Category Archives: Web Article Review

psychedelics, the cure for…everything?

Serious research suggests psychedelics may be an effective cure for depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and addiction, among other things. This article also compares reported experiences under psychedelics to meditation, which I found interesting.

What is happening when a person meditates? If you meditate in a dedicated way, for long enough, most people say that they start to experience a spiritual change. Why did meditation make people feel they were being changed in a way that was mystical — and what did that even mean? He stumbled across the psychedelics studies from the 1960s, and it seemed to him that the way people described feeling when they took psychedelics was very similar to the way people described when they were in a state of deep meditation. He began to wonder if they were, in some strange sense, two different ways of approaching the same insight. Could investigating one unlock the secrets of the other? …

When you take a psychedelic, most people will have a spiritual experience – you get a sense that your ego-walls have been lowered, and you are deeply connected to the people around you, to our whole species, to the natural world, to existence. But it turns out the intensity of the spiritual experience varies from person to person. For some people, it will be incredibly intense; for some people, mild; and some people have no spiritual experience at all. At Johns Hopkins, the team discovered that many of the positive effects correlate very closely with the intensity of the spiritual experience. So if you had a super-charged spiritual experience, you got the benefits very heavily; and if you had no spiritual experience, you didn’t have many positive effects.

Okay, I don’t usually go here, but let’s say just for the sake of argument that religion is not objectively true. Then these spiritual experiences people tend to have while under the effects of drugs, meditation, and prayer actually come from inside us, are baked into our minds in some way. And maybe people who have more of them really are happier and better off, which would seem to be a good thing maybe even if they are not objectively true.

plastic risk

The bond rating agencies might go after companies that produce plastic packaging next. After taxing pollution like carbon emissions and other air and water pollutants, taxing waste products could make sense. These materials could be designed for easier recycling and reuse, and they are not because neither the manufacturer nor the retailer of the product inside them has to pay the cost. Homeowners, business owners, and municipalies pay the costs of waste collection and disposal, and natural ecosystems pay the price for plastic waste that is not being disposed of responsibly. Shifting these costs onto the manufacturers and/or retailers could raise funds to help deal with the problem while providing an incentive to innovate and produce better packaging and close the loop on materials.

Plastic packaging makers may be less credit-worthy in the future as governments try to curb marine litter, Moody’s Corp. said in a report…

Packaging consumes about 40 percent of plastics worldwide and accounts for about 60 percent of the material that ends up as waste. Governments worldwide are concerned that plastics take decades or even centuries to degrade and that they’ve been working their way into the food chain as they seep into rivers and oceans. By 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation…

The issue has garnered attention from one of the world’s biggest oil companies. Earlier this year, BP Plc cut its forecast for oil demand from petrochemicals by 2 million barrels a day, citing the risk that regulations tighten on plastic products and shopping bags. Packaging makes up about 3 percent of global oil use, according to the company’s chief economist, Spencer Dale.

Closing the loop might start to seem less crazy. My Amazon Fresh delivery person will pick up my used cooler – why not take back the plastic packaging for recycling, or develop other types of reusable containers? As more of this gets automated, hopefully the “ick” factor will be reduced.

I wish people would stop hating on plastic straws though. They are so tiny, and so useful to help children drink without spilling things. And have you ever tried to wash a “reusable” straw? Busy working people trying to raise the aforementioned children do not have time for that. So I say either invent a straw washing machine or give these tiny pieces of useful plastic a pass and focus on the mountains of plastic wrap and food containers that are actually filling our garbage cans, trucks and landfills.

Boulder vs. Exxon

Boulder, Colorado is suing Exxon.

The politically liberal town known as the gateway to the Rocky Mountains and two counties in the same neck of the woods said Colorado’s economy depends on snow, water and cool weather when they accused Exxon Mobil Corp. and Suncor Energy Inc. of “causing and exacerbating climate change” in a state-court lawsuit filed Tuesday…

The Colorado communities said they’re facing expenses and costs related to earlier snow melt, which has increased the risk of forest fires, dried-out soil, beetle outbreaks and drought.

The lawsuit joins others against fossil fuel companies filed by California and New York communities, but this is the first brought by an interior state. “Colorado is one of the fastest-warming states in the nation,” Elise Jones, Boulder County Commissioner said in a statement. “Climate change is not just about sea level rise. It affects all of us in the middle of the country as well.”

sustainability risk

HSBC publishes its “sustainability risk policies” (a public version of them anyway). They are fairly general, but what I find interesting is that they follow various international conventions from the UN, World Bank, and others in making lending decisions. Examples include the Paris convention and the Ramsar wetland convention. So even if politicians in certain countries deride these international bodies and conventions as being a lot of hot air, they can in fact have a large impact when adopted widely by public and private actors around the world.

big banks divesting from dirtiest fossil fuels

A number of banks have stopped funding new coal and tar sand projects due to climate risk, including HSBC.

Europe’s largest bank HSBC said on Friday it would mostly stop funding new coal power plants, oil sands and arctic drilling, becoming the latest in a long line of investors to shun the fossil fuels.

