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To make steel, you need to separate the oxygen from the iron and add a tiny bit of carbon. You can accomplish both at the same time by melting iron ore at very high temperatures (1,700 degrees Celsius or over 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit), in the presence of oxygen and a type of coal called coke. At those temperatures, the iron ore releases its oxygen, and the coke releases its carbon. A bit of the carbon bonds with the iron, forming the steel we want, and the rest of the carbon grabs onto the oxygen, forming a by-product we don’t want: carbon dioxide. Quite a bit of carbon dioxide, in fact.
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To make cement, you need calcium. To get calcium, you start with limestone—which contains calcium plus carbon and oxygen—and burn it in a furnace along with some other materials. Given the presence of carbon and oxygen, you can probably see where this is going. After burning the limestone, you end up with the thing you want—calcium for your cement—plus something you don’t want: carbon dioxide. Nobody knows of a way to make cement without going through this process. It’s a chemical reaction—limestone plus heat equals calcium oxide plus carbon dioxide—and there’s no way around it. It’s a
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when we make a plastic, around half of the carbon stays in the plastic. (The actual percentage varies quite a bit, depending on which kind of plastic you’re talking about, but around half is a reasonable approximation.) Carbon really likes bonding with the oxygen and hydrogen, and it isn’t inclined to let go. Plastics can take hundreds of years to degrade.
To sum up, the path to zero emissions in manufacturing looks like this: Electrify every process possible. This is going to take a lot of innovation.
Get that electricity from a power grid that’s been decarbonized. This also will take a lot of innovation. Use carbon capture to absorb the remaining emissions. And so will this. Use materials more efficiently. Same.
approaches to geoengineering; they all have three things in common. One, they’re relatively cheap compared with the scale of the problem, requiring up-front capital costs of less than $10 billion and minimal operating expenses. Two, the effect on clouds lasts for a week or so, so we could use them as long as we needed to and then stop with no long-term impacts. And three, whatever technical problems these ideas might face are nothing compared with the political hurdles they’ll definitely face.
hard to imagine getting countries around the world to agree to artificially set the planet’s temperature. But geoengineering is the only known way that we could hope to lower the earth’s temperature within years or even decades without crippling the economy. There may come a day when we don’t have a choice. Best to prepare for that day now.
Human Genome Project (HGP).
independent study of the HGP found that every $1 invested by the federal government in the project generated $141 in returns to the U.S. economy.2
Impressive and proof that government funded R&D is not wasted taxpayers money....
