By William
James
LONDON (Reuters) - Joe Biden will
attend his first meeting as U.S. president with Group of Seven leaders on
Friday to discuss plans to defeat the novel coronavirus, reopen the battered
world economy and counter the challenge posed by China.
The COVID-19 pandemic has killed 2.4
million people, tipped the global economy into its worst peacetime slump since
the Great Depression and upended normal life for billions just as the West
grapples with the rise of China.
Biden “will focus on the global
response to the pandemic, including vaccine production, distribution of
supplies” and efforts to fight emerging infections, White House spokeswoman Jen
Psaki said on Thursday.
He “will also discuss the global
economic recovery, including the importance of all industrial countries
maintaining economic support for the recovery” and “the importance of updating
global roles to tackle economic challenges such as those posed by China,” Psaki
said.
The call with G7 leaders at 1400 GMT
is a chance for Biden, a Democrat who took over from Republican former
President Donald Trump on Jan. 20, to project a message of re-engagement with
the world and with global institutions after four years of his predecessor’s
“America First” policies.
Besides Biden, Italy’s new prime
minister, Mario Draghi, will be a new face at the leaders’ virtual table,
though he is famous for “doing whatever it takes” at the European Central Bank
to save the euro during the European debt crisis.
Britain, which holds the rotating
chair of the G7 and is trying to recast itself as a steward of the rules-based
international system following Brexit, will ask members to help speed up the
development of future vaccines to 100 days.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson is keen
to build ties with Biden who did not support Brexit and who, as a presidential
candidate, last year publicly warned Britain against endangering peace in
Ireland.
Johnson has said he is interested in
the idea of a global treaty on pandemics to ensure proper transparency after
the novel coronavirus outbreak which originated in China.
China will also be on the agenda.
In his first major foreign policy
speech as president, Biden cast China as the “most serious competitor” of the
United States.
“We’ll confront China’s economic
abuses; counter its aggressive, coercive action; to push back on China’s attack
on human rights, intellectual property, and global governance,” Biden said on
Feb. 4.
The G7 of the United States, Japan,
Germany, United Kingdom, France, Italy and Canada has a combined gross domestic
product of about $40 trillion - a little less than half of the global economy.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-g7-meeting/biden-to-debut-at-g7-with-vaccines-economy-and-china-in-focus-idUSKBN2AJ0F5
In “Global Warming” Great
Texas Freeze news, power is getting restored, but the problem now seems to be a
lack of drinkable water.
Texas is not technically part of the Third World, but no one has
told the Texans.
With apologies to P. J. O'Rourke and Italy.
Some electricity restored in
Texas, but water woes grow By
PAUL J. WEBER and JILL BLEED February 19, 2021
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Power was
restored to more homes and businesses Thursday in states hit by a deadly blast
of winter that overwhelmed the electrical grid and left millions shivering in
the cold this week. But the crisis was far from over in parts of the South,
where many people still lacked safe drinking water.
In Texas on Thursday, about 325,000
homes and businesses remained without power, down from about 3 million a day
earlier, though utility officials said limited rolling blackouts were still
possible.
The storms also left more than
320,000 homes and businesses without power in Louisiana, Mississippi and
Alabama. About 70,000 power outages persisted after an ice storm in eastern
Kentucky, while nearly 67,000 were without electricity in West Virginia.
And more than 100,000 customers
remained without power Thursday in Oregon, a week after a massive snow and ice
storm. Maria Pope, the CEO of Portland General Electric, said she expects power
to be restored by Friday night to more than 90% of the customers still in the
dark.
Meanwhile, snow and ice moved into
the Appalachians, northern Maryland and southern Pennsylvania, and later the
Northeast. Back-to-back storms left 15 inches (38 centimeters) of snow in
Little Rock, Arkansas, tying a 1918 record, the National Weather Service said.
---- Texas’ remaining outages were mostly
weather-related, rather than forced blackouts, according to the state’s grid
manager, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. ERCOT Senior Director of
System Operations Dan Woodfin said rotating outages could return if electricity
demand rises as people get power and heating back, though they wouldn’t last as
long as outages earlier this week.
