The Weekly Anthropocene, October 26 2022
A Dispatch from the Wild, Weird World of Humanity and its Biosphere
Papahānaumokuākea
The magnificently named Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument is the largest protected area under the U.S. flag, created by President Bush in 2006 and more than quadrupled in size by President Obama in 2016. It now protects ten islands and atolls northwest of Hawaii (boundary pictured in the map above), as well as 1,510,000 square kilometers of life-rich Pacific Ocean surrounding them. For context, that’s an area larger than Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, New York, and Florida combined where fishing and other extractive industries are completely prohibited-the largest no-fishing zone in all Earth’s ocean.
Now, a new study published in Science has found that Papahānaumokuākea is doing its job spectacularly, providing a space for tuna populations to recover while also benefiting nearby Pacific fisheries. The researchers examined fishing records from the period between 2010 and 2019 and calculated that after the 2016 expansion, catch rates for yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares) increased by 54% in waters near the reserve, while catch rates for bigeye tuna increased by 12% and catch rates for other fish species increased by 8%. Notably, tuna catches near the reserve were found to increase even when looking at individual fishers over time, and catch rates were divided by the total number of fish hooks in the water, so it’s not just more effective fishing crews or more extensive gear moving into the area. Catch rates were highest just outside the reserve’s boundaries and trailed off with distance.
This builds off several other studies finding that from marine protected areas, or MPAs, provide immense, wide-ranging benefits to both humans and the wild biosphere. A 2020 study found that revenue from Hawaii’s longline fishing industry was actually 13.7% higher in 2014-2017 than it was from 2010-2013, an early sign that the expansion of Papahānaumokuākea was at the very least not harming local fishers. Furthermore, a new comprehensive literature review and meta-analysis of over 22,000 studies covering 241 different marine protected areas around the world found that well-managed MPAs are a highly effective ocean-based climate solution, substantially increasing biodiversity, local fishers’ incomes, carbon sequestration1, and even protection of coastal communities from storms.
Altogether, this new research is very strong evidence for a classic “spillover effect,” where a marine protected area both protects biodiversity and increases fishers’ catch nearby. Essentially, we can increase fish catches by banning fishing in big chunks of the ocean to give the species a chance to grow, breed, and recover in safety before coming back out. And as the meta-analysis found, doing that helps draw down atmospheric and protect coastlines from climate disasters as well! Just one of the many ways that we can “have our cake and it eat too” with smart ecological management in the Anthropocene. Great news!
Clean Energy: Supercharged!
The Biden Administration has awarded $2.8 billion to 20 companies to boost US manufacturing of electric vehicle batteries! The money, from last year’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, will help fund 21 projects building or expanding of EV battery manufacturing facilities across 12 states. (See map above: here’s the breakdown with details). Of particular note is that many of these projects focus on domestic processing of key minerals in the battery supply chain, such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and graphite, and will substantively reduce dependence on an increasingly authoritarian China2.
“This is truly a remarkable time for manufacturing in America, as President Biden’s Agenda and historic investments supercharge the private sector to ensure our clean energy future is American-made,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “Producing advanced batteries and components here at home will accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels to meet the strong demand for electric vehicles, creating more good-paying jobs across the country.”
And this is just the first tranche of the $7 billion in BIL funds for batteries! And beyond that, the much, much bigger Inflation Reduction Act clean energy investment money (totaling $391 billion on energy and climate spending!) hasn’t even started to come through yet!
We’re already seeing that venture capital is psyched by the guaranteed federal support-around $28 billion in new private-sector manufacturing investment has been announced since the IRA was signed on August 16th. Clean energy is now one of the surest economic bets in the world, as the next decade is now absolutely, letter-of-the-law certain to see ongoing massive American federal investment in the clean energy revolution. This is a hugely successful (though already underreported) victory from the Biden Administration. Spectacular news!
On October 21, the US EPA formally began work to establish a “green bank,” the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. It will use a whopping $27 billion in Inflation Reduction Act money to give grants to low-income and disadvantaged communities across America to deploy clean energy and zero-emissions projects.
"It's exciting to know that we are creating a program that will infuse billions of dollars of capital into local communities that will have a direct impact on energy efficiency programs, community solar programs or [other] programs that they know will reduce pollution and create jobs," EPA Administrator Michael Regan, to Reuters.
