We can't eliminate all concrete use in construction, but we can replace part of it with mass timber, which has a much lighter carbon footprint. (See https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/1/144 )
Mass timber is rapidly growing in popularity in Europe, North America and Japan, and is now being explored in China as well.
Probably the "wave of the future" for construction of buildings. Combined with 3-D printed and hyper modular designs, wood could replace a lot of the steel and concrete in use today.
However, that implies more sprawl. You won't be able to go as high vertically so cities will flatten out and get wider.With good public transit systems that could work but it would have to be carefully done.
Everything comes with tradeoffs when you "replace" something you know with something different.
"We need innovations to eliminate CO2 production from the direct process itself."
Yes! Thankfully there are a host of great companies innovation on cement and concrete production. We need a wartime-level effort to scale these ASAP. But hope is on the horizon.
Umm... Do you follow the science? Not really. Not in any kind of time frame that will save us from COLLAPSE.
“You can’t just sit around waiting for hope to come,” “Then you’re acting like spoiled, irresponsible children. You don’t seem to understand that hope is something you have to earn.” - Gretta Thunberg
Yes, because the project is being built on Sami land. These are the Indigenous people of Scandinavia who, to this day, live as reindeer herders. They VOTED against allowing the project on their land. Then the Norwegian High Court ruled that "the greater good" should prevail and the project should be built anyway.
You know, screw the Natives we have a treaty with. We NEED these windmills.
"They will be fine. We will give them a bunch of money and move them into regular houses. Why in God's name are people still living like that in the 21st century anyway. Taking their land to build this project is actually HELPING them."
SO YES, I AM WITH GRETTA ON THIS. MY GREAT GRANDMOTHER WAS COMANCHE. I "FEEL" THEIR PAIN.
Cement is needed for concrete which is needed for construction and at a cost of 4% of CO2 emissions seems like a reasonable price for civilization. As Vaclav Simil writes in his books, cement, fertilizer and other non-energy emissions are the hardest to reduce
This article explores the environmental impact of China's cement production compared to the United States', highlighting the importance of sustainable practices in the cement industry for global climate efforts. See - https://augustagaconcretecontractor.com/
Great post, but I'm struggling with the last figure. Are these just fuel-based emissions, rather than total emissions? The original data says fuel and process emissions for cement, but 1.6 billion tonnes of CO2 for 4.1 billion tonnes of cement is ~400kgCO2/tonne, which is about right for fuel use.
I'm not sure what point you are making. "China makes a LOT of cement and that's bad for global warming" seems to be all I see. Am I missing something?
I write on the 'Climate Crisis" that's currently happening. I understand the importance of the point you are making because I think about infrastructure/CO2 levels/warming and how they intersect and affect each other. Cement and concrete are a "wicked problem" because our Anthroposphere (constructed world) is built on them.
Like oil, gas, coal, and steel they are the 19th century underpinnings to our 21st century world.
Consider “green concrete.”
As promising as a company like CarbiCrete may be, the niche it fills is a narrow one. Since it has to be cured in chambers filled with concentrated CO2, CarbiCrete can’t be poured at a work site. It can be used only for pre-cast products, such as cinder blocks or patio tiles.
Although the blocks and tiles absorb CO2 as they harden, a great deal of CO2 is released in the process of producing the slag that went into making them. The company uses the slag produced by the steel industry.
Globally, the steel industry is responsible for roughly the same number of tons of CO2 emissions as the concrete industry, roughly three billion.
Cleaning up one industry by using the waste products of another sounds good. But, if “carbicrete” became the new cement that leaves us still producing three billion tons of CO2 in order to make the slag we need for the carbicrete.
Which really means carbicrete is a "nonstarter". Because we also have to decarbonize the steel industry AT THE SAME TIME and the production of slag should fall to zero.
You also miss the geopolitical history behind China's massive surge in cement production, the Belt and Road project. China wants a secure supply line to Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. One that the US cannot interdict with our Navy. Building out the Belt and Road project is a matter of National Security for them. As well as a way of generating future economic growth the way the Interstate Highway Project (of similar carbon footprint BTW) did in the US.
We cannot demand the rest of the world not build highways and bridges until the steel and concrete problem is resolved. Not when we have "used up" the global "CARBON BUDGET". Not when the Average American is so "energy rich" and most of the world is "energy starved".
If you add up all the energy America uses in a year and you divide that by the total number of Americans, the result is per-capita consumption. The figure comes to about eighty thousand kilowatt hours.
