this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
116 points (95.3% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
5104 readers
475 users here now
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Which is why the federal government is trying to buy concrete made in different ways that don't cause those emissions.
It's not at full scale yet, and won't be for some years. but it's how you actually solve that kind of problem without making peoples' lives worse.
This shit is like clean coal. Its not a thing, concrete production involves releasing the co2 from calcium carbonate, not even mentioning the heating and fuel requirements that go into that process. These highways are going to be built with conventional concrete.
The problem hasn't been "you can't do it" but "architects and engineers don't have enough experience with it to trust it, so they don't use it" — a federal government purchasing program can fix that.
You literally cant do it, its a chemical reaction that outputs co2. In the same way you cant run a combustion engine without producing co2.
You can use a different chemistry to make a hard substance. There are a ton of options which look good in tests, and pretty much nobody uses them.
You are reaching far too deep to try and imagine this somehow turning out alright for the climate. The hundreds of billions are budgeted already. Highway construction is happening. Conventional concrete is being used. Truck and SUV sales are increasing to fill the new highways.
Vehicle sales remain below pre-pandemic levels
I don't deny that conventional concrete is still being used at scale. It's something like 1% of US emissions.