It's also people with technical & legal understanding of all of the possible areas of law broken from fiscal to contract to record keeping. A shadow cabinet could be giving daily pressers w/ a team behind the scenes cataloging each broken law in every domain (envy, hr, pub health, foreign affairs)

During the first Trump admin there was a published study about how cities were leading on climate. There are many women at local & state scales who wield their considerable power for status quoism. Much housing and transport work is climate work & occurs at the local level. BAU is gender neutral

Moving complex climate systems requires moving people away from material conditions they like: flying, driving, living in a big house w/ yard vs a smaller walkable home w/ shared walls. Business as usual is about corporations sure, but also everyone who can make different choices & continues as is

Michael Pollen stays evergreen with: "eat food. not too much. mostly plants."

than hanging them at a 90° angle, he proposed to run them across at a slight bias. That would save time, money & new steel. Occasionally you meet someone in the field who wants to solve technical problems, when saying it can't be done would be easier. Finding these folks leads to greener projects

The IEEE article talks about the reversal of the climate efforts of the big tech companies in furtherance of your point. It would be interesting to see the externalities of concrete priced in. What would it cost to pour then & how much change would that drive? A mix of carrots & sticks

That resonates with my experiences out east based on my conversations with contractors regarding concrete orders. Multiple jobs across multiple contractors being delayed for days, weeks & in one case months.

Later this year I'll pour concrete with zero Portland cement and 99% recycled post consumer glass aggregate/sand. It takes longer to source, test & find willing batch plants. The delays are the right tradeoff for the project, but most concrete still relies on Portland & dredged sand/aggregates

Exactly. The scale of concrete required for the global rise in data centers is enormous: billions of tons, which requires tons of dredged sand, mined aggregates & ghg-heavy Portland cement in addition to the water in the mix.

spectrum.ieee.org/green-concrete

Artisinally (read: very slowly) excavating dirt for local recycling, a rare practice here where most is landfilled, while salvaging the antique brick, river stone, oyster shells, and glass for reuse as part of the expanded space.

All the time. Renovating a 90 yo building with no rebar and extremely dense concrete. There are glass bottles and china under the slab. The parts rebuilt over time are what's failing. Quality was high then with less regs, less formality, less specialization

“It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living."

Sir David Attenborough🌿