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I saw this tweet by Palmer Luckey the other day:
"The real secret of of global warming is that the climate can be whatever humanity wants it to be. Two dozen nations could each single-handedly send us all into an ice age."
He's right. It wouldn't be that hard to prevent climate change via geoengineering. In fact we did some geoengineering by mistake last year. New regulations limited the amount of sulfur that oceangoing ships could emit. This caused an increase in the global temperature.
So, if climate change is such a threat, why don't we do something about it?
Because, let's be honest, our current climate change mitigation strategies are doomed to fail and will only make us poor.
Even if the United States and Europe cut 100% of carbon emissions tomorrow, the climate is going to get hotter. China already emits about 3 times as much carbon as the United States. In the developing world, new coal plants are being built every day. 2024 will set a record for coal production, and 2025 will be greater still. And there is hundreds of years of coal left to be consumed.
Getting people to downsize their SUV to a Prius isn't going to fix the problem. Renewables are not the answer either, being both unreliable and requiring constant upgrades. We are using huge amounts of resources to build solar and wind capacity, but the lifetime of these projects is just a couple of decades. So we need more metals and more concrete, which will result in more emissions, not to mention the associated ecological destruction from strip mines.
Did you know that 8% of global carbon emissions come from the production of concrete, the same amount produced by all private passenger automobiles? Fantasies about electric cars solving global warming are just that.
To fully fix global warming, we need to reduce global carbon emissions by at least 90%, more likely 99%. Carbon in the atmosphere has been increasing since before 1800 AD.
So why are we spending trillions trying to nibble at the edges when we could spend billions and achieve much better results. We can cool the climate to an acceptable level while we wait for the carbon removal technology that is the only way to fully solve the problem.
I would assume the processes involved in producing things like steel and concrete are amenable to electrification. Most serious suggestions for how to tackle climate change come down electrifying as much as possible and generating as much clean electricity as possible. Of course for this you need a lot of nuclear energy, which is needlessly politically contentious.
Kinda. Right now, every ton of steel with a blast furnace requires about 3/4 ton of coal to produce. Eventually, electric arc furnace production will become greater, but it will be a multi-decade process.
When it comes to concrete, there are also improvements to be made, but the chemical process unavoidably creates carbon emissions. There is no such thing as concrete without massive emissions.
For now on the concrete side. We have new processes in the works. At the end of the day, new technology is the only feasible solution.
What processes? There are proposals to reduce carbon emissions in concrete production but as far as I know it can't be eliminated.
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