Toss in the energy used to manufacture the goods imported into the U.S., and the Per Capita energy consumption for Americans rises to almost a hundred thousand kilowatt hours each.
To put this in terms of power, Americans EACH consume roughly eleven thousand watts every moment of every day. A string of incandescent Christmas lights uses about forty watts. It’s as if each of us had two hundred and seventy-five of these strings wrapped around our bodies, like the chains around Scrooge, burning 24/7.
This every-day-is-Christmas level of consumption,means that annual emissions in the U.S. run to sixteen metric tons of CO2 per person.
Americans don’t have the world’s highest per-capita emissions — that dubious honor goes to Kuwaitis and Qataris — but we’re up there.
Per-capita consumption in Thailand and Argentina runs to around two and a half thousand watts and emissions to around four tons.
Ugandans and Ethiopians use a hundred watts and emit a tenth of a ton.
Somalis consume a mere thirty watts and emit just ninety pounds.
This means that an American household of four is responsible for the same emissions as sixteen Argentinians, six hundred Ugandans, or a Somali village of sixteen hundred.
Now here’s the essential question. Are we going to build enough renewables in the next 20 years for everyone in the world to live like Americans currently do, or are American’s going to have to use less?
We waited until the very last minute to start and now we have to do “everything, everywhere, all at once”.
Because, if WE don’t do this All Together. We will ALL burn, Together.
Good luck!! It is hopeless. And we cannot expect the underdeveloped countries to stay that way and not have the luxuries we have. Buy a Prius/tesla....hahaha!!!
The world population is not going to all burn in twenty years, there is no scientific basis for that at all. Wanting the world to live at the energy budget of Somalia is global suicide for a problem which has unknown effects and very little in the next two decades.
Earth observation satellites are constantly measuring the Earth’s albedo using a suite of sensors, and the reflectivity of the planet is measured through earthshine, the light from the Earth that reflects off the Moon. This paper analyzes earthshine measurements between 1998 and 2017 to see if the Earth’s albedo is rising or declining in response to climate change. Here’s their conclusion.
“We have reported a two-decade long data set of the Earth’s nearly globally averaged albedo as derived from earthshine observations. Stringent data quality standards were applied to generate monthly and annual means.
These vary significantly on monthly, annual, and decadal scales with the net being a gradual decline over the two decades, which accelerated in the most recent years (much of the decrease in reflectance occurred during the last three years of the two-decade period the team studied). Remarkably, the inter-annual earthshine anomalies agree well with those from CERES satellite observations, despite their differences in global coverage, underlying assumptions to derive the albedo, and the very different sensitivities to retroflected and wider-angle reflected light.”
The two-decade decrease in earthshine-derived albedo corresponds to an increase in radiative forcing of about 0.5 W/m2,
Which is climatologically significant (Miller et al., 2014).
For comparison, total anthropogenic forcing increased by about 0.6 W/m2 over the same period.
The CERES data show an even stronger trend of decreasing global albedo over the most recent years, which has been associated to changes in the PDO, SSTs and low cloud formation changes..
Notice that the paper quantifies how much of an effect this change in albedo is having. By 2017 it had reached 0.5 W/m2 (Watts per square meter). That doesn’t sound like much, until you realize that the effect of all our CO2 pollution for the same period was 0.6 W/m2. Bottom line.
By 2017 the decline in the Earth’s albedo doubled the rate that the Earth was warming. We are warming up twice as fast as we were.
THE EARTH IS NOW WARMING AT A RATE OF 0.36C PER DECADE.
If this keeps up, even if we don’t put any more CO2 in the atmosphere, we will get 4℃ of warming by 2100.
Here’s the "TELL" that the PLANETARY ALBEDO has CHANGED. That the amount of HEAT flowing into the OCEANS has jumped from 5 Hiros per second to 10 Hiros per second.
THE OCEANS ARE WARMING UP AT UNPRECEDENTED RATES. “HEAT” DOESN’T “JUST HAPPEN”. WHERE ELSE COULD THE ENERGY FOR THIS AMOUNT OF OCEAN WARMING COME FROM?
The amount of excess heat buried in the planet’s oceans, a strong marker of climate change, reached a record high in 2022, reflecting more stored heat energy than in any year since reliable measurements were available in the late 1950s, a group of scientists reported Wednesday.
