You're listening to shortwave from NPR.

Hey there, Maddie Sifai here with NPR correspondent Dan Charles-Hi Dan.

Hi Maddie.

Maddie, you know how last week my colleagues Lauren Summer and Becky Hirscher were on here

talking about the Biden administration's promise that by 2030 the U.S. will reduce its greenhouse

gas emissions by at least 50% from 2005 levels?

Yeah, they said that's going to take a lot of work Dan.

Big companies are going to have to really change the way they do business, but there are things

that regular people can do in how we get around, how we heat and cool our homes.

Yeah, I mean last month you and I talked about how to make homes more efficient by using heat

pumps, that kind of stuff.

I have been thinking so much about this, about heat pumps and other things that people can

do in their homes ever since a particular day.

Last summer I was on a street in Brooklyn with Denelle Baird.

He runs a company called Block Power and we were looking at a row of brown stones.

And Denelle was explaining that buildings have a carbon footprint.

Most of them here, everywhere they run on fossil fuels of some kind.

The trick is how do you move these buildings off of fossil fuels?

How do you move them to clean energy?

And he pointed toward one building where they'd done it.

They had new electric heating and cooling systems, there were solar panels on the roof.

He said that this building's carbon emissions had dropped by 40%.

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