Daily Quick Read - October 23, 2019

Trump’s New Island

The Russian navy has discovered five previously unknown islands in the Arctic Ocean.  The islands were revealed as the Arctic glacier covering them melted away in the warming ocean.  Rumor has it that the islands will be named Exxon, Shell, BP, Mobil and Trump.

An expedition in August and September charted the islands, which have yet to be named and were previously hidden under glaciers, said the head of the northern fleet, Vice-Admiral Alexander Moiseyev.

“Mainly this is of course caused by changes to the ice situation,” Moiseyev, who headed the expedition, said at a press conference in Moscow. “Before these were glaciers; we thought they were (part of) the main glacier. Melting, collapse and temperature changes led to these islands being uncovered.”

Glacier loss in the Arctic in the period from 2015 to 2019 was more than in any other five-year period on record, a United Nations report on global warming said last month.

Steel City Farming

In the Pittsburgh suburb of Braddock, a relic of the regions steel making past is being renovated and fitted out as an indoor vertical farm.  We wrote about a new vertical farm being completed in Ohio back in August.  Urban industrial farming like these start-ups may be a high-tech vision of the future of farm to table agriculture or money sucking high tech busts.  One thing that gives me confidence that this may be a viable concept – the Koch brothers are against it.

In the shadow of one of Pittsburgh’s long-standing steel mills, a startup is hoping to cultivate a farm out of the grit of Braddock.

Next door to U.S. Steel’s Mon Valley Works, Fifth Season is building an indoor vertical farm that will integrate high-tech elements like artificial intelligence, data analysis and robotics to seed, harvest and package leafy greens to ship to local grocery stores and restaurants.

The Braddock farm is expected to produce more than 500,000 pounds of lettuce, spinach, kale, arugula and herbs from a 25,000-square-foot grow room during the first full year of operation.

Who Pays For the Clean-up?

Earlier this month, we wrote about the financial woes of the fracking industry.  It is highly likely that the fracking wells will require massive public funding to be safely retired.  In many cases fracking companies will follow the example of coal and other mining interest, declare bankruptcy and walk away from any mitigation costs. There already are millions of abandoned oil and gas wells in the US.  The fracking boom has created hundreds of thousands of additional wells that are likely to be abandoned as the glut of natural gas in the market makes it unprofitable to operate them.

Increasingly, U.S. shale firms appear unable to pay back investors for the money borrowed to fuel the last decade of the fracking boom. In a similar vein, those companies also seem poised to stiff the public on cleanup costs for abandoned oil and gas wells once the producers have moved on.

"It's starting to become out of control, and we want to rein this in," Bruce Hicks, assistant director of the North Dakota Oil and Gas Division, said in August about companies abandoning oil and gas wells. If North Dakota's regulators, some of the most industry-friendly in the country, are sounding the alarm, then that doesn't bode well for the rest of the nation.

Oil and gas companies are obligated to set aside funds to pay for well clean-ups. However, the financial set-asides, known as bonding, are skewed in the industries favor, often covering a small percentage of the actual clean-up costs. Insufficient bonding funds are hidden government subsidy to the oil and gas industry.

South Dakota allows companies to post a $30,000 bond for as many wells as the company chooses to drill. Spyglass Cedar Creek is a Texas-based company that was operating in South Dakota and recently abandoned 40 wells, which the state has estimated will have a cleanup cost of $1.2 million.

However, there is a twist to this story. That $30,000 bond doesn't really exist. The owners of the company had put $20,000 of it into a Certificate of Deposit. But when the state went looking for that money, the owners said they had cashed it in 2015 because, as reported by the Rapid City Journal, "company officials did not remember what the money was for."

The math works out pretty well for the oil company.  Even if they had set aside the full bonding amount of $30,000, the taxpayers in South Dakota would have been on the hook for $1,170,000.

Seashells by the Seashore

In 1921 an Italian immigrant started an unusual project on a small parcel of land he owned in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.  Over the next 33 years his project became the world famous Watts Towers.  

Sabato Rodia was a beachcomber. Barely five feet tall, with a face as creased as a used map and eyes perpetually squinted against the sun, he spent untold days prowling the beaches and estuaries of Southern California with an old cement sack slung over his shoulder. As he walked, he filled the sack with the shells that marine mollusks had once built from seawater to protect their vulnerable bodies.

Rodia hauled some 10,000 seashells from the coast to his property, where he built a whimsical fantasy of concrete walls, arches, and towers that soared to over 30 meters. He studded the structure with the shells, as well as with broken tools, plastic toys, glass bottles, pieces of tile, and thousands of other found objects.

Rodia’s whimsical structure is now a National Historic Landmark and a Los Angeles cultural center. That alone would be enough, but Rodia’s beachcombing resulted in a remarkable shell collection that is literally built into the towers.  A collection that puts three decades of natural history in plain sight.

Bruno Pernet, a marine biologist at California State University, Long Beach, decided to look at Rodia’s history through the mollusks he collected. After several years of identifying clams, abalone, and other shells, Pernet and his colleagues realized that they not only corroborated scattered accounts of Rodia’s beachcombing habits, they captured a richer moment in the region’s environmental history. Some of the towers’ most common species are now locally extinct or rare, and invasive newcomers have become common.

Rodia isn’t alone in his affinity for seashells.  Shell are powerful symbols in human societies across the globe.

For millennia, people have carried shells over mountains and across deserts and through city streets with the belief that somehow these chambers built from seawater can help us find our way home. Maybe they can. Maybe as our ties to the natural world grow increasingly frayed, their true power is simply that they remind us how beautiful the world can be.

More Santa Ana Winds Coming

California’s three major public utilities have decided that instead of spending money on clearly identified and understood power distribution grid improvements they are going to plunge the state into darkness for days at a time if necessary.  The world’s 5^th largest economy is being forced to emulate a 3^rd world country.  

California is doing just about everything to make the problem worse and handle it poorly. Even as global warming extends its droughts, decades of poor forest and land management have made the state a tinderbox. More and more Californians are living in the most remote, fire-prone areas in the state, doing too little to make their houses and communities resilient in the face of fire. Meanwhile, the state’s biggest utility, PG&E, is a debt-ridden, mismanaged omnishambles currently being chewed over by a bankruptcy court. Covering its enormous maintenance and fire-prevention backlog is going to cause rates to rise even as power becomes less reliable.