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If you want to decarbonize concrete, it helps to understand the incredible scale of the problem.
To say that concrete poses a decarbonization challenge would be an understatement. Cement production alone is responsible for somewhere between 5 and 10% of global CO2 emissions [0], roughly two to four times more than aviation, a fact that even the construction industry is finally coming to grips with.
And yet the real problem with decarbonizing concrete isn’t the scale of its emissions, it’s the scale of concrete itself. There is simply a preposterous amount of the stuff. Contemplating concrete is like contemplating the universe — awesome, in the old God-fearing definition of the word.
Before we get into the jaw-dropping amount of concrete we produce every year, it’s worth briefly discussing how the stuff is made, and thus where its emissions come from.
Concrete is formed by mixing together cement (mostly calcium silicates), aggregates (such as sand and gravel), and water into a liquid slurry. The cement reacts with the water, forming a paste that binds the mixture into a single solid mass. Beyond concrete’s high strength and low cost, it’s these liquid beginnings that make concrete so useful. It can easily be formed into any shape and leveled with the help of gravity so you can walk on it or park a car 10 stories up on it. Essentially all modern concrete is also reinforced with steel bars, which provide tensile strength and arrest cracks.
So what about the emissions? Roughly 70-90% of the embodied carbon in concrete comes from manufacturing just the cement [1]. Partly this is because making cement is an energy-intensive process — limestone and clay are put into a kiln and heated around 2500 degrees Fahrenheit. But it’s also because the chemical reaction that turns the limestone into cement (known as calcination) releases CO₂ as a byproduct. Roughly 50-60% of cement’s carbon emissions are due to calcination [2], and thus wouldn’t be addressed by moving to less carbon-intensive electricity sources, like green hydrogen.
Now for the good stuff. Again, the most important thing to understand about concrete is the scale of its production. The world produces somewhere around 4.25 billion metric tons of cement annually (though estimates vary) [3], which works out to about 30 billion tons of concrete produced each year [4].
How much are 30 billion tons?
One way of looking at it is we produce around 4 metric tons, or just under 60 cubic feet (roughly a cube 4 feet on a side), of concrete for each person on the planet each year.
Another way of looking at it is to consider the total amount of mass, full stop, that civilization ingests each year. Estimates here vary quite a bit, but it seems to be in the neighborhood of 100 billion tons [5]. So of the total volume of material that gets extracted and used each year — including all mining, all oil drilling, all agriculture and tree harvesting — around 30% of it by mass goes toward making concrete. The amount of concrete produced each year exceeds the weight of all the biomass we use annually, and all the fossil fuels we use annually.
Total civilization annual material extraction, via Krausmann et al 2018. This is up to 2015, and has now exceeded over 90 Gt/year, with another ~8 Gt/year of recycled material.
Another way of looking at it is that the total mass of all plants on Earth is around 900 billion metric tons. So at current rates of production, it would take about 30 years to produce enough concrete to exceed all the Earth’s plant (dry) biomass.
Because humans have been producing concrete for a while, and because concrete tends to last a long time, we seem to be on the cusp of this happening. Elhacham et al 2020 estimate that total human-created mass (roughly half of which is concrete) reached the total weight of all Earth’s biomass sometime in 2020. Eyeballing their graph, concrete alone will exceed the total weight of all biomass sometime around 2040.
Anthropogenic mass vs biomass during the 20th century, via Elhacham et al 2020
In a pure mass-flow sense, human civilization is basically a machine for producing concrete and gravel (and to a lesser extent bricks and asphalt).
So civilization uses a lot of concrete. Where is it all going?
China, mostly. In recent history, China has been responsible for roughly half the world’s cement production, and by implication, concrete use [6]. The U.S., by comparison, only uses 2%, with Europe using another 5%.
Cement production by region, via Sanjuan et al 2020. Since cement production roughly tracks consumption (see here and here), we can also use this as a rough guide toward where concrete is used. Note that this gives yet another value for total global cement production of 4.65 Gt
Here’s another view from around 2010, showing what this has looked like over time (data after 2010 is a projection).
