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I think you've pointed out reasons to be optimistic, but these problems are harder than you're implying, even assuming we have the political will and foresight

I think you've pointed out reasons to be optimistic, but these problems are harder than you're implying, even assuming we have the political will and foresight to address them. For example, electric cars require large amounts of copper, cobalt, and nickel. We don't produce enough to electrify all cars, so that means we need new mines. Mines take a long time to discover and build and have their own environmental problems. Also, recyclability of these batteries still needs a lot of work. As for shifting steel to net-zero emissions, I agree it's possible in principle, but you need to get a lot hotter than 600C. Steel melts at ~1500C. A blast furnace needs to get to at least 1300C to separate iron from ore and temperatures can get up to ~2000C. The engineered wood products are interesting, but they aren't well understood yet for use in large structures. One of the advantages of reinforced concrete is that the building is monolithic. There are no joints that can fail, it's one piece of reinforced concrete. The composites need joints, and every joint is a potential source of failure, which can then load other joints, potentially causing them to fail, and so on. These probably aren't insurmountable problems, but they are unsolved engineering problems and create a more complex structure. I'm not trying to be pessimistic or contrarian. I think technological advances will be important in maintaining quality of life as we transition to more sustainable sources of energy, but they aren't going to solve all our problems.

WorldMaker 7y ago
> For example, electric cars require large amounts of copper, cobalt, and nickel. We don't produce enough to electrify all cars, so that means we need new mines. Cobalt comes "free" as a waste product from copper/nickel mining. So long as copper/nickel get mined, there will be cobalt. There doesn't currently seem to be any threat right now of a shortage in the cobalt market (even in some hypothetical of "electrify all cars immediately" worst case). On top of that, we already have proven Lithium Ion battery formulations that don't need Cobalt (it's about a quarter of batteries on the market), and the ones in current production that use Cobalt typically list their usage of Cobalt in ppm [parts per million]. > Also, recyclability of these batteries still needs a lot of work. Current car-sized batteries have been showing real world usage statistics at hundreds of thousands to just shy of tens of millions of cycles in their "first use" in cars, not enough have made it to secondary markets yet to have reliable statistics, but current beliefs are that secondary usages in devices such as "power walls" and grid supplementations should see tens of thousands of cycles at reduced capacities. In the tertiary stages where recycling becomes useful/necessary, we know that Lithium, the vast majority of battery compositions, is entirely recyclable (and a known entity, we've doing that much for a while). We aren't currently good at recycling Cobalt, but we haven't needed to do any such thing in bulk to date because A) again, most car batteries are still in their first lives, which are showing to be 15-20 years in some cases, B) Cobalt is often measured in ppm so a tiny percentage of battery composition, C) Cobalt is a "waste product" from other mining and economically the incentives just do not align to recycle it when it just keeps coming out of mines whether or not we need it. Not that pessimism isn't useful, but another possibly helpful reminder we may be better off than we think we are.

WorldMaker 7y ago

> For example, electric cars require large amounts of copper, cobalt, and nickel. We don't produce enough to electrify all cars, so that means we need new mines. Cobalt comes "free" as a waste product from copper/nickel mining. So long as copper/nickel get mined, there will be cobalt. There doesn't currently seem to be any threat right now of a shortage in the cobalt market (even in some hypothetical of "electrify all cars immediately" worst case). On top of that, we already have proven Lithium Ion battery formulations that don't need Cobalt (it's about a quarter of batteries on the market), and the ones in current production that use Cobalt typically list their usage of Cobalt in ppm [parts per million]. > Also, recyclability of these batteries still needs a lot of work. Current car-sized batteries have been showing real world usage statistics at hundreds of thousands to just shy of tens of millions of cycles in their "first use" in cars, not enough have made it to secondary markets yet to have reliable statistics, but current beliefs are that secondary usages in devices such as "power walls" and grid supplementations should see tens of thousands of cycles at reduced capacities. In the tertiary stages where recycling becomes useful/necessary, we know that Lithium, the vast majority of battery compositions, is entirely recyclable (and a known entity, we've doing that much for a while). We aren't currently good at recycling Cobalt, but we haven't needed to do any such thing in bulk to date because A) again, most car batteries are still in their first lives, which are showing to be 15-20 years in some cases, B) Cobalt is often measured in ppm so a tiny percentage of battery composition, C) Cobalt is a "waste product" from other mining and economically the incentives just do not align to recycle it when it just keeps coming out of mines whether or not we need it. Not that pessimism isn't useful, but another possibly helpful reminder we may be better off than we think we are.