I know what you’re saying. “Wait, concrete? Like, in buildings? Not the rocky guy in the comcs, right?” And yes, I’m talking about concrete. More specifically, Portland cement – but since Portland cement is the primary ingredient of concrete, we’re really talking about the same thing.

Every ton of cement that we manufacture produces .81 tons of carbon dioxide. Cement is made by pulverizing limestone under high heat, and when you do that, you produce CO2. Lots of it. Chalk in the CO2 cost of production and quarrying, and cement produces CO2 at one-for-one: one ton of cement, one ton of CO2. We the world produce 2.5 billion tons of cement a year. Cement, all by itself, produces five percent of the world’s CO2 emissions, and this is generally not well known because people focus their attention (understandably) on fossil fuel use. Hell, I follow global warming science much closer than average, and I didn’t know about it until a few weeks ago. To say that it blew my mind is an understatement.

Do we have alternatives to cement? Yes, there are options. Aircrete reduces the amount of cement needed to make concrete greatly by essentially treating concrete like bread (volume enhanced by air). High strength concrete mixes cement with silica fume or fly ash to make a block stronger than normal concrete by far, and with less cement by weight in the finished product. This guy, who apparently has multiple patents for medical cement, claims to have invented a cement manufacture process that doesn’t emit CO2 and in fact may even help to sequester it.

But Aircrete needs aluminum powder for its manufacture, and aluminum powder is horrible, global-warming-wise, to manufacture. High strength concrete depends on silica fume or fly ash, and one is mostly found in the Third World and the other you get by either pulverizing or burning coal. And the guy who invented eco-concrete is, as of yet, unproven. (But we can hope.)

Most of the reading I’ve done on the subject points to geopolymerous cement as being the best remaining hope for ecologically friendly concrete manufacture. G-cement doesn’t release CO2 into the atmosphere because it’s cooked at a lower temperature than limestone is, and we know it works because, well, it’s what the ancient Romans used. The drawback is that you still need some fly ash – but certainly not as much as you would find in high-strength concrete, where you’re using it as a binding agent in conjunction with regular old cement. Here, you’re using fly ash (or the right type of volcanic ash, if you can get it) as an ingredient in the cement itself, along with various sands. The fly ash is still problematic, but even with it, you’re losing vast amounts of CO2 production in the actual manufacture of the cement.

Of course, people have been discussing replacing traditional Portland cement with geopolymerous for more than a decade now, and nothing’s happened. Why? Simple: market economics. Geopolymerous cement is more expensive to manufacture than Portland cement. Admittedly, most of that additional expense comes from the fact that there’s no economics of scale at work, since nobody makes geopolymerous cement in mass quantities.

The answer here is frankly simple, although conservatives aren’t going to like it: the introduction of regulation. Carbon taxation and/or cap and trade might serve as incentives for cement manufacturers to diversify, but I personally prefer the stick to the carrot: allow a five-to-ten year timeframe, requiring production mandates for environmentally friendlier cement, and at the end of it, ban Portland cement. Period. The market is good, but it’s too slow; we need action, quickly, in this regard.

UPDATE: Quixim, in comments on the previous post:

Do I detect a hint of scorn at the prospects of nuclear power?

I know that you’re aware it’s perfectly clean, and even less radioactive than coal power, not as damaging to ecosystems as hydroelectric, and more feasible than tidal or wind… So… for something that can essentially hold us indefinitely until we find a permanently sustainable form of energy, it’s sure getting a lot of flak here…

There are a multitude of reasons not to seriously consider nuclear power (beyond those installations already in place). Here are some of the major ones, and I’m not even going to address the issue of waste.

