30 October 2024. Politics | Cement
The new American tech-libertarian right // Decarbonising cement. [#612]
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1: The new American tech-libertarian right
It is probably a good moment to write here about the interaction between America’s alt-right culture and Silicon Valley—and the way that as the alt-right has got noisier, the more reactionary members of the Billionaire Tech Bro Club have become noisier and noisier. Fortunately, Rebecca Jennings has a reasonably nuanced version than this in Vox, called ‘The cultural power of the anti-work tech bro.’
One of the themes of the story is that over two decades our idea of what set of values is associated with the libertarian right has shifted. It used to be about economics and politics: in favour of small government and so-called ‘free’ markets. Derek Robertson, who writes Politico’s Digital Future Daily newsletter, tells Jennings that libertarianism has shifted
from this “really wonky” philosophy centered around less government interference in all aspects of life to a movement that’s almost entirely centralized around cultural grievances. “It’s just a reactionary movement against the increasing presence of women in culture, the increasing domination of women in academia and corporate fields,” he says.
In other words, it is now about a set of social values, and is much clearer about what it is against than what it is for.
As Jennings says, it sees the world as being “over-indexed” on equality and diversity. Its advocates are quite a big group, and mostly a male group, but it includes influencers like “Sneako and the Paul brothers, to mega podcasters Dave Rubin and Tim Pool.” Social media, in other words, features large in this story.
She argues that two things created the transition in worldviews of this group and how those are expressed online:
the overhaul of acceptable political discourse caused by the election of Donald Trump and, of course, the pandemic.
She positions the Silicon Valley Peter Thiel as being a bit of a godfather figure in all of this (maybe ‘godfather’ should come with a capital G there.) Thiel has always been quite a long way to the right, but he has disclosed this to us slowly, first in proposing the creation of monopolies as the objective of a successful entrepreneur, more recently someone “whose libertarian views have curdled into the anti-democratic”.
He has, for years, funded what might be broadly be called cultural assets—media, festivals, conferences—that promote anti-feminist ideas and climate change denial.
A critical moment came in 2017 when the Google employee James Damore was fired by the company for publishing an open letter complaining about the company’s diversity policies (some might say: such as they were.) He immediately became a celebrity on the alt-right media circuit, interviewed by Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, even by the white nationalist podcaster Stefan Molyneux:
The letter was also a litmus test for what was acceptable to say publicly in a world where Donald Trump was president. The sudden open hostility to diversity grew to include a stew of related grievances. Anyone who prevented entrepreneurs and other “big thinkers” from doing exactly as they pleased became the enemy: unions, the media, academia, government institutions, anyone with a liberal arts degree, as well as women and people of color in positions of power (although this part usually goes unsaid).
(The Tesla Cybertruck: “a culture war on wheels.” Rendered here in lego. BrickinNick/flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
The part played by the pandemic is worth some attention—partly because I’m not sure that its impact on our politics has really been explored enough.
At a surface level, from a libertarian perspective, the pandemic was about government over-reach, and perhaps, for American right-wingers, it raised the truly terrifying prospect that socialised medicine might be more effective than the US insurance model. But it went deeper than that: it represented a conflict in worldviews:
The CDC’s [the US Centre for Disease Control] response to Covid-19, says Hussein Kesvani, a journalist and podcaster who covers internet culture and politics, clashed with the tech bros’ sensibilities: Public health required individuals to alter their behavior for the sake of the collective good and sacrifice certain personal freedoms.
But it also played into a whole set of notions about the deep state and its myriad forms of social control:
“So much of this conspiratorial stuff is rooted in this idea that these institutions — hospitals, governments — are keeping the secrets of the universe away from you,” says Kesvani.
Indeed, some of the stranger conspiracy theories in the alt-right world are about health. One of the results of this is that almost any alt-right podcaster worth the name has a collection of lucrative health supplements that they peddle off the back of their social media channels:
“They’re sold in this ‘macho lifestyle’ way, where if you drink Prime you can crush your enemies beneath your chariot wheels... says Helen Lewis, an Atlantic staff writer who covers politics and digital culture. “You have anti-woke moisturizers, anti-woke plunge baths, all this self-care which feels very feminine, so you have to put a macho spin on it to make men feel okay about it.”
