The show featured a panel of special effects professionals testing myths from TV shows or popular lore, such as: Can a snowplow flip a car? Can you fly with fireworks? Are elephants really afraid of mice? The team tried to figure out the answers in a process that often involved explosions, and often turned to a crash test dummy they called Buster for help.
My process today as a journalist looks a little different, but I think it’s dozens of rounds Myth busters the cycle—ask, search, answer—definitely left an impression on me.
The Myth busters pilot came out 20 years ago last week, so in honor of the occasion, we’re going to bust some myths about one of my favorite topics: the materials needed to combat climate change.
Myth #1: We don’t have enough materials to make what we need to fight climate change.
This comes up a lot, and there’s a pretty good reason. We will need many things to create a new world without emissions.
To keep things relatively simple, I’m going to focus on the two industries with the highest emissions today: power generation and transportation. Together, they account for nearly three quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions.
To reduce emissions in these sectors, we need to build a lot of new infrastructure, especially new ways of generating electricity and batteries that can store it. So how much material are we covering here?
Almost any structure requires some combination of steel, aluminum, and possibly copper. According to a new study, we’ll need large amounts of each just to build the infrastructure to generate electricity to meet our climate goals. Between now and 2050, demand could reach 1.96 billion metric tons of steel, 241 million metric tons of aluminum, and 82 million metric tons of copper.
That sounds like a lot, and it is. But if you compare these numbers to the known reserves on the planet that we can access economically, they are a small fraction. And annual production does not need to grow by more than 20% for supply of any of these materials to meet demand.