1.) Nuclear power is expensive. It has never, ever been cost-efficient on a private-sector basis; Mr. Burns is a fictional character, and there is no nuclear plant in the entire world capable of operating without very large government subsidy. This does not apply to solar (particularly so) or wind or any renewable energy source worth considering. On a cents per kilowatt-hour scale, nuclear right now tends to linger around 12 to 15 cents. Compare that to wind (4-7 cents) or tidal (2-3 cents) and it’s a joke. Solar energy two years ago was at 15-20 cents, and with the recent advances in solar technology making them vastly more efficient and with cheap fuel cell technology essentially perfected allowing us to more or less store solar energy overnight, solar’s costs are going to drop exponentially in the very near future.

(If we got fusion running, it would still be better than solar in many respects, but the two are essentially complementary technologies anyhow.)

2.) Nuclear power is a mature technology and it doesn’t work with economies of scale. More bluntly: it’s not going to get any cheaper because of scientific advances (pebblebed reactors are still going to cost buckets of money), and it’s not going to get cheaper if we make a lot of them. (Actually, all evidence points to the fact that nuclear plants actually get more expensive the more of them you build.) On top of that, nuclear plants represent massive infrastructure investments that just don’t exist for the likes of solar and wind.

3.) Nuclear plants are not like solar panels or windmills, which you basically just set up and then check on every once in a while. Nuclear plants are gigantic complicated fucking things that require continuous expert staffing, and for good reasons (most of which involve the word “radioactivity”). And we want safer nuclear plants, but the problem is that safer nuclear plants means more oversight, complicated devices, and staffing – meaning that the safer you want the plant, the more expensive it is to operate.

4.) Nuclear plants need enriched uranium to use as fuel. Nuke-fans, when discussing the prospects for nuclear fuel, typically point out that there is shitloads of uranium left on the planet. The problem is that we’ve already used up most of the naturally occurring enriched uranium in nuclear plants already, and most of what’s left isn’t easily accessible. This means for the long term, we have two options: 1.) strip-mining to get at the last naturally enriched uranium and 2.) refining the raw, low-grade uranium that is most of our planet’s supply into fuel-grade uranium. Either of these skyrockets the cost of nuclear power.

5.) The new “safer” reactors nuke-fans love to talk about barely exist. Pebble-bed reactors are still an experimental technology. We are decades away from mass installation of pebble-bed reactors.

Now let’s take that pin out of the meltdown and waste issues and discuss it rationally without talking about two-headed mutant babies. We don’t have a foolproof way of burying nuclear waste that can prevent it from seeping into groundwater; even if we did, what you’re then talking about is yet another additional cost assigned to nuclear power that solar and wind do not have in any meaningful context. Likewise, the necessity of preventing meltdowns greatly increases nuclear energy’s cost. Even before we consider things like radioactive risk, nuclear energy is just a bad deal.

Now, the nuke-fan might respond by saying “well it doesn’t matter if it’s expensive or not – wind and solar can’t do the job themselves.” Wind can’t do the job itself, that’s true (it can probably do a good chunk of it, say twenty percent or so, but that’s probably about it at present). Solar, however, can. If you don’t believe me, go ask Popular Mechanics, who used a very conservative plan (which, incidentally, is already outdated less than a year later as scientific advances have rendered solar collection more efficient) and determined that the USA could be fully solar-powered by 2050 for an investment cost of about $1 billion per year.

And that is why I dismiss nuclear power.

The continuing experiments on Bob Bussard’s theories of IEC fusion power generation seem to be going better than anticipated.

I’ve said before that I don’t think fusion power is a likely solution to our energy and pollution problems given the timeframe involved, and I stick by that. However, that’s no reason not to fund it to a reasonable extent; after all, this offers the potential for more return than, say, a lottery ticket.

(I’m taking a course in climate change law this year, so I’ve been doing a lot of pre-reading for it. This is a series of thoughts I wanted to pass on as I did my reading.)

By this point, everybody except the kooks and the desperate liberal-haters know that global warming is serious business. Most people don’t realize how serious it is, though. We are on a clock that nobody in our political arena is willing to mention.