Cement consumption by region, via Altwair 2010
This gets summarized in the oft-repeated statistic that China used more cement in three years than the U.S. did in the entire 20th century.
But since China has a much larger population than the U.S., we can get a more intuitive understanding of this by looking at cement consumption per capita. Here’s per capita consumption sometime around 2015:
Per capita cement consumption by country, via Globbulk
We see that the official numbers from China make it a huge outlier in cement consumption, using around eight times as much per capita as the U.S. However, in per capita terms, some Middle Eastern countries exceed it. Saudi Arabia is higher, and Qatar, which is somewhere over 2,000 kg/capita, is so high it doesn’t even show up on the graph. It’s the combination of China’s huge population and its huge per-capita consumption that make it such an outlier in concrete production.
The official Chinese numbers are so huge, in fact, that some analysts suspect that they’re inflated, either by manipulating the data or by producing construction projects that don’t have actual demand (or both). The graph above also includes a more “realistic” estimate (which is still 3x as high as U.S. per-capita use).
What does all this concrete construction mean in practical terms? Well, China has somewhere around 50-60% of the floor space per capita as the U.S. does, or roughly as much living space per capita as most European countries [7]. This is the result of a massive trend toward urbanization over the last quarter century. Urbanization rates went from around 25% in 1990 to 60% in 2017, a period in which China’s population also increased by 250 million. In other words, in less than 30 years over 550 million moved into Chinese cities, and they all needed somewhere to live. By building enormous numbers of concrete high rises, in under 20 years China quintupled its urban residential floor space and doubled its residential floor space overall.
Residential floor space in China over time, via Pan 2020
Beyond China, we see high per capita rates of cement use in the rest of Southeast Asia, as well as the Middle East [8].
One reason you see this volume of concrete use in lower-income, urbanizing countries is that concrete construction is comparatively labor-intensive to produce. The materials for concrete are extremely cheap, and much of its cost in high-cost labor countries (such as the U.S.) is from the labor to produce it — building and setting up the formwork, laying out the reinforcing, placing the embeds, etc. If you’re a country with a lot of low-cost labor, this is a pretty good trade-off.
In addition to the current largest users of concrete, one trend to keep an eye on long-term is India’s concrete use. If India ever proceeds on a path of mass urbanization similar to China (as some folks speculate it will), we could see a massive uptick in global concrete output — India’s urbanization rate of 34% is around where China was in the late 1990s. A shift in India toward a per capita cement consumption more consistent with the rest of Southeast Asia (say around 600 kg/capita) would increase worldwide cement consumption by about 13%, and it does seem as if India’s cement use is trending upward.
By contrast, one thing clear from this data is that the U.S. actually uses an unusually low amount of concrete. Per capita, it uses as little as any other Western country, and far, far less than some — like, surprisingly, Belgium.
So we’ve seen where it gets used in the world. Can we go deeper and look at specifically what concrete is being used for?
This will vary significantly depending on the region and the local construction tradition. In the U.S., we have roughly the following breakdown (via the Portland Cement Association):
Overall, roughly half of our concrete gets used in buildings — about 26% goes into residential buildings, 2% in public buildings, and 16% into commercial buildings. The other half gets used for infrastructure — streets and highways, water conveyance and treatment tanks, etc. Because most construction in the U.S. is just one- or two-story buildings (mostly wood for residential buildings and steel for commercial ones), concrete in buildings is probably mostly going into foundations, slabs on grade, and concrete over metal deck, though there’s probably a substantial amount going into concrete masonry units as well.
But the U.S. has a somewhat unusual construction tradition, where the vast majority of our residential construction, both single-family homes and multifamily apartments, is built from light-framed wood. In other places, it's much more common to use concrete. For instance, the U.K. uses closer to 80% of its concrete for buildings, with most of that going toward the superstructure, the concrete frame that holds the building up. China, which has urbanized on the back of huge numbers of concrete residential high rises, probably devotes an even larger share of its concrete to residential construction.
Understanding how much concrete the world uses, and where it’s being used, is important if you want to use less of it.
