1 Week, 7 Stories #21
Bioethics, chimeras, engineering weather, and other stories with weird and wonderful twists
Every edition features 7 stories, from the past week. I’ll draw on my background in media, journalism, agriculture, biotech, and renewable energy to come up with an interesting selection and to offer some context.
Sometimes built around a theme, sometimes random, but with a Canadian twist.
This story had me going in circles. Can drones replace bees in pollinating crops? We have found ourselves in quite a mess where climate change is affecting food production, so we need to build resilience into our plans. Bee populations are declining in many parts of the world including here in Canada and a recent University of British Columbia report found that “Where the wild bees are – and aren’t – impacts food supply”. Where they aren’t, is in closed environments where we are growing more of our food as part of our climate resilience planning. Apart from the 8.1 billion people we need to feed today, crops needing wild pollinators account for $2 billion in Canadian farm income. So as the vicious circle keeps going, we turn to tech for answers (like drones or a six-armed pollinating robot ) and for that resilience we need.
David Clayton-Thomas had it pegged in 1968.
Let the Spinning Wheel spin
You got no money, you got no home
Spinning Wheel all alone
Talkin' 'bout your troubles and you
You never learn
This news just in from the world of spinning pieces of plastic. Vinyl records are now in the inflation basket and are going under the sustainable microscope. The attention comes from the increase of sales in what was once considered an old medium. The Conversation said this week that in the US alone, 49 million units were sold in 2023. Not bad considering less than one million went off the shelves in 2006. With popularity comes responsibility it seems, because the Office for National Statistics in the United Kingdom said that because of the resurgence in popularity vinyl records have been added back to the inflation basket of goods. The Guardian notes that the last time records were part of the inflation calculation Simply Red’s album Stars was at the top of the charts. There are several reasons for the sales surge and none other that Taylor Swift is at least one factor. (Air fryers were also added to the UK’s 2024 inflation basket but I’m guessing that has nothing to do with the Swiftie set). As for the sustainability lens turned on vinyl records, Billie Eilish has said her next record due out in May will adopt eco-friendly vinyl practices. Vinyl records are made from plastics, but there is a more sustainable alternative called BioVinyl. Is this just a case of slapping “bio” on the front of an old word and calling it more environmentally friendly? Biovinyl sits somewhere on the good side of the ledger. It incorporates recycled materials such as used cooking oils and is ISCC certified. If the golden age of vinyl is back for good, it might as well start its new life headed in the right direction.
Starlink is another tool hanging from the corporate toolbelt of Elon Musk. He calls it a “satellite constellation”, but in simple terms it is a network of low earth orbit satellites which deliver broadband Internet. More than 5,000 satellites beam the Internet around the world, including to Canada where it is of special value in remote and rural areas. That coverage and the number of satellite it takes to deliver it causes problems because it interferes with observations of space from the earth, and are a safety concern for other spaceflights. Mr. Musk’s venture however is experiencing a few of its own problems. In February TechCrunch said the company would “de-orbit” 100 or so of the satellites because they were “currently non-maneuverable”. In other words, they had become space junk and would be burnt up in the atmosphere.
Having to trash part of your fleet can’t be good for business and this week Bloomberg reported that StarLink was “burning through more cash than it brings in”. To complicate Musk’s constellation, it has also become deeply involved in geopolitics. After Ukraine was invaded by Russia in 2022, President Zelensky asked StarLink to activate the service in his country to replace internet and communication networks destroyed or damaged during the war. The company agreed and initially covered the costs of the service and the terminals. The United States is now covering the cost and this week it was reported that the contract is worth $23 million. A good shot in the arm for a company losing money but wait – there’s more. Reports in the Daily Mail and the Wall Street Journal say that black market dealers have been selling StarLink kits to Sudanese rebels and Russian forces in Ukraine. This puts the US in an awkward situation. It is paying to keep the service active which makes it a government contractor providing a service that is also being used illegally by Russia. Democrats are calling for an investigation into the practice and we’ll see what the next step will be.