Hence another important strain in this discourse, around martial arts such as Brazilian ju-jitsu and related activities which seem like they’re straight out of Fight Club.
And if it seems that a lot of this is about a crisis of male identity, then that’s probably right, although Jennings’s piece touches on this via several tangents rather than directly. Because when Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone, he posited it as a general social problem, not a gendered problem.
A couple of quotes from the article pick this up:
The tech writer Ed Zitron:
“I think it’s really important to know how much of this comes down to the breakdown of male friendships,” he adds. “Women seem to have some degree of sisterhood, a gender-based solidarity. Guys don’t seem to have this unless it’s just being sexist.”
Helen Lewis again:
“The very macho styling feels countercultural to them. I think it feels punkish: ‘There is a polite society that is dominated by feminine codes of behavior, and we are the insurgent uprising to that.’
It should be said that Jennings has spoken only to a range of journalists and commentators here—not even to some of the social researchers who might have a point of view. She doesn’t offer a perspective on the deeper forces that are shaping this change—although perhaps that’s not her job here. Vox isn’t the London Review of Books. And you don’t have to go far into her subtext to detect that deep shifts in social values and the corresponding decline in power and status of previously more privileged groups might have these effects.
We might, for example, be in the (contested) territory of Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris here, of long-run shifts in social values, in other words, but with a more complex take that overlays gender effects on top of cohort effects, and stirs in some Girardian ideas about status and mimetic desire.
The inchoate nature of this phenomenon is reflected in the fact that none of Jennings’ interviewees seem to know what to call it. Derek Robertson proposes “masculine futurism”; Ed Zitron suggests “New nihilism”. We will understand it better when we can name it.
Read more on J2T: ‘The problem with men’.
H/t Dense Discovery.
2: Decarbonising cement
If we’re going to get to Net Positive on emissions, we’re going to have to decarbonise the hard stuff, and there’s not much that’s harder to decarbonise than cement. We produce four billion tonnes of concrete globally every year, and cement is a key ingredient, and its carbon emissions are through the roof.
So it’s worth noting an article in Yale Environment 360 that looks at the ways in which manufacturers are trying to de-carbonise cement production.
This is the problem, specifically:
Since the early days of the industrial revolution, coal and other fossil fuels have been used to heat cement kilns to 1,500 degrees. And when limestone is incinerated to form clinker, the precursor to cement, it releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Globally, cement production generates 5-8% of emissions annually, more than the aviation industry or the data centre business. It’s also been growing rapidly. There’s a famous statistic that says that China used as much cement between 2010 and 2013 as the USA got through in the entire 20th century.
(Source: Community Emissions Data System via Our World In Data, in Yale Environment 360)
Because this is one of those big and hard-to-solve decarbonisation problems, people are working at it across a wide area:
Some companies are replacing their fossil heat and electricity sources with renewables. Others are reducing the proportion of limestone in clinker and the proportion of clinker in cement, switching to fossil-free materials for additives, and capturing remaining carbon dioxide for either disposal or recycling.
The Yale Environment 360 article is written by a German science journalist, Christian Schwägerl, and he has had access to a German cement plant in Lagerdorf, owned by Holcim, one of the largest building materials companies in the world. It is investing millions of Euros to decarbonise its entire operation. It
aims to convert the Lägerdorf campus, by 2028, into one of the world’s first carbon-neutral cement plants by capturing its CO2 emissions.
They have already done the basic things you need to do to reduce emissions. They are using renewable and clean sources of energy, and they have reduced the proportion of clinker in their cement. This has cut emissions by 20% since 2010, according to German government data.
But the critical issue is that emissions happen as you turn limestone into clinker. It is, in effect, integral to the process. So if you’re going to use limestone, you need to capture the emissions. At Lagerdorf, they are doing this in two stages:
[T]he new kiln at the plant will use pure oxygen instead of ambient air to burn the raw meal, a change that increases combustion efficiency and excludes nitrogen from exhaust gases, leading to almost pure CO2. Next, that gas is cooled to a liquid, to make it ready for transport.
