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Comment by pengaru | Hacker News Reader

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pengaru·

Now if only we could get the externalities of burning all that bunker fuel shipping the bauxite paid for up front...

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One possible solution there would be Green Ammonia, which Iceland is also well placed to produce:

https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/low-carbon-e...

Don Sadoway has a really interesting MIT open course wear course on solid state chemistry.

I think it is in there where he mentions an interesting trade off between the environmental cost of making aluminium vs the long term savings of making, for example, car parts out of aluminium rather than say cast iron which they would have been made from in the past.

Which is to say, it's not immediately clear that increasing the cost of aluminium to encompass the externalities of shipping it is actually a net benefit to the planet as a whole.

I definitely agree that all externalities should be paid for but the co2 emissions from shipping are very low compared to producing aluminium from coal. This comment puts it at 3%

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23632148

Which would be great if co2 were all they emitted, burning bunker fuel is very dirty. Of all forms of emissions co2 is relatively harmless.

Beginning January 2020 ships worldwide are required to burn fuel with less than 0.5% sulphur or install scrubbers, so the problem has been greatly reduced. It's still way worse than regular diesel, but it's much better (about where diesel was at 30 years ago).

Hey! :) I wanted to edit my post, saying something like "one could argue over the (CO2-)economics of shipping large volumes back and forth", but then i mentally shrugged, seeing that this is how the world (currently) works. So i canceled the edit.

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