That eclipses the ocean heat record set in 2021 — which eclipsed the record set in 2020, which eclipsed the one set in 2019.
Oceans surged to another record-high temperature in 2022 WAPO January 11, 2023
In 2022, the heat content in the upper 2000 meters of the Pacific ocean reached a record level “by a large margin,” researchers say, “which supports the extreme events witnessed, such as intensive heat waves and deoxygenation, and poses a substantial risk to marine life in this region.”
Oceans Broke Yet Another Heat Record in 2022, Scientists Warn Science Alert Jan 12, 2023
It was the 46th-consecutive year with global temperatures above the 20th-century average, according to the NOAA analysis.
Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies stated.
“The long-term trends are very clear, the increases in temperature are not due to natural variation. They are not due to the sun. They are not due to volcanoes. They are due to our emissions of greenhouse gases and as long as we continue to emit large amounts of greenhouse gases, these trends will continue.”
World’s Oceans Absorbed Record Heat From Warming Climate in 2022 WSJ Jan 12, 2023
THE OCEAN IS RELEASING HEAT. WE ARE HAVING A “MILD” WINTER RIGHT NOW. BY THIS SUMMER HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS WILL BE DYING IN HEATWAVES.
Because 60 years of paleoclimate research says 420ppm equals 4.0C of warming. At 0.36C of warming per decade we will find out what that's like before 2100.
We can't eliminate all concrete use in construction, but we can replace part of it with mass timber, which has a much lighter carbon footprint. (See https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/1/144 )
Mass timber is rapidly growing in popularity in Europe, North America and Japan, and is now being explored in China as well.
Probably the "wave of the future" for construction of buildings. Combined with 3-D printed and hyper modular designs, wood could replace a lot of the steel and concrete in use today.
However, that implies more sprawl. You won't be able to go as high vertically so cities will flatten out and get wider.With good public transit systems that could work but it would have to be carefully done.
Everything comes with tradeoffs when you "replace" something you know with something different.
"We need innovations to eliminate CO2 production from the direct process itself."
Yes! Thankfully there are a host of great companies innovation on cement and concrete production. We need a wartime-level effort to scale these ASAP. But hope is on the horizon.
Umm... Do you follow the science? Not really. Not in any kind of time frame that will save us from COLLAPSE.
“You can’t just sit around waiting for hope to come,” “Then you’re acting like spoiled, irresponsible children. You don’t seem to understand that hope is something you have to earn.” - Gretta Thunberg
Greta is not just sitting around waiting for the collapse, she’s helping it along by protesting windmills in Norway.
Yes, because the project is being built on Sami land. These are the Indigenous people of Scandinavia who, to this day, live as reindeer herders. They VOTED against allowing the project on their land. Then the Norwegian High Court ruled that "the greater good" should prevail and the project should be built anyway.
You know, screw the Natives we have a treaty with. We NEED these windmills.
"They will be fine. We will give them a bunch of money and move them into regular houses. Why in God's name are people still living like that in the 21st century anyway. Taking their land to build this project is actually HELPING them."
SO YES, I AM WITH GRETTA ON THIS. MY GREAT GRANDMOTHER WAS COMANCHE. I "FEEL" THEIR PAIN.
Is that CLEAR enough for you?
Cement is needed for concrete which is needed for construction and at a cost of 4% of CO2 emissions seems like a reasonable price for civilization. As Vaclav Simil writes in his books, cement, fertilizer and other non-energy emissions are the hardest to reduce
This article explores the environmental impact of China's cement production compared to the United States', highlighting the importance of sustainable practices in the cement industry for global climate efforts. See - https://augustagaconcretecontractor.com/
Why compare 2020 to the 90s ? could easily use 2010-2020. May not get as many clicks though..
Great post, but I'm struggling with the last figure. Are these just fuel-based emissions, rather than total emissions? The original data says fuel and process emissions for cement, but 1.6 billion tonnes of CO2 for 4.1 billion tonnes of cement is ~400kgCO2/tonne, which is about right for fuel use.
I'm not sure what point you are making. "China makes a LOT of cement and that's bad for global warming" seems to be all I see. Am I missing something?
I write on the 'Climate Crisis" that's currently happening. I understand the importance of the point you are making because I think about infrastructure/CO2 levels/warming and how they intersect and affect each other. Cement and concrete are a "wicked problem" because our Anthroposphere (constructed world) is built on them.
Like oil, gas, coal, and steel they are the 19th century underpinnings to our 21st century world.