Texas
Gov. Greg Abbott and
disruptions in food supply chains
Adding to the state’s misery, the weather
jeopardized drinking water systems. Authorities ordered 7 million people — a
quarter of the population of the nation’s second-largest state — to boil tap
water before drinking it, following record low temperatures that damaged
infrastructure and pipes.
More
https://apnews.com/article/texas-power-outages-icy-weather-186cf801ead7e2d21f001a99b3aaa936
Finally, Europe’s
getting ready to opt for “Green Hydrogen.”
No really, seriously, of course it is. What could possibly go wrong? Look
away from Texas now.
30 Energy Players Partner to
Deliver Green Hydrogen Across Europe at the Price of Fossil Fuels February 15, 2021 by Emily Holbrook
After 2 years of research and confidential preparation, a
group of 30 European energy players officially launched “HyDeal
Ambition” with the aim of delivering 100% green hydrogen across Europe at €1.5/kg ($1.82/kg) before
2030.
The production of green hydrogen generated by
solar-driven electrolysis from the Iberian Peninsula will begin in 2022. The
ambition is to achieve 95 GW of solar and 67 GW of electrolysis capacity by 2030 to deliver
3.6 million tonnes of green hydrogen per year to users in the energy, industry
and mobility sectors via the gas transmission and storage network, the energy
equivalent of 1.5 months of oil consumption in France. A phased approach is
anticipated with first deliveries in Spain and the Southwest of France followed
by an extension towards the East of France and then Germany.
Industrial innovation goes beyond the simple production of
truly green or climate-friendly energy. It lies in particular in the price to
be delivered to customers at fossil fuel parity, making the transition to a
carbon-neutral economy a self-evident perspective.
A series of projects and partnerships are currently being
launched involving several of the 30 participants of HyDeal Ambition, with a
first initiative expected within a year in Spain, based on a portfolio of solar
sites with a capacity of close to 10 GW.
The HyDeal Ambition constitutes a complete industrial
ecosystem spanning the whole green hydrogen value chain (upstream, midstream,
downstream, finance), and results from 2 years of research, analysis, modeling,
feasibility studies and contract design.
Participants include:
Solar
developers: DH2/Dhamma Energy (Spain), Falck Renewables (Italy), Qair
(France) Electrolysis
OEMs, engineering and EPC providers: McPhy Energy (France), VINCI
Construction (France) Gas
TSOs: Enagás (Spain), OGE (Germany), SNAM (Italy), GRTgaz (France),
Teréga (France) Energy and
industrial groups: Gazel Energie, subsidiary of EPH (France), Naturgy
(Spain), HDF Energie (France) Infrastructure
funds: Cube, Marguerite, Meridiam Consultants
and advisors: European Investment Bank, CVA, Clifford Chance,
Cranmore Partners, Finergreen, Envision Digital International https://www.environmentalleader.com/2021/02/30-energy-players-partner-to-deliver-green-hydrogen-across-europe-at-the-price-of-fossil-fuels/
Well,
we can’t just stand here doing nothing, people will think we’re British
workmen.
Spike
Milligan.
Covid-19 Corner This
section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Can a Vaccinated Person Still
Spread the Coronavirus? By John
Lauerman and Jason Gale
1. Why
is this important? While getting vaccinated gives people considerable
insurance against falling ill with Covid, which is sometimes fatal , it’s so far no assurance that they
won’t get silently infected with SARS-CoV-2 and pass it on, potentially
sickening people who aren’t immune. Those who are infected but never develop
symptoms are responsible for 24% of transmission , one study estimated. The more
SARS-CoV-2 circulates, the more opportunity the virus has to mutate in ways
that enhance its ability to spread, sicken and kill people, and evade the
immunity provided by existing vaccines or a past infection. Already, variants of the virus have emerged that
appear to be more dangerous. Also, using vaccination to achieve so-called herd
immunity, when an entire community is protected though not everyone has been
immunized, requires vaccines that prevent transmission .
