This is a video about bricks.
Now, if you’ve been watching this channel a while, you may know a bit about bricks themselves,
but you probably don’t know about the Brick Tax of 1784.
To help pay for the war with the soon-to-be-United States of America, King George III began taxing
bricks at two shillings and eight cents per one-thousand bricks, leading manufacturers
to increase the size of their bricks to mitigate the tax.
This resulted in—
Alright, there’s no way the feds would sit through all of that.
Now let’s talk about our real subject: Why the Washington Monument is actually a life-size
statue of George Washington, and the secret government documents that prove that America’s
first president was actually a 500-foot obelisk in a trench-coat--
What the…
Oh my god.
Employee: Sam!
SAM!
It’s happening!
He’s calling!
Sam: I knew this day would come.
I just hoped we would have had more time.
Employee: What are you gonna do?
Sam: I’m going to answer it.
Sam: Hello, Mr. Gates.
Yes, sir.
I understand, sir.
Absolutely, sir.
Thank you, sir.
Employee: So?
What happened?
Sam: It’s time.
We’re going to make a brick video.
So here we go.
Look at this: your friendly neighborhood brick.
It looks harmless.
Nice, even.
You probably look at this brick and think, “I bet that brick works its hardest and
loves its children the same way I do.”
But you’d be wrong.
What if I told you that all this time, bricks have been trying to kill you, your friends,
and the planet.
These reprehensible rectangular prisms of evil are everywhere--at school, at work, at
the park.
In fact, you probably have a brick... in your own home.
We thought bricks were our friends, but it turns out, they’ve been the villain all
along… and concrete bricks are the most sinister of all.
Did you know that concrete production accounts for 8% of global CO2 emissions?
What’s that, you didn’t?
Exactly.
Because the bricks don’t want you to.
In fact, if concrete production were a country, it would be the third largest CO2 emitter
in the world, behind only the US and China.
Cement bricks have cemented their place as agents of evil.
And it’s up to us to do something about it.
I’m Sam and I approve this message.
To understand why our bricks are killing us, I first have to tell you about my grandmother.
She... had a difficult life, growing up in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, but amidst
the fighting and destruction, she always found comfort in this family recipe, passed down
from generation to generation, for ACI CODE-301-84 compliant Normal Strength Concrete.
She recorded this oral telling of it just days before she passed:
What up my dillas this Auntie Emina coming at you hot with fresh new 5-minute dinner
recipe.
Today we’ve got concrete, which may seem kind of sus but actually really slaps when
it go down your gullet.
Now, first you’ve got to gather your ingredients: you want some limestone, some clay, little
bit of sand, gravel, water, gypsum, and a juice box--preferably those dope ones with
Big Bird on the side.
Next, take big bowl and mix limestone and clay together, and pop that bad boy into rotating
kiln set to 1450 degrees celsius--I don’t know what that is in Fahrenheit.
I’m in friggin Yugoslavia.
Now here’s some hot tea to spill: limestone, which is stage name for calcium carbonate,
is actually made up of Calcium, Carbon, and Oxygen.
When you heat that up supa hot fire, though, limestone will split with calcium going over
here, taking one oxygen with it, and making calcium oxide.
That leave one of these carbon bois and two oxygen, which make it CO2.
We take the calcium oxide, and mix that shizz with gypsum, water, sand, and gravel to make
concrete, and then we just let the carbon dioxide fly away into atmosphere because it’s
1970s and there’s no way at all that that would be harmful in any way.
Alright my peeps remember to like and smash that subscribe button.
I’m out.
Hello.
This is Arnold Fitzgerald--Half as Interesting Incorporated’s assistant deputy fact-checker
for the south-east Pacific region.
For liability purposes I am required to read the following prepared statement: “The previous
clip, featuring Emina Lara Hadžiosmanović, known colloquially by the moniker Auntie Emina,
included the assertion that “there’s no way at all that that would be harmful in any
way,” in reference to entrance of carbon dioxide or CO2 into the atmosphere of the
earth.
