It seems
that someone explained to the President of the European Commission that the
built environment is responsible for 40% of all greenhouse gas emissions (maybe it was Bill Gates). And that is why she wrote in an article, published in several newspapers
in several European countries where she went so far as to say that in the
production of steel and cement a high amount of energy is consumed and that there
are also high carbon emissions, including from chemical reactions. Taking into account this serious problem, Dr Ursula
von der Leyden, warns that in the next two years, five projects will be
launched in several European countries to tackle this problem focusing on different perspectives, from building materials to energy efficiency, sustainable
mobility ... etc etc. The
aim is to "stimulate debate on new construction methods and
new forms of design" as part of the 750 billion strategy for
Europe's economic recovery.
It is good to know that after some pharaonic research
projects in the field of medicine, which seem to have been born in the minds of some scientists suffering from the
Napoleon syndrome, trying to compensate for its scientific irrelevance with pharaonic projects (the same way Napoleon tried to compensate for his short stature seeking grand wars), like the disappointing Brain project, where one billion euros
were melted
Still and unlike researchers from the
field of Medicine (that have little ethics) and do not mind promising great
discoveries to fill the eye of the political class, the researchers of the built environment, at least those in the cement area do not have excellent news
to give to the President of the European Commission, as the future has yet to be built with a lot of high carbon cement at least until a tax is created that penalizes carbon
emissions, in order to allow that green materials and green technologies, can become economically
competitive.
PS - Regarding the little ethics mentioned above, it
should be remembered that the area of medicine is one where there is a high
number of researchers caught in fraudulent studies. In this respect, no other scientific area comes close to it. Particularly enlightening
is the fact that medicine accounts for less than 20% of
publications indexed worldwide, although it accounts for more than 50% of those
that have been retracted. And a curious fact is
that the country with the most publications retracted due to manipulation of
images or data is the USA and not a third world country. See in this respect: Bar-Ilan,
J. and Halevi, G., 2020. Retracted articles–The scientific version of fake
news. The psychology of fake news: Accepting, sharing, and correcting
misinformation. London: Routledge.
