This is of great interest!
a few FACTS so we can try to start there because this plan is actually significantly more thought out than "California is funny and I don't understand it but I am scared of change and of California therefore it must be bad and I must be smarter than then"
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Natural gas is definitely the cleanest fossil fuel. But that has very little to do with replacing coal, the real motivation is and always will be - cost. natural gas is cheap, entirely because of fracking. (to be honest I think cheap natural gas has more to do with the return of manufacturing, low unemployment and economic gains that nay Obama or trump era policies, but let's not sidetrack too far) The only way to circumvent cost being the #1 driver for any action is regulation & policy, which either adds a tax (generating public revenue while also providing cost incentive to benefit the general population and the environment) or all out bans use of whatever.
So natural gas - I'll dip over here = Fracking is not inherently bad, not if don't properly. problem is it's rarely done properly, because few regulations enforce that it is, and in many places it causes significant issues like earthquakes. Still natural gas can provide chemically much more energy per CO2 emissions (unfortunately crappy drilling can release a lot of natural gas and leaks are also fairly common leading to CH4 emissions that are even more potent greenhouse gasses than CO2)
That said, natural gas has a place in transitioning to a lower CO2 global economy.
The biggest point here is that removing natural gas use in homes and businesses and replacing with electric heat EVEN IF THAT ELECTRICTY IS GENERATED BY NATURAL GAS offers significant improvements. Natural gas combustion at one source can easily be coupled with carbon capture technologies which work at large scale single sources, but would be impossible in a distributed system. Alternately It can also be used with a pyrolysis approach which breaks down CH4 into H2 and solid C, the H2 can be easily distributed pretty much the same way as natural gas and used similarly with NO net emissions but steam, meanwhile the carbon can be used for all sorts of things from tires to building materials to soil modifiers etc etc.
So no, Natural gas generated power does not make this a useless idea