After rigorous review, scrupulous consideration, and fastidious auditing, third-party fact
checkers have determined this claim to be demonstrably false.
According to data from the Portland Cement Association, due to a lamentable combination
of limestone breakup and kiln heating, an average of 927 kg or 2044 lbs of CO2 are emitted
for every 1000 kg or 2205 lbs of portland cement produced in the US--and indeed, excess
quantities of CO2, in and of themselves, can be harmful in excess quantities insofar as
that results in climate change--which is, you know... bad.”
Thanks Arnold, you make some interesting points.
The good news is, there are two solutions on the horizon to help us salvage our concrete
comrades.
Well, actually, there are more than two, but we already ate up most of our budget on legal
fees.
So there’s a company called bioMASON that essentially grows things called bio-bricks,
and they were actually really nice.
They sent us little samples of their bricks, which are great as little paperweights or
for throwing at the interns if they go for unscheduled bathroom breaks.
bioMASON even gave us footage of their process to help with our explanation.
The only problem is, it’s all in black and white and it’s only 30 seconds long, and
it has no sound.
So we’re going to narrate.
Here we go.
We open on a building that is not made of bio bricks.
So surely this isn’t the building where they...
Nope sign says bioMASON, okay.
Alright here’s a guy turning a thingy.
A--oh, okay this is actually important.
So that dirt looking stuff is called waste aggregate, and it’s basically gonna get
used as the scaffolding that the brick will get grown on.
We’ll come back to it.
Let’s keep going.
We’ve got some very dramatic forklift framing.
Forklift guy forgot to put his second mask strap on
Oh, okay stop.
So this guy at the big vat, what he’s doing is actually important.
So, remember how much fun you had in chemistry class, when you had to learn a bunch of equations?
It was awesome and you loved it, remember?
Well great, because we’re going to do more of that now.
So, making a bio-brick is all about making calcium carbonate, also known as CaCO3, also
known as calcium carbonate.
It’s basically limestone.
I’m going to explain how to make it, but I just want to warn you, it involves a lot
of discussion of a chemical called urea, and you’re all gonna have to be big kids about
that.
So, what vat guy is probably doing up there is putting together a bunch of stuff: the
aggregated waste, some water, some urea, some calcium salts, and a special little micro-organism,
who we'll call Jeff.
Jeff releases a reacty-goo, or enzyme, to make the urea, which is made up of all of
this, reacts with the water, which as we know is H2O, and it splits into two ammonias, NH3s,
and something called carbonic acid, H2CO3.
The ammonias react with the water to make ammonium, NH4, and hydroxide, HO, which makes
the solution basic, which then makes that carbonic acid split into HCO3 and H. And then,
the HCO3 gives its H to one of the HOs, to make H2O, leaving CO3.
Then that CO3 just grabs some calcium from the salts, and boom, you’ve got CaCO3--calcium
carbonate.
That sort of latches onto that aggregated waste from before, and it forms a bio brick.
If that explanation was confusing to you, don’t worry, I’m sure the rest of the
footage will help explain.
Okay we’ve got a guy hitting a thingy.
Oh no it has a leak!
Something that looks like the inside of a printer.
Alright vat guy is back but he forgot to put on his other mask loop, and he’s pressing
buttons, and then next to him, another guy is pointing at the buttons, in case the first
guy forgets where they are.
Oh look more aggregate!
Alright we got a big machine that looks like Deadpool wearing a tophat.
Giant stamp.
Oh look it’s snickers bars!
Mmmmm.
Delicious.
And yep, that building is definitely still not made out of biobricks.
And okay that’s the end.
Hmm.
That didn’t really help explain it.
Soooo hopefully it made sense the first time.
Bio bricks are just one solution, though.
The other big idea these days is something called carbon capture, and we figured, after
the bioMASON people were so nice, we should reach out to Capture-create--a carbon capture
concrete company--and they’d probably be just as helpful and accommodating to us.
