Just a small point:
THE Hoover Dam is enormous, as you probably know. The tour guides have
ways of making its enormousness comprehensible. There’s enough concrete
in there, one told us, to lay a four-foot wide pavement all the way
around the equator. Another: there’s enough concrete in the dam to
concrete over the whole of Rhode Island. I wonder whether either of
these alternative projects was given proper consideration. Both have
their merits.
That’s a hell of a lot of concrete…and a lot of CO2 emissions.
In all the debates over power generation and carbon emissions, worth remembering that there is in fact no method of power generation that does not have carbon emissions. None, nada. Hydro is, as above, emittive because of the cement. In fact, as the chart here shows, hydro is more emittive than nuclear. And, err, biomass is twice as bad as either.
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