I think that statement needs to be qualified and quantified.
Qualified: your claim is probably only intended to apply to air-source heat pumps, not ground-source heat pumps. Ground-source heat pumps are popular in places with cold weather, for instance Sweden.
Quantified: If you mean -40°C, then, yes, air-source heat pumps aren't going to work. But most people don't live in places that cold, and just because we can't use air-source heat pumps in a few places doesn't mean they're useless everywhere. Here's a data sheet for a relatively cheap air-source heat pump that's rated to work down to -25°C (about -14 F):
https://img.polarpumpen.se/pfiles/fujitsu-km-slim-09-12-14-p...
As far as ground sourced those are significantly more expensive. The cost/benefit is not there unless the only factor in your purchase is climate change.
I think you underestimate how much people like their cars and aren't considering how unwilling people are to walk or bike when it's cold or hot out.
Public transit should be fixed though. Keep buses and their fixed route and schedule during rush hours and for the rest of the day have publicly funded ride-share type of service.
The route Google Maps suggests walking is 44 minutes. There are no sidewalks. There are two roundabouts, one mini, where drivers aren't even really sure whose turn it is.
It isn't a relaxing experience by any stretch of the imagination, especially if I wanted to bring my kids.
It's not that I'm unwilling. I want to walk more. I just don't have 1h30m to dedicate to the most basic of trips.
If it’s a 44 minute walk I’d guesstimate that’d be 20 minutes at a leisurely pace on a bike, or 15 if you’re quick on a road bike (or still leisurely on an e-bike).
Walk to any Costco in NYC and you’ll see plenty of people doing just fine with 50+lbs of groceries and a shopping cart.
Alternatively, go to any suburban grocery store and you’ll see people driving away in massive pickup trucks and SUVs having only picked up a gallon of milk.
> you’ll see people driving away in massive pickup trucks and SUVs having only picked up a gallon of milk
It's not about need. Most of those people didn't choose the massive truck or SUV because that was the most sensible vehicle for them. They bought it because they like it.
Even if they don't strictly need to drive their truck to the store, they still will because they like driving it. It's not a wildly different mindset from people who buy the latest and greatest phone every year or spend thousands on a wristwatch that keeps time worse than a $20 digital watch you buy in a drug store.
I've lived in cities and depended on public transportation when I was younger and now I'm out in the 'burbs. Right now, the suburbs is where I want to be. My quality of life is higher. If I had a self-driving car, I'd move even further out of the city.
Do some people drive because they like it? Yes
Do some people drive because it’s required to do anything based off of a car-centric environment? Yes
If I do need to make a larger trip, I bring a folding wagon. It’s less convenient than just stopping by on my way home from something else but there are two full grocery stores within a 5 minute walk of home so it’s no big deal. Same as before, minimal lines.
I’m about to move to the suburbs where the nearest large grocery store will be a 7-minute bike away, so I’m planning to get a front-loader cargo bike like the Urban Arrow: https://na.urbanarrow.com/family-bikes/
…though while it is that short of a trip taking a direct route, that route seems somewhat inhospitable outside of a car, so in practice I might have to take some long detours. The town’s supposedly planning to put in bicycle infrastructure at some point, but I think that’ll be my rallying cry once I move there. :)
Took them a year to do it, too.
I guess it's better than a painted line.
And public transit is not feasible as long as cities are designed for cars. Train lines just don't scale when things are too spread out. Public transit only works when lots of people are going between the same two points. Public ride-share? You mean taxis? That's not feasible at all; we can't afford to give everyone a private chauffeur.
Effectively, every time the temperature raises above 0 degrees, you fill up your buffer.
The size of the buffer is designed so that at the end of the heating period, most water has been turned to ice. And now you also have free cooling for the summer.
This system can cover periods where the outside temperature drops below zero without loss of efficiency.
[1] freezing a liter of water at 0 degrees requires an equivalent energy to heating a liter by 80 degrees Celsius.
Sure they do, their efficiency just drops to below the point where it remains feasible (i.e. cheaper than furnace/boiler). Technology has come a long way and most of the world's population doen't seem to live in that 'very cold' weather, so I'd wager heat pumps are still the way to go. Especially ground source heat pumps thrive well enough in cold climates, just not always doable to install on existing sites.
https://carbonswitch.com/do-heat-pumps-work-in-cold-weather/ touches the subject; not the best source perhaps but searching for 'cold climate heat pump' gives plenty of info.
You can use heat pumps with a underground heat sink (not sure what they are called in english). However, they really only make sense in climates where it is extensively below -10 degree Celcius. Even in southern Sweden they don't really make much sense.
As for cars, for mass transport nothing beats ships or rail. The last mile, however, remains to be trucks for the forseeable future.
Better yet, redesign cities so they're walkable and bikable and have good public transit (running on electricity of course), so people don't need cars. Cars are bad in many many ways: emissions are only a small part of the problem with cars. Crashes kill tens of thousands of people in America alone every year, they cause people to be obese because they don't walk anywhere, I could go on and on.
>And replace natural gas heating for homes with electric heat pumps.
Electric heat pumps actually don't work in very cold weather.