The scale of the industry is particularly important to keep in mind. For instance, you often see enthusiasm for the idea of replacing concrete buildings with mass timber ones. But assuming you could substitute all the world’s concrete for an equal volume of wood [9], you’d need to more than triple the total annual volume of global wood harvested [10], which puts a somewhat different spin on the issue.
Most other materials would have emissions as bad or worse than concrete if they were used on the same scale.
Consider, for instance, railway ties. In the U.S., these are still largely made out of wood, but in many places they have been replaced with concrete ties. And some places are considering changing from concrete ties to plastic composite rail ties instead. It’s hard to know the exact embodied emissions without a lot of specific details about the materials and supply chains used, but can we ballpark how much a plastic tie uses compared to a concrete one?
Per the Inventory of Carbon and Energy database, concrete varies between 150 and 400 kg of embodied CO2 per cubic meter, depending on the properties of the mix, with an “average” value of about 250. Plastics mostly have embodied emissions of about 3-4 kg of CO2 per kg of plastic, or about 3,500 kg per cubic meter (assuming a density of about 1,000 kg per cubic meter). So per unit volume, plastic has somewhere around 10 times the embodied emissions of concrete.
We can also do a more direct comparison. Consider a beam spanning around 20 feet and supporting a vertical load of 21,000 pounds per linear foot. The lightest U.S. standard steel section that will span this distance is a W16x26, which weighs about 236 kg and will have embodied carbon emissions of around 354 kg.
A concrete beam of the same depth, supporting the same load and spanning the same distance, will be 10.5 inches wide by 16 inches deep, with three #10 steel bars running along the bottom. This beam will have about 190 kg of embodied emissions from the concrete, and about another 230 kg of embodied emissions from the steel rebar. This is about 20% more than the steel beam, but in the same ballpark — and over half the “concrete” emissions are actually due to the embedded reinforcing steel.
This is arguably a nonrepresentative example (most concrete, such as in columns or slabs, will have a much lower ratio of steel), but the basic logic holds: Concrete is unusual in its total volume of use, not how emissions-heavy it is as a material. Most material substitutes that aren’t wood, recycled materials, or industrial byproducts that can be had for “free” won’t necessarily be much better when used at the same scale. In some ways, it’s surprising that the carbon emissions from concrete are as low as they are.
Of course, this calculus is likely to change over time — as electricity sources change over to lower carbon ones, you’re likely to see the embodied emissions of materials drop along with it. And since cement releases CO2 as part of the chemical process of producing it, concrete will look increasingly worse compared to other materials over time.
One potential option is to find ways of changing the cement production process to be less carbon-intensive. The easiest option is to just replace manufactured Portland Cement with some other cementitious material. Industrial byproducts such as blast furnace slag, silica fume, and fly ash, often have cementitious properties and don’t have a “carbon penalty” (since they’d be produced regardless.) Materials like these can potentially eliminate large volumes of cement in a concrete mix, and they’re a key part of current low-carbon concrete strategies — even “normal” concrete mixes tend to utilize these to some degree. But the total volume of these materials is limited by the extent of various industrial processes. And for things like fly ash (which is a byproduct from coal plants) and slag (which is a byproduct from CO2-emitting blast furnaces), we can expect production to decline over time.
Another option is to take advantage of the fact that concrete will naturally absorb CO2 over time, a process known as carbonation. Even normal concrete will absorb roughly 30% of the CO2 emitted during the production process over the course of its life. Companies like Carbicrete, Carboncure, Carbonbuilt, and Solida all offer methods of concrete production that allow the concrete to absorb CO₂ during the production process, substantially reducing embodied emissions. Interestingly, these producers mostly claim that their concrete is actually cheaper than conventional concretes, which would obviously be a massive tailwind for the technology’s adoption.
It’s not obvious what the best path forward is for addressing concrete carbon emissions (like with most things, I suspect it’ll end up being a mix of different solutions), but understanding the parameters of the problem is necessary for solving it.
Note: A version of this article originally appeared in the author’s newsletter, Construction Physics, and has been repurposed for Heatmap.
