4 February

Grrrr!! We just dug ourselves out (barely--still a pile of snow near the car since we cleared enough to get into the car and drive out) and we have more coming today and expect more from Sunday through Tuesday next week. For some reason the snow removal services our landlord uses didn't clear around the cars and did a pretty poor job on the sidewalks. Nor did they clear a path from the front sidewalk to the mailboxes. I hope we don't have to do that again soon.

For several years I have seen laudatory articles and programs on "carbon capture and sequestration" technology. It has been touted as the solution to all our problems generated by fossil fuel use. I might have been enthusiastic thirty years ago but in my old age I have seen too many technological marvels that over promised and under delivered. Now I greet new technology with a good deal of skepticism. I know a few authors who have a similar viewpoint but their views have been drowned out by the flood of boosterism. I found this article first off this morning. Molly Taft describes the closing of the last CCS plant in the country and the reasons for it. She echoes what the contrarians of CCS technology have said almost from the beginning: it is a complicated technology with multiple points of failure, it is incredibly expensive, and it isn't really scaleable. Notice the point that it required so much energy the company had to build a natural gas plant just to fuel the scrubbers.

Evidently, according to Gizmodo,  the Australian fire season is off to a miserable start. That is after last year's disastrous fire season and at the same time the city of Perth was supposed to go into a strict lockdown because of COVID. We are dealing with the aftermath of our own disastrous season last year. California has had mudslides and lost a part of the Coast Highway thanks to heavy rainfall washing down soil and debris.