As new technology and infrastructure develops the costs, performance and even convenience of green technology will overtake fossil fuels. The arguments made for clinging to fossil fuels are looking more and more like those who resisted phasing out lead or even those who opposed replacing gas lights with electricity.
I always love this - the idea that you can't recognize climate change is an issue and action is needed unless you are willing to personally go 0 emissions as if that is going to impact anything. Climate change is not an individual problem, it's a collective one. And it takes collective change to fix, not individual. And it's not going to be fixed because too many people have been led to believe it's a hoax, or even beneficial. It exposes a flaw in humanity - in its inability to process information without incredible bias. It's a ridiculous self-inflicted wound as if we seriously addressed this issue we could find solutions that didn't impact us economically and still hold off the worst of what is to come.
Cost is now another example where you can completely remove climate change from the equation and still make the same decision. Cost for fossil fuel will continue to be widely sensitive to geopolitical factors and also has an upward pressure with a declining raw material source while cost for solar will continue to go down due to technological advancements, economies of scale, and increased efficiency in manufacturing processes. The future is about clean, renewable energy, independent of climate change. The timing of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the infrastructure bill may not be perfect, but they have coincided favorably with the point at which clean energy prices have become competitive and even lower cost than fossil fuels. These legislative measures provide a significant boost to the clean energy sector, facilitating the transition towards a more sustainable and cost-effective energy future. Looking back, we will likely view these two acts as instrumental and smart, as they successfully align public policy with private technological readiness.
Cement emits as much CO2 as India. Why is it so hard to fix? The cement industry is responsible for 8 percent of global carbon emissions -- triple the emissions of the aviation industry https://www.washingtonpost.com/clim.../27/concrete-greenhouse-gas-emissions-cement/ short article: Let’s do a quiz: After water, what is the most-used material in the world? Is it steel? Wood? Aluminum? Plastic? The answer, it turns out, is concrete. Concrete, a blend of water, sand, gravel and cement, has helped build everything from the Roman Pantheon to the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. We walk on concrete, drive on it, live in it. According to one estimate, more of the planet’s mass is locked up in concrete than it is all of the planet’s trees, bushes and shrubs. And making all that concrete also emits an enormous amount of carbon dioxide. This is thanks to cement, effectively the chemical “glue” that holds all the components of concrete together. “Concrete is the cake, and cement is the flour,” said Randolph Kirchain, the co-director of the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub. Although cement is only about 10 percent of concrete by mass, it makes up the lion’s share of concrete’s carbon emissions. The most common type of cement in the world is Portland cement, which is made from limestone. (It is named after the British Isle of Portland, not the city in Oregon.) Baked in a giant kiln at very high temperatures — think around 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit — limestone transforms into carbon dioxide and calcium oxide. That calcium oxide, or lime, is a key ingredient in the cement that holds our bridges, apartment buildings and roads together. That process produces a lot of greenhouse gas emissions. Not only does the carbon dioxide from the reaction spill into the atmosphere, but cement producers also use huge amounts of coal or natural gas to heat the kiln. As a result, the cement industry generates 8 percent of global carbon emissions — triple the emissions of the aviation industry. “You make about a ton of CO2 for every ton of cement,” said Eric Toone, technical lead at Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which invests in emerging low-carbon cement technologies. Some producers are slowly trying to implement solutions. One option is simply making concrete with less cement. Hessam AzariJafari, the deputy director of the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub, says producers can substitute fly ash — a product of coal combustion — or waste from steel production instead of limestone. These materials can also help bind concrete together without the need for copious amounts of Portland cement. Today, around 11 to 23 percent of concrete’s “binder” is made from these other materials; experts estimate that in future, it could reach 50 or even 80 percent. Other, more radical changes are also possible. Some start-ups are experimenting with a completely new chemistry for cement that doesn’t include calcium carbonate. The California-based start-up Brimstone is working on a recipe that involves calcium silicate instead; the resulting chemical reaction doesn’t release carbon dioxide and can be cooked at a lower kiln temperature. Other companies, including Canadian start-up CarbonCure, are working on injecting and storing CO2 into concrete itself. But progress is slow. Concrete is a crucial component in modern construction; changing its ingredients poses not only an engineering problem but also a regulatory and safety problem. When it comes to innovating in the concrete industry, “everybody wants to be third,” Toone said. In the United States, many individual states have their own specifications for how concrete should be made and with what materials; changing the ingredients of concrete will mean a painful regulatory overhaul. Those standards exist for good reasons. “Many of these things are safety-critical,” Kirchain said. But to clean up one of the most carbon-polluting industries in the world, some of the rules will have to change. That’s partly why many previous attempts to green concrete have failed: Promising start-ups have run out of money or failed to find a market for their products. Kirchain says there is a way to cut carbon emissions significantly and ensure safety at the same time. And that will be critical to the coming transition. “The things that concrete goes into are things that we need to last,” he said.
There’s a lot of work on concrete that is more efficient. As the piece above notes adoption is slow but I’ve already been on projects that have used different formulations of concrete that is more environmentally friendly. Here’s a breakdown of some of some of them. https://www.specifyconcrete.org/blog/eco-friendly-alternatives-to-traditional-concrete
Still a thing in old housing that hasn't been updated because of affordability to upgrade for low income homeowners. It's one of the criteria to determine whether a community is considered disadvantaged or not. This is one screening tool used to determine whether to approve federal grant money for entities like non-profits that seek out funding in order to help disadvantaged communities through climate based measures. Use this to know which areas in your local neck of the woods are considered disadvantaged. Much of East Austin through 183 and areas around Austin-Bergstrom and Hornsby Bend fit the criteria around Austin. https://screeningtool.geoplatform.gov/en/#3/33.47/-97.5 How Austin’s Map of Trees Helped City Leaders See and Tackle Social Inequities By Christopher Thomas https://www.treefolks.org/
That is because the science took in new evidence thst showed that the earth wasn’t cooling but was warming. That shows that Climate science isn’t some sort of religion pushed for ideological reasons but actually considers and changes according to new evidence.
So 200 years ago they didn't know about quantum mechanics - so clearly quantum mechanics is mass hysteria.
NEWS 16 June 2023 Update 19 June 2023 Rampant groundwater pumping has changed the tilt of Earth’s axis Human depletion of underground reservoirs has shifted the global distribution of water so much that the North Pole has drifted by more than 4 centimetres per year. Davide Castelvecchi Non-paywall article here.
I can't believe we're sitting here burning our balls off every summer in a way we didn't do 10-20 years ago, while freezing in our dark houses every winter, and some of y'all still say we should deny what's in front of our faces.
Particularly people on FL and Houston. In addition to what you note it seems Like Houston has a 100 year flood every year now while FL is dealing with salt water intrusion into ground water and beach erosion.
what can survive baseballs smashing down at 150 mph? https://cowboystatedaily.com/2023/0...s-at-150-mph-destroys-scottsbluff-solar-farm/
my engineer brother's first job in the Air Force was at Wright-Patterson shooting frozen geese out of a cannon at cockpit glass. He went on to a lucrative career making fiber optic cable for Corning. as far as the solar panels go . . . looks like they're gonna need a bigger boat.
