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Global greenhouse gas emissions by sector (ourworldindata.org)
12 points by eoo_owid on Sept 18, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments


The only surprise here is that there have been no significant changes to these proportions in decades.

Correction: changes will come after sufficient people are surprised by the consequences.


These proportions should change a lot in the coming decades, between wind/solar/storage and EV revolutions addressing about 2/3 of the "energy generation" part, at least.

As for food, the major potential revolutions are vertical farming and "lab meat", and those are very far from large scale implementation.


That may be. I have no idea how many solar panels it takes to power the manufacture of a solar panel.


Solar EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) is very good. As the grid gets cleaner, solar manufacturing gets cleaner as well (solar, wind, hydro pushing out coal and natural gas)

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/02/03/solar-power-can-pay-eas...


Wonderful pie graph.

It’s interesting to see that although roads & transport are the largest single emitter, iron and steel production is actually within the same ballpark. I wonder if the figures are correct because that is truly an enormous amount of emissions from just iron and steel processing from ore, equivalent to ~2/3 of all road transport!


Can those power requirements be done via electrical power/green energy? As a LFTR fan I look for some role for nuclear in the mix of power generation, which just doesn't compete with the plummeting costs for solar/wind.

I thought aluminum smelting was even worse than steel.


The actual electrical consumption component is probably small relative to the emissions from the actual processing, if the numbers are at all correct. Even aluminum smelters, which do use more electricity, don’t use that much.

LFTRs are interesting though the proliferation risk probably makes it more of a political problem.


I thought LFTR breeding only produced isotopes that couldn't be used for weapons, (U-232 breeding I think), has that changed?




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