I'm not opposed to designing things to recycle, reuse, etc better, but my instinct tells me entropy will win and that carbon taxes + public R&D/venture funding are likely enough, and I'm unsure they'd come to this conclusion. Is your project going to be public?
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don't forget the emissions from moving all that plastic bullshit around too, Nick! it really adds up. carbon tax would be fine but why not design better. (I recall looking into this but don't have a cite atm)
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Yea sure, I hope people try this approach if they believe the math. I'm just skeptical that a circular economy is realistically better than other means. There are many examples of "built to last" products having average use lifespans below the energy payback period (ie net loss).
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this is my cynicism / experience in industrial design too: you can spend a heck of a lot of design and tooling time on making something good and repairable, a lot more resources to build it, and people throw it out anyway.
I'm all for right to repair, but nearly no one does it
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Yea same here - I keep thinking of the example of a stainless water bottle where most users never used it long enough to pay back the upfront energy investment.
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Yeah it’s not a panacea. Plastic straws and cloth totes are other examples. It’s a mix of targeted redesign, proper labeling, modeling and imitation, and incentives. Designing for durability and repairability as a general default in isolation won’t work.
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But the larger point is, there’s no way to decarbonize without shifting consumption patterns to a lower-emissions equilibrium. There’s only so far you can get with taxes, cap-and-trade, and carbon credits. And with matter unlike energy there’s fewer big levers like renewables.
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Carbon tax / sequestration seems like the true panacea. It could be done at massive scale while the economy adjusts. I don't see what would limit it if carbon tax / credits could provide the funding.
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The only issue I'm heard is saing that carbon taxes don't work fast enough, so we need the R&D side as well because the market pressure would arrive too late to hit the targets. Thoughts Sam?
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Re: Consumption Patterns - I'm unsure what the top patterns we'd need to change are, but things like cars can be easily made more efficient (electric + smaller engines), lighting can be moved to LED, etc.
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Direct energy use is about half the carbon pie chart. The other half is materially embodied. Accounting methods are a bit messy, but currently the biggest pattern that needs shifting in the energy half of the pie is probably HVAC.
Energy in general is much more legible and within it, electricity generation and transportation are the most legible parts. But I don’t think there’s a way to decarbonize based on energy alone. You have to do a “renewables” equivalent to materials production and use as well.
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But something about moving mass consumption manufacturing to net negative carbon without touching the content seems off to me. Medium is the message. I can’t imagine carbon negative high-tech renewables based factories delivering through EV supply chains...the same crap as today.
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If you could get China to run all their mining ops and factories on renewables that would certainly make the point moot. My guess is that transition will happen but too slowly to matter.
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But materially embodied energy is direct energy somewhere right? Are you saying that when say China sends stuff we'd have carbon tariffs to account for them not doing it? That would seem reasonable.



