Newest green energy grift: "sustainable concrete buyer's alliance" selling "sustainable attribute certificates"

The "green energy" grifters have come up with a new one: "Low-carbon concrete."  They've formed the "Sustainable Concrete Buyers Association," and like all scammers they've turned to CNBC to bleat to investors what a FAAAABULOUs idea this is.

I'll get into the technicals later, but buried deep in CNBC's fawning, slobberiing stock-scam article is this gem:

>>“[The grifters] will do this through so-called book-and-claim, *which is a more innovative demand-side mechanism that will help expand the market.*  It’s the same system used in the renewable energy market, where consumers purchase a certificate for the environmental benefits of a sustainable product, but they don’t actually physically get that product itself. 
   It doesn’t make *logical sense* [ahh, as opposed to "illogical sense"?] for an *ambitious buyer* in New York to ship cement that is low-carbon all the way from California for their project. So what we’re enabling is a transaction in which they are buying an environmental attribute certificate that gives them the rights to that low-carbon product, but the physical product is actually being sourced locally.”

<<Wow!  It's Al Gore's "carbon credit" scam with a new name!  "Environmental attribute certificates," y'say?  Which "gives [the wokie buyer] the rights to that low-carbon product, but the physical product is actually being sourced locally.”

This has been done dozens of times before, just in different disguises.  My favorite is the scammer who said "Pay my faaaabulous company a million bucks and we'll go to Africa and plant 100,000 trees--so for only ten bucks a tree your company can show wokie investors how totally woke you are!"

Spoiler: no trees were planted.  The clue was when a reporter asked the CEO which country in Africa they were planting trees in, and the scammer clumsily dodged the question.  He was confident no friendly "journalist" would dare ask him the question!  Cuz he knew journalists loved anything touted as "green," eh? 

So who are the companies behind this?  Amazon, Meta (Zuck's Fakebook, cunningly re-named in 2021) and...RMI.

The latter is the outfit that organized this faaabulous grift.  "RMI" is the new camouflage name for the Rocky Mountain Institute, started in 1982 by Amory Lovins.  If you wanna see how totally, brazenly the Left fellates this outfit, click here.  Go down to a section headlined "Recognition."  The entire section consists of one sentence: "Co-founder Amory Lovins has received many awards."  That's it.

Someone get the leftists at Wikipedia a napkin to wipe their faces.

Now: There are two kinds of people in the "future of energy" world: One group sells faaabulous-sounding but childishly unworkable scams--"we can run the world on unicorn farts and solar panels."  That group just flushed $2 BILLION down the toilet by getting the bribem regime to give 'em taxpayer money to build a HUGE solar project in the Mojave desert.  The electricity it produced cost far more than "regular" electricity, so after a brief PR-driven honeymoon (slobbering, fawning press releases and TV ads), utilities declined to buy more of the stuff.  Project went bankrupt.  

Now the only remaining question is, How do the grifters dispose of the now-useless mirrors and boilers and towers?"

Scammer: "No worries, mon, jus' leave it dere, cuz ten minutes after duh Media stop talkin' 'bout it, no American will believe it ever happened."

The other group is hard-nosed engineers--yes, the people Hollywood always portrays as bumbling, clueless.  Naive, no sense of fashion, no sense of humor...yeah, it's a standing joke.  A cliche.  Sure.

But engineers study hard to learn the laws that control how the universe works, and if someone proposes a faaabulous idea to produce electricity, engineers can tell ya if it has a prayer of being cost-competitive.

Democrats:  "Dat not possible!  Yew fashion-impaired nerds can't know stuff like dat!  Whut impo'tant iz whut wimmins' studies majors an' African studies an' Tay-tay an' Hollywood stars say?  And Kimmel!  Colbert!  Stewart!"

Ah yes, the "cool kidz."  The ones who get into government bureaucracies and RULE.

So returning to "sustainable concrete:"  Since Roman times, concrete has been made from cement and "aggregate"--rock and sand.  Most of the mass is rock, with the cement only being used to bond the rock and sand together.

But making cement takes huge amounts of energy, which is done by burning *lots* of natural gas, which produces lots of CO2.  So how does so-called "sustainable concrete" change this?

Spoiler: it doesn't.  Instead the green grifters say their faaabulous product replaces some of the rock and sand--material that doesn't require any heat energy--with what they call "supplementary cementitious materials--like "fly ash," slag and "recycled aggregates."

But you'll look in vain for how much less of the energy-intensive Portland cement is used.  Answer seems to be: a miniscule saving.

So this seems to be yet another "We gon' sell yew wokie corporate execs faaaabulous certificates showin' how woke you are!  "Ouah initiative will enable Amazon, Prologis, Meta [all founders] and other leading organizations to participate in a first-of-its-kind joint purchase of 'sustainable concrete attribute certificates'"

Wow, "sustainable concrete attribute certificates," y'say!  Dat WAY mo' impressive den "carbon credits"!  After all, the cool new name has nine syllables, versus just four for "carbon credits."

Wonder how many millions of tax dollars bribem's corrupt Energy Department gave these grifters? 

Source.  

 
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/05/prologis-amazon-and-meta-sign-low-carbon-concrete-pact.html