2. Don’t vaccines stop infection and thus
transmission? Some do and some don’t. The gold standard in vaccinology is
to stop infection as well as disease -- providing so-called sterilizing
immunity. But it’s not always achieved. The vaccine for measles , for example, provides it; the one for hepatitis B does not.
3. Do Covid vaccines have to prevent
infection to stop transmission? Not necessarily. To the extent a vaccine prevents
infection, it also prevents forward transmission. But it can do the latter
without doing the former. Since SARS-CoV-2 spreads through respiratory
particles from an infected person’s throat and nose, a vaccine that reduces the
duration of the infection, the amount of virus in the respiratory tract (the
viral load), or how often an infected person coughs may decrease the likelihood
of it being transmitted to others.
4. Why don’t we know whether
Covid vaccines prevent infection and transmission? The trials testing the vaccines weren’t set up to answer those questions
first. Rather, they were designed to initially determine the more urgent matter of whether vaccines would prevent
people from getting sick and overwhelming medical systems. To explore that
question, researchers typically gave one group of volunteers the experimental
vaccine and another group of equal size a placebo. After the total number of
volunteers with confirmed Covid symptoms in the trial reached a pre-set level,
investigators compared the number in each group to determine whether those who got
the vaccine fared significantly better than those who received the placebo. For
the inoculations that have worked, the vaccine groups have had anywhere from
50% to 95% fewer cases of sickness, figures that are referred to as the
vaccines’ efficacy rates.
More
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-18/can-a-vaccinated-person-still-spread-the-coronavirus-quicktake
UK ethics body approves COVID-19
trial to infect healthy subjects with virus By Rich Haridy February 17, 2021
A
world-first human challenge trial is set to commence in weeks after a UK
clinical trial ethics committee approved the controversial study. The research
will ultimately look to test vaccine efficacy, however, the first step will
involve exposing young subjects to small volumes of the virus to understand the
lowest dose that leads to COVID-19.
Early
on in the pandemic the topic of human
challenge trials was suggested as a way to speed
up vaccine development. The idea of exposing healthy volunteers to a pathogen
in order to learn more about infection or test a vaccine is not new, but it is
rarely deployed and always ethically controversial.
As we learned more about this novel coronavirus over the
course of 2020 calls for human challenge trials increased and in October last
year the
UK government announced a large investment into running these trials. Now,
months later, an Ethics Committee convened by the UK Health Research Authority
has formally approved an initial study that should commence in the coming weeks.
This initial trial is the first stage of any human
challenge research, and it is called a virus characterization study. Before
scientists can test vaccine efficacy they need to empirically investigate the
precise dose of virus to use in future research.
To do this, 90 healthy volunteers
will be recruited and exposed to very low doses of virus in order to home in on
the safest and smallest volume of virus that consistently leads to the
development of COVID-19. Once this has been determined future studies can then
investigate vaccine efficacy in controlled conditions.
The subjects recruited will be
young, aged between 18 and 30, carefully recruited to make sure they are at the
lowest risk for any disease-related complications. They will be exposed to the virus
in a purpose-built quarantine facility in London.
Andrew Catchpole, chief science
officer at hVIVO, an organization that has conducted human challenge studies
for over 30 years, suggests this initial virus characterization phase is not
just a cursory stage of research. He says it will deliver valuable new insights
into the earliest stages of infection. This is data scientists have been unable
to gather so far in the pandemic.
“We will start to see useful results
very quickly after the commencement of the study,” says Catchpole. “From the
moment we inoculate someone with this virus, we will learn important
information about disease progression and treatment. This crucial data feeds
directly back into how to develop effective vaccines and better treatments
because they identify what type of immune response needs to be triggered.”
More
https://newatlas.com/health-wellbeing/coronavirus-human-challenge-study-uk-ethics-approval/
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on Sme.sk and Korzar.sk Next, some vaccine links kindly
sent along from a LIR reader in Canada. The links come from a most informative
update from Stanford Hospital in California.
World
Health Organization - Landscape of COVID-19 candidate vaccines . https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/draft-landscape-of-covid-19-candidate-vaccines
NY
Times Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker . https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker.html
Stanford
Website . https://racetoacure.stanford.edu/clinical-trials/132
Regulatory
Focus COVID-19 vaccine tracker . https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/covid-19-vaccine-tracker
Some other useful Covid links.
