this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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Natural gas heating is very efficient and huge BTUs for low cost. When you live where it actually gets cold, it's important. As is heating water. Cooking at restaurants also important.
Not everything is binary. We don't need 100% renewables and 0% gas and 0% plastic and 0% ICE vehicles. Renewable energy is 68% in Canada or 20% in the USA in terms of energy production. Getting those USA numbers to 50% or both to 80% is more important.
FYI, in the USA natural gas is about 32% of the USA's energy use. 15% of natural gas is used by residences. That's 4.8% of the power. Which means this entire debate goes out the window if you just installed 5% more solar or wind energy.
Making people fight and become tribal over trivial things that mean nothing is an easy way to prevent anything from happening. Idiots are fighting over trying to reduce 4.8% of energy that is perfectly fine at what it's doing. Meanwhile the natural gas companies are happy to keep supplying the remaining 27% of the USAs entire power via gas, and not a damn thing is being done. Use your energy to get that 27% down to 22% and you've done better than you ever will with demanding residences be built with shitty alternatives.
We actually do need 0% emissions and 100% renewables.
Yes. The sooner the better.
But on the way there we have to take the wins we can get and not let perfect be the enemy of good.
The way we truly save the world from everything is exactly your philosophy. Continuously improve. Donβt refuse to do good things that are not perfect ( unless your true goal is to do nothing ).
Which is not physically possible as most modern life relies on things that are not renewable.
The little that is done to reduce on a personal scale is meaningless compared to what is needed to be done globally and by industry.
Doesn't mean you shouldn't do your part. But it's stupid to believe any of it will help at all. At best it causes discourse for no reason. At worst, you're being played as a fool by large corporations to put off actual change longer and longer.
And just because it seems Lemmy can't seem to understand not everything is binary, I have had 10KW of solar for 15 years. I have had hybrid cars for 20 years. I've had pure electric cars for 13 years. I am one of the few that have installed heat pumps. I also have electric (solar) powered radiant water heating because water is a good energy store. I do way more than your average person. But I'm not stupid enough to think "0 emmisions" is possible. And nobody after a 5 minute google shouldn't understand commercial and industrial energy usage versus residential usage.
Not that it matters, but I don't think you should be getting down voted for expressing your perspective. I will say it comes off like you're some kind of captain planet villain advocating for gas expansion.
How do you know this is the case? Maybe there are other reasons to downvote?
I dunno, the long text and count I guess? It could be their username?
I guess I assumed but I don't doubt people just downvote what they don't agree with.
People definitely downvote on things they don't agree with.
This is different from downvoting because someone expressed their perspective.
OK..?
People on Lemmy seem more tribal than even reddit. You must be "for" or "against" something, black and white.
For example if tomorrow every house in Canada and the USA stopped using natural gas, like the supply just stops and electric equivalents are installed, emmisions would go UP.
A 100k BTU furnace is about 29kwh. My old high efficiency furnace was 96%. The crappy ones are usually 80% efficient. Assuming 80% efficiency, the worst sold is installed everywhere then you need 23kwh per hour.
If the energy source is coal, your electric furnace produces 50.6 CO2e. 22.3 CO2e if the source is natural gas itself (natural gas plant making electricity for you to make heat). If it's an average USA KWh of 0.86 CO2e/kWh, then that's 19.5. And it's 11.7 CO2e if you just burn it for heat in your house.
For some areas in Canada, like BC, the electricity is cheap, renewable, and awesome. In that case it's almost 2x better to run electric heat than the 80% natural gas furnace. But not everywhere is BC.
And that's part of the point. You have to look at the whole picture. There's really no reason to not run a natural gas line to a new residential property. It's a high pressure pipe connecting everyone's house. Maybe in the future that's where the organic smell-o-vision inlet comes in for our holodecks. All the power and heat being electric, but saving individual deliveries of thousands of compounds to every house versus one. Repurposing utility scale infrastructure is common. You don't have to know what the need is today. But knowing how ridiculously expensive it is to install later should be all the warning people need.
Comparing one fossil fuel to a worse one is not a valid argument. Electricity generation is being pushed towards nuclear and renewables for the foreseeable future.
Humans don't need any additional gasses to survive. The only reason we use methane is that it was once very cheap and we didn't know how bad it was in the longterm. All of our other needs are met by electricity (energy), water, or a trip to a store, if for some reason the xXxBox9080 needs a compressed gas cylinder in 2030 you can go pick it up. Throwing resources in a literal hole in the ground today because we might find a use for it tomorrow is not good planning.
You obviously can't comprehend basic things, so goodbye.
As a species, we need to get to zero emissions, and ideally negative numbers. It's easy to point fingers at others and then do nothing, but there's too much of that going on right now. Any reduction is a good thing.
You can't have 0 emmisions. Even a barren asteroid emits.
You can have net 0. And net 0 can include petrochemicals.
Maybe at some point in the future when carbon capture is a viable technology. But we're already at the point where "we'll deal with it later" is not a good enough solution.
I agree that there's no way around petrochemicals, and we'll have to offset the emissions to reach net 0.
Gas heating has an alternative though. Heat pumps are already cheaper to run compared to gas heating, even without any carbon offsetting.
The pressure to reach net 0 is only gonna grow as the impacts of climate change get worse. To reach net 0 we'll have to offset all significant emissions. When the offsets are priced in, using gas heaters becomes insanely expensive in comparison to heat pumps.
It's just a matter of time until gas heating is essentially dead. It might be in 10 years or 20 years, but there's no way around it.
I have an air source heat pump for my house and a heat pump water heater. Even in the dead of winter at 0F it kept my house just as warm as always and my water was hot. Heat pumps are not "shitty alternatives" any longer. Maybe in Alaska they would struggle but anywhere else and they work just fine.
If we want to honestly improve the climate then it is REQUIRED that we become carbon negative, not just net zero. And every little bit of emission that is prevented is a lot of power that isn't needed later on to suck that carbon back out of the air.
You can complain that big companies aren't doing enough to cut emissions and I agree, but that doesn't mean we should wait till they clean up their act to start working on ours.
There are also many ways to build a more efficient building envelope and insulation is one of the cheapest things that goes into a house. That makes the heat pumps even more viable in more climates.
I also love how people love to hate on heat pumps when there's so many shit box homes with electric baseboards wasting tons of power.
Yep, the standards for energy efficiency in homes is just barely above being non-existent. We spent decades with cheap energy so no one cared if every house leaked like a sieve. Now that's coming back to bite us.