Many people are aware that four degrees of warming is probably where the catastrophic end of mankind begins – at four degrees of warming, land-based ice shelves melt enough that most of the world’s major cities find themselves underwater. The four degree marker is fairly well known. The problem is that the four degree marker isn’t what we should be worrying about: what we need to worry about is the two degree marker. (One point nine, two point five, it’s somewhere around two and a little bit, most likely.) At two more degrees of warming, most global warming models predict that our climate system will start creating its own warming feedback at such a rate that we won’t be able to stop global warming without some major league scientific brilliance. We will most likely not manage the major league scientific brilliance, and in any case who the hell wants to rely on a Hail Mary pass for the future of the human race?

(Some will say at this point: “but Chris, there’s a reasonable chance that we can afford slightly more global warming than two degrees. There isn’t universal agreement on which model is the most accurate.” And this is true. However, given that the “slightly more warming” models are at best slight outliers, this is not an optimal strategy. Moreover, the other problem is that those models are counterbalanced by equally probable models that are, shall we say, much more disastrous. We should be hoping that the most likely prediction pans out and not get greedy.)

To stop global warming before we hit the inevitability junction of two degrees (and change), we need to cut global emissions drastically. I’m talking eighty-five to ninety-percent by 2030-2040 “drastically.”

Yes, it means we have to convince China to stop building coal plants, but contrary to what some might have you believe, when you show that an environmentally friendly lifestyle approach is both economically feasible (and, in a few years, probably economically preferable to a wasteful one) and healthier to boot, most people will generally jump at the chance to emulate you. Chinese people consume American (and increasingly European) culture in mass quantities: they want what we have, not necessarily because it is better but because our lifestyle has become a status symbol.

And yes, it means giving up a few things, but the trick here is not to think of these as sacrifices but rather trades. I don’t just mean “trading pleasures of life right now for the good of the planet later on,” either. I mean trading one set of pleasures for another.

My favorite example of this is the supermarket. Supermarkets are ridiculously wasteful of energy. You know this – you’ve been in one. Supermarkets have giant banks of open freezers without doors. They have hot lamps shining down on the fresh fish, which have to be laid out in ice to keep them from spoiling because of the intense heat the lamps generate. They have hot air blasters at the front door to keep the store warm in winter, which in turn mean the freezers have to be even more powerful when the hot air blasters are on.

But consider this: the abandonment of the supermarket entirely, and instead opting for delivery. Most supermarket chains already deliver anyway, and there are already delivery-only grocery companies. And deliveries will already be made just about any time of day. So let’s make it universal. I mean, just about everybody has a phone now, or net access, so ordering is pretty much a done deal. There’s no need to operate a massive, wasteful supermarket – you can just deliver from the warehouse. (The additional delivery jobs should make up for the loss of supermarket jobs, at least partially.) The need for bags, reusable or otherwise, disappears entirely. And best of all, consider this as a consumer. You don’t have to make a trip to the supermarket. You get to hang around the home – at a time convenient to you – and you get the time you would have spent on a half-hour or hour long shopping trip for your own purposes.

That’s what I mean when I talk about looking at “giving up” as a matter of trading. But enough about supermarkets. Let’s talk about air travel.

When it comes to emissions control, air travel is the giant in the room absolutely nobody wants to talk about. It’s obvious why: we like to fly. We really, really, like to fly. We like it so much we’ve spread our families all over the world, and we’ve come to regard it as a right to be able to visit them if we want and can afford to. On the whole, we’ve got a point, too: air travel has made the world smaller, and mostly for the better. Our societies grow more mixed, and understanding grows ever greater. (Not fast enough, of course, but certainly faster than in the days of mass xenophobia.)

But air travel as we know it isn’t sustainable. There are no fuel alternatives for airplanes. There are no “electric planes” waiting in the wings. Airplane manufacturers claim that fuel-efficient planes are coming soon, but they haven’t got any proof of it and every incentive to lie to you, so as a general rule not trusting them worth a damn generally pays off.