Johns Hopkins Coronavirus resource
centre
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
Rt Covid-19
https://rt.live/
Covid19info.live
https://wuflu.live/
Centers for Disease Control
Coronavirus
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html
The Spectator
https://data.spectator.co.uk/city/national
Technology Update.
With events happening
fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section.
Updates as they get reported.
Kagome graphene promises exciting
properties Date: February 16, 2021
Source: Swiss Nanoscience Institute, University of
Basel
Summary: For the first time, physicists have produced
a graphene compound consisting of carbon atoms and a small number of nitrogen
atoms in a regular grid of hexagons and triangles. This honeycomb-structured
''kagome lattice'' behaves as a semiconductor and may also have unusual
electrical properties. In the future, it could potentially be used in
electronic sensors or quantum computers.
Researchers around the world are
searching for new synthetic materials with special properties such as superconductivity
-- that is, the conduction of electric current without resistance. These new
substances are an important step in the development of highly energy-efficient
electronics. The starting material is often a single-layer honeycomb structure
of carbon atoms (graphene).
Theoretical calculations predict
that the compound known as "kagome graphene" should have completely
different properties to graphene. Kagome graphene consists of a regular pattern
of hexagons and equilateral triangles that surround one another. The name
"kagome" comes from Japanese and refers to the old Japanese art of
kagome weaving, in which baskets were woven in the aforementioned pattern.
Kagome lattice with new properties
Researchers from the Department of
Physics and the Swiss Nanoscience Institute at the University of Basel, working
in collaboration with the University of Bern, have now produced and studied
kagome graphene for the first time, as they report in the journal Angewandte
Chemie . The researchers' measurements have delivered promising results that
point to unusual electrical or magnetic properties.
To produce the kagome graphene, the
team applied a precursor to a silver substrate by vapor deposition and then
heated it to form an organometallic intermediate on the metal surface. Further
heating produced kagome graphene, which is made up exclusively of carbon and
nitrogen atoms and features the same regular pattern of hexagons and triangles.
Strong interactions between
electrons
"We used scanning tunneling and
atomic force microscopes to study the structural and electronic properties of
the kagome lattice," reports Dr. Rémy Pawlak, first author of the study.
With microscopes of this kind, researchers can probe the structural and
electrical properties of materials using a tiny tip -- in this case, the tip
was terminated with individual carbon monoxide molecules.
In doing so, the researchers
observed that electrons of a defined energy, which is selected by applying an
electrical voltage, are "trapped" between the triangles that appear
in the crystal lattice of kagome graphene. This behavior clearly distinguishes
the material from conventional graphene, where electrons are distributed across
various energy states in the lattice -- in other words, they are delocalized.
"The localization observed in
kagome graphene is desirable and precisely what we were looking for,"
explains Professor Ernst Meyer, who leads the group in which the projects were
carried out. "It causes strong interactions between the electrons -- and,
in turn, these interactions provide the basis for unusual phenomena, such as
conduction without resistance."
Further investigations planned
The analyses also revealed that
kagome graphene features semiconducting properties -- in other words, its
conducting properties can be switched on or off, as with a transistor. In this
way, kagome graphene differs significantly from graphene, whose conductivity
cannot be switched on and off as easily.
In subsequent investigations, the
team will detach the kagome lattice from its metallic substrate and study its
electronic properties further. "The flat band structure identified in the
experiments supports the theoretical calculations, which predict that exciting
electronic and magnetic phenomena could occur in kagome lattices. In the
future, kagome graphene could act as a key building block in sustainable and
efficient electronic components," says Ernst Meyer.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/02/210216100134.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fmatter_energy%2Fgraphene+%28Graphene+News+--+ScienceDaily%29
Another weekend, and
no President Trump to blame for the incompetence on display in Texas. So it
must be President Biden’s fault. Someone at MIT lend them a hand. Have a great
weekend everyone.
You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all the
people some of the time, which is just long enough to be president of the
United States.
Spike
Milligan.
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