The Weekly Anthropocene, August 7 2024
Wind & solar > fossil fuels in EU power sector, swimming in the Seine, sturgeon in Sweden, $4.3 billion for 25 U.S. climate action projects, monarchs in the Bay Area, and more!
European Union
According to a new report from think tank Ember, wind and solar together provided more electricity to the European Union than all fossil fuels combined in the first half of 2024! For January through June 2024, wind and solar provided 30% of the EU’s electricity, while fossil fuels provided just 27%. When you add in other low-carbon sources like nuclear and hydro (which are very helpful, but aren’t rapidly growing like wind and solar), non-fossil fuel sources provided a full 73% of the EU’s electricity in the first half of this year.
And EU emissions continue to fall blazingly fast, with power sector emissions in the first half of 2024 a full 31% lower than in the first half of 2022, an unprecedented decline in just two years. Nearly a third of all climate pollution from the entire European Union’s electricity generation, gone in two years. Of course, there’s still transport and heating to electrify on top of electricity generation, but abundant clean energy will make those easier to decarbonize as well!
These are some truly epic milestones, the latest of many from a supranational union that’s long been in the vanguard of the fast-accelerating global cleantech revolution! Superb news.
The Paris 2024 Olympics successfully held a swimming event in the Seine, after an epic years-long effort to clean up the historic river. One vital component was the construction of the Austerlitz Basin, giant rainwater storage tank the size of 20 Olympic swimming pools, meant to prevent runoff and overflow from sewage systems during storms. The story has been hotly followed lately, with Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo taking a swim on July 17 and last-minute drama during the Games themselves as the water quality hovered on the edge of acceptable limits. By 2025, if all goes well, the Seine will be open for public swimming for the first time since 1923. Hopes are high for fish stocks to rapidly grow in the coming years.
This is an urban design, water quality, public health, and conservation success of profound cultural resonance; a model to the world. Great work!
Atlantic sturgeon (Acipenser oxyrinchus oxyrinchus) have been reintroduced in Sweden for the first time ever, with 100 juvenile sturgeon individuals set to be released into the Göta River over a multi-week period. The species historically spawned in this river but were driven locally extinct by overfishing and pollution in the early 1900s. Another awesome rewilding success!
China
Norwegian consultancy Rystad Energy reports that the total installed wind and solar capacity in China has now overtaken the total coal capacity1, and predicts that solar alone will surpass coal by 2026. They note that 100 GW of new solar were built in China in the first half of 2024, compared to 8 GW of coal. Another amazing milestone!
United States
On July 22, 20242, the Biden-Harris Administration announced an incredible $4.3 billion in Inflation Reduction Act-funded EPA grants for 25 selected climate action projects across the nation. Per the EPA, “The 25 selected applications – from states, a Tribe, local governments, and coalitions of these entities – will receive federal funding to implement local and regional solutions. Many of these projects can be expanded and provide examples that other states, local governments, Tribes, and even businesses can replicate in their work to tackle the climate crisis.”
It’s almost hard to even try to summarize these 25 projects, because each one really deserves a full article of its own just to describe the concept, and probably an entire book once it’s finished. But here’s a quick sample of the scope and scale of what just got funded!
The 25 selected applicants include:
Wildfire mitigation and forest management across Montana.
EV chargers for heavy-duty vehicles up and down the I-95 Corridor
Replacing a coal plant with a solar farm in Cuyahoga County, Ohio.
Helping local governments accelerate clean energy siting, zoning, and permitting in Michigan.
Climate-smart agriculture in Nebraska
New energy-efficient heat pumps to warm entire communities in Alaska.
Conserving Atlantic coastal wetlands from Virginia to Georgia.
And many, many more!!!
“Under President Biden’s leadership, this Administration has mobilized every tool and resource to reduce climate pollution, advance environmental justice, and spark economic growth in communities across America, and today’s transformational investments will further empower Governors and Mayors to seize these opportunities.
As part of President Biden’s historic climate laws, today’s funding announcement for locally led projects will support community priorities while animating a race to the top on climate jobs. These awards will supercharge American climate progress across sectors – from reaching 100% clean electricity to slashing super-pollutants like methane to harnessing the power of nature across our farms and forests in the fight against climate change. This is a big deal.”
-White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi.
This is absolutely incredible stuff: a suite of transformative investments to supercharge American economies, ecosystems, and communities for the clean energy and climate resilience era. Even though it’s barely getting noticed amid everything else going on, it’s no less of an epic climate action victory. Spectacular news!
This newsletter has long tracked efforts at the Biden-Harris Administration’s Department of the Interior to promote solar on America’s abundant public lands. Now, they’re starting to pay off in a big way, with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management recently announcing the advancement of nine major U.S. solar projects in the West: the Esmeralda Seven (a set of seven linked solar plus battery storage projects near Tonopah, Nevada), the Libra Solar project (which also includes battery storage and a new power line) elsewhere in Nevada, and the Elisabeth Solar project near Yuma, Arizona.
And these are BIG projects! The Esmeralda Seven would together generate a titanic 5.35 gigawatts (5,350 MW) of electricity, enough to power roughly 1.6 million American homes. This is a true American mega-scale cleantech development on par with the gigawatt-scale solar farms going up in India and China! Great work.
In 2015, the Florida grasshopper sparrow (Ammodramus savannarum floridanus) hovered on the edge of extinction as one of the rarest and most imperiled birds in North America, leading conservationists to take the last remaining breeding pairs into captivity. Now, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has released the 1,000th conservation-bred Florida grasshopper sparrow into the wild, a milestone reached on July 16, 2024. Great work!
In a fascinating discovery of rapidly evolving climate resilience, researchers report that a population of monarch butterflies in the urban landscape of the San Francisco Bay Area are successfully breeding during the winter. The study followed monarch pupae on the Googleplex campus during the winter of 2021/2022 and found that despite some losses due to landscaping work, 49.5% of winter pupae successfully emerged as adult butterflies, establishing urban Northern California as a new monarch breeding site. Quickly adapting to both warmer winters and human-dominated landscapes, monarch butterflies are responding with vigor to the challenges and opportunities of the Anthropocene! Great news.
This isn’t necessarily the same thing as saying solar now generates more electricity than coal in China, because “capacity” means, roughly, how much an installation can generate at its best, and solar farms generate a lot less than their capacity on rainy days or at night. (Then again, China’s coal plants are often running well below their capacity these days too, switched off more and more as burning coal becomes increasingly uneconomic). But it’s sure as heck a gigantic step in the right direction!
This date is probably why all this AMAZING progress got lost in the news shuffle: that’s one day after President Biden announced he would not be running for re-election and Vice President Harris launched her historic presidential campaign. People were focused on other things, understandably! But now it’s time to spotlight this incredible work.
Love the Mkonarch Butterfly breeding in the Bay area,!
Love hearing about the 25 EPA projects! Thanks so much!