And airplanes are terrible carbon emitters. They emit plenty all on their own, but worse, they do it at high altitudes where the damage from their emissions is more pronounced. Worse yet they emit other gases that are also warming gases you don’t want high up in the atmosphere. George Monbiot, in Heat, estimates that on a single one-way flight from New York to London, a single passenger on a full plane is responsible for 1.2 tons of CO2 emissions.

There’s no easy way around this: jet planes have to go, save for emergency flight and super-extreme-high-end luxury. If we need to cut eighty-five to ninety percent of our carbon emissions, it’s going to be hard enough everywhere else without having to cushion for the frigging jet plane emissions we refuse to cut because we’ve always wanted to visit Tahiti.

“But Chris,” you say, “you were talking about trades and how it doesn’t necessarily have to be a sacrifice! Was that bullshit?” And the answer is “well, a little bit,” but only in the way that you bullshit a kid to get them to eat their creamed spinach by pretending it is tasty rather than creamed spinach, which is the most disgusting edible thing on the planet. (Yes, it’s worse than maggots.) The point is that there’s something good coming as a result of the sacrifice.

And there is something good. See, when I said we didn’t have the technology to make non-environmentally-damaging aircraft, I was only half truthful. Because we don’t have the technology to make non-environmentally damaging airplanes.

But zeppelins? We can do zeppelins.

(I know it’s in vogue to call them “airships,” but fuck that. They are zeppelins. I know I am being technically incorrect, but “zeppelin” is a cool word.)

We had commercial zeppelin travel over eighty years ago. Now, understandably, the Hindenburg explosion soured people on it, and then the advent of supercheap oil made airplanes more economically feasible than zeppelins – planes were faster and used less fuel, and also they didn’t have trouble when trying to pilot into a headwind.

But apart from speed, none of that is true any more. (Well, zeppelins still have trouble piloting into a headwind, but air maps are a lot better than they used to be and we can minimize the impact of it.) Zeppelins don’t use hydrogen to fill their balloons any more; they use helium, which doesn’t explode and is in fact a fire retardant. And in terms of fuel, new zeppelin design emphasizes their large, flat tops to stack solar cells across them – using the solar energy to power rotors and store energy during the day, zeppelins could feasibly be permanently and cleanly self-powered.

In terms of speed… well. Turtle Airships, the most prominent neo-zep design company, claims their maiden ship will fly up to 200 mph, which would make for about a 17 hour trip between New York City and London – not jet speed, to be sure, but certainly not bad. Unfortunately, that figure is probably crap in the way that all optimistic engineering estimates produced for press releases are probably crap. But even if their ship’s top speed is only half that, you’ve still got a one-way trip of 35 hours, which while not short is good enough to keep international travel alive and well. (Business travel will probably diminish some as a result, but, as Garth Ennis once wrote, well, that’s just fuckin’ tough. They can teleconference, after all.)

Zeppelins also offer what planes can’t – comfort. Planes, after all, are uncomfortable for a reason – they have to pack a whole lot into a giant metal tube that is basically shot into the sky, and making that cost-effective is tricky. Compare to the original zeppelin flights, which were more comparable to luxury cruises – you serenely glide over the ocean (or mountains, or whatever), looking down on the world. Turbulence isn’t particularly an issue. Imagine going up into your personal cabin on the zeppelin – nothing fancy, but your own little room for a day or two as you fly to your destination.

When I titled this post “It’s Only A Matter Of Will,” I meant it; building an airship fleet to replace, say, ninety percent of all jet planes within ten years’ time won’t be cheap, but it’s nowhere near impossible or even that difficult. In exchange for discomfort, increasing expense and environmental damage – instead we can have a relaxing zeppelin ride. The only thing we have to sacrifice is our own desperate need to get there now now now. Is that so much to ask?

