Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com 
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com 
Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger on Pexels.com
We suppose it’s good news that new use of dexamethasone may alleviate the sufferings of Covid-19 victims. We even think that vaccines and pretty effective tests may be available soon. But if you think that when this passes everything will be fine and dandy, well think again. For a start, a new antibiotic-resistant micro-organism could start a worse pandemic at any time. And then there is our old friend Global warming, which is so deadly that it hasn’t even gone into remission.
It’s true that there has been a blessed fall in the number of aeroplanes, and traffic has not been quite at its normal neurotic levels. However, two reports today (we use the Guardian, but they are all over the media) suggest all is very far from well. In the first, Fiona Miller *describes the awful dangers of a reckless uncontrolled economic bounce back, regardless of its environmental consequences. And just to underline the problem Damian Carrington headlines a new climate study from Siberia*. Fans of coincidence will love the fact that it was in Siberia that the most cataclysmic disaster event of all time originated, the famous Permian-Triassic Mass extinction. Just thought we’d mention it.
But, gentle readers, we could not leave you without hope! The same Damian Carrington, in the same Guardian, has filed another piece in which someone is trying to do something about our plight. Highview Power in Greater Manchester, have come up with new technology which uses green energy to compress air into a liquid. When they want, they just release it to spin a turbine, the world’s biggest in fact, powering many homes. It should go live in 2022.
In the long ago 2000s, opponents of green energy solutions used to love sneering that renewable ideas only worked when the sun was out, the wind blowing, blah etc, blah etc, etc blah. Technologies like Highview’s show that it is easy store power from peak times and release it later, hugely extending the efficiency of new systems. Remember that this is only one such solution. History shows that as new ideas and technologies develop, whole economies can grow and thrive. It’s fossil fuels that need to wither and die.
#damiangreen #fionamiller #highvewpower #globalwarming #climatechange
Learning, Science and Society 