While Elon Musk fills near-Earth space with thousands of satellites there is another development being considered that sounds like it comes from the science fiction world. And no, it isn’t fear of our AI overlords. It is weather modification. We have been modifying weather by cloud seeding as far back as the sixties when the US used it to “make mud, not war” during the Vietnam war. Today it is primarily to limit hailstorms and to squeeze some extra precipitation out of the atmosphere. The latest ideas however go way beyond that. At the risk of encouraging those with conspiracy theories at the top of mind, I’ll point you to the Smithsonian Magazine which said this week that scientists gathered in a “semi-clandestine fashion” in San Francisco to shoot microscopic salt particles in the air to brighten clouds and reflect sunlight back into space. Popular Science took a recent paper published in Global Sustainability and turned it into a “Researchers explore sci-fi scenarios of human weather control” headline that was over the top and not exactly what the paper was all about. It was not entirely wrong though because let’s face it, limiting temperature increases by limiting what we pump into the atmosphere is not working too well, so there are scientists and companies looking at other scenarios. As the planet heats up and water supplies become tight a “future where weather itself is privatized” and rainfall bought and sold seems both fantastical - and possible - at the same time. We’re developing technology to suck carbon dioxide out of the air and the number of those giant-sized vacuums it would take to solve our problem is staggering. Scientists writing in the Australian Journal of International Affairs admitted they too had an idea that is controversial, but nevertheless said “Australia, we need to talk about geoengineering”. Given our global environmental track record so far, trying to alter Mother Nature’s basic instincts does not sound like a wise idea.
The Federal Conservatives have proposed 200 or so amendments to the government’s Bill C-50 better known as the Canadian Sustainable Jobs Act. It made it through first and second reading but has been stuck in committee since early December. The Liberals have said the Opposition is using AI to intentionally slow things down. The Act was introduced in June of last year as a key piece of legislation to give a substantial boost to the ‘just transition’ to renewable energy and sustainable energy job growth. Without the bill passing it is just a piece of paper, and various government funded programs with good intentions have not proved their worth yet. (see my last newsletter for more on that) The Council of Canadians have said enough stalling and get the act passed, and unions have been adding there voice for months.
Workers need to not only step up and ask for opportunities in the renewable energy sector but step up to demand that renewable energy become a priority. People follow the jobs and right now there just are not enough jobs in clean tech for the average worker to take the risk of changing their career path.
1 in 10 Canadians have some from of kidney disease and 53,000 Canadians are currently being treated for kidney failure according to the Kidney Foundation of Canada. End-stage kidney disease is nearly always fatal which is why so much research into cures and detection is so important. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a Boston man with end-stage renal disease who received a new kidney from a genetically modified pig. (He has since left hospital and so far the kidney is performing as hoped). Now a story from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore set a new target in the search for kidney disease cures. Researchers have successfully grown ‘mini kidneys’ in the lab and grafted them into live mice. More correctly called kidney organoids they are grown in the lab using stem cells and in this research those cells came from human patients with polycystic kidney disease to learn more about the defects causing PKD and to develop new therapies. In 2023 similar research used human stem cells which were transplanted into a pig which developed a normal kidney structure after 28 days. The resulting organism contains DNA from two different species and is called a Chimera which comes from a Greek mythical beast that looked like a lion with a snake for a tail and a goat’s head protruding from its back. Yes that sounds horrifying and in an effort to find cures for kidney and liver diseases there are many ethical questions as well as biotechnology and medical hurdles to overcome.
The latest legislation from the Government of Alberta seems to be a solution desperately seeking a problem. This week the government said municipalities could not deal directly with the federal government on funding, and then for good measure added that Universities seeking research funding also had to work through the province first. Bill 18 or the Provincial Priorities Act, was introduced on April 10th, and has passed First Reading. However Premier Smith likes to call it the “stay out of my backyard bill”. The bill however puts her not only in the backyard of Alberta’s researchers, but also has her looking over the shoulders of those researchers to ensure their work is ideologically aligned with her government.
Research grants handed out at the federal level are not handed out by politicians or political parties. They are overseen by research committees, researchers, and civil servants. Research into genetics, drug addiction, climate change, or any other pure research topic you can think of are not matters of political affiliation. But aha…maybe that is exactly what provincial government politicians are afraid of. Research into climate change, emissions, and oil & gas extraction might not support government policy. The province has rejected those concerns and Advanced Education Minister Rajan Sawhney said “I can’t think of a single grant stream that’s going to the post-secondaries that would be problematic”.
Which begs the question – so why did we need the legislation?
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