We don't use CO2 to make cement, we use limestone, and CO2 is the byproduct of heating the limestone to make reactive calcium.

Do you know ferrock?

It is a kind of cement that uses CO2 to cure.

I work on decarbonising cement production, and the cement producers are betting _heavily_ on carbon capture as their "get out of jail free card".

I think they're likely wrong, but - again - it's not like we can just stop making concrete: all the solar farms, wind farms, dams, and assorted infrastructure that we need to combat climate change will be made with concrete, and there is currently no viable zero carbon alternative.

The grid is the easy bit, and will happen as a result of market forces, but those hard-to-abate sectors are really fricking hard.

Cement is actually great for renewable balancing, too.

You can store high grade heat for calcination via grid load leveling (eg use curtailed solar, which sometimes the grid will pay you to take, to preheat rocks). This allows solar to scale up to a larger fraction of the grid, win win.

Yes! Likewise for grinding: offload excess power to industrial plants so they can grind rocks when it's windy. If you look at the problem in the right way, a silo full of ground rock is just a battery.

A rock grinder is a significant capital investment, who is going to want to purchase that and leave it idle for a windy day?

What workforce is going to sign up for those jobs? "We will call you when the wind starts to blow, you need to be ready to start your shift within 30 minutes of the call."

Aren't there also carbon neutral ways to make cement/concrete?

Not at any scale that counts. There are a whole bunch of companies _trying_ to make zero carbon cement, but it's all very early stuff.

The lifetime of a cement plant is 30-50 years, and they cost 100-200M Euros to build, so even if there were a process that was ready to scale today, producing a cement that passed regulatory standards, we'd still be making some Portland cement into the 2070s.

Ergo, producers would like to stick a carbon-capture plant onto their kilns.

Concrete absorbs co2 while curing. It's the calcination process, where we heat limestone up until the co2 burns off, that has unavoidable emissions. Since this concrete is recycled, that's already happened.

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40461810 for a correction

Billions of people do care https://www.carbonbrief.org/interview-why-global-support-for...

The emissions trend is slowing. We have the technology we need in order to change course, we're just not deploying it fast enough.

The worst projections, at least, are off the table: we're not headed for 6 degrees of warming, we're on track for 3, and I strongly suspect we'll end up closer to 2 degrees of warming.

That is going to be terrible. People will die, wars will be fought, and we'll see the largest migrations in human history with all the attendant political upheaval and barbarity, but we'll still be here. Humans as a species are going to make it.

For me, I found it helpful to go and work in climate. So long as I wasn't actively working to solve the problem, I was driven mad by the knowledge that we were heading for disaster.

> For me, I found it helpful to go and work in climate.

Curious, can you say what you switched from and to?

If you're new to programming, steer clear of design patterns. If you're a working python programmer who's curious about how other ecosystems use design patterns, try https://www.cosmicpython.com/

I'm starting a new job doing exactly these things in order to reduce the carbon intensiveness of heavy industry, specifically cement production. I'm hyped because I think the technical challenges aren't too daunting, and the prize is huge.

I've started looking into CO2e reduction techniques as well. Would be great to discuss. Working with a client in the food space who is doing this just to learn more

The difference is that every single one of your counterexamples is something that society depends on.

Nobody depends on 8chan. 8chan is not comparable to "air".

This point is so incredibly banal that I'm surprised to find myself making it.

Indeed, but speech itself is is. I think OP's point was that free-speech is as fundamental a "air" and that everybody everywhere depends on it.

And they're free to continue their speech elsewhere. Cloudflare and Voxility are within their rights to refuse service to a client on the basis that the client is persistently associated with terrorism and kiddy porn.

Why is that a remotely controversial statement? Nobody is suggesting that chan-tards should be rounded up for unamerican activities, and I'd be the first to speak against that, but CF don't need to tarnish their brand with 8chans bullshit.

They're free to withhold their support and so express an opinion.

> Why is that a remotely controversial statement?

Because Cloudflare used to say that they would never take anyone down, and now they have. I think it's valid to wonder if they'll be more willing to take down other content, and perhaps become a target by groups looking to restrict the spread of certain information now that they've shown that this is something they're willing to do. This also brings up the point of why Cloudflare thought this specific website was worth taking down, and not the other horrible things that they do support.

Yes. Reasonable people "exclude the middle ground" on support for domestic terrorism.

Your comments here aren't helping. The clear implication is that Dr Bouman is receiving "undue credit" in order to push a "feminist narrative".

If that's your honest reading of events, then you're the problem here, my dude.