Daily Quick Read - October 25, 2019

New Uber Drivers

Researchers at the University of Richmond (Go Spiders!) have trained rats to drive rat sized electric cars in search of food.  The rats were able to accelerate and steer the cars while negotiating their way around a four meter square arena to receive Froot Loop cereal rewards.

Rats have mastered the art of driving a tiny car, suggesting that their brains are more flexible than we thought. The finding could be used to understand how learning new skills relieves stress and how neurological and psychiatric conditions affect mental capabilities.

The team encouraged the rats to advance their driving skills by placing the food rewards at increasingly distant points around the arena. “They learned to navigate the car in unique ways and engaged in steering patterns they had never used to eventually arrive at the reward,” says Lambert.

Learning to drive seemed to relax the rats. The researchers assessed this by measuring levels of two hormones: corticosterone, a marker of stress, and dehydroepiandrosterone, which counteracts stress. The ratio of dehydroepiandrosterone to corticosterone in the rats’ faeces increased over the course of their driving training.

Girl Scouts Helping Bees

                                                                                                          Patrick Pearce 

Bees are a cornerstone species.  Their numbers have declined substantially in the wild due to habitat destruction, pesticides and climate change.  There are at least 20,000 species of bees, most of which are pollinators, while only a few are honey producing.  They do critical work for the environment and so are these young ladies.

…In Colorado, the task of saving bees from the consequences of climate change has fallen to the girls who sell us the best cookies. Yes, you heard that right. Over the summer, at a Girl Scout day camp in Denver, Girl Scout troops fashioned tiny homes for wild bees called “bee hotels” to fight the depopulation of bees across the country.

After building their bee hotels, the girls went out to install them in green pockets of their community, such as community gardens and the local botanical garden. They also donated one to a local beekeeper who spoke to the troops. “The most interesting thing I learned is probably when you think of bees, you just think of honeybees, but there are so many different types out there,” said Aimee, another 11-year-old Girl Scout.

Million $ Whales

Whales are more efficient at carbon sequestration than trees.  Humans have hunted whales to near extinction, while they have been saving us from climate change.  Now the International Monetary Fund has generated an analysis that monetize their value to the environment.  That’s $2 million per great whale or $1 trillion for all existing great whales.  

As it turns out, whales are doing far more for us than most people realize. Consider this, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF):

“Whales absorb more carbon than rain forests and help produce half of the planet's oxygen supply.”

And now, a team of economists led by Ralph Chami, assistant director of the IMF’s Institute for Capacity Development, has decided to crunch the numbers and see what the value of these benefits might be. The results were published in an article published in Finance & Development on the IMF website.

Since they are economists, they go further into the economics of the whole thing – of which you can read more about in the article. But the gist is this: The role of whales in fighting climate change is undeniable and we would be well served to be focusing on this.

Is Oakland For Sale?

The port of Oakland, California is one of the country’s largest marine cargo handling facilities.  A facility that generates a substantial number of quality jobs in a city that has always struggled in comparison to neighboring San Francisco.  A local group, The Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal (OBOT) has proposed building a new marine terminal in Oakland that will generate more jobs and revenue.  However, in 2016 the Oakland city council voted to ban the handling and storage of coal within the city limits.  The company proposing the new terminal fully intends to use the facility to load coal for shipment to Asia.

OBOT sued the city and in May 2018 a federal judge sided with the company by invalidating the coal ban. The city appealed the judge’s ruling and court hearings are scheduled for November.

Insight Terminal Solutions, a Kentucky-based company led by veteran coal industry executive John Siegel, paid half of OBOT’s legal costs to overturn the city’s coal ban. ITS hopes to lease the terminal from OBOT once it’s built, however, Siegel’s company filed for bankruptcy protection in July.

The records show that at the same time the coal terminal investors have been battling the city in court, they have also spent tens of thousands on local lobbyists hoping to convince Oakland’s city council to drop its legal opposition.

Who are the coal interests lobbying?  African American civic leaders.

Finding allies in Oakland’s black community, which has suffered from disproportionate exposure to pollution from the city’s port for decades, has been a key goal of the coal lobbyists.

One city official who met repeatedly with Siegel and McConnell over the past year was Oakland City Council president Rebecca Kaplan.

A document provided by Insight Terminal Solutions to Kaplan in July, just before she met with the company’s lobbyist Greg McConnell in a private room at a seafood restaurant in Oakland’s Jack London

Square, states that “without coal, the terminal cannot be built”, but the company promised only “clean coal” will be handled. The same document claims that the city will see $6m in revenue each year from a wharfage fee plus $5m in contributions to an Oakland Initiatives Fund, which can support charities and health programs.

Crumbs to Oakland’s poor, that will dry up much sooner than the coal lobbyists promise.  

Renewable Power Growth

Renewable energy capacity will increase by 50% over the next five years in the IEA bases case, with the potential to match the output of coal power generation by 2024.

This would mean global hydro, wind, solar and biomass capacity rising from 2,501 gigawatts (GW) in 2018 to 3,721GW in 2024. The increase of 1,220GW means the world would be building renewable capacity equal to the entire U.S. electricity system today, says the IEA.

It is worth noting, however, that the IEA's base-case has historically underestimated the pace of growth, as the chart above shows. As a result, successive forecasts have been revised upwards in light of increasingly favorable policy conditions and faster-than-expected reductions in cost.