The Weekly Anthropocene, August 21 2024
Two years of the Inflation Reduction Act, glass recycling for wetland restoration, lions in Cameroon, baby skates, the world's largest urban park opens in Mexico City, storks in India, and more!
United States
August 2024 saw the two-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act, with a new report calculating that the Act has already created over 334,000 new clean energy jobs. Many more are on the way as cleantech manufacturing investments continue to multiply across America.
“Two years ago, I signed the Inflation Reduction Act—the largest climate investment in history that is lowering energy costs and creating good-paying union jobs, while taking on Big Pharma to lower prescription drug costs—with Vice President Harris casting the tie-breaking vote. Already, this law is lowering health care costs for millions of families, strengthening energy security, and creating more than 330,000 clean energy jobs.”
-President Joe Biden
Here are some more amazing stats1:
For the 2023 tax returns, 3.4 million American families claimed over $8 billion in home clean energy tax credits.
More than 250,000 Americans have claimed the IRA’s electric vehicle tax credit since January 2024.
Companies have announced over $900 billion in clean energy & manufacturing investments since the Biden-Harris Administration took office.
Per the Treasury Department, “75% of private sector clean energy investments have flowed to counties with lower than median household incomes.”
Over 99% of high-poverty counties in the United States are home to a new investment project funded by one of the Biden-Harris Administration’s new laws.
The IRA isn’t just supercharging the renewables revolution - it’s delivering a longed-for just transition away from fossil fuels, benefiting long-overlooked communities with a new prosperity powered by the clean electron economy. This is arguably the biggest economic success in America since the New Deal, and a still-underreported massive success from the Biden-Harris Administration2. To help keep it, share and discuss this story with the voters you know!
6,000 sheep will soon be grazing across eight solar farms in Texas, the largest solar grazing project in U.S. history.
Texas also just made a deal for an enhanced geothermal energy storage project!
The gigantic 176-turbine, 2,640 MW (2.6 GW!) Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project is actively getting built, with more and more turbines in the water! It’s such a success, the parent company is buying up adjacent offshore wind leases to potentially expand the CVOW wind farm even further. America is finally getting giant electron-generating artificial reefs. Epic progress!
In other offshore wind news, this writer’s home state of Maine finalized its lease for a long-proposed 12-turbine floating offshore wind research array, America’s first! Yay.
Maine is also getting a revolutionary grid-scale iron-air battery installation at the site of a former pulp and paper mill. Spectacular!
American innovator company Natron Energy is building “Project Neptune,” a $1.4 billion battery gigafactory in Edgecomb County, North Carolina, set to create 1,000 jobs and produce 24 GW (24,000 MW!) of batteries per year when complete. This is just one of the multitude of new cleantech factories that have sprung up nationwide thanks to the ongoing IRA cleantech boom- but this one is extra special.
Natron Energy’s new North Carolina factory will be the largest-ever sodium-ion battery factory in America, using a recently developed battery chemistry (and their unique Prussian blue electrodes) to make fully functional large-scale batteries containing zero lithium, cobalt, nickel, or copper, instead using much more commonly available minerals like aluminum, manganese, iron, and sodium. Natron also claims that their sodium-ion batteries are nonflammable and can charge and discharge power faster than lithium-ion batteries.
Project Neptune is a bold bet on a powerful new technology, with amazing potential to catalyze a new industry that could help rev up the renewables revolution even further. It’s also a smart geopolitical move for America, as China has developed a substantial lead in lithium-ion battery manufacturing market share, but sodium-ion batteries are just starting out and the USA is moving a lot faster this time. Great work!
Founded by two college students in 2020, scrappy startup Glass Half Full has become the only glass recycling company in New Orleans, Louisiana - and they’re helping build climate resilience along the way3. Glass Half Full collect glass bottles and other used glassware from businesses, then grinds it into a fine sand which can be used for coastal restoration, whether filling erosion-control sandbags or directly used in wetland restoration projects. An NSF-funded research project found that local plants can grow in the newly milled sand and that it doesn’t harm fish or crabs.
Impressively, this model seems scalable: Glass Half Full is breaking even and expanding their coverage area, they’ve processed seven million pounds of glass in their four years of existence, and they’re just getting started, with plans to build a new facility that will be able to process 300,000 pounds of glass a day. As The New York Times notes, they might just have found a way to solve a glaring mismatch: only about a third of U.S. glass waste is recycled, while sand is in ever-higher demand around the world for construction, restoration, erosion control, and disaster relief projects. Awesome work!
Cameroon
The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Cameroonian government have successfully radio-collared seven lions in Cameroon’s Bouba Ndjidda National Park. The collars will upload data to satellites four times a day, providing near-real time tracking that empowers rangers to plan anti-poaching patrols where the lions are. Another great example of proactive Anthropocene conservation! Great work.
“Over a decade ago, we took on organized elephant poachers from Sudan, and succeeded in pushing them out of Bouba Ndjidda and Cameroon. GPS collars have helped us to safeguard our elephants, and we are very pleased to now use the same technique for lions.”
