A climate activist and a gas executive walk into a bar

In 2007, Zainab Maghavi and her husband bought a fixer-upper in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

It was clearly a home that was loved, but it had a very ancient furnace that even had a little door to put your garbage in and burn it.

Our producer, Felix Poon, talked to her about it.

Did you use it?

No, no, no.

Zainab had two kids, and she knew there was a link between natural gas and kids getting asthma.

I didn't want to burn anything inside the house.

So no combustion.

It creates particulate matters and it's bad for your health.

So she looked into her best options to replace the old gas furnace.

And she wanted it to be really climate friendly.

What she landed on was geothermal.

It seemed really obvious geothermal heating and cooling was basically blowing everything else out of the water.

When you hear geothermal, you might be thinking about places like Iceland.

They have the kind of industrial plants that tap into super hot water and steam underground that's been heated up by hot rocks and magma.

Those plants need to be in volcanic regions.

And they also need to have these massive boreholes that go a mile or two below the surface.

But there's another kind of geothermal that doesn't need volcanoes or very, very deep boreholes.

This type of geothermal relies on the fact that just about 10 to 20 feet underground, the temperature stays at a constant 50 to 60 degrees.

That is year round and in most places around the world.

You tap into that and you've got geothermal power heating and cooling for your home.

For Zainab, it was a no brainer.

So she reached out to a contractor and...

It kind of broke our budget.

Turns out geothermal energy is cheap, but installation, that's a whole nother story.

So it's kind of like buying your fuel for the next 50 years on day one.

Zainab was persistent though.

So she asked the contractor, like, is there any way this could be cheaper?

And he said, well, you know what? I can give you a discount if you can get some of your neighbors to also get a geothermal warhole.

Because a lot of the cost for me is bringing the rig out, setting it up.

I said, oh, that's interesting.

So that's how I met some of my neighbors is I knocked on their door and I was like, hi, I'm your new neighbor.

And also, can we talk about geothermal

energy?

And none of my neighbors said yes, which isn't particularly surprising.

What were their reasons?

A couple of them said, oh, well, that sounds really interesting when my furnace dies, right? And others were just totally uninterested, didn't care at all about their heating system or even know what it was.

Now, for most people, that would have been the end of the story.

But fast forward to today, about two decades later, and Zainab has finally made her dream a reality.

She spearheaded a first-in-the-country geothermal project, not for her own home, but for an entire neighborhood.

And how'd she do it? By pairing with a very unlikely ally.

My name is Bill Akeley.

I am the evil president of the gas business.

I'm Nate Hedgie, and this is Outside In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide.

Today, how a climate activist and a gas executive put their differences aside to find a win-win proposition.

It was just science, right? For little money, you can make a big impact.

But is this actually a good idea? Can utilities invested in the status quo really be trusted to drive change?

If there are competing goals between making as much money as possible for shareholders and reducing emissions from heating buildings, I think we know what direction the gas utilities are going to go in.

Producer Felix Poon has the story.