You should probably look into helping the Boarines out, there are only 15 million of them, and they are possibly dying off as well.
Trade routes are setup through the Race Specific interaction screens, you found the menu item, but the option to setup trade routes hasn't been unlocked yet.
You can right click to cancel out of most screens.
In combat, you can left click on the type of energy allocation you want to increase it, it will take it out of another power source. It makes transferring power faster.
