How will we able to heat our homes? I can’t imagine how much more electricity it would take to replace national gas, it could be many times our current electrical production.
This isn’t even a new idea, most homes in Russian cities are heated using district heating. At scale it’s so efficient that they don’t even bother metering the heat.
Additionally with a district heating system, geothermal, and ground source heat pumps start to make a significant amount of sense. Their both technologies the benefit significantly from very large installations.
Don't worry Canadian-bro. Texas has you covered. An alarming amount of the natural gas produced in the Permian Basin is flared or manages to sneak out of leaky fittings and tanks as fugitive emissions. We put off building out the infrastructure necessary to capture and use this resource because it was expensive to build and natural gas prices were low. Since our state government would never make a corporation or an industry self-fund anything expensive, there was never any money in the budget to build it.
We're doing the easy work of pumping the whole atmosphere full of methane so that everyone can stay warm, even our friendly neighborhood Canadians.
/s of course.
https://www.alberta.ca/natural-gas-overview.aspx
You're gonna be fine.
Also a return of the proper coat as casual indoor wear?
Can you honestly see droves of people doing this by choice? I can't.
When was a proper coat last casual indoor wear? 200 years ago it wasn't. In a cabin with a fireplace you don't need this.
If it's either that or dying I can see most people choosing the former.
And those cabins were always a minority over folks in the cities. Being able to afford to hire someone to bring wood or coal is different from just going outside and chopping down whatever looks ready. (Though really you need to season it, and that takes time)
It certainly isn’t everyone that is so poor that it is a concern, but Dickens used the theme for a reason.
Before that: smaller houses, closed off rooms, wearing sweaters inside all winter, sitting around a fireplace/stove most of the evening, and using thick down comforters half the year (if you could afford one).
Insulation and design standards need to be stepped up, with passivhaus the standard if it isn't already.
This is already done in Russia
Though it's expensive to install in an existing house, and needs a lot of land (or a well).
Mitsubishi's heat pumps with their "Hyper-Heat" feature are able to work at 76% of their capacity down to -25℃. If those colder periods aren't too long, a heat pump combined with good insulation might be enough to get through that.
New homes built to A++ standard need so little heating people are just opting to use electricity and use saved cash to build solar plant (provided your grid lets to store power long term).