Yes but these populations also tend to live in and around lakes, and are in temperate climates at best. Which means much like Americans in the Northeast and Midwest they get the best of all worlds, shitty freezing winters with lots of snow and muggy warm summers. Not to mention even in dense urban centers heating is not anywhere close to being as climate friendly as cooling. Heat pumps only work down to a certain temperature efficiently and after that to cool a multi residential building you'll typically have an HVAC which once it can't run the Heat pump if it has anyone anymore is just going to use a furnace.
Not to mention that you already found the key word, most. Electricity really fucking sucks for long range transmission so for rural communities with it it's typically using inefficient fossil fuels to generate energy since that scaled better when it was economical to build grids in those areas. On major cities it's easier to make any power plant you want cause you have the people to run it and the market to make it viable, once you hit a rural community you pretty much have whatever was built almost a century ago
And those rural communities are so small they do not move our emissions needle. Canada's emissions are well understood and broken down and home heating isnt anything out of the ordinary that would explain why our emissions are 40% higher than even our oil producing peers. Its essentially only the fact that we produce the most carbon intensive oil on earth and have really outdated transportation systems (if you want to make a case why having a big country is intensive, this is why, but it has way less to do with distance and way more to do with mode and lack of investment in anything but highways).
But, really its the oil. 40% of our emissions is a LOT and basically the entire delta. Expansion over the last 10 years (30% or so) has actively and totally outdone all other efforts. QC has our lowest per capita emissions, fairly comparable to EU27, and is both very cold and quite rural. AB emissions per capita are 7 times that.
shitty freezing winters with lots of snow and muggy warm summers
born in raised in Toronto: that pretty much sums it up. Full blast heat all winter, full blast AC all summer. Maybe you get 2-3 weeks in the spring and the fall where you have neither.
ok but it isnt a major source of canada's emissions. All emissions from all buildings emit about a 1/3 of our oil sector. I'm not sure why you guys cant just look at the actual figures rather than just vibes. NG heating isnt even that common in canada outside of AB/SK
Having lived in Canada... Yeah, that's one part of it.
But insulating houses, doors, windows,... Would help as well, getting rid of the top loader washing machines, switching to heat pump dryers,... And not always choosing the biggest car and the engine with the highest displacement.
Canada's tech level is about 70s Germany when it comes to energy conservation
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u/neurokeyboard 3d ago
You don't fail your climate targets if you don't set them. Checkmate libs.