Environment

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Environmental and ecological discussion, particularly of things like weather and other natural phenomena (especially if they're not breaking news).

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Sustainable building effort reaches new heights with wooden skyscrapers (yaleclimateconnections.org)

submitted 1 week ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/environment@beehaw.org

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[–] alyaza@beehaw.org 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

as the article kind of notes steelmaking in specific is very carbon intensive, so we either need to use less of it or decarbonize its production (or more likely a mixture of both). the statistics on this according to Wikipedia are:

As of 2021, steelmaking is estimated to be responsible for around 11% of the global emissions of carbon dioxide and around 7% of the global greenhouse gas emissions.[12][13] Making 1 ton of steel emits about 1.8 tons of carbon dioxide.[14]

[–] TehPers@beehaw.org 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

steelmaking in specific is very carbon intensive

Makes sense, given that steel is an iron/carbon alloy. I guess decarbonization would be making the process more efficient and capturing more of the carbon into the steel?

[–] alyaza@beehaw.org 2 points 6 days ago

my understanding is yes that's the general avenue people are researching; there's also the actual energy inputs powering steelmaking that hypothetically can be made greener (currently, it's a process that seems to almost exclusively use fossil fuels because of the very high temperatures needed)