(And one more thing: airships, unlike planes, are not innately explosive guided missiles, lessening their security risk immensely.)

Next week: The biggest carbon emitter you probably never even knew about.

Remember a while back I mentioned how there was this big “dead zone” of oxygen-depleted water off the Pacific Coast?

There’s a lot more of them, and they’re growing very fast.

Hilzoy over at Obsidian Wings is angry about the fact that athletes are going to have to compete in the horrible Chinese smog, where they can’t be at their best (heck, where they stand a good chance of not finishing their events). This is understandable, because people like watching the Olympics; they’re fun and at their best moments display the potential for nobility inherent within the human spirit, which no doubt is what Pierre de Coubertin intended.

But make no mistake: if we have to watch athletes wheezing their way through events, turning the Olympics into a joke? Well, it’s really no less than we deserve. We’re all of us wholly complicit in China’s environmental rape. Nobody forced us to go buy cheap Chinese-made goods, but we did. (And seriously – try avoiding them. IKEA’s goods are all almost Chinese-made now, for heaven’s sake. You go to IKEA, you expect stuff to be Swedish, but no.) And we can pretend all we like that giving China the Olympics was done in the hope that their society would open up, but all that’s happened instead is the party leadership treating the Olympics as a propaganda opportunity and cracking down even more harshly on dissidents. How we’re supposed to be surprised by that happening is beyond me.

So maybe these Olympics should really, really suck. Maybe then we’ll learn something about the limits of the healing power of sport, or at the very least about the wholly scummy, sycophantic nature of the International Olympic Committee. Maybe then.

Over at Patterico’s, he and his commenters are just having a good laugh at the expense of all those stupid liberals who worry about “endangered species” now that we’ve found 100,000 new Western Lowland gorillas, because even with 100,000 new gorillas, stupid scientists are saying they might still be endangered! Like, there’s 100,000 more of them now! How can 100,000 of anything be endangered?

Of course, what Patterico and his commenters don’t know (or don’t care to know) is that “endangered” has a specific scientific meaning: that the species in question is either considered likely to or already has had its population decrease by eighty percent over three generations. In the case of the Western Lowland gorilla, just because we’ve discovered 100,000 new gorillas doesn’t mean they’re not endangered, because the population is still at obvious risk from – wait, let’s just pause for a second and quote one of his commenters:

It’s not necessarily because “humans are taking over their natural habitat”…

Er, yes, it’s largely because of that. Western Lowland gorillas have been gradually reducing in numbers for two reasons: poaching and destruction of their habitat. (Africans in need of cheap fuel have taken to cutting down jungle as fodder for charcoal.) The Western Lowland gorilla is also threatened by the Ebola virus. Now, of course, humans aren’t to blame for the Ebola virus – but given the speed with which Ebola kills gorillas, the only way Ebola is a major threat to gorillas beyond the level of a single band is if you crowd more gorillas into less habitat than they can handle, which is exactly what humans have been doing.

Oh, and one more thing: remember again that “endangered” is qualified over the span of three generations. A Western Lowland gorilla generation is about thirteen to fifteen years. Do you think there’s still going to be a hundred thousand gorillas in forty years’ time? Because I don’t like their odds with their habitat gradually being destroyed.

(And of course it’s worth remembering that there’s three other species of gorilla – Eastern Lowland, mountain and Cross River – that are all doing much, much worse than Western Lowland gorillas. There’s only 600 or so mountain gorillas and 250-300 Cross River gorillas.)

To pair off with that revelation in making solar cells more efficient by using glass panels to increase their capture ability (discussed here), guess what the folks at MIT did: they invented a cheap, efficient and stable fuel cell so that solar cells can store energy more efficiently for night-time use.

…Tata Motors developed the world’s first commercially mass-produced car run off compressed air.

The Liberal Party released their carbon taxation plan today, and I’d say it’s… okay. It does a lot of what a carbon taxation scheme should, of course, but it misses two major points.

