The Weekly Anthropocene, April 3 2024
The hybrid wolves of Europe, Brazil's creative health solutions, the largest power plant in history is being built in India, coral restoration in Indonesia, U.S. solar, sawfish, robot dogs, and more!
European Union
Mirroring America’s “coywolves,” the nations of Europe are increasingly home to hybrid “wolfdogs,” often the descendants of neglected rural working dogs who “went wild” and interacted with wolves. Despite some advocating for all hybrids to be killed to “preserve” some nebulous concept of wolf purity, the only place this is a problem is within the categorization-obsessed human mind. Free-living wolves chose to mate with dogs, and their offspring are doing well. Wolf-dog hybrids are now present in “nearly every European country with wolves,” and seem to be thriving and reproducing well in the wild. In Tuscany, among other regions, hybrids may account for as much as 70% of the wolf population, and their population is “growing steadily.” They may even have some special evolutionary advantages, like disease resistance. Good news!
“In the modern, human-dominated world, maybe it is useful for the wolves to have some dog-like behaviour in them.”
-Dr. Miha Krofel
Brazil
Brazil is suffering multiple severe consequences of climate change at once: a massive drought and accompanying wildfires in the Amazon Rainforest (plus floods in a different part!), as well as a nationwide epidemic of mosquito-borne dengue fever.
However, both of these crises are being handled really quite well, all things considered. Forest loss is continuing to decrease in the Brazilian Amazon despite the uptick in wildfires, as the country moves away from Bolsonaro’s blatant encouragement of illegal deforestation. Enforcing environmental law makes a big difference!
And on the dengue fever front, years of hard work are finally bearing fruit. While over 1 million Brazilians have fallen sick with dengue fever (although thankfully there have been less than 300 deaths so far), a newly developed dengue vaccine from Japan, dubbed Qdenga, is now being rolled out to the public.
Furthermore, a long-running project by the World Mosquito Program is addressing the root cause, and literally taking the fight to the virus, by mass-breeding and releasing mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia bacteria which directly compete for resources with the dengue virus within the mosquito bodies (interrupting disease transmission) and can be passed from females to their young, spreading through the population. The city of Niterói, near Rio de Janeiro, already appears to be “fully protected” by previous Wolbachia-infected mosquito releases in the area, with just 403 cases (a rate of 69 cases per 100,000 people) to Rio’s 42,000 cases (700 per 100,000).
Several other efforts to release genetically modified sterile or “producing non-biting male children only” mosquitoes in Brazil are also in the works. Even as a warming world provides conditions for diseases to spread, humans are winning more and more on public health!
“Niterói is the first Brazilian city we have fully protected with our Wolbachia method. The whole city is covered by Wolbachia mosquitoes, which is why the dengue cases are dropping significantly.”
-Alex Jackson, World Mosquito Program
Senegal
The recent presidential election in the West African nation of Senegal was a triumph for democracy. Despite recent violence leading to fears of a coup, a free and fair election defeated the ruling party’s candidate and looks nearly certain to produce a peaceful transfer of power—plus potentially some environmental progress as well. The new president-elect of Senegal, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, has pledged to combat the longstanding threat of exploitative international IUU fishing fleets (IUU here means illegal, unreported, or unregulated), which has become a major threat to Senegal’s food security-vital small-scale artisanal fishing sector. Faye also plans to develop a national artificial reefs1 program to reconstruct damaged marine habitats.
Concurrently, renowned NGO Panthera is using hundreds of camera traps to survey the wildlife of Senegal’s Niokolo-Koba National Park in unprecedented detail. Lion and leopard populations appear to be on the rebound! This park is developing into the premier wildlife stronghold in West Africa.
India
The Khavda Renewable Energy Park, a gigantic complex of solar and wind farms currently under construction in the barren salt deserts of the Indian state of Gujarat, is of such ridiculously gigantic proportions that it’s hard to properly talk about. When complete around 2029 (it’s being built by India’s mega-rich Adani Group), Khavda will have an electricity-generating capacity of nearly 30 gigawatts (30,000 megawatts!!!). But that dry number doesn’t come close to conveying the sheer visceral scale involved.
It will physically cover2 200 square miles (more than five times the size of Paris, France), and will produce enough electricity for 16 million Indian homes (assuming a conservative 2 people per home, that’s more humans than the entire population of Texas). It will be the largest power plant, of any source, in the history of human civilization (!!!), beating out China’s Three Gorges Dam by a considerable margin. This is just…wow. This is what a really really big and rapid clean energy transition looks like!
“There is no choice for India but to start doing things at a previously unimagined size and scale.”
-Sagar Adani, Adani Green Energy Limited
Indonesia
A new study reports on a highly successful new method of coral reef restoration tested over the past few years in Indonesia’s Spermonde Archipelago, southwest of Sulawesi. The archipelago’s reefs were devastated by years of dynamite fishing, but began to rebound thanks to a collaborative restoration project deploying “reef stars,” six-legged steel structures stabilizing and protecting coral fragments.
