The Weekly Anthropocene, February 22 2023
Dispatches Against Despair, from the Wild, Weird World of Humanity and its Biosphere
Costa Rica
Endangered golden-mantled howler monkeys (Alouatta palliata palliata) are often killed when attempting to cross roads that traverse their forest habitat. They’re arboreal, so they often get electrocuted when they try to climb across power lines, while dogs and cars await on the ground. In 2015, primatologist Inés Rojas of the University of Costa Rica put together a team to build a network of simple, low-cost canopy bridges, made of a mesh cylinder and a rope topline (pictured), over the roads at 20 key howler monkey crossing hotspots in the Playa Hermosa forest of Costa Rica’s Guanacaste province. They were a runaway success, with over 76 crossings recorded in the first few months. The howler monkey population in the Playa Hermosa forest nearly doubled between 2015 and 2021. Costa Rica is now reportedly close to passing a new law that mandates building canopy bridges as part of all new road projects, as well as over existing roads where wildlife crossings have been observed. This is a spectacular example of how with just a little extra thought and care, humans can create hospitable landscapes for wildlife to thrive alongside us in the Anthropocene. Great work!
Clean Energy
On February 15th, the Biden Administration announced new standards to ensure consistency across the growing national EV charging network, mandating that all chargers receiving federal funds meet certain “Made in America” standards and use a standardized charging system to ensure interoperability across states and EV models. They also revealed a landmark new deal with Tesla through which at least 7,500 Tesla Superchargers will be opened up to charge all EVs by the end of 2024. (The current network of Tesla Superchargers are accessible only to Tesla vehicles). General Motors, Hertz, and many other companies also announced plans to build out more EV chargers as part of the growing national network.
Inflation Reduction Act-funded clean energy projects continue to bloom across America, with a 200 MW battery storage project in Texas and a $3.5 billion Ford lithium iron phosphate EV battery plant in Michigan among the latest crop of announcements. Despite senseless anti-renewables NIMBYism continuing to be a drag on progress, the renewables revolution keeps rolling along.
On February 14th, the European Parliament passed a law requiring automakers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from new cars sold in the EU by 50% or more by 2030 and 100% by 2035. The EU’s 27 member nations now join California, Massachusetts, Washington, Oregon, and New York in effectively banning new non-electric vehicles after 2035! Great news.
“These targets create clarity for the car industry and stimulate innovation and investments for car manufacturers. Purchasing and driving zero-emission cars will become cheaper for consumers and a second-hand market will emerge more quickly. It makes sustainable driving accessible to everyone.”
-Member of the European Parliament Jan Huitema
Until recently, a scarcity of cobalt, a key battery mineral, was considered to be a major obstacle to the clean energy transition. Now, as The Economist reports, a huge surge in cobalt production in Indonesia has completely removed this bottleneck. Cobalt prices fell from $82,000 per tonne in early 2022 to $35,000 per tonne in early 2023, and will likely stay low or fall still further as production continues to increase. Great news!
Danish wind turbine company Vestas announced that it has developed a process to effectively break down the epoxy resin that makes up wind turbines blades into its base materials, ready to use for new projects. They’re now working with a recycling company and an epoxy manufacturer to bring this to the market. This essentially means that all wind turbine blades are now recyclable (though it may take a few years to fully scale up), making an already climate crisis-fighting industry even more sustainable. Spectacular news!
Netherlands
Off the coast of the Netherlands, a project called North Sea Farm 1 (partly funded by Amazon’s climate fund) is set to become the world’s first commercial seaweed farm located amidst offshore wind turbines. The project is set to be completed by the end of 2023, will occupy ten hectares of unused ocean space between turbines, and should produce over 6,000 kilograms of edible seaweed per year. Many other locations around the world (for example, the US state of Maine) are developing offshore wind and already has offshore seaweed farming, so this could be a relevant model for many other countries’ working waterfronts in a few years!
Coral Reefs
A new study analyzing 40 years of reef monitoring data has found that some coral reefs could survive as late as the 2060s, due to the spread of a more heat-tolerant species of symbiotic algae.
Some background: corals are animals, in the phylum Cnidaria along with jellyfish, but they host colorful photosynthetic algae symbiotes that provide them with most of their energy in “exchange” for key nutrients and a safe place to grow. Marine heatwaves often cause “coral bleaching” events, in which rising temperatures screw up the symbiotic relationship and force stressed and damaged corals to expel their algae (turning them a “bleached” white color), causing mass mortality across the reef.
Now, it looks like some reefs are evolving tougher algae. After recent Anthropocene marine heat waves, the Durusdinium glynnii heat-tolerant alga has become an increasingly common symbiont within Pocillopora corals, a key reef-building species in the eastern tropical Pacific. The alga appears to become more common after every heatwave (unsurprisingly), and projecting that forward, this boost could allow some eastern tropical Pacific reefs to survive for decades longer than previously expected. If we manage to get climate change under control this century, it’s starting to look like we might be able to preserve some coral reef ecosystems after all!