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Spain is in the news.
Spain has now become the fourth Eurozone country, after Greece, Ireland and Portugal, to get bailout funds in the growing crisis gripping the Euro.
Unemployment is high and services are being cut to reduce debt and bring budgets into balance. Some economists doubt this is possible within the context of a single currency shared with Germany and France. There have been violent but futile street demonstrations.
It's now past two years since SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) spread beyond China and became a pandemic.
From the outset, I've covered aspects of the pandemic on this website, beginning with Love in the time of Coronavirus back in March 2020, so the passing of the pandemic's second birthday seemed an appropriate time to review what we've learnt.
The positive news is that: Covid-19 has been far less deadly than the 1918-20 "Spanish Influenza' pandemic.
This relative success in limiting the number of deaths this time round is entirely due to modern science.
Carbon Sequestration Source: Wikimedia Commons
At the present state of technological development in NSW we have few (perhaps no) alternatives to burning coal. But there is a fundamental issue with the proposed underground sequestration of carbon dioxide (CO2) as a means of reducing the impact of coal burning on the atmosphere. This is the same issue that plagues the whole current energy debate. It is the issue of scale.
Disposal of liquid CO2: underground; below the seabed; in depleted oil or gas reservoirs; or in deep saline aquifers is technically possible and is already practiced in some oil fields to improve oil extraction. But the scale required for meaningful sequestration of coal sourced carbon dioxide is an enormous engineering and environmental challenge of quite a different magnitude.
It is one thing to land a man on the Moon; it is another to relocate the Great Pyramid (of Cheops) there.
