Your getting downvoted because you raise no interesting counterpoints and are just leaving unfounded conspiracies like other brain damaged folks.

I downvoted you because seeing conspiracies in progress is not reasonable. Heat pumps have been popular for a long time. Most of the houses around me have had them for decades.

This is a normal news cycle. A few articles pop up and then all the blogspam sites copy them. It's not a conspiracy, it's lazy publishers who won't do actual journalism combined with confirmation bias on your part.

It's a hot topic in the USA now because finally heat pumps are available and the prices are starting to be affordable. Many areas in the USA still heat with oil for single family residential properties. Residential heating oil has been getting much more expensive and lots of the in-house tanks needed for oil heating are at the end of their life. Rather than buy a new oil tank and continue to spend the money buying oil, it can be less expensive to switch to using a heat pump. Removing the oil tanks from your house can also have health benefits.

Many houses in the USA also already have central air conditioning and when replacing your air conditioner system by buying a heat pump is not much extra cost. But now you have the option to use the heat pump to heat your home at least some of the time. For some temperature ranges, depending on your heating fuel and electricity cost, a heat pump is clearly less expensive than using any fuel to produce heat.

The popularity can easily be explained simply by looking at total costs of ownership for residential heating.

It's just a centuries old technology, Air Conditioning and Refridgerator, used in reverse. It's been in use in other parts of the world since a very long time.

I have no idea why it's only now becoming a "hot" topic in the US. We've been using heat pumps for multiple decades in Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#History

And we have been using heat pumps for a long time in the US too. It is just that until recently heat pumps were not as efficient at lower temps and you would always have a backup heater source to heat during colder periods of the season.

Now heat pumps are able to reliably and efficiently heat most parts of the US. In combination there is a general push for electrification. We have increasingly cheap renewables, EVs and other interesting tech that in the electric space.

From a grid perspective over the long term it can make sense to electrify everything. You no longer need to maintain two energy types going to a home (thinking of natty or similar), you now only need to maintain an electrical grid.

Heat pumps are culture wars now, believe it or not.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/net-zero/why-heat-pumps-wi...

DT article to illustrate, not necessarily to inform. The idea I believe being that heat pumps are part of a supposedly unnecessary and costly push to Net Zero driven by industry and shadowy interest groups but which are just another means of a) enforcing control and b) screwing money out of 'the little guy' and siphoning tax dollars off compliant governments. And thus one is able to wave away an article absolutely bursting with scientific detail and research as 'well, it's all a bit convenient, isn't it?'

I honestly despair.

Oh wow. I lived in the US for a year, so this doesn't come as a complete surprise. But Heatpumps? I thought everybody loved Aircon, regardless of polical party, or socioeconomical background.

This is just Aircon.

I'll despair with you. Unfortunately, trends that emerge in the US tend to find their way to the rest of the western world too..

Counter point, the war on heat pumps is mostly a British problem. Everytime I have heard it come up its in context of the UK. Don't think the US has anything to do with it.

There’s an obvious PR component here, it’s not a mere coincidence when anything becomes an all-platforms hot topic.

Well, there is certainly PR and a push for heat pumps .. as a means of addressing climate change. You can even read that in these articles you keep dismissing.