Yes - I think there’s still a good chance that it will be stopped despite the government - either through the courts or just by the scale of opposition and protest - processes that might well outlast the government !
It is, but not exactly for the carbon content of steel (roughly 0.4 to 0.6%). Besides that carbon is locked up and not problematic.
Iron ore is basically iron oxide (as haematite (Fe2O3) and magnetite (Fe3O4) ) - basically forms of rust and you need to get rid of the oxygen somehow. That’s where the carbon comes in, it combines with the oxygen generating CO2 which is (obviously) given off as a gas and the iron is left behind.
Getting rid of carbon is possible - hydrogen could be used for example in which case the by-product is water.
See https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2021/690008/EPRS_STU(2021)690008_EN.pdf
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Another reminder of why this thread is called ‘climate/ecological breakdown’…
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Talking of iron, carbon and steel - I don’t believe in any form of intelligent design but sometimes nature arranges things almost too conveniently to believe.
Given that carbon is needed to reduce the iron ore to iron the resulting product - pig iron is high in carbon and tends to be brittle.
But the carbon content can be reduced by “working” the iron - heating, folding, beating etc to yield a much more ductile, tougher material with no need for any technical knowledge of metallurgy.
Which is a bit weird if you think about it, given how it drives human intellectual advancement.
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The logical mistake in ‘intelligent design’ theorisations lies in the either/or assumption that the only alternative is chaos. They all run something like: we see evidence of wonderful, complex arrangements all around, which are highly unlikely to be the result of chance, or chains of accidents, therefore they must be evidence of design’.
But in reality, of course, there are many non-teleological natural and human processes that produce results that look just like complex design. Examples are precisely processes like evolution, or social change. When Tim Berners-Lee invented the world-wide-web in 1989, he didn’t plan the amazing and harmonious complexity that would enable us to talk about intelligent design, in hundreds of different places, on hundreds of different devices, in the middle of doing hundreds of other different things.
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The problem is that the alternative is not chaos exactly but a world where intelligent life did not evolve - we can’t see the numerous “failed” or partially working experiments that nature carried out.
I don’t believe much in the strong anthropic principle either, but the weak anthropic principle is plausible.
I think either the weak or the strong anthropic principles are ideas that trouble scientists, but not philosophers - Wittgenstein dealt with the weak anthropic principle a century ago in his formulation that ‘all substantial necessary truths are tautologies’ - ie. ‘truisms’ - they just say something like ‘the universe we observe is the universe we’re observing’.
The weak one does anyway, the strong one is more like “the universe was specifically arranged so that we might be observing it”
I don’t think it’s significantly different from the weak principle - and belongs firmly in the realm of what Jim Baggott calls ‘fairy tale physics’. Many such ideas seems to have some kind of content if you’re immersed in speculation about ‘multiverses’, etc - but wouldn’t survive the merest brush with logical positivism.
Now this:
It’s almost as if they’ve accepted they’ve lost the next election, so they’re looking for their next consultancy.
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And filling their boots with the family silver before leaving
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There goes the ‘green and pleasant land’
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One of the things that prompted buying a house in France was the overcrowding, loss of green space, intense pressure for more and more building. There are still green and pleasant parts, but they are getting crowded out.
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" London has just a quarter the population density of Paris."
That’s astonishing.
While Paris is the most densely populated city in Europe, with 21,000 inhabitants per square meter, it is tiny when compared to London. London covers an area of 600 square miles, while Paris is squeezed into 40 square miles .
I really recommend the report Land for the Many - a brilliant diagnosis of exactly what’s wrong with UK land and housing - and prescription for putting it right.
One thing it makes crystal clear is that there is no ‘housing crisis’ in the UK - no need to build on green spaces - what there is, is a crisis of inequality. Here for example is one key passage:
It may surprise readers to learn that the number of dwellings in the UK has been
growing faster than the number of households, even as house prices have been rising,
and that we have more bedrooms per person than ever before. The simultaneous rise
in housing stock, overcrowding and homelessness might seem counterintuitive, but it
reflects an increasingly unequal distribution.Census data shows that between 2001 and 2011 there was a 21% increase in homes
which sit empty for most of the year, often in the most desirable seaside and inner-
city locations. The data suggests that this demand among wealthy elites for rural
getaways and pieds-à-terre in major cities has a significant impact on local house prices, further depriving less wealthy people of the opportunity to buy or rent in the
communities in which they have grown up.The DCLG’s English Housing Survey 2014/5 reveals that more than half the owner-
occupied homes in England have at least two bedrooms that are not regularly
occupied. This represents a 31% increase in under-occupation since 1995/6. Indeed,
inequality measured by rooms per person is at its highest level since 1901: the richest
tenth of households now have five times as many rooms per household member,
compared to the worst-off tenth.Rather than discouraging this inefficiency, our
council tax system actually offers discounts for second homes and for single people
occupying large homes, encouraging the over consumption of housing.
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Interesting. That title used to belong to Naples or so I understood. Good point about the relative size, because Paris didn’t feel any denser than some other European capitals I’ve visited, though I’ve not been for more than a decade.
In 1901 they would a lot of servants in big houses?
Tiny workers houses do we want to go back to that. I know the conservatives are doing their best to drive things that way, meat for the rich, weeds for the peasants, dismantling the NHS by stealth and scareing people into poor quality private health.
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