The Weekly Anthropocene, February 1 2023
Dispatches Against Despair, from the Wild, Weird World of Humanity and its Biosphere
The Global Renewables Revolution
A new report from the Rocky Mountain Institute makes a strong case that global use of fossil fuels for electricity has already peaked, and will likely plateau through 2025 then decline afterwards, as renewables continue to grow rapidly. (Here’s a Q&A with the report author). This is EXCELLENT news! We of course need to speed this up still further to reduce climate damage (and air pollution deaths) as much as possible and as fast as possible, but we’re on the right track.
Global investments in clean energy technologies reached a record high of $1.1 trillion in 2022, approximately equal to what the world spends every year producing fossil fuels. And that only counts direct deployment of clean technologies, with hundreds of billions more spent on manufacturing and supply chain work and venture capital for clean tech startups bringing total transition spending closer to $1.6 trillion!
In the European Union, wind and solar together provided a record high 22% of electricity for the first time in 2022, passing 20% for the first time and overtaking natural gas. This was aided by a plethora of new EU initiatives to boost renewables and reduce dependence on Russian gas, and the trend is likely to accelerate. The European transition has been rapid: to take just one country-level example from think tank Ember, the Netherlands went from 1% of their electricity from solar power in 2015 to 14% in 2022, while reducing coal power from 36% to 13% over the same period. They’re now planning a rapid expansion of offshore wind to get 100% clean power by 2030, and many other EU countries have similar plans. Spectacular progress!
United States: Climate Adaptation
The Biden Administration announced in January that it would be spending $490 million to reduce wildlife risk in 11 vulnerable landscapes across Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Washington, using Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act funds. The Forest Service will use the money to thin forests, support community fire preparation efforts, and conduct low-intensity prescribed burns to help keep forests healthy and clear out dense underbrush (a longstanding practice of American indigenous peoples, suppressed during the 20th century).
The Biden Administration also recently finalized protections for the Alaska Panhandle’s Tongass National Forest, in a continuation of executive back-and-forth over this wildland. To be precise, Biden repealed a 2020 Trump-era rule that had stripped away Bill Clinton-era protections from 9.37 million acres of this carbon-sequestering temperate rainforest. The Biden action returns this vast swath of forest to “roadless” status, where road construction and logging are prohibited.
And innovative jurisdictions are pioneering new methods of climate adaptation across the aridification-stricken American West.
Newly elected Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs of Arizona is making water management reform a priority, warning of development outstripping water availability in Maricopa Valley and establishing a Governor’s Water Policy Council to review the
The city of Healdsburg, California, is now recycling a whopping 350 million gallons of wastewater annually, then giving it away for free to residents who want to water their orchards and vineyards. This could be a great model for other towns!
The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of Montana developed a plan to protect their lands on the Flathead Reservation from climate threats. They’ve already developed a nursery of 30,000 young whitebark pine trees, a species ravaged by blister rust, pine beetles, and wildfires.
On the Colorado River, Glen Canyon Dam is nearing both “power pool” and “dead pool,” where the water level in the reservoir behind it (Lake Powell) is so low that it can no longer provide electric power or water respectively to the communities downriver. However, many experts are arguing that this dam is now more trouble that it’s worth anyway, and it would be more efficient in terms of water management to circumvent it (perhaps with new tunnels) and consolidate all available Colorado River water at Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam. This would also restore Glen Canyon, a long-lost environmental cause célèbre flooded when the dam was built. Such a change would require congressional action, but that might come quickly once the dam’s turbines shudder to a halt. We’ll see!
United States: Climate Action
The Economist has a truly excellent article (free here) about the rise of “green on green” battles in America, with local soi-disant “environmental groups” opposing renewable energy projects vital to slowing climate change. Sometimes there’s a real climate/biodiversity conflict, but often the opposition is for selfishly parochial reasons. For example, a proposed 850 MW solar farm in Nevada that would have supplied 500,000 homes with electricity was shut down in 2021 after residents rallied against the “eyesore.”
However, despite the drag from this sort of shortsightedness, green technology is still zooming ahead across the United States!
MIT spinoff Boston Metal announced that it raised $120 million in venture capital (from steel giant ArcelorMittal and Microsoft, among others), enough to build their first fossil fuel-free electric steelmaking plant. As recently as the mid-2010s, steelmaking was considered a “hard to decarbonize” sector that would likely be dependent on burning coal for decades to come, but in recent years coal-free steelmaking has surged from Colorado to Sweden! Great news.
Major utility Xcel Energy is planning to install two of startup Form Energy’s cutting-edge grid-scale iron-air batteries on the sites of retired coal plants by 2025, one each in Minnesota and Colorado.
In Texas, residents can now sign up for a burgeoning virtual power plant program, making money by selling power from home battery systems (e.g. Tesla Powerwalls) to the grid.
And a Politico story calculated that much of the clean energy funding in the Inflation Reduction Act will go to support new renewables projects in “red states,” represented by Republicans who voted against climate action. U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is excited about this, saying “Blue states, red states, really it helps to save people money, so it’s all about green.” Hopes are high that this could substantially depolarize renewable energy as a political issue when conservative voters see the economic benefits to their communities!
Elephants
A fascinating new study found that critically endangered African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis, only recognized as a distinct species in 2021) play a vital role in increasing forests’ carbon sequestration capacity. They preferentially eat the leaves of many low-carbon-sequestration tree species, which limits their growth, while eating the fruits of many high-carbon-sequestration tree species (such as the critically endangered mukulungu tree), which disperses their seeds. The researchers calculate that elephants may boost carbon sequestration in Central Africa’s forests by as much as 6 to 9 percent. As African forest elephant populations have declined by 60% in the last decade, and they now inhabit only 25% of their historic range, this creates an obvious climate/biodiversity win-win: we need to save the African forest elephant to help fight climate change!
Another great issue Sam
Hey, nice article, I like especially the last part you talked about the elephants. That's a totally new fact to me, and useful to know, too. Thanks for your insights