

Walking Together

Every household that transitions away from fossil fuels improves our energy system for everyone. Fewer customers for natural gas means less drilling, fracking, and fugitive emissions. Fewer gasoline buyers means less refining and shipping. Individual choices aggregate into market signals, and market signals reshape entire industries.

But there’s something more immediate, too. A fossil fuel-free home is safer, healthier, and quieter—no furnace rumble, no combustion roar from the stove, no soot, and no carbon monoxide concerns. And once you’ve electrified and solarized, you’ll never need to worry about the price of oil or gas again. You simply don’t need to buy fossil fuel. Sunlight and batteries are better technologies that allow billions more people to prosper on Earth than ever could if we all kept burning coal, oil, and gas.

The pathway to a peaceful, prosperous planet runs through homes like yours, each one choosing electrons over explosions, one appliance at a time.

And if you’ve already made the switch? Your step this week is to help a neighbor or family member start their own plan to become fossil fuel-free. The pathway widens when we walk it together.

References and Resources

Prevalence of Fossil Fuels in U.S. Homes

Carbon Neutral vs. Fossil Fuel Free

Fugitive Emissions & Methane Leaks

Health Impacts of Gas Stoves

Renewable Energy Potential

More Resources from Sustainable Practice

Sustainable Practice, the publisher of Your Earth Share: Seven Pathways to Sustainable Living and Sustainable Practices: Your Handbook for Effective Action, provides essential, comprehensive, science-based resources for sustainability practitioners at www.suspra.com.