Consider “green concrete.”
As promising as a company like CarbiCrete may be, the niche it fills is a narrow one. Since it has to be cured in chambers filled with concentrated CO2, CarbiCrete can’t be poured at a work site. It can be used only for pre-cast products, such as cinder blocks or patio tiles.
Although the blocks and tiles absorb CO2 as they harden, a great deal of CO2 is released in the process of producing the slag that went into making them. The company uses the slag produced by the steel industry.
Globally, the steel industry is responsible for roughly the same number of tons of CO2 emissions as the concrete industry, roughly three billion.
Cleaning up one industry by using the waste products of another sounds good. But, if “carbicrete” became the new cement that leaves us still producing three billion tons of CO2 in order to make the slag we need for the carbicrete.
Which really means carbicrete is a "nonstarter". Because we also have to decarbonize the steel industry AT THE SAME TIME and the production of slag should fall to zero.
You also miss the geopolitical history behind China's massive surge in cement production, the Belt and Road project. China wants a secure supply line to Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. One that the US cannot interdict with our Navy. Building out the Belt and Road project is a matter of National Security for them. As well as a way of generating future economic growth the way the Interstate Highway Project (of similar carbon footprint BTW) did in the US.
We cannot demand the rest of the world not build highways and bridges until the steel and concrete problem is resolved. Not when we have "used up" the global "CARBON BUDGET". Not when the Average American is so "energy rich" and most of the world is "energy starved".
If you add up all the energy America uses in a year and you divide that by the total number of Americans, the result is per-capita consumption. The figure comes to about eighty thousand kilowatt hours.
Toss in the energy used to manufacture the goods imported into the U.S., and the Per Capita energy consumption for Americans rises to almost a hundred thousand kilowatt hours each.
To put this in terms of power, Americans EACH consume roughly eleven thousand watts every moment of every day. A string of incandescent Christmas lights uses about forty watts. It’s as if each of us had two hundred and seventy-five of these strings wrapped around our bodies, like the chains around Scrooge, burning 24/7.
This every-day-is-Christmas level of consumption,means that annual emissions in the U.S. run to sixteen metric tons of CO2 per person.
Americans don’t have the world’s highest per-capita emissions — that dubious honor goes to Kuwaitis and Qataris — but we’re up there.
Per-capita consumption in Thailand and Argentina runs to around two and a half thousand watts and emissions to around four tons.
Ugandans and Ethiopians use a hundred watts and emit a tenth of a ton.
Somalis consume a mere thirty watts and emit just ninety pounds.
This means that an American household of four is responsible for the same emissions as sixteen Argentinians, six hundred Ugandans, or a Somali village of sixteen hundred.
Now here’s the essential question. Are we going to build enough renewables in the next 20 years for everyone in the world to live like Americans currently do, or are American’s going to have to use less?
We waited until the very last minute to start and now we have to do “everything, everywhere, all at once”.
Because, if WE don’t do this All Together. We will ALL burn, Together.
Good luck!! It is hopeless. And we cannot expect the underdeveloped countries to stay that way and not have the luxuries we have. Buy a Prius/tesla....hahaha!!!
The world population is not going to all burn in twenty years, there is no scientific basis for that at all. Wanting the world to live at the energy budget of Somalia is global suicide for a problem which has unknown effects and very little in the next two decades.
Well, you are completely wrong about that.
The Climate System is pretty straightforward.
Energy from the Sun hits the Earth. Most of it gets reflected back into space.
Because our planet is "tilted" in its orientation to the Sun, the Energy from the Sun is unevenly absorbed on the Earth.
80% of the Energy from the Sun is absorbed in the Equatorial Zone of the Earth.
90% of that ENERGY goes into the Global Ocean System. GLOBAL WARMING IS OCEAN WARMING.
20% is split between the Northern and Southern "Mid-Latitudes".
Both of the Polar Zones are "Energy Sinks" for the Earth. They lose more energy during the 4 months of darkness than they take in from the Sun.
This creates an ENERGY GRADIENT between the HOT EQUATORIAL ZONE and the COLD POLAR ZONES. Heat "flows" from HOT to COLD places.
The "flow" of that heat is our Climate.
THE BOTTOM LINE OF THE CLIMATE SYSTEM: THE ARCTIC ICEPACK.
If it's growing and thickening - the planet is cooling.
If it's shrinking and thinning - the planet is warming.
See how easy to understand that is?