[0] - This figure varies depending on the source. Chatham House provides a frequently cited estimate of 8%. We can also ballpark it — roughly 0.93 pounds of CO₂ gets emitted for each pound of cement produced, around 4.25 billion tons of cement are produced annually, which gets ~3.95 billion tons of CO₂, and total annual CO₂ emissions are in the neighborhood of 46 billion tons, getting us a bit less than 9%.
[1] - Per Circular Ecology, ~70-90% of emissions are from the cement production process, depending on the type of concrete and what the rest of the supply chain looks like.
[2] - This seems to vary depending on where the cement is being made — in Myanmar, for instance, it’s around 46%.
[3] - Another number where the sources often don’t agree with each other, see here, here, and here for estimates on annual cement production.
[4] - Concrete is roughly 10-15% cement by weight, depending on the strength of the mix, what other cementitious materials are being used, etc. An average value of 12.5% yields 34 billion tons, which we’ll knock down to account for other uses of cement (masonry mortar, grout, gypsum overlay, etc.) This roughly tracks with estimates from PCA (“4 tons of concrete produced each year for every person on Earth”), and from the now-defunct Cement Sustainability Initiative, which estimated 25 billion tons of concrete against 3.125 billion tons of cement in 2015.
[5] - See here, here, and here for an estimate of total civilization mass flow. This doesn’t (I believe) include waste byproducts, which can be substantial — for instance, it doesn’t include the ~46 billion tons of CO₂ emitted each year, or the 16 billion tons of mine tailings, or the 140 billion tons of agriculture byproducts (though this last number is difficult to verify and seems high).
[6] - We see something similar with cement as we do with other bulky, low-value materials, in that it's made in lots of distributed manufacturing facilities relatively close to where it’s used. See here for a map of cement plants in the U.S. around 2001, for instance.
[7] - For China’s total floor space, see here (most sources seem to agree with these numbers). For U.S. floor space, see my Every Building In America article. For per-capita living space in Europe, see here.
[8] - The often high rates of cement use by middle-income countries have led some folks to develop a U-shaped cement consumption theory of industrial development — that countries start out using a small amount of cement, use more as they get richer and build up their physical infrastructure, and then eventually transition to using lower volumes of cement again. The Globbulk paper spends considerable time debunking this.
[9] - It’s not actually obvious to me what the substitution ratio would be. In strength-governed cases, you’d need proportionally more timber than concrete, but in other cases (such as replacing concrete walls with light-framed stud walls), you’d probably use less. Obviously, you can’t substitute all concrete for wood, but you can probably switch out more than you think — there’s no reason you couldn’t use wood foundations instead of concrete ones in many cases, for instance.
[10] - 30 billion tons of concrete is roughly 12.5 billion cubic meters, and total annual wood products produced is currently around 5.5 billion cubic meters.
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Any household savings will barely make a dent in the added costs from Trump’s many tariffs.
Donald Trump’s tariffs — the “fentanyl” levies on Canada, China, and Mexico, the “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly every country (and some uninhabited islands), and the global 10% tariff — will almost certainly cause consumer goods on average to get more expensive. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that in combination, the tariffs Trump has announced so far in his second term will cause prices to rise 2.3%, reducing purchasing power by $3,800 per year per household.
But there’s one very important consumer good that seems due to decline in price.
Trump administration officials — including the president himself — have touted cheaper oil to suggest that the economic response to the tariffs hasn’t been all bad. On Sunday, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent told NBC, “Oil prices went down almost 15% in two days, which impacts working Americans much more than the stock market does.”
Trump picked up this line on Truth Social Monday morning. “Oil prices are down, interest rates are down (the slow moving Fed should cut rates!), food prices are down, there is NO INFLATION,” he wrote. He then spent the day posting quotes from Fox Business commentators echoing that idea, first Maria Bartiromo (“Rates are plummeting, oil prices are plummeting, deregulation is happening. President Trump is not going to bend”) then Charles Payne (“What we’re not talking about is, oil was $76, now it’s $65. Gasoline prices are going to plummet”).