This turned out to be a highly effective method, with a fully recovered reef arising in just four years! While this method doesn’t directly help with bleaching and warming waters, it’s a vital new lifeline for physically damaged reefs, hopefully giving them the “breathing space” to adapt and evolve to the changing oceans of Anthropocene Earth (like Cambodian and other reefs are beginning to do). Great work!
United States
The Rye Development company has been awarded $81 million from Biden’s Department of Energy to further their plans to build the Lewis Ridge pumped hydro energy storage project on disused coal mining land in southeastern Kentucky. Another great “coal to clean” transition in the making!
The U.S. solar power industry had its biggest January ever in 2024, with over 2 gigawatts (2,000 MW) of newly installed solar accounting for 87.3% of new electricity-generating capacity nationwide in January 2024. All renewables combined accounted for a super-colossal 98.3%! Absolutely spectacular.
And this is still just the tip of the iceberg: solar is so economically successful now that investors are straining at the leash to build new projects, with the few remaining barriers including grid interconnection backlogs and local NIMBYism. At year-end 2023, the “waiting list” of proposed solar projects awaiting grid connections to be built reached an unbelievable record high of 1,086 GW, or 1,086,000 MW! To be fair, some of that is likely double-counting when a project is proposed for multiple locations and will be built at the one where the grid can accommodate it first, but still, wow!
Thanks to a new voluntary agreement between Granite Shore Power and the U.S. EPA, New Hampshire’s Merrimack Station and Schiller Station, the last two coal plants in all New England, will shut down and be replaced by renewables. Schiller Station, with its valuable preexisting grid connections, will close in 2025 and become the site of a new battery storage project with the potential to be hooked up to future offshore wind farms. Merrimack will close in 2028, and the site will anchor a new clean energy center with 100 MW of solar and more battery storage. In addition to the broader climate benefits, this will remove the single largest source of air pollution in the state of New Hampshire. Another epic milestone in the making!
“We're undertaking a bold step forward and making good on a promise to transition our coal fired plants to clean energy facilities.”
-Jim Andrews, CEO of Granite Shore Power
The Biden Administration is making possible the first-ever reopening of a shut-down nuclear plant in American history, with a new $1.5 billion loan to restore and upgrade the 800 MW Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan. Great work; we need as much safe, clean power as we can get!
After a wave of unexplained deaths in Florida’s critically endangered smalltooth sawfish population (possibly disease or pollution-related), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is launching an unprecedented effort to proactively rescue and rehabilitate surviving individuals in aquaria. Great work; NOAA is on the ball in acting before this becomes an existential threat to the species!
In the rising clean energy powerhouse that is Texas, former oil and gas workers are moving into next-generation geothermal by the dozen, repurposing their drilling and hydraulic skills to speed the renewables revolution!
A utility in Connecticut is using a Boston Dynamics robot dog to inspect grid substations much more frequently than humans can, hopefully spotting problems earlier and reducing outages.
And in Alaska, another Boston Dynamics robot dog will soon patrol the Fairbanks airport to scare wild animals off the runway. Reminds me of Japan’s Super Monster Wolf! What a fascinating time we live in.
Keep in mind that “cover” here doesn’t mean “cover” in the same sense as a parking lot: for example, widely spaced out wind turbines can coexist with wide areas of relatively undisturbed land, and vegetation and wildlife can often thrive even amidst relatively densely packed solar arrays.
I have a friend who works in renewables development on the financing side (on the developer not finance side). She told me that IRA has unleashed a ton of financing but is also delaying things because the incentives to buy domestically manufactured panels and batteries now wildly outpaces production capacity. Have you heard much about this? Any idea of resolution timeline?
Another great issue! Where to start!
1. Dengue fever a quickly spreading-problem..now in Puerto Rico on a large scale. Hope we use the Japanese vaccine!
2. India solar development! What a project!
3. American nuclear power renaissance.. unfairly maligned in days gone by, but making a comeback. With a few reservations, I'm onboard with it!
4. Twirling behavior in fish. A serious problem, but pretty well known. I found this on the web (a site devoted to aquarium maintenance):
"This symptom is most often caused by a gram-positive bacterium. Per the book “Fundamentals of Ornamental Fish Health”, Helen Roberts, 2010, Page 181:
“The most common bacteria in this group that cause disease in fish are Streptococcus spp.; other Gram-positive genera that are closely related to Streptococcus and cause disease in fish include Lactococcus , Enterococcus , and Vagococcus . Neurological signs are extremely common in fish with streptococcal infections, and abnormal swimming behavior such as spiraling or spinning is often reported (Yanong and Francis-Floyd, 2006). High mortality may also occur.
Streptococcus infection can cause neurologic signs if it enters the brain. This infection is rare but has been found in rainbow sharks, rosy barbs, danios, and some tetras and cichlids. All fish are considered susceptible. Signs of neurologic disease caused by Streptococcus infection include spinning or spiraling in the water..."
https://aquariumscience.org/index.php/11-8-twirling/