From today's NYT:
But making cement means making pollution, in the form of carbon dioxide emissions. Cement plants account for 5 percent of global emissions of carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming. Cement has no viable recycling potential; each new road, each new building needs new cement.
In places like Ukraine, production is doubling every four years.
Now, green incentives may be increasing pollution. The European Union subsidizes Western companies that buy outmoded cement plants in poor countries and refit them with green technology. But the greenest technologies can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by only about 20 percent.
So when Western companies revamp Eastern factories, the emissions decrease for each ton of concrete produced. But the amount of cement produced often goes way up, as does the total pollution generated.
Cement is just another indicator of indiscriminate growth. As people increasingly are beginning to see, indiscriminate growth is leading to mass overshoot. We can see the overshoot dynamic on the horizon in looming water shortages, pollution, environmental degradation, global warming, global peak oil production, and North American peak oil production.
Until we re-think our basic capitalist assumptions about indiscriminate growth, these problems will continue to grow worse -- exponentially.
If you haven't internalized the insidious, surprising, and nasty power of exponential growth, please watch this 8.5 min video clip:
Are Humans Smarter Than Yeast?