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The state rebates and federal tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act are helping, but the main reason heat pumps are being adopted so quickly, this story suggests, is that once one household installs a heat pump as proof of concept—often despite strong initial skepticism—everyone else wants one. From the Times:

“Ten years ago, they weren’t really popular,” said Josh Tucker, of Valley Home Services, a family-owned heating company outside of Bangor. “No one really knew what they were.” He first installed heat pumps in his sister’s new home in 2014, over the objections of her building contractor who, Mr. Tucker said, “was against it big time.”

“He thought she was going to freeze to death unless she had a furnace or boiler,” he said. She didn’t, and uses the same heat pumps today.

The new technology was embraced especially quickly in one northern Maine community after Mr. Tucker’s father installed heat pumps at a Methodist church there. The Tucker family still sells heating oil and propane, but less and less. Its heat pump business, meanwhile, grew from installing two to three units a week to 3,000 last year, a nearly 20-fold increase.

“We’ve done TV ads, advertising on social media, but the big one’s always been word of mouth and that’s how it exploded,” Mr. Tucker said.

What does this have to do with Darren Woods? Well, recall what the CEO said about consumer choice. One reason it’s interesting to see Maine “falling hard” for heat pumps is that the heating oil and gas industry spent lots of time and money convincing people that heat pumps wouldn’t work in places like Maine, claiming the devices wouldn’t work in cold weather. “Internal documents show that the National Oilheat Research Alliance, a trade association representing heating oil sellers, has funded campaigns fighting electrification that target New England homeowners and real estate agents,” The Washington Post reported almost a year ago. The Propane Education and Research Council, similarly, “has put out training material coaching installers how to dissuade customers from switching to electrical appliances.”

Consumers don’t make their choices in a vacuum. No one does. The options available to them right now are the result of decades of corporate profits on high-emissions products leading to further investments in these products and entrenching economies of scale. Those profits in turn were guided by over a century of government subsidy. The government’s tools for boosting greener products are severely hampered by a tremendous amount of corporate lobbying on Capitol Hill, consumer marketing, and the rulings of judges that these corporations helped put on the bench. And this full-court press works: The Biden administration, for instance, is pulling back from several Environmental Protection Agency rules intended to nudge the market toward more climate-friendly products, due to concerns about court challenges and election-year pushback.