One unfortunate side effect of this is that methane leaks are growing due to the switch from coal to natural gas, and we don't know how much. The impact of that natural gas may make this switch net negative in terms of its climate impact, and we just don't know.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/12/climate/texas...
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Natural gas is releases half as much CO2 as coal, and methane is roughly 28x worse as a greenhouse gas and other natural gases sink. Natural gas would be better than coal as long as if we aren't leaking 1/28th of our natural gas. That would be an awful lot of wasted money, so I'm inclined to believe that natural gas is still better than coal.
Here in the UK we waste about 20 percent of all the treated water through leaks (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/11/water-co...)
Looks like somewhere around 3 percent of gas is lost through the system - is this leaks or other issues the article asks: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-much-natural-...
That is only when gas has reached the supplier. Don't forget gas is also lost when drilling and also lost in huge amounts when drilling for oil. Gut feel, from the limited research I've done I would guess losses as far above the 1/28th sadly.
It looks like most of the leaks described in the second article are related to the gas utilities rather than gas used to generate electricity. I'd like to imagine that it's a lot cost effective and easier to make sure a big pipe that goes to a power plant is not leaking rather than a thousand small pipes that go to homes. It's an eye opening finding either way though.
Permafrost in the Artic circle is shrinking, and it also affected methane emissions there. [0]
[0]: https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/12/us/arctic-methane-gas-flare-t...
Thawing permafrost with methane inside is also all over the place in Siberia. Ultimately it seems that we'll need an increase in several orders of magnitude of ability to do major engineering projects if we ever want to see the old climate again.