-Serge Patrick Tadjo, Warden of Bouba Ndjidda
Iraq
After being in the works for twenty years, a new 300 MW, 115-kilometer power line between Iraq and Turkey has finally opened, following a new power line between Jordan and Iraq in March. These projects, along with Iraq’s embryonic solar farm efforts, have nontrivial geopolitical import, as they make Iraq’s fragile quasi-democracy less dependent on Iran for electricity. They’re also another instance of an underreported global mega-trend: the World Grid continues to be built!
Australia
The Maugean skate (Dipturus maugeanus) is one of the most endangered fish in the world, with possibly fewer than 1,000 individuals living only in the estuary of Macquarie Harbor, Tasmania. Now, a University of Tasmania captive breeding program begun in 2023 is showing signs of serious success, with over half of 50 wild-collected skate eggs hatching and a wild-caught female skate laying over 100 more eggs after capture. Recently, one of those 100 hatched as well, heralding the first-ever Maugean skate born from an egg laid in captivity. Great work!
Mexico
Mexico City is opening the world’s largest urban park, a culmination of years of ecosystem restoration efforts. Lake Texcoco Ecological Park4 covers 14,000 hectares of restored wetland, grassland, and forests (an area twice the size of Manhattan!) interspersed with new sports fields and hiking trails.
The site was originally planned to host a new airport (the concrete foundations of an unbuilt terminal are still there), but that was canceled in 2018 and replaced by the ecological park vision of architect Iñaki Echeverría. The design is a meticulous megaproject of hydrologic engineering, with banks of red tezontle rock forming new networks of ponds and canals to retain water. That serves many purposes, including to create wildlife habitat (one pre-existing artificial lake within the area is already home to 60,000 birds), to provide oases of cool during extreme heatwaves, and to help recharge the aquifer below Mexico City. It’s a landscape-scale multitool for the Anthropocene.
“This is the main goal of the project: to make this valley inhabitable for the next 80 or 100 years…
Our mantra is to bring as much water back as possible.”
-Iñaki Echeverría
This project also has profound historical resonance; the original Lake Texcoco sustained the mysterious civilization of Teotihuacan and the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan on its shores, but the lake was almost entirely drained by the Spanish, with modern Mexico City occupying much of its former area. Now, a part is back, as a unique mélange of human-made ecosystem services. Amazing work!
India
India’s lesser-known eastern state of Assam has become home to some fascinating examples of human-wildlife coexistence. Endangered greater adjutant storks are thriving at the Boragaon landfill, overseen by an all-women “Stork Sisters” grassroots conservation group (founded by biologist Purnima Devi Barman in 2007) that has helped more than double the local greater adjutant population.
The state of Assam has also launched Haati, an app to send people an early warning when elephant herds are approaching their area, hopefully reducing conflict.
The state of Bihar is seeing a boom in makhana or “fox nut” growing. This type of edible seed-bearing water lily (Euryale ferox) has gained popularity as they can survive wild weather and unexpected floods which would destroy other crops, with innovations in cultivation and processing helping to move the sector forward.
And the cleantech revolution continues to surge across India, with new projects springing up rapidly. Just the last few weeks saw progress on new solar farms in Rajasthan, pumped hydro in Maharashtra, battery storage in Uttar Pradesh, and a new solar factory in Tamil Nadu, among many others!
The Big Picture
A landmark new paper calculates that due to rapidly accelerating clean energy progress around the world, human civilization is now likely “at or near” a peak in carbon emissions, and the rate of global warming will likely to slow down in upcoming decades
“Various analyses suggest that under current mitigation policies we are at or near a time of peak anthropogenic carbon emissions…
The central expectation is a declining rate of warming under climate policies now in place.”
-Duan & Caldeira 2024, Environmental Research Letters.
To be clear, we’re not out of the woods yet: a slowing rate of global warming means that the planet is still getting hotter, just not as fast as before. Still, this is an incredible milestone and a sign of the amazing progress we’ve made in recent years! Let’s double down and move further still. Great news!
Also worth noting: the IRA’s mass closing of tax loopholes means that the bill funding all this still reduces the deficit in the long run. IRA provisions have already led to revenue gains of over $1 billion just from 1,500 individual millionaire tax cheats.
In fact, the IRA’s success has become so undeniably apparent, we’re already starting to see pleasantly surprising glimmers of bipartisan support for sustained cleantech funding. Amazingly, 18 House Republicans recently signed a letter advocating to protect the IRA’s clean energy tax credits. Maybe in a few years, we’ll see renewable energy spending attaining a bipartisan “sacrosanct” status in U.S. politics akin to military spending"?
Big thanks to the reader who told me about this awesome story! I hadn’t heard of it before, and it’s really cool.
Often known as PELT, the Spanish acronym.
Thanks for the more positive look at work going on out there. I needed some refresher, it's easy to get caught up. Glad to hear about lots of policy becoming the new norm! Which can lead to a global collaboration which is the ultimate goal!✨
"Natron Energy’s new North Carolina factory will be the largest-ever sodium-ion battery factory in America"
This is a great development! Battery technology is improving almost daily!