OF THE
TIMES


Should Australia house a giant vacuum cleaner to suck carbon from the sky?The big machine in Iceland and will soon start pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere each year and turning it into calcium carbonate rock underground.
In May this year, on the flat plains of an Icelandic geothermal reserve, a gigantic vacuum cleaner designed to suck planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the sky was switched on.
The machine, called Mammoth, would not be entirely out of place on a Mad Max set....

"We sleep on the ground, on sand where worms come out underneath us. We cannot bathe our children as before. There are no hygiene and sanitary products for us to wash and clean the place. There's nothing. The sea is all sewage. They even throw garbage and baby napkins into the sea."Parents used to tell their children to wash in the Mediterranean. But pollution that has built up as war has devastated basic facilities has accentuated the risk of disease.

The old stock exchange was being renovated and had been shrouded in scaffolding and protective plastic covering. It currently houses the Danish chamber of commerce, which described the scenes on Tuesday morning as a terrible sight.It may be that these renovations provide some plausible deniability as to the real cause of some of these fires.
Local craftsman Henrik Grage told Danish TV that it was a tragic day. "This is our Notre-Dame," he said, comparing it with the fire that engulfed the roof and spire of the cathedral in the centre of Paris almost exactly five years ago.
The Paris fire broke out under the eaves of Notre-Dame on 15 April 2019 when it was also shrouded in scaffolding as part of extensive renovations. Investigators have blamed either a short circuit in the electrics or a worker's cigarette butt that was not properly put out.

Comment: It's not a new problem, but suppression of conservative voices on social media via monetary strangulation is finally getting some attention.