It’s hard out there for climate justice advocate these days. Few know how quickly your eyes glaze over when the topic turns to, say, heating pumps, than this year’s Young Hero, Brennan Breen.
Breen, the campaign coordinator of Energize Bend, a nonprofit coalition advocating for electrification, however, decidedly does not live in mamby-pamby land. At just 26, Breen has worked in a missile factory (doing environmental compliance) and afterward, in the (renewable) natural gas industry.
Perhaps counterintuitively, these posts give him environmentalist cred.
“I’ve yet to encounter somebody else in the advocacy space who’s worked in the natural gas industry,” Breen said. “I can sit across the table from a natural gas lobbyist and, most likely, I’ve been on more natural gas sites than they have.”
The Sisyphean challenges of those roles, in their respective industries, led Breen to his current charge with Energize Bend. Advocating for change on the local level feels, well, much less like an uphill battle.
“There are problems locally, but we can fix them,” Breen said. “At Energize Bend, we have capacity and platform to get people engaged locally. We can make governments work for us. We need to push them in the direction we want to see.”
Breen cropped up in Central Oregon news stories in late 2025 and early this year as a staunch supporter of a fee on natural gas appliances in new home construction. (City councilors voted on a fee rate that would cost about $2,000 per home; they’ll vote in June on whether to adopt it.)
Breen and other electrification advocates would have preferred to see fee rates set at $10,000 per new home, which would have accounted for 100% of the Environmental Protection Agency’s estimated social cost of 1 ton of carbon dioxide emissions in long-term climate change-related harm. Yet a fifth of the way there would be, at least, a step in the right direction. The point, Breen makes, is to de-incentivize natural gas, whose emissions contribute to a warming planet, in favor of electrified homes that feature one-and-done electric heating pumps. They’re like air conditioner units but can heat air, too, he explained.
Whoops — there Breen goes again, rambling about heating pumps.
“Even if you’re a person who hasn’t, you know, paid attention or studied environmental science, but you’ve lived in Bend for 15 years, there’s some good gut-check intuition you can do,” Breen said. “You know there wasn’t a fire season 15 years ago and there is one now.
“It’s a pretty easy calculus that things are not gonna get better on their own,” he continued. “Bend only exists because we take care of the environment and all the tourism and opportunities that it brings. That’s an economic priority.”
Having a mix of people in Bend who can work in the service and tourism industries, for example, and live here without being cost-burdened, is an ongoing problem in Central Oregon. And home electrification and affordable housing, he says, aren’t mutually exclusive.
Breen steers the conversation back to the natural gas fee — the money it would collect would get funneled into a transition fund. From there, it would be divvied up toward initiatives like weatherizing rental homes, which would cut down on heating and cooling costs for renters. The fund would go toward installing electric heating pumps in new dwellings, as well.
“We can meet both climate-change and housing affordability goals at the same time,” Breen says. “The longer that we wait, the more it’s going to cost us. If we really care about affordability, let’s put our money where our mouth is and start investing in clean things that are more affordable.”
This article appears in the Source April 16, 2026.
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