The article has some interesting info but there are some oversights:
- Unburnt natural gas is methane gas, which is over 25× more impactful as a greenhouse gas than CO₂. And you cannot burn natural gas without unburnt gas escaping – not just at ignition but the whole infrastructure leaks unavoidably. So some folks are saying natural gas is more environmentally dentrimental than coal. The gas is also toxic and kills brain cells. Nasty stuff.
- Follow the money. If you consume natural gas, you likely pay for it using banking services. Some regions in Europe have secretly/silently removed the option to pay for gas using cash. Banks are terrible for climate (ref: “Banking on Climate Chaos” annual reports). Even if you can pay with cash, the gas companies themselves finance republican politicians in the US. Republicans are terrible for the environment.
I have used wood stoves most of my life. If done properly, it’s a sustainable and closed loop method for heating. Occasionally there’s a push against the “unhealthy pollution” of wood stoves, with natural gas selling itself as the clean solution… So there’s that.
A geothermal or large solar system may offer clean/green heating, otherwise wood heat is one of the better natural sustainable ways to provide heat.
Also worth noting that biomass powerplants are considered renewables, and they are in fact burning wood. Hopefully they have the secondary burning rigged up so the smog itself gets burnt again.
This isn’t really about climate change, just local effects. But yeah, wood fires are super unhealthy.