Firstly, there’s no tax on gasoline. I understand that gasoline taxes are unpopular, but the lack of a gas tax in a carbon taxation plan when you are taxing literally every other fossil fuel seems like staggering pandering to me. I don’t even think a gas tax is unsellable – say “look, we’re going to tax gas, yes, but the gas taxes are going to be specifically redirected into a fund to improve public transportation so that in five years you can take a hybrid bus from Chilliwack to the Bay of Fundy or from your home to your grandma’s back yard.” The longer you let people think that their old lifestyles are sustainable – and they just aren’t – the harder it’s going to be to tell them the truth.

Secondly, the tax is revenue-neutral, erring on the side of costing a bit of money. I understand that the Liberals want to make carbon taxation as painless as possible by lowering income taxes at the same time. But this idea is flawed for two reasons:

1.) We desperately need massive energy infrastructure investment. Canada has too much oil power generation as it is; we need to replace that with solar, tidal and wind ASAP, and additional revenues created by a carbon tax in the short term could help fund these initiatives.

2.) Carbon taxation in the short run is revenue neutral, but in the long run it is presumably revenue-lowering because given time everybody will find ecological ways to avoid paying the tax. Which is good, but that means eventually you have to jack income taxes back up to compensate. I don’t look forward to the squabbling when that happens.

Still, on the whole, it’s an all-right plan, a solid B+ effort. Could have been much, much worse.

Also: 350.

Volkswagen introduces concept car that gets 100km on one litre of gasoline.

I’m working on a long-form project which involves gorillas (I’m not really able to say more at this point), and during my research I was reminded of this.

Gorillas are gentle, shy creatures who would almost always rather run than fight, and they’re some of our closest relatives in the world; we know they’re intelligent, on the very borderline of human intelligence. There is no reason to kill them; mountain gorillas aren’t even good bushmeat. This is the work of some asshole or assholes with guns who couldn’t think of anything better to do with their time than slaughter some gorillas.

This makes me so angry I have trouble expressing it.

Federally funded scientists created fertilizer from human and industrial waste and tested it in poor black neighborhoods without informing residents of the potential risks.

Key sentence:

“However, there has been a paucity of research into the possible harmful effects of heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, other chemicals, and disease-causing microorganisms often found in sludge.”

Last year, it was bees – this year, it’s bats.

I consider energy issues to be awfully important, so here are some links that you can all read and then you can share with the rest of us your interesting thoughts on this global-emergency-level problem.

Firstly: this blog comment: ten reasons why nuclear power is a bad idea. Meltdowns and waste removal are barely even addressed, so you know it’s a good post when it doesn’t have to bother with the boogeyman reasons to avoid nuclear power and instead goes into the harder economics.

Secondly, Scientific American’s “solar grand plan” to make America completely solar-powered by 2050. The article makes extremely conservative assumptions about the progression of solar power (as in “it won’t get any more efficient” – they even ignore the new advances in the past two years which have made it more efficient, that’s how conservative their assumptions are) and ignore the potential upsides of individual home generation (IE, having photovoltaic cells on your roof). That last element is important, because decentralization of power makes it both more efficient and more secure. (I’m not particularly worried about a terrorist attack in Canada, but if I were, them taking out two or three generation plants in mid-January would probably be the nightmare scenario.)

Thirdly, if those arguing that it’s too late to stop global warming through carbon emission reduction because of the likewise reduction of global dimming are correct (and they probably are), how do we combat that? Realclimate discusses some of the options (lousy as they might be) here; to my mind they’re probably a little more down on the “smokestack plan” (which involves basically putting giant hoses on smokestacks, floating them up with weather balloons, and releasing sulphates into the upper atmosphere to simulate the cooling effect of a volcanic eruption) – not to say that the plan isn’t problematic, what with the threat of acid rain at the very least, but desperate times and desperate measures, etc.