It’s this time of year I wish I had an almost guilt-free heat pump here at Terra Infirma Towers, as I hold off that moment when I switch on the gas fired central heating for the winter. We’ve done some initial investigations to changing, but due to some layout issues, it looks as if installing a heat pump may be trickier than we had hoped.

However, in the meantime, we’ve just called out our gas engineer for the second year running to replace a (different) critical component in our gas combo boiler. While this has led to some grumbling, we’ve never felt buyers’ regret over the boiler. But imagine if we’d installed a heat pump and it had failed two years running? What would we think then?

This fear of the new is natural. In pre-historic times, if something unfamiliar turns up in our habitat, we treat it with great suspicion until it proves itself benign over time, whereas we would just ignore anything that’s always been there. This fear of change is an all-too-easy opportunity to create news stories/clickbait – almost every vehicle fire is pronounced to be an EV, but usually turns out to be a bog standard ICE vehicle, and the world moves on to the next scare.

In some ways the climate action debate is a battle of fears. The fear of current and future impacts versus the fear of the solutions required to head off those impacts. The problem with the former is that we have seen storms, flooding and wildfires before, so it is easy to dismiss the rising occurrences. Whereas being required to change your boiler? Call the Police!

Anything that can be done to reduce that fear is helpful. Some organisations run a ‘visit my heat pump’ programme to allow people to at least see the beast and question its owners before taking the dive. Some employers allow employees to borrow an EV to find that range anxiety should only affects a really high mileage minority. And several acquaintances have bought cargo bikes after trying out mine (I bought it after trying one belonging to a friend of a friend). This ripple effect is one of the reasons why individual action is so important – we’ve got to help make low carbon appear to be the new normal.