Canada

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.