But according to Neil Dutta, head of economic research at Renaissance Macro Research, pointing to falling oil prices as a stimulus is just another example of the “4D chess” theory, under which some market participants attribute motives to Trump’s trade policy beyond his stated goal of reducing trade deficits to as near zero (or surplus!) as possible.
Instead, oil markets are primarily “responding to the recession risk that comes from the tariff and the trade war,” Dutta told me. “That is the main story.” In short, oil markets see less global trade and less global production, and therefore falling demand for oil. The effect on household consumption, he said, was a “second order effect.”
It is true that falling oil prices will help “stabilize consumption,” Dutta told me (although they could also devastate America’s own oil industry). “It helps. It’ll provide some lift to real income growth for consumers, because they’re not spending as much on gasoline.” But “to fully offset the trade war effects, you basically need to get oil down to zero.”
That’s confirmed by some simple and extremely back of the envelope math. In 2023, households on average consumed about 700 gallons of gasoline per year, based on Energy Information Administration calculations that the average gasoline price in 2023 was $3.52, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics put average household gasoline expenditures at about $2,450.
Let’s generously assume that due to the tariffs and Trump’s regulatory and diplomatic efforts, gas prices drop from the $3.26 they were at on Monday, according to AAA, to $2.60, the average price in 2019. (GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haanwrote Monday that the tariffs combined with OPEC+ production hikes could lead gas prices “to fall below $3 per gallon.”)
Let’s also assume that this drop in gas prices does not cause people to drive more or buy less fuel-efficient vehicles. In that case, those same 700 gallons cost the average American $1,820, which would generate annual savings of $630 on average per household. If we went to the lowest price since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, about $3 per gallon, total consumption of 700 gallons would cost a household about $2,100, saving $350 per household per year.
That being said, $1,820 is a pretty low level for annual gasoline consumption. In 2021, as the economy was recovering from the Covid recession and before gas prices popped, annual gasoline expenditures only got as low as $1,948; in 2020 — when oil prices dropped to literally negative dollars per barrel and gas prices got down to $1.85 a gallon — annual expenditures were just over $1,500.
In any case, if you remember the opening paragraphs of this story, even the most generous estimated savings would go nowhere near surmounting the overall rise in prices forecast by the Yale Budget Lab. $630 is less than $3,800! (JPMorgan has forecast a more mild increase in prices of 1% to 1.5%, but agrees that prices will likely rise and purchasing power will decline.)
But maybe look at it this way: You might be able to drive a little more than you expected to, even as your costs elsewhere are going up. Just please be careful! You don’t want to get into a bad accident and have to replace your car: New car prices are expected to rise by several thousand dollars due to Trump’s tariffs.
With cars about to get more expensive, it might be time to start tinkering.
More than a decade ago, when I was a young editor at Popular Mechanics, we got a Nissan Leaf. It was a big deal. The magazine had always kept long-term test cars to give readers a full report of how they drove over weeks and months. A true test of the first true production electric vehicle from a major car company felt like a watershed moment: The future was finally beginning. They even installed a destination charger in the basement of the Hearst Corporation’s Manhattan skyscraper.
That Leaf was a bit of a lump, aesthetically and mechanically. It looked like a potato, got about 100 miles of range, and delivered only 110 horsepower or so via its electric motors. This made the O.G. Leaf a scapegoat for Top Gear-style car enthusiasts eager to slander EVs as low-testosterone automobiles of the meek, forced upon an unwilling population of drivers. Once the rise of Tesla in the 2010s had smashed that paradigm and led lots of people to see electric vehicles as sexy and powerful, the original Leaf faded from the public imagination, a relic of the earliest days of the new EV revolution.
Yet lots of those cars are still around. I see a few prowling my workplace parking garage or roaming the streets of Los Angeles. With the faded performance of their old batteries, these long-running EVs aren’t good for much but short-distance city driving. Ignore the outdated battery pack for a second, though, and what surrounds that unit is a perfectly serviceable EV.
