I've avoided posting in this thread because I didn't see much point. But I listened to an interesting podcast from
99 Percent Invisible about sand. It was an interview about a new book
The World in a Grain, with the author Vince Beiser. He had done research how much sand developing countries are using in sand, glass, and computer chips. He has some crazy stats about how much cement we are creating every year. He also pointed out that sand use is following the path of oil where we've exhausted the easy to access sand and are now having to find sources that are more impactful to the environment similar to fraking for oil. He's hoping his research leads to a change in the modern trend of making things larger than we really need out of cement. It was a lot more interesting than you think a conversation about sand would be.
His best quote was in summary at the end that inspired me to try and paraphrase here. That the use of sand is dwarfed by all the other contributers to climate change. But that they really all boil down to overconsumption. The overconsumption of oil, carbon, clean water, meat, sand, timber, and fish. Obviously not all these things are as critical as others or as easily solved as others. His estimation was that clean water was probably the most critical, and probably the hardest to solve. He admitted that sand fell pretty far down on priority, and something that there will always be a base minimum need for.
The rest are my opinions and not the authors:
The US has been successful recently in timber restrictions and replanting requirements. Hopefully Trump doesn't roll these back more and we can influence developing countries to adopt similar practices.
Other posters on here have downplayed the impact of overconsumption of Carbon, and and I won't argue it because there's no point. However, I do think it is an easier one to solve. Almost all uses of carbon for energy can be replaced by renewables. I wish the US has the foresight and the guts to replace or energy use with renewables. We can create a lot of well paying jobs, cut the cost of renewables, and make it more accessible. Then we can sell that technology and techniques to these developing countries. Instead we have a President that thinks climate change is a hoax or fake news/science and energy companies literally spending millions of dollars to influence scientific studies, the press, and politicians to try and downplay the impact that CO2 emissions have on the environment.