Heat pumps work in cold weather and should have emergency heat where it's resistance coils inside the home. Your HVAC installer should install the correct system by zone.
Your fear of people freezing to death over heat pumps are unfounded. There are backups built in that work with the insulation value of a house. New homes should be very air tight and require less heating, suited for heat pumps.
I never claimed heat pumps don't work in cold weather. The point is about non-electric redundancy, not heat pumps having resistance coils. I'm well aware of the functionality of modern heat pumps.
Even in a house with foam insulation - the highest "normally available" insulation - freezing to death is just a matter of time without heat. When considering city-wide infrastructure it's something that needs to be considered. I'm not saying it's necessarily going to happen, but you'd be dumb not to think about redundancy measures, hence my top-level comment.
This type of redundancy is why many commercial buildings have gas generators, for example.
A gas furnace would require electricity. You need electricity to ignite and exhaust most natural gas heating. There are vent-free options. Not common for those to be installed and back to having your own option for backup power. Which can be propane or gasoline.
The amount of electricity a gas furnace requires is trivial and not really relevant to this discussion. A heat pump requires many orders of magnitude more electricity. A 10kwh battery could power a gas furnace and a water heater electrically for a year.
Now this natural gas house has a 10kwh whole house battery backup too? Hope your refrigerator can also last a year off that battery pack (oh wait it's a ac compressor too!),
Heat Pump for heat, Heat Pump water heater is the future for new home builds. Buy a portable generator, a 10kwh gasoline generator is <$1,000 USD and 1/10th the price of a 10kwh batter pack. Problem solved.
The problem with relying on resistance-based emergency heat is that it means heating efficiency tanks by a factor of potentially 4 or so at the same time as heating demand is also at its highest. This is a really great recipe for collapse of the electrical grid, which of course people are going to be 100% reliant on for heating, at a time when not having heating would literally be fatal.
