The Weekly Anthropocene, February 26 2025
A cornucopia of changemaking creations from China, global animal and AI news, Nauru's national climate survival plan, vicuña poop in Peru, U.S. EV battery factories, Wisdom is a mom again, and more!
Earth
A landmark new paper has integrated vast swathes of data to reveal that zoogeomorphic effects, when animals physically change the surface landscape of Earth around them, are much more sizeable and widespread than previously thought. The researchers estimate that each year, wild animal geomorphic agents — that’s everything from beaver dams to gopher tortoises burrowing to salmon redds moving river sediment — expend approximately 76,000 gigajoules of energy, equivalent to hundreds of thousands of extreme floods, and possibly much more than that given uncertainties in biomass numbers. We live on a planet literally shaped by the animals that live on it. Fascinating!
Google has unveiled a revolutionary “AI co-scientist” product, a multi-agent AI research assistant that can independently generate actionable hypotheses and detailed experimental protocols to test them based on analyzing all existing data in the field. Currently only a very few scientists are early testers1, but the immediate potential to accelerate human progress is enormous: one team at the Imperial College London found that the AI co-scientist was able to propose the same hypothesis they had developed over ten years of work within two days. The Star Trek future of “Computer, design a cure for that new disease” may be here soon!
“What our findings show is that AI has the potential to synthesize all the available evidence and direct us to the most important questions and experimental designs…
If the system works as well as we hope it could, this could be game-changing; ruling out ‘dead ends’ and effectively enabling us to progress at an extraordinary pace.”
— Tiago Dias da Costa, Imperial College London.
The tinyML budget AI model, which generally costs less than $100 including the chips and (once trained) can run for weeks using as little electricity as a laser pointer, is rapidly becoming an incredible new source of technological empowerment for farmers, scientists, and citizens across the Global South. A recent Science article highlighted tinyML running on small drones that enabled cashew farmers in India to rapidly find and identify disease on their trees — just one example of many. Amazing!
China
As previously reported in this newsletter, China installed a record-high 277.17 GW (277,170 MW) of solar power in 2024, bringing the national total to 886.66 GW at the end of 2024. That’s up by an amazing 45.48% in one year from 609.49 GW at the end of 2023, a history-making speed record for solar progress. But that’s just within China: newly released data shows that the nation also exported a whopping 235.93 GW worth of solar modules in 2024, 94.4 GW of which went to Europe and over 16 GW each to Pakistan and India. This newsletter is running out of words to describe how world-transformingly huge and fast China’s solar buildout is. Wow!
The International Energy Agency recently reported that the total consumption of gasoline, gasoil, and jet fuel, across China have all declined slightly in 2024 to below 2021 levels, thanks in large part to the country’s incredibly rapid adoption of electric vehicles2 (which now provide over 50% of new car sales). This is historically unprecedented and frankly GREAT news for accelerating clean energy progress!
“For China’s fuel growth trajectory to be leveling off at this early stage of development is without historical precedent…
This slide is likely to accelerate over the medium-term, which would be sufficient to generate a plateau in total China oil demand this decade.”
— International Energy Agency
Chinese researchers have invented a new multi-layered tandem solar cell (including a perovskite layer) with impressive 29.36% efficiency rate. For context, the maximum physically possible efficiency rate (i.e. conversation of light to electricity) of a basic silicon solar cell is 32%. This is the kind of tech that could deliver a whole new wave of epic solar progress! The Solar Age of Humanity is just beginning.
A new study from the Yellow River Delta in China found that farming sea cucumbers (Apostichopus japonicus) under solar panels led to more growth and likely higher yields, thanks to the panels providing shade to pools. Sea cucumbers now join desert plants, vineyards, sheep grazing, wild birds, and much more in the rapidly expanding category of “researchers find that solar panels actually help this thing grow!”
A new study has found that newly crossbred rice cultivar SUSIBA2, as grown at locations across China, reduces methane emissions from rice cultivation by up to 70% while delivering yields at nearly twice the global average. Rice paddies can emit climate-warming methane (about 12% of human civilization’s total!) due to methanogenic microbes feeding off compounds released by traditional rice plants, and this new cultivar could scale up to be a big emissions reducer! Awesome work.
Scientists have discovered that the critically endangered Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla) is a vital ecosystem engineer with impressive benefits for biodiversity and habitat restoration. The deep soil-churning burrows they dig can encourage plant growth, shelter multitudes of other wildlife during forest fires, and help the entire ecosystem recover more quickly after being burned.
“Pangolins’ burrowing activities significantly promote the recovery of biodiversity in burn sites…
The presence of various plant species in burrow microhabitats is significantly and positively correlated with the occurrence of burrow commensal birds, indicating that frequent use of burrows by birds benefits the dispersal of plant seeds into burn sites.”
