“Should I Turn Down the Thermostat or Overthrow the Capitalist Mode of Production?,” by Brendan Cooney. Challenges assumptions that rising greenhouse gas emissions are attributable to consumers’ behavior and the fact that the wrong leaders are in charge. [...]
  • Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.netEnglish
    11·
    7 hours ago

    Using their example of industrial heat, I think they’re overstating how fucked this is in terms of technology:

    Take industrial heating as an example. By some estimates, 10% of global emissions come from industrial heat, the high-intensity heat needed to produce steel, cement and other materials. Those high temperatures come from burning fossil fuels, and we don’t currently have the means of replacing those fossil fuels with alternate green sources of high heat

    The thing is, for this example, we do have the technology, the catch is the cost:

    In terms of production costs, one ton of steel currently costs in the order of €400, which includes about €50 required for the coal used. Replacing this coal with hydrogen would require around €180 worth of hydrogen at current best prices (€3.6/kg), which would increase the total price of a ton of steel by about one third. If the large-scale production of hydrogen drives down the price of hydrogen to €1.80/kg by 2030, the price difference between conventional steel and steel produced by green hydrogen would drop to the order of 10 %.

    https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2020/641552/EPRS_BRI(2020)641552_EN.pdf

    Capitalism is definitely contributing to this part of the problem, but it isn’t alone. This is a switching cost, one inherent to decarbonizing industry, and so it will be a problem regardless of the economic model used (assuming the same output of steel). The rest of this article has good insights.

    Obligitory: Eat the rich, down with capitalism, communism for all