Agreed. It's foolishly short-sighted to worry about the one-time construction emissions of a facility that can go on to produce power for decades. It's frustrating to see a segment of climate advocacy motivated not by quantitative concerns regarding radiative forcing, but by an aesthetic opposition to industrial civilization itself no matter what form it might take.
I find the "deep green" collapsitarians awful. But I don't think that's where most of this counterproductive hand-wringing comes from. I think it's mostly due to crippling innumeracy. People apparently lose the ability to do arithmetic or compare numbers once the numbers get larger than the price of a house. Words like "massive" get overloaded to describe phenomena separated by multiple orders of magnitude.
How much carbon dioxide is emitted during a wind farm's construction?
Massive.
How much carbon dioxide is emitted by fossil-fueled automobiles?
Massive.
How much carbon dioxide is emitted by unused cell phone chargers that are left plugged in?
Massive.
The United States stops driving fossil fueled automobiles and unplugs its idle cell phone chargers. How much does it reduce CO2 emissions? Show your work.
It saves one massive from the cars and one massive from unplugging chargers. One massive plus one massive equals a total reduction of two massives.
That's a huge part of it. I do feel that the aforementioned anti-industrial mindset does still motivate the lack of enthusiasm for number crunching.
Find me a way to reduce co2 that involves wicker, green leaves, and pure water, even tangentially, and you'll find huge support for it even if it can be beaten by donating three dollars to a wind farm. That notion will affect a lot of people who aren't even consciously anti-industrial. It's just kind of the default frame of mind when discussing environmental protection.
Or try talking about fixing global warming instead of preventing it. People who are (rightly) very concerned about impending wholesale death suddenly are not interested at all. It comes as an affront. Our mental image of a global warming solution is already clearly set as some type of industrial shutdown.
Cement is one of the bigger unknown problems in the world regarding climate change. I think we can make a huge improvement by creating carbon negative concrete.
There are couple of different ways to create carbon negative concrete, but they keep on failing due to the industry and barriers. There is a great insightful article with an in depth analysis into why these techniques/companies fail: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221042241...
However,I don't see the cement industry changing anytime soon, so I expect innovation in the industry to come from less impactful angles (like http://c8s.co.uk/ and http://www.blueplanet-ltd.com/ ).
