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.
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?
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.
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.
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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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We already have the harmonized code / UNSPEC systems though to start with though, so we'd have a good idea of embodied carbon by code, and there'd be a whole business of trying to green certify that you were doing better than average to reduce your taxes.
And yea - I'm talking more than energy too. Stuff like concrete is the CO2 from natural gas furnaces + the CO2 emitted from the process.
Exactly. Concrete is a good stress-test example. Very basic material that China uses at the fastest rate in history, and it’s hard to imagine either a substitute product or sufficiently negative-carbonized production to offset emissions in use. It’s basic to a whole way of life.
Source capture --> sequestration near the source wouldn't be that crazy for this though. It'd make cement plants near CO2 injection sites uniquely profitable.
Also, there are carbon negative concretes available today, we just need to offset their cost increase.

