We have to build differently with concrete
For those clicking in, seeing the length and thinking something like &quot;Pages and pages; sounds <i>really</i> alarmist&quot; and are ready to click off, he ends up doing a really thorough job also explaining what advances have been made, what&#x27;s being looked at for each of the various identified problems and it ends up being an interesting and informative piece on the subject ... if you find Concrete interesting.  (That&#x27;s a pretty good tl;dr if you want one, but it makes me sound (at best) underwhelmed or (at worst) grumpy, so ...)<p>I&#x27;m kind of reading this thinking &quot;that sounds like a bunch of crappy things to say&quot; and I can&#x27;t find a way to <i>accurately</i> explain where my head was at without kind of sounding like &quot;a dick&quot; -- it&#x27;s really not intended.  I get <i>extremely</i> annoyed with alarmist articles, especially those with the words &quot;Carbon Footprint&quot; and &quot;Climate Change&quot; in the title[0].  I am not a &quot;Climate Denier&quot;-whatever-boogie-man, I&#x27;ve just noticed that articles with those words in the title are (a) almost certainly going to tell me nothing I don&#x27;t already know -- they&#x27;re very low-information, (b) they&#x27;re low-information because their audience is the general public usually for the purpose of getting them behind some government action that will &quot;move money around and help nothing&quot; or (c) no-information because the goal was to scare you into clicking.<p>I feel <i>really badly</i> for getting annoyed at this article given that it was none of these things, but turned out to explain history, current state-of-the-art, the various problems, various approaches being looked at by industry&#x2F;in use (or near&#x2F;in research).  Failing to include those components causes readers to fall into a &quot;mental trap&quot; that I&#x27;m sure has a name, but which I don&#x27;t know.  It&#x27;s the &quot;5% of cars are electric vehicles, we expect that to grow to 10% but if ((really unpalatable&#x2F;expensive solution)) isn&#x27;t done, we won&#x27;t have the charging&#x2F;grid&#x2F;etc capacity to support it!&quot;, ignoring the fact that ten years ago we didn&#x27;t have the infrastructure to support the 5% that we have, today and assuming that we&#x27;ll suddenly <i>stop</i> building out new infrastructure.<p>&quot;Humanity&quot;[1] advances at an <i>accelerating</i> pace.  It&#x27;s easy to get lost in that word.  A way that helps me grasp it better was told to me in fifth grade: as time goes on, we double the amount of things we know in less and less time.  Yes, we lose things, too, and even regress in places, but we&#x27;re getting better at that, too and overall we&#x27;re ahead.  By including past advances, current state of the art and where things are heading, the author reminded the reader that &quot;the world is moving around all of these problems, too.&quot;<p>It also presents the trade-offs correctly.  I find it interesting that -- in my lifetime -- I&#x27;ve watched 12 miles of a 6 or 8-lane cement road get blown away and rebuilt twice (along with <i>years</i> of roving maintenance).  Grumbling about &quot;it seems like they work on that same road every other year despite replacing it every 25 or so&quot; aside, the differences in <i>how</i> they are built and the final product are astounding.  Gone are the rusting painted iron road bridges, replaced with cement.  In two cases, a 2.5-year (and I mean, in-between snowfalls on both ends of the year) job took under a year to do the second time.  I think the biggest difference was how the road bed was put down.  Before, it was methodical, a few squares at a time at various stages in the &quot;pouring from the cement truck&quot; to &quot;cleaning everything up and smoothing the top out&quot;.  In all cases the last several years, it&#x27;s some combination of &quot;prepare the foundation the surface of the road will sit&quot; then over two weekends this machine the width of the <i>entire road</i> rolls down the bed while about the same number of workers manage the machine.  They finish it off with curbs&#x2F;the like and Bob&#x27;s your Uncle.  If this similarly reduces the <i>cost</i> (I have to believe it does but I have no data), an interesting equilibrium has to be reached between price, the time it takes to build[2], maintain and destroy[3].  Unfortunately, the raw &quot;price&quot; of the most expensive part and &quot;how long the voters will be furious&quot; will win out provided everything else is &quot;barely passable&quot;.<p>[0] Calm down... just read on.<p>[1] I know, what&#x27;s &quot;Humanity&quot; -- a subset of humanity, of course, but enough of us to matter.<p>[2] And similar balancing of civilian annoyance: I&#x27;m OK with an important highway being taken out for a year every 25 or so if maintenance is &quot;knocking a lane out for a few months every 5 years&quot; instead of &quot;knocking most of the highway out for most weekends every other summer&quot; for a material that goes down in a few months (or lasts for 50 years, etc).<p>[3] Extremely durable&#x2F;robust concrete is great until it&#x27;s time to build a bypass through town and some roads need to ripped up before their useful lifetime.  Concrete that survives being beaten up by God, semis and all of us for hundreds of years is going to be resistant to ... a lot of stuff.