Not easy

News blues

With America in a pandemic lull, communities across the country are choosing to shut down COVID testing and vaccination sites, even as experts warn that another wave could be on the horizon. 

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Shanghai, China’s financial hub of 25 million people, has quickly become the epicenter of China's worst coronavirus outbreak, posting its highest-ever daily caseload this week.
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On War:
Tens of thousands gather in London to show solidarity with Ukraine >> 

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The Lincoln Project: Be not afraid (1:53 mins)

Healthy planet, anyone?

Even prior to his words shared here, Senate Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse would have made as good a president of the US as anyone in the political class, certainly better than 99.9 percent of that class. He’ll never get the chance. Alas, his views on US climate policy are good, including his opinion that, to date, US climate action has been ‘a calamity’ >> 

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Amory Lovins, nicknamed the “Einstein of energy efficiency”, and adjunct professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, has been one of the world’s leading advocates and innovators of energy conservation for 50 years. He wrote his first paper on climate change while at Oxford in 1968, and in 1976 he offered Jimmy Carter’s government a blueprint for how to triple energy efficiency and get off oil and coal within 40 years. He says,

“Solar and wind are now the cheapest bulk power sources in 91% of the world, and the UN’s International Energy Agency (IEA) expects renewables to generate 90% of all new power in the coming years. The energy revolution has happened. Sorry if you missed it.”
But just as with the 1970s oil shocks, the problem today is not where to find energy but how to use it better. The answer, he says, is what he calls “integrative, or whole-system, design,” a way to employ orthodox engineering to achieve radically more energy-efficient results by changing the design logic.

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Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Same old, same old.
Up and at ‘em.
Trying to kick back on this so-called Day of Rest.
Not easy to do.
Alas.