So we called them up, and here’s what they had to say.
So we left a message, and waited as long as we could for them to get back to us, but we
didn’t hear anything before we had to publish the video.
Totally no big deal though, we 100% get it, people are busy… no hard feelings.
In fact, as a show of good will, we figured we’d just play their ad.
Here at Capture-crete, we’re busy making concrete bricks that will change the world.
So busy, in fact, that we don’t have much time for doing anything else at all, even
returning phone calls.
The first step in making our concrete is pre-combustion carbon capture.
You see, when fossil fuels are burned, from the plants that power the lights in our house,
or the phones in our offices that we don’t check, they let off a bunch of things called
flue gases: water vapor, sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, and most importantly, CO2.
But by placing a filter on the smokestack releasing these gases, we’re able to separate
the CO2 out.
It’s not easy.
In fact, it’s hard.
So hard that our brains have to stay completely, 100% full of that information, leaving no
room at all for remembering how to check an answering machine, or how to extend the common
courtesy of calling someone back.
Anyways, now that we’ve got that CO2, we have to put it into concrete bricks.
We start with a material that’s a byproduct of steel making, steel slag, which is full
of calcium oxide, pour it into a mold, and then “cure” it with CO2.
They combine together to form calcium carbonate--a solid that can support a structure.
So now, you’ve got a concrete brick that didn’t involve the carbon-intensive process
of superheating a kiln, and instead of releasing CO2, you actually absorbed about 1 kilogram
of it into a brick.
I know--it sounds so simple.
And it is.
Maybe.
It might be more complicated, but how would you know that?
It’s not like we would actually take the time to have a quick phone call to explain
it to you.
You’re just a dumb little idiot who runs a YouTube channel with nearly two million
subscribers, who wanted to tell the world about our product, but we decided that YOU
weren’t worth OUR TIME.
FREE PUBLICITY?!
NO THANKS!!
WE’RE JUST SOOOOO BUSY MAKING CONCRETE!!
CONCRETE CONCRETE CONCRETE!!
WOOOOHOOOOO!!!
Capture-crete: We care about the environment… but not about Sam’s feelings.
Alright, so what’s the point of all of this?
Well, it really all comes down to something Bill Gates says in his new book, How to Avoid
a Climate Disaster.
In it, he wrote, “All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alfred A Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House”
okay that seems like the wrong quote.
Um… he wrote,
“U.S. Department of Energy, “History of Air Conditioning,” www.energy.gov” nope
that’s the citations…
Oh, here we go.
“By 2060, the world’s building stock—a measure that factors in the number of buildings
and their size—will double.
That’s like putting up another New York City every month for 40 years.”
Look, neither bio bricks nor the jerks at Carbicrete Capture-crete are poised right
now to completely fix the problem of carbon emissions in building materials, although--and
it makes me furious to admit this--carbon capture concrete technology is probably a
bit closer.
But they can both help.
Plus, there are some other processes--including alternative and recycled materials--that we
didn’t even get a chance to talk about here, because we wasted all our runtime holding
a grudge against a concrete company.
In the end, the real point is that we need to be exploring lots of ideas, even knowing
that many of them will fail.
I think Bill summed up that point best, when he wrote in his book, “We need to be exploring
lots of ideas, even knowing that many of them will fail.”
And lastly, I’ll leave you with one final quote from Bill’s book.
In chapter three, he writes, “Hey Half as Interesting viewers, they finally did it,
alright?
They made a bricks video.
It’s done.
They made it.
You can stop spamming the suggestions page.
It’s finished.
Happy now?”
So, just to be clear, this video really was created in partnership with Bill Gates, and
he really does have a new book out called “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” and
for what it’s worth, I’ve read it and it’s really, genuinely great.
He does an incredible job of laying out the problem--or really, the many problems--at
the heart of climate change, and then writes smartly, clearly, thoughtfully, and realistically
about the solutions.
You can find out more about how we can all work together to avoid a climate disaster
at the link below.