Here’s the bad news: the Earth’s albedo has been declining during the last 20 years.
Earth’s Albedo 1998–2017 as Measured From Earthshine pub. Aug 2021
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2021GL094888
Earth observation satellites are constantly measuring the Earth’s albedo using a suite of sensors, and the reflectivity of the planet is measured through earthshine, the light from the Earth that reflects off the Moon. This paper analyzes earthshine measurements between 1998 and 2017 to see if the Earth’s albedo is rising or declining in response to climate change. Here’s their conclusion.
“We have reported a two-decade long data set of the Earth’s nearly globally averaged albedo as derived from earthshine observations. Stringent data quality standards were applied to generate monthly and annual means.
These vary significantly on monthly, annual, and decadal scales with the net being a gradual decline over the two decades, which accelerated in the most recent years (much of the decrease in reflectance occurred during the last three years of the two-decade period the team studied). Remarkably, the inter-annual earthshine anomalies agree well with those from CERES satellite observations, despite their differences in global coverage, underlying assumptions to derive the albedo, and the very different sensitivities to retroflected and wider-angle reflected light.”
The two-decade decrease in earthshine-derived albedo corresponds to an increase in radiative forcing of about 0.5 W/m2,
Which is climatologically significant (Miller et al., 2014).
For comparison, total anthropogenic forcing increased by about 0.6 W/m2 over the same period.
The CERES data show an even stronger trend of decreasing global albedo over the most recent years, which has been associated to changes in the PDO, SSTs and low cloud formation changes..
Notice that the paper quantifies how much of an effect this change in albedo is having. By 2017 it had reached 0.5 W/m2 (Watts per square meter). That doesn’t sound like much, until you realize that the effect of all our CO2 pollution for the same period was 0.6 W/m2. Bottom line.
By 2017 the decline in the Earth’s albedo doubled the rate that the Earth was warming. We are warming up twice as fast as we were.
THE EARTH IS NOW WARMING AT A RATE OF 0.36C PER DECADE.
If this keeps up, even if we don’t put any more CO2 in the atmosphere, we will get 4℃ of warming by 2100.
Here’s the "TELL" that the PLANETARY ALBEDO has CHANGED. That the amount of HEAT flowing into the OCEANS has jumped from 5 Hiros per second to 10 Hiros per second.
THE OCEANS ARE WARMING UP AT UNPRECEDENTED RATES. “HEAT” DOESN’T “JUST HAPPEN”. WHERE ELSE COULD THE ENERGY FOR THIS AMOUNT OF OCEAN WARMING COME FROM?
The amount of excess heat buried in the planet’s oceans, a strong marker of climate change, reached a record high in 2022, reflecting more stored heat energy than in any year since reliable measurements were available in the late 1950s, a group of scientists reported Wednesday.
That eclipses the ocean heat record set in 2021 — which eclipsed the record set in 2020, which eclipsed the one set in 2019.
Oceans surged to another record-high temperature in 2022 WAPO January 11, 2023
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/01/11/ocean-heat-climate-change/
In 2022, the heat content in the upper 2000 meters of the Pacific ocean reached a record level “by a large margin,” researchers say, “which supports the extreme events witnessed, such as intensive heat waves and deoxygenation, and poses a substantial risk to marine life in this region.”
Oceans Broke Yet Another Heat Record in 2022, Scientists Warn Science Alert Jan 12, 2023
https://www.sciencealert.com/oceans-broke-yet-another-heat-record-in-2022-scientists-warn
It was the 46th-consecutive year with global temperatures above the 20th-century average, according to the NOAA analysis.
Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies stated.
“The long-term trends are very clear, the increases in temperature are not due to natural variation. They are not due to the sun. They are not due to volcanoes. They are due to our emissions of greenhouse gases and as long as we continue to emit large amounts of greenhouse gases, these trends will continue.”
World’s Oceans Absorbed Record Heat From Warming Climate in 2022 WSJ Jan 12, 2023
https://www.wsj.com/articles/worlds-oceans-absorbed-record-heat-from-warming-climate-in-2022-11673546873
THE OCEAN IS RELEASING HEAT. WE ARE HAVING A “MILD” WINTER RIGHT NOW. BY THIS SUMMER HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS WILL BE DYING IN HEATWAVES.
Because 60 years of paleoclimate research says 420ppm equals 4.0C of warming. At 0.36C of warming per decade we will find out what that's like before 2100.