Firstly, I’d like to say ‘ thanks’ to my colleague Peter Edwards for writing the Last Word since the start of the pandemic. We’ll now be taking it in turns to write the column for the foreseeable future.
Secondly, a lot has happened since I last wrote in this column, in May 2020. Officially, over 200 million people have been infected with Covid-19 worldwide, and over four million have died1, although both of these numbers are likely to be only half of the actual numbers worldwide.2
The pandemic is no-longer global: it has become a series of national epidemics, with some countries seemingly well past the worst due to successful vaccination campaigns, and others still suffering largely due to the ravages of the more contagious Delta variant. As of August 2021, 30.4% of the world population has received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine,
although only 1.2% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose.3 Covid-19 is increasingly becoming a disease of the undeveloped and developing world. It has often been said that ‘No-one is safe until we are all safe,’ and that remains true today.
It looks likely that Covid-19 will become an endemic disease, circulating in the human population indefinitely, akin to flu or the common cold, but with more serious consequences for those who are unvaccinated. The time is coming when we have to learn to live with the disease in order to get back to anything like a ‘pre-Covid normal,’ even if those days no-longer exist.
While we have been sheltering from the ravages of Covid, something else seems to have become more apparent, or more glaringly obvious: the ongoing global Climate Crisis. From heat domes, record temperatures and forest fires to flooding, storms and droughts, we are clearly seeing the effects of a warming world.
The recently published Sixth Assessment Report4 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, puts it in black and white: “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred. The scale of recent changes across the climate system as a whole and the present state of many aspects of the climate system are unprecedented over many centuries to many thousands of years. Global surface temperature will continue to increase until at least the mid-century under all emissions scenarios considered. Global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C will be exceeded during the 21st century unless deep reductions in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions occur in the coming decades.... Limiting human-induced global warming to a specific level requires limiting cumulative CO2 emissions, reaching at least net zero CO2 emissions, along with strong reductions in other greenhouse gas emissions”(primarily CH4, methane). Here you have it, in a report that has been signed off by every national government in the world.
Those that continue to deny the situation place themselves alongside the criminal hypocrites from the tobacco and fossil fuel industries, who knew of the dangers of their products but lied to keep their jobs and their companies a oat. Be under no illusion - this report signals the death-knell for the cement industry as we know it. We have passed the Rubicon - the point
of no return. We are now obliged to take action.
By 2050, the amount of clinker that the cement industry produces will be a fraction of what it makes today: We have probably already passed Peak Clinker.5 It is arguable that no new clinker production capacity is needed worldwide: the world is awash with overcapacity, albeit o en in the wrong places. Clinker import and export facilities, yes, and new grinding plants, yes, but each new clinker production plant should now be seen - unambiguously - as akin to building a new coal mine or sinking a new oil well - just as humankind needs to make less CO2, not more. In the future, the global cement industry will have to make more cement with less clinker. The good news is, we can do that.
In fact, as the ‘old’ clinker-based cement industry that we have known during our working lives withers over the next two to three decades to 2050, a new low or no-clinker cement industry will have to be invented, financed and built. People will still need concrete - it’s the best, cheapest, near-instant liquid rock that we know how to make, and it builds the modern world. ‘Cement’ is the stuff that sticks it together. It’s just that future cement will be made with a fraction of the clinker that is used today - if any at all. Get ready for even more change!
1 https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
2 http://www.healthdata.org/special-analysis/estimation-excess-mortality-due-covid-19-and-scalars-reported-covid-19-deaths19-and-scalars-reported-covid-19-deaths
3 https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
4 https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/
5 ‘Have we reached ‘Peak Cement’?’ R. McCaffrey,Virtual IEEE-IAS-PCA 2021