Other large banks such as ING and BNP Paribas have made similar pledges in recent months as investors have mounted pressure to make sure bank’s actions align with the Paris Agreement, a global pact to limit greenhouse gas emissions and curb rising temperatures.

I might like to believe that the finance industry has become socially responsible, but I don’t. It is completely amoral. Still, that means that when it thinks there is a significant risk to investment returns and takes action as a result, we can assume the risk is real.

 

Impossible Foods

Impossible Foods is a synthetic meat company.

The ingredient, made from soybean roots and genetically engineered yeast, goes into vegetarian Impossible Burgers, which are available in a growing number of restaurants — even fast-food stalwart White Castle…

It contains heme (pronounced HEEM), a key part of red meat and a source of iron, which humans can’t live without. Think of Brown’s discovery as plant-based blood. Brown, 63, says it makes the Impossible Burger sizzle, smell and taste like real red meat…

Fake meat will be one of the year’s hottest food trends. An increasing number of flexitarians — people not looking to eat meat at every meal — are helping to drive interest, according to Rabobank. Sales of alternative proteins are dwarfed by the $49 billion red meat and chicken market, but they’re expected to grow about 17 percent a year to $863 million in 2021, according to a CoBank estimate.

Apparently the company is having some trouble with the FDA, which it voluntarily sought approval from.

San Francisco area earthquake forecast

USGS reminds us that a big earthquake in the San Francisco area is eventually coming.

In the 50 years prior to 1906, there were 13 earthquakes with a magnitude between 6 and 7, but only 6 earthquakes of similar magnitude in the 110 years since 1906. The rate of large earthquakes is expected to increase from this low level as tectonic plate movements continue to increase the stress on the faults in the region…

Smaller earthquakes occur more frequently than larger earthquakes. The probability that an earthquake of magnitude 6.0 or larger will occur before 2043 is 98 percent. The probability of at least one earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or larger in the San Francisco Bay region is 72 percent, and for at least one earthquake of magnitude 7.0 or larger it is 51 percent. These probabilities include earthquakes on the major faults, lesser-known faults, and unknown faults.

water tunnels

As tunneling technology continues to advance, this article says that transportation tunnels get all the press but water tunnels are also becoming much more numerous and common.

Most of the attention in other cities may go to the multibillion-dollar transportation tunnel projects, like the Second Avenue Subway in New York City or the Gateway tunnel between New York and New Jersey. But the sheer number of water tunnels being built or planned exceeds the sexier transportation tunnels. “There are more water tunnels than transportation tunnels,” says Mike Schultz, technical strategy leader for the geotechnical-structural group at CDM Smith.

Egger at Black & Veatch estimates there are about 200 miles of water tunneling in various stages of planning and design in North America, 50 miles of which directly involve Black & Veatch. Jacobs alone is involved in the development of  more 150 miles of water, wastewater and CSO tunnels around the world.

Technology has reduced the price of tunnels enough so that mid-size cities like Fort Wayne and Alexandria, Va., can use a tunnel option to handle their excess water. Technology also has made tunneling a viable option in some cities with soft ground, such as Houston, which couldn’t have considered building tunnels just a decade ago.

Full disclosure: This is the business I am in and I have a business relationship with one of the firms above. Well, not the tunneling business specifically but the water management business. I would much rather see water managed using green infrastructure and ecosystem-based solutions as much as possible, but a backbone of hard infrastructure certainly has its place in urban areas.

“coal plant chicken”

No, coal plant chicken is not grilling chicken using waste heat from a coal plant, although that is not a terrible idea. It’s the idea that coal-fired utilities are competing for slices of a shrinking pie, and they are going to blink out of existence one by one.

Zindler, BNEF’s head of Americas, said about half of all U.S. coal plants lose money on any given day as cheap gas, along with wind and solar farms, push electricity prices lower. Meanwhile, demand for power is flat. The result, Zindler said, is coal plants wrestle to outlast one another, fighting for a bigger piece of the pie. “Every day across multiple regional transmission operating systems, we see power plants staring across at each other and saying ‘Who is going to go first?’ ” Zindler said. “It’s only a matter of time as these plants try to outlast each other.”

Elsewhere in the same article, coal-fired utility executives say this is not true because coal and nuclear are currently the only two cost-effective ways to generate a constant base load. I don’t have the expertise to agree or disagree, but I know that nuclear technology is advancing, and battery technology which can be used to smooth out intermittent loads is also advancing.

farm robots

Farm machinery is getting more high-tech and more automated all the time, due in part ot climate change.

Technological improvements from boosting crop yields to data-tracking systems will be required in coming decades as companies adapt to shifts in weather patterns, according to BMI Research. That may increasingly push agribusiness companies, especially grain handlers and input firms, into acquiring agritech startups.

“The rise of agtech use and ‘precision agriculture’ will benefit or disrupt a number of operations and businesses in the process,” the company said in a report Tuesday.

Farmers and businesses around the world are poised to feel the impact of climate change as supplies get disrupted and farmland and yields come under pressure. At the same time, agriculture, one of the largest sources of gas emissions, will face action from regulators targeting livestock and soil management.