This is really big and really great news! A US green bank like this is exactly what environmentalists have been clamoring for since the Bush Administration, and now that we have it the sound of victory is getting drowned out by all the other things happening in the world. Amidst the tumult, let’s take a moment to celebrate the win-and get excited for the amazing progress it will make possible!
On October 7, an Australian company opened the only cobalt mine in America, in the Salmon River Mountains of Idaho. Cobalt is an absolutely critical material for the global clean energy transition: for example, an EV’s battery pack can contain up to 40 pounds of it. Notable beyond the clean energy importance is how respectful this mining project in particular is being to the local ecology: they will treat their wastewater extensively to prevent toxins from entering streams, dispose of waste rock and tailings in lined cells, and have voluntarily, proactively committed to fund the new Upper Salmon Conservation Action Program (in partnership with the Idaho Conservation League) to protect and restore local fish habitat3. A 21st century mine for a better Anthropocene, on both the global and local scales! Great news.
California regulators have unanimously approved the Doheny Ocean Desalination Project, a $140 million new desalination plant in Orange County that will provide 5 million gallons of drinking water per day, enough for 40,000 people. Such projects will likely be key to Southern California’s future as the American West undergoes its worst drought in over 1,200 years (an estimated 42% of which is caused by climate change).
Australia has finalized a contract for the world’s largest grid-scale battery storage project to date. The Waratah Super Battery in the state of New South Wales will be a massive 850-megawatt/1,680-megawatt-hour facility and will sit on the former location of the Munmorah coal plant (demolished in 2017). This new mega-battery will provide enough grid capacity to allow the 2025 closure of Eraring, Australia’s largest coal plant, to go forward as planned. Great news!
Britain
As this newsletter previously reported, wild bison returned to Britain after a millennia-long absence in July 2022, when the Wilder Blean project introduced three adult females into Kent’s Blean Woods. Now, it has been revealed that a new, unexpected milestone was reached: the first wild baby bison born in Britain for thousands of years! One of the arriving females turned out to be unexpectedly pregnant (bison have evolved to hide their pregnancies to avoid showing weakness to predators, so it was easy to miss), and a calf was born sometime around September 9th, with the announcement delayed due to the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Bison are an extremely precocial4 species, so the calf is already very active.
“It’s amazing, within a week she was so sure on her feet. She now seems to absolutely love the rain and she’ll hare around in circles, doing donuts.”-Tom Gibbs, bison ranger.
More broadly, the bison are already acting as ecosystem engineers in their new home, creating pathways with their bulk that break up the canopy and let in more light to the forest floor. Anecdotal evidence indicates that dung beetles, songbirds, and slow-worms (a reptile, despite the name) have all become more common since the bison arrived. A bull bison from Germany is set to arrive soon, and more arrivals are planned to grow the herd further after that. The future for this bold rewilding project looks bright!
Marine protected areas help sequester carbon in several ways: by protecting mangroves, seagrass, tidal marshes, and macroalgae and allowing them to grow, preventing carbon-rich sediments from being disturbed by trawlers, and even by protecting the fish themselves. How do fish sequester carbon? Fish directly or indirectly eat algae that have formed their bodies out of atmospheric carbon through photosynthesis. Then, the fishes’ feces, and eventually their dead bodies, sink to the ocean depths, burying that carbon in the sediment. The effect is even stronger for whales, which have recently been found to sequester way more carbon than previously thought. This writer absolutely loves this kind of “biological ocean carbon pump” research because it’s such a perfect, on-the-nose mix of the “classical” whale-protecting environmentalism of the 1970s and the global carbon emissions and sequestration concerns of the 2020s. Everything on Earth is connected, and we’re finding more and more than when we restore or create new healthy, functioning ecosystems, it has even more positive benefits than we expected.
This comes on the heels of Biden’s unprecedented action to choke off Chinese access to advanced semiconductors; in this writer’s opinion, a welcome touch of liberal economic nationalism against an increasingly dictatorial rival.
Aside from security and geopolitics issues, one very good reason to support critical mineral mining in America is this: with our relatively environmentalist culture, mines here are likely to meet much higher safety and ecological well-being standards than their competitors in China or Africa.
Precocial: that is, bison babies are relatively mature and can move around on their own right after birth, often within minutes-a key trait for surviving as a prey animal on a predator-filled prairie when your parents can’t carry your around. Humans are the opposite: we’re highly altricial, as our babies take a long time to mature.