Although this eliminates the CO2 emissions from the production process, it takes four times as much energy. Fortunately, Germany has invested heavily in renewables over recent years, and the plant can get enough clean energy from the grid.
By 2028, Lagerdorf will be producing 1.2 million tonnes of CO2, as a liquid, then sending it via pipeline to a new ‘CO2 hub’ on the river Elbe, about 20 miles (30km) away. From there it could be transported to the North Sea and injected and stored (sequestered) deep below the seabed, or it could be used as a raw material.
Sequestration—a form of carbon capture and storage [CCS] is being used by cement companies around the world as they try to reduce emissions:
Susanne Buiter, chief scientist of the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, says that “carbon capture and storage” (CCS) can be done safely in the saltwater and limestone pores at 600 to 1,200 meters below the seabed. “It will either dissolve as carbonic acid or bind with the limestone,” she says.
CCS through injection sites in the North Sea is the German government’s main strategy for dealing with so-called “unavoidable emissions”. In Norway, similarly, the cement producer Heidelberg Materials will from next year capture half of the CO2 emissions of its Brevik plant and store them in former North Sea natural gas deposits.
In theory, using it as a raw material ought to be a better solution, because it creates a circular economy rather than focussing on managing waste. There are customers for liquid CO2, according to Sven Weidner, the director of the Lagerdorf 'Carbon2Business’ project. These
include companies growing food in greenhouses and industries looking for ways to replace fossil carbon with new sources. “The chemical industry could use our gas to make synthetic fuels or plastics without fossil oil,” he says.
But.
This process, known as CCUS [Carbon capture, utilisation, and storage], doesn’t remove the CO2 emissions. It just kicks it down the road for as long as it is being used in another production process. It delays the impact, it doesn’t remove it:
“Where carbon is used several times, emissions are shifted all the way downstream of the last use,” the Umweltbundesamt, Germany’s Environmental Protection Agency, warns, adding: “This recirculation only leads to a temporal and local shift, but not to a reduction of the original emissions.”
Some cement companies are working on more radical approaches that remove emissions by redesigning the production process.
An American company, Terra CO2 Technologies, is trying to reduce a portion of the limestone with powders made from mining waste, which could reduce emissions by 70% when compared to those from pure Portland waste.
However, Oliver Blask, a concrete researcher at Ingolstadt University, tells Schwägerl that the potential for this kind of substitution is limited. Blask suggests something more radical:
[T]he most promising approach is to replace limestone at the very beginning of the process with alternative materials that don’t release CO2 when burned. Experiments have been underway for some time with special clays or ground slag from iron and steel production.
These could potentially take CO2 out of the production process completely.
In the US, the Inflation Reduction Act has offered funding for approaches to do this. One company is trying to replace the limestone with carbon-free silicate rock; another proposes to use “so-called calcined clays”. A third company is using “an electrolytic reactor instead of a kiln to process non-carbonate materials”.
There’s also potential for carbon reduction at the other end of the concrete life cycle. Concrete from demolished buildings is the largest waste stream in the world, accounting for 900 million tonnes annually. The Swiss start-up Neustark has developed a technique to
accelerate crushed concrete’s ability to absorb and bind carbon dioxide by injecting CO2 produced in biogas plants into concrete granulate in recycling plants.
The secret is in the crushing, which increases the ability of the concrete to absorb concentrated carbon dioxide. Neustark already has 19 plants in operation, with more under construction. It hopes to store a million tons of greenhouse gases in concrete granulate per year by 2030. According to its website,
Neustark stores around 10kg of CO₂ per ton of demolished concrete. One site can do in one hour what 50 trees do in one year.
It says that the CO2-enriched concrete can then be reused, as recycled concrete or as aggregate.
Of course, given where we are on climate change, we need to do all of this as quickly as possible. And reading some of the detail, you realise how long it takes to build all the interlocking pieces of infrastructure and related systems that are required. All the same, a sensible carbon price would make a difference,
j2t#612
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