That’s exactly what a new brand of EV restorers see. Last week, car site The Autopiancovered DIYers who are scooping up cheap old Leafs, some costing as little as $3,000, and swapping in affordable Chinese-made 62 kilowatt-hour battery units in place of the original 24 kilowatt-hour units to instantly boost the car’s range to about 250 miles. One restorer bought a new battery on the Chinese site Alibaba for $6,000 ($4,500, plus $1,500 to ship that beast across the sea).
The possibility of the (relatively) simple battery swap is a longtime EV owner’s daydream. In the earlier days of the electrification race, many manufacturers and drivers saw simple and quick battery exchange as the solution for EV road-tripping. Instead of waiting half an hour for a battery to recharge, you’d swap your depleted unit for a fully charged one and be on your way. Even Tesla tested this approach last decade before settling for good on the Supercharger network of fast-charging stations.
There are still companies experimenting with battery swaps, but this technology lost. Other EV startups and legacy car companies that followed Nissan and Tesla into making production EVs embraced the rechargeable lithium-ion battery that is meant to be refilled at a fast-charging station and is not designed to be easily removed from the vehicle. Buy an electric vehicle and you’re buying a big battery with a long warranty but no clear plan for replacement. The companies imagine their EVs as something like a smartphone: It’s far from impossible to replace the battery and give the car a new life, but most people won’t bother and will simply move on to a new car when they can’t take the limitations of their old one anymore.
I think about this impasse a lot. My 2019 Tesla Model 3 began its life with a nominal 240 miles of range. Now that the vehicle has nearly six years and 70,000 miles on it, its maximum range is down to just 200, while its functional range at highway speed is much less than that. I don’t want to sink money into another vehicle, which means living with an EV’s range that diminishes as the years go by.
But what if, one day, I replaced its battery? Even if it costs thousands of dollars to achieve, a big range boost via a new battery would make an older EV feel new again, and at a cost that’s still far less than financing a whole new car. The thought is even more compelling in the age of Trump-imposed tariffs that will raise already-expensive new vehicles to a place that’s simply out of reach for many people (though new battery units will be heavily tariffed, too).
This is no simple weekend task. Car enthusiasts have been swapping parts and modifying gas-burning vehicles since the dawn of the automotive age, but modern EVs aren’t exactly made with the garage mechanic in mind. Because so few EVs are on the road, there is a dearth of qualified mechanics and not a huge population of people with the savvy to conduct major surgery on an electric car without electrocuting themselves. A battery-replacing owner would need to acquire not only the correct pack but also potentially adapters and other equipment necessary to make the new battery play nice with the older car. Some Nissan Leaf modifiers are finding their replacement packs aren’t exactly the same size, shape or weight, The Autopian says, meaning they need things like spacers to make the battery sit in just the right place.
A new battery isn’t a fix-all either. The motors and other electrical components wear down and will need to be replaced eventually, too. A man in Norway who drove his Tesla more than a million miles has replaced at least four battery packs and 14 motors, turning his EV into a sort of car of Theseus.
Crucially, though, EVs are much simpler, mechanically, than combustion-powered cars, what with the latter’s belts and spark plugs and thousands of moving parts. The car that surrounds a depleted battery pack might be in perfectly good shape to keep on running for thousands of miles to come if the owner were to install a new unit, one that could potentially give the EV more driving range than it had when it was new.
The battery swap is still the domain of serious top-tier DIYers, and not for the mildly interested or faint of heart. But it is a sign of things to come. A market for very affordable used Teslas is booming as owners ditch their cars at any cost to distance themselves from Elon Musk. Old Leafs, Chevy Bolts and other EVs from the 2010s can be had for cheap. The generation of early vehicles that came with an unacceptably low 100 to 150 miles of range would look a lot more enticing if you imagine today’s battery packs swapped into them. The possibility of a like-new old EV will look more and more promising, especially as millions of Americans realize they can no longer afford a new car.
On the shifting energy mix, tariff impacts, and carbon capture
Current conditions: Europe just experienced its warmest March since record-keeping began 47 years ago • It’s 105 degrees Fahrenheit in India’s capital Delhi where heat warnings are in effect • The risk of severe flooding remains high across much of the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys.
