this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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[–] Macallan 0 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I prefer cooking on a gas stove. 🤷‍♂️

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[–] TechNerdWizard42 -4 points 6 days ago (20 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 days ago (5 children)

We can make synthetic methane with renewable energy though. I don't have a problem with building such infrastructure becsuse it can be used with renewable energy

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The boat salesman says you need a boat.

YOU pay for the infrastructure, YOU pay for the maintenance, YOU pay for the gas. Why would they stop now?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago

"Growth at any cost" is a great motto for corporations, and cancer.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (3 children)

That's great for climate goals, but can someone tell me how we're supposed to heat our homes? Electricity?

[–] [email protected] -2 points 6 days ago

Synthetic methane.

[–] rtxn 39 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)
  1. Better insulation.
  2. Heat pumps.
  3. By the time gas heating is eliminated, climate change will have solved that problem.
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

Heat pumps sounds like a good way forward. I haven't looked into the cost to replace a heater in a home, but I guess new homes could just have them installed by default.

What about natural gas use in home cooking/restaurants? Surely, you can't just replace that easily.

EDIT: And what about heating water? I mean, natural gas is used for more than heating the space in a home.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago

Induction stovetops are fast, efficient, and safe. (but regular electric is fine as well)

Water heaters are similarly available in electric and heat pump configurations.

[–] rtxn 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

Surely you can. Modern electric stovetops use infrared radiation from a wire coil to heat cookware. The stovetop is covered with a ceramic that allows infrared radiation to pass through, and if you put something on it, it'll absorb the radiation as heat. The technology is also scalable to industrial applications.

I'll let Brown Jacket Man explain the principle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ff04ecF9Dfw

(edit) My house has an electric water heater that was built in the Soviet Union. It uses a ~200-litre tank with a large heating element inside.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

Um, yes? Heat pump until -15C, baseboards for the relatively fewer days that go below that. Plus good insulation.

In Quebec we have cheap hydroelectric of course, but I mean, between nuclear power, renewables and hydro, that's basically how.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Natural gas infrastructure and heating could be transitioned to hydrogen or biogas.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


In 2022, buildings accounted for 13 per cent of the country's emissions, making them the third biggest source of greenhouse gases by sector, after oil and gas and transportation.

It was overseen by provincial and territorial regulators whose key goal was to ensure safe and reliable energy at fair rates for customers.

It aimed to incentivize developers "to choose the most cost-effective, energy-efficient choice," but the board was overruled by the Ontario government, so the original plan will go ahead.

Kate Harland, lead author of the Canadian Climate Institute report, said utility regulators' mandates should be changed to include climate targets, as has been done in the U.K. And they could change "obligation to serve rules" in order to consider alternative technologies, such as electrification, energy efficiency measures or thermal networks to provide heating to customers.

It is the perfect method to allow gas utilities to transition and keep or increase their annual profit, while at the same time reducing the customer's energy bills, according to Schulman.

Harland says current incentives alone won't drive down customer demand for gas quickly enough and energy policies need to change.


The original article contains 1,091 words, the summary contains 182 words. Saved 83%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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