The Scandinavian way to zero-carbon construction – cities like Oslo, Helsinki and Copenhagen are working to clean up one of the world's most high-emission industries

I could have said this as a joke :

electric construction machinery is easy, just use a very long extension cord.

Well, what do I know ? They did it.

That's great.

Now, we'll lament once more that journalists still don't understand what zero carbon means, even at the very serious Beeb. Well, here we have machines that don't emit carbon at the point of use.. Great. This being Scandinavia, electricity is already largely low carbon, and has been for decades, thanks to dams and atoms.

Now, emissions from machineries are but a fraction of the overall carbon footprint of a building. One big source of carbon emission in construction is cement, and the basic chemical reaction of calcium carbonate calcination makes this inescapable. The real revolution will be construction without cement, and we're light-years away from it. So, really carbon-neutral construction would be no construction at all, or failing this, C&S. I'd like to know what cement with C&S would mean to real estate prices.

Then of course, once the building is built, it is inhabited, which, in most of the industrialized world and specially in Scandinavia, means heated. Of course, heating a home is most often done by burning things, mostly fossil fuels. Reaching carbon neutrality in 2050, now less than 28 and a half years away, means re-engineering heating system for most homes. Meaning heat pumps and electric radiators, meaning a huge power call in winter, meaning a complete overhaul of the grid and generation plants. The later being also low carbon, either atomic or operating C&S.

Bottom line : an electric front loader tethered with a long extension cord is somewhat funny but light-years away from zero-carbon construction.

Oh well, I suppose that climate remediation can't be learned simply by reading the teevee.