The severe weather outbreak that has brought tornadoes, extreme rainfall, hail, and flash flooding to states across the central U.S. over the past week has already caused between $80 billion and $90 billion in damages and economic losses, according to a preliminary estimate from AccuWeather. The true toll is likely to be costlier because some areas have yet to report their damages, and the flooding is ongoing. “A rare atmospheric river continually resupplying a firehose of deep tropical moisture into the central U.S., combined with a series of storms traversing the same area in rapid succession, created a ‘perfect storm’ for catastrophic flooding and devastating tornadoes,” said AccuWeather’s chief meteorologist Jonathan Porter. The estimate takes into account damages to buildings and infrastructure, as well as secondary effects like supply chain and shipping disruptions, extended power outages, and travel delays. So far 23 people are known to have died in the storms. “This is the third preliminary estimate for total damage and economic loss that AccuWeather experts have issued so far this year,” the outlet noted in a release, “outpacing the frequency of major, costly weather disasters since AccuWeather began issuing estimates in 2017.”
AccuWeather
Low-emission energy sources accounted for 41% of global electricity generation in 2024, up from 39.4% in 2023, according to energy think tank Ember’s annual Global Electricity Review. That includes renewables as well as nuclear. If nuclear is left out of the equation, renewables alone made up 32% of power generation last year. Overall, renewables added a record 858 terawatt hours, nearly 50% more than the previous record set in 2022. Hydro was the largest source of low-carbon power, followed by nuclear. But wind and solar combined overtook hydro last year, while nuclear’s share of the energy mix reached a 45-year low. More solar capacity was installed in 2024 than in any other single year.
Ember
The report notes that demand for electricity rose thanks to heat waves and air conditioning use. This resulted in a slight, 1.4% annual increase in fossil-fuel power generation and pushed power-sector emissions to a new all-time high of 14.5 billion metric tons. “Clean electricity generation met 96% of the demand growth not caused by hotter temperatures,” the report said.
President Trump’s new tariffs will have a “limited” effect on the amount of solar components the U.S. imports from Asia because the U.S. already imposes tariffs on these products, according to a report from research firm BMI. That said, the U.S. still relies heavily on imported solar cells, and the new fees are likely to raise costs for domestic manufacturers and developers, which will ultimately be passed on to buyers and could slow solar growth. “Since the U.S.’s manufacturing capacity is insufficient to meet demand for solar, wind, and grid components, we do expect that costs will increase for developers due to the tariffs which will now be imposed upon these components,” BMI wrote.
In other tariff news, the British government is adjusting its 2030 target of ending the sale of new internal combustion engine cars to ease some of the pain from President Trump’s new 25% auto tariffs. Under the U.K.’s new EV mandate, carmakers will be able to sell new hybrids through 2035 (whereas the previous version of the rules banned them by 2030), and gas and diesel vans can also be sold through 2035. The changes also carve out exemptions for luxury supercar brands like McLaren and Aston Martin, which will be allowed to keep selling new ICE vehicles beyond 2030 because, the government says, they produce so few. The goal is to “help ease the transition and give industry more time to prepare.” British Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander insisted the changes have been “carefully calibrated” and their impact on carbon emissions is “negligible.” As The New York Timesnoted, the U.S. is the largest single-country export market for British cars.
The Environmental Protection Agency has approved Occidental Petroleum’s application to capture and sequester carbon dioxide at its direct air capture facility in Texas, and issued permits that will allow the company to drill and inject the gas more than one mile underground. The Stratos DAC plant is being developed by Occidental subsidiary 1PointFive. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham has reported, Stratos is designed to remove up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 annually and set to come online later this year. Its success (or failure) could shape the future of DAC investment at a time when the Trump administration is hollowing out the Department of Energy’s nascent Carbon Dioxide Removal team and casting doubt over the future of the DOE’s $3.5 billion Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs program. While Stratos is not a part of the hubs program, it will use the same technology as Occidental’s South Texas DAC hub.
The Bezos Earth Fund and the Global Methane Hub are launching a $27 million effort to fund research into selectively breeding cattle that emit less methane.