The Weekly Anthropocene, February 7 2024

Exponential battery growth, platypus reintroduction, China's ginormous renewables buildout, Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, Baltimore's new electric school buses, and more!

Feb 07, 2024

Thanks to the Rocky Mountain Institute folks for their awesome work!

The awesome folks at the Rocky Mountain Institute have a new report out on the incredible exponential rise of battery technology around the globe, and there’s lots of good news.

For the last 30 years, global battery sales (from EVs to laptops to grid-scale stationary storage) have been growing by an average of 33% per year, rising to 40% in the last decade.
That compounding growth has led to a massive surge in recent years, from less than 400 gigawatt-hours of batteries sold in 2020 to over 1,000 in 2023!

Battery costs have fallen by 99% in the last 30 years. For every doubling of batteries deployed, costs have fallen by 19%-a very high “learning rate” for this technology!
Battery sales keep growing faster than forecasters predict.
RMI projects battery costs continuing to fall and deployment continuing to rise, speeding up the replacement of fossil fuels!

Spectacular news! Ever-improving battery tech, paired with solar and other clean energy sources, is delivering a much better world, with less air pollution and more abundant, reliable power. It could be slowed down by bad policy choices, but it looks unstoppable in the long term!

Australia

Matilda, a rescued platypus puggle at the Taronga Zoo, Sydney.

May 2023 saw a landmark Australian platypus reintroduction, with ten of the the quirky duck-billed monotremes1 released in Royal National Park, just south of Sydney. Now, all ten seem to be thriving, with hopes that the upcoming breeding season will see the population grow. Plans are also afoot to reintroduce the platypus to the Torrens River in Adelaide within a few years! Another great example of rewilding.

Obelisks

A landmark new preprint study reveals that scientists have discovered an entirely new type of debatably-alive biological entity, rod-shaped bundles of RNA dubbed “obelisks” that have been found to be colonizing bacteria in the human mouth and gut. They’ve presumably been here all along and we’ve just never found them until now. Viruses, a similar class of quasi-living entities, have been found to potentially have indirect effects on the global carbon cycle (to say nothing of virus-borne diseases). It’s fascinating to comtemplate what we may learn now that we’ve discovered obelisks!

China

China’s renewable energy buildout continues to be ridiculously history-changingly ultra-mega-gigantic. If some alien civilization were observing Earth right now, this would probably make the top three list of biggest changes they’d notice.

An offshore wind/floating solar hybrid project off Shandong Province

In 2023, China built 216.9 gigawatts of new solar power capacity (up from 87.4 GW in 2022), which is more solar than any other country has built in total, ever. China also built 75.9 GW of wind power in 2023, up from 37.6 GW in 2022, also a record. (China also built 57.93 GW of new fossil fuel-burning power plants in 2023, but many of those may end up not being used that much, if at all).

All this is rapidly changing the global picture on climate change and emissions reductions. As this newsletter previously shared, China’s carbon dioxide emissions are likely to have peaked in 2023, many years earlier than expected! Furthermore, as China’s population continues to shrink and its domestic property sector suffers, the country is doubling down on exports of its clean energy manufactures to prop up its economy, creating a surge of cheap solar panels, EVs, and batteries on the world market while putting pressure on the USA and EU to continue boosting their own domestic clean energy manufacturing industries.

This is what a civilizational turn towards decarbonization looks like! At this rate, by the 2030s the fight to switch the world to a clean energy-powered development trajectory may be effectively won!

Kyrgyzstan

The remote 255-person mountain settlement of Zardaly, Kyrgyzstan recently got its first-ever consistent source of electricity, in the form of solar panels painstakingly brought in through a hazardous mountain pass on the backs of a herd of donkeys. Now, every household can recharge phones, and the Zardaly school has an Internet connection.

And in the country at large, Emirati renewables developer Masdar (an increasingly important global player) is planning to develop up to 1 GW of renewables projects in Kyrgyzstan by 2026.

Clean energy is changing the world on many scales, from the massive world economy-reshaping solar buildout in China to a better life brought on donkey-back to a tiny village in Kyrgyzstan!

Republic of Congo

Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, in the Republic of Congo2, is one of Africa’s great remaining wilderness areas, home to stable populations of around 2,200 gorillas, 3,000 chimpanzees, and 3,200 forest elephants. Now, for the first time since data collection began, it appears that zero elephants were killed by poachers in Nouabalé-Ndoki in 2023, thanks to robust community-supported conservation efforts.

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) works with the Congolese government to administer the park, which provides schooling for nearly 300 students in nearby villages and has established a health center that sees 250 patients a month. The next step is a project to develop ecotourism as a driver of economic growth! Great work.

Madagascar

Top to bottom, left to right: G. vakoa, G. ambasoana, G. rianasoa, and G. rianasoa in a pandanus tree.

In Madagascar’s eastern rainforests, scientists have described three new species of frogs that live entirely within the leafy crowns of pandanus trees. They lay their eggs on the leaves, their tadpoles drop into leaf-pools of rainwater, and frogs emerge to breed again. All three new species are in the Guibemantis genus, and their scientific names of G. vakoa, G. rianasoa and G. ambakoana draw from the local Malagasy language. A fascinating new discovery; this world has many marvels yet to be shared!

United States

Baltimore City Public Schools has rolled out 25 new electric school buses, thanks to BIL funding from the Biden Administration EPA’s Clean School Bus Program! This is just one of many such clean fleets starting to hit the road: the EPA has awarded funds for approximately 5,000 school bus replacements at over 600 schools across the nation! Kids with asthma will soon be breathing easier with zero-air-pollution rides.

The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will now provide grant funding to clean energy projects, from solar microgrids to heat pumps, for communities recovering from disasters. Climate action and resilience!

A new study used iNaturalist data to find that cities in the northeastern U.S. (and Canada) are hospitable habitat for many reptile and amphibian species, thanks to abundant green spaces.

The Minnesota Department of Transportation is evaluating adding solar panels to roads’ snow fencing.

NASA is set to launch the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem (PACE) satellite, with a new hyperspectral imager that will provide highly valuable new data on the role of phytoplankton, aerosols, and clouds in the global climate.

Platypuses are proverbially fascinating biological specimens; they’re mammals but they lay eggs, the males have venomous spurs, and they have electroreceptors in their bill that help them hunt prey.

The Republic of Congo, aka Congo-Brazzaville, is not the same country as the neighboring (and substantially more violent) Democratic Republic of Congo, aka Congo-Kinshasa. Yes, it is confusing.