The Grenfell Tower disaster was the result of “decades of failure” by central government to stop the spread of combustible cladding combined with the “systematic dishonesty” of multimillion-dollar companies whose products spread the fire that killed
At the end of the past century, a world without walls seemed feasible; in the first decades of this one, walls spread without control. Many are physical, fragmenting the territory with inaccessible precincts; others are judicial, segmenting the popul
New techniques and novel ingredients can greatly reduce the immense carbon emissions from cement and concrete production. We make more concrete than we do any other material on Earth. Cement is one of the most energy-intensive products on the planet.
Turkish authorities have issued more than 100 arrest warrants over collapsed buildings, amid warnings that the death toll from the earthquake that struck parts of Turkey and Syria could double from the current tally of 33,000. State media reported th
The concrete used was self-healing and anachronistically green The romans were master builders. Many of their works, from the Pantheon (pictured above) and the Colosseum in Rome itself, to the Pont du Gard in southern Gaul and the equally impressive
They offer ways to produce cement without releasing carbon dioxide. Concrete is one of the world’s most important materials. But making the cement that binds it generates about 8% of anthropogenic carbon-dioxide emissions. This is not just because of
At this year’s U.N. climate conference in Egypt, COP27, Pakistan and a group of other frustrated developing countries are pushing to develop a pool of money for “loss and damages.” It would be a fund, financed by the developed nations most responsibl
Helen Thompson is Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University, and Disorder gives a history of the 21st century where both the terms of her chair are interpreted from the prism of energy. As in her work of 2017, Oil and the Western Economi
While we discuss the price of electricity, the ghost of famine hovers over the world. It is energy we are talking about in both cases, but while exosomatic energy depends on social organization, endosomatic energy has biological boundaries. Alfred Lo
Lack of global governance is blocking the adoption of measures that would curb the effects of the planet’s already advanced process of climate change.