— Dr. Song Sun
Nauru
The tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru (population around 12,000) is embarking on a bold climate resilience plan. The nation plans to relocate 10,000 people, about 90% of its population, from low-lying coastal settlements vulnerable to sea level rise to a new township and farms planned in the formerly phosphate mining-devastated interior.
One major source of funding for the endeavor is selling Nauruan passports and citizenship for $140,500, which grants the buyer visa-free access to the UK and Singapore even if they never set foot on Nauru itself — an innovative monetization of sovereignty to further national survival. Fascinating work!
Peru
“Latrine islands” formed by vicuña (Lama vicugna) poop are helping plant species colonize the rocky wastes left by retreating glaciers in the high Andes of Peru. The llama relatives habitually defecate in communal “toilets,” quickly creating patches of nutrient-rich fertile soil that become havens for arriving plant species and eventually attract other wildlife, like pumas.
Notably, this is all a ripple effect of previous victories. In 1974, only about 6,000 wild vicunas were left, but their numbers have since grown to over 350,000 thanks to hard-working conservationists and an innovative sustainable wool-shearing system. A great example of climate adaptation, conservation success, and ecosystem engineering!
United States
As the “rapid unscheduled disassembly” of the U.S. government continues under the incompetent auspices of lawless wannabe autocrats, there’s still amazing work being done across America to help build a better future for humanity and its biosphere.
A nonprofit called the Footprint Project has opened the WNC Free Store to provide free solar panels and other cleantech to victims of Hurricane Helene in the area around Asheville, North Carolina. Grassroots liberatory power — spectacular work!
A new study reports that prairie falcons (Falco mexicanus) are thriving in the Morley Nelson Snake River Birds of Prey National Conservation Area, a federal protected area in Idaho, with steady nesting success for 45 years and an increase from around 193 nesting pairs in the 1990s to 257 in 2021. Great news!
Ten big new electric vehicle battery factories are set to go online across the United States in 2025, with most construction already complete. If they all open, this will nearly double America’s EV battery manufacturing capacity in one year. All the current administration needs to do here is to not actually physically tear down the factories that the Biden Boom built — fingers crossed!
A research team at the University of Washington used AI-assisted science to design a completely novel enzyme that can digest some common forms of plastic.
California is kicking off the new year with an epic surge in renewable energy production, thanks in large part to a rapid battery build-out making more clean electrons available 24/7. Over the first 48 days of 2025, combined wind, water, and solar generation in California is up 18% year-on-year and is 32% higher than fossil gas, as solar generation grew by 33.8% and battery output increased by 78% since the same period in 2024. On February 16, 2025, solar met nearly 100% of California’s grid demand — in the middle of winter. Excellent news!
In February 2025, two common short-beaked dolphins (Delphinus delphis) were spotted in New York’s East River off Manhattan. This is yet another milestone in the ecological renaissance of New York City’s cleaner and cleaner waters: 2024 recorded over 160 individual whales in the area! Great work.
Researchers at Cornell University have developed HelioSkin, a new bio-inspired lightweight, flexible, and aesthetically appealing solar fabric that can be roll-to-roll printed for low costs and wrapped around complex surfaces to generate power.
Dominion Energy has stated that it expects its epic under-construction 2.6 GW (2,600 MW) Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project (permitted under the Biden-Harris Administration) to begin providing clean power in 2026 as planned, despite the current presidential administration’s imbecilic efforts to sabotage the offshore wind industry. Virginia will still get its awesome biodiversity-boosting artificial reef!!!
Nine Democratic-leaning U.S. states are continuing their Buy Clean efforts to source lower-carbon building materials like steel, concrete, and glass, with increasing collaboration to maintain progress despite chaos and destruction at the federal level.
In December 2024, this newsletter reported that Wisdom, a female Laysan albatross (Phoebastria immutabilis) who is the oldest known wild bird on Earth at an estimated 74 years old, had laid another egg on Midway Atoll — possibly her sixtieth. Now, in February 2025, that egg has hatched, with Wisdom and her latest mate the proud parents of a new Laysan albatross chick. Couples of their species take turns incubating the chick and hunting for food at sea. Truly beautiful news!
China’s incredibly fast ascent to become a world-dominating exporter of electric vehicles is also an unheralded world-changing story, particularly little-known as major brands like BYD are not available in the U.S. even while they transform mobility markets worldwide.
I live in Australia and the number of BYDs has increased rapidly. There is also a lot enthusiastic for BYD's new plugin hybrid ute (pick-up trucks for you Americans).
Enjoying immensely