How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

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.

making plastics. If enough pieces come together, plastics could one day become a carbon sink—a way to remove carbon rather than emit it.

molten oxide electrolysis: Instead of burning iron in a furnace with coke, you pass electricity through a cell that contains a mixture of liquid iron oxide and other ingredients. The electricity causes the iron oxide to break apart, leaving you with the pure iron you need for steel, and pure oxygen as a by-product. No carbon dioxide is produced at all.

We emit greenhouse gases (1) when we use fossil fuels to generate the electricity that factories need to run their operations; (2) when we use them to generate heat needed for different manufacturing processes, like melting iron ore to make steel; and (3) when we actually make these materials, like the way cement manufacturing inevitably creates carbon dioxide.

We manufacture an enormous amount of materials, resulting in copious amounts of greenhouse gases, nearly a third of the 51 billion tons per year. We need to get those emissions down to zero, but it’s not an option to simply stop making things.

Pieces of plastic floating around in the ocean cause all sorts of problems, including poisoning marine life. But they’re not making climate change worse.

Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air, David MacKay

It’s extremely difficult and expensive to store electricity on a large scale, but that’s one of the things we’ll need to do if we’re going to rely on intermittent sources to provide a significant percentage of clean electricity in the coming years.

read Weather for Dummies, still one of the best books on weather that I’ve found

In other words, we’ll save money by building renewables in the best locations, building a unified national grid, and shipping zero-emissions electrons wherever they’re needed.*