The Weekly Anthropocene, January 14 2026
Twin newborn mountain gorillas, Greenphyto, flat-headed cats, R21 malaria vaccine rollout in Kule, meliponine rights, DeepMind's UK lab, U.S. solar, NYC congestion pricing, Iowa oxbow lakes, and more!
The Big Picture
As the invaluable Our World in Data team quantifies and visualizes, humanity’s global food production has risen immensely from the 1960s to the 2020s, outpacing human population growth on every continent. As the human population rose 2.6-fold from over 3 billion to over 8 billion, food production (measured in calories) rose 3.5-fold. And many more new agricultural innovations are emerging, from resilient crops to Solein. Despite climate change, humanity has never been further from starvation!
Global banks made more on loans & bonds for clean power than fossil fuels in 2025.
Leading think tank Ember reports that electric vehicle sales rapidly accelerated worldwide in 2025, with many emerging markets rapidly “leapfrogging” the U.S. and Europe. To take just a few of many examples, in January-October 2025 EVs made up over 45% of new passenger car sales in Singapore, over 37% in Vietnam, over 21% in Thailand, over 14% in Indonesia, and over 8% in Brazil, all sharp increases over 2024. (Note: EVs’ efficiency reduces emissions even when charged on fossil-heavy grids). For comparison, EVs are at ~10% of sales in the U.S. and over 50% in China. Awesome!
Democratic Republic of Congo
On January 3, 2026, conservationists discovered that Mafuko, a female mountain gorilla living in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, had given birth to twins (incredibly rare in her species) bringing the population of the Bageni family group to 59. Both newborns are male.
Mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) were on the verge of extinction in the 1970s and 1980s, with only around 250 individuals left after heavy poaching and habitat destruction. Thanks to decades of dedicated conservation work, there are over 1,000 mountain gorillas today across parks in the DRC, Rwanda, and Uganda. The heroic rangers of Virunga and other parks continue the fight to protect our great ape cousins (with funding from the EU and UNESCO) despite extremely dangerous conditions (the M23 armed rebel group controls parts of Virunga). Incredible work!
Singapore
The world’s tallest-yet indoor vertical farm has opened in Singapore, a dynamic island city-state highly dependent on food imports. The Greenphyto facility is fully automated with AI and robots, stands 23 meters tall (about 7 stories) while covering 2 hectares, and can produce 2,000 tonnes of leafy greens per year! The company also plans to sell its vertical farming system and AI software worldwide. AMAZING work!
Thailand
The flat-headed cat (Prionailurus planiceps) is an endangered wetland-dwelling web-toed tiny wildcat native to Southeast Asia, with an estimated 2,500 adults remaining globally. It was last seen in Thailand in 1995 and was believed to be extinct in that country. Until now! A recent remote camera trap survey detected flat-headed cats 13 times in 2024 and 16 times in 2025 in the Princess Sirindhorn Wildlife Sanctuary — including a mother and baby. Encouraging news for the future of the species! Superb.
Ethiopia
Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders in English) has completed a full round of R21 malaria vaccine deployment for children in the Kule refugee camp. Kule is in the Gambella region of Ethiopia, is home to over 55,000 refugees from South Sudan, and has been ravaged by malaria in recent years. 2,100 children under age 5 living in Kule received their fourth and final dose of R21 in November 2025, safeguarding them from malaria in the future. It’s the first full vaccination round (against any disease) carried out in a refugee camp anywhere in the world! Awesome.
“Now my children have all the doses of the vaccine, and I feel hope. I can see them growing up healthy, even with all the problems we face here. My child is four years old and vaccinated. He has not been sick the whole of this year! But before he used to get sick of malaria twice a year.”
United Kingdom
Google DeepMind has announced that they are building an automated research lab in the United Kingdom in 2026, part of a broad new partnership with the British government. This could supercharge “A-Lab”-style acceleration of scientific progress! Here’s my previous article describing early efforts in AI-automated science.
“A multidisciplinary team of researchers will oversee research in the lab, which will be built from the ground up to be fully integrated with Gemini. By directing world-class robotics to synthesize and characterize hundreds of materials per day, the team intends to significantly shorten the timeline for identifying transformative new materials…
Other novel materials could help us tackle critical energy challenges by unlocking advanced batteries, next-generation solar cells and more efficient computer chips.”
The ideal is to eventually build something like the Star Trek “Computer, synthesize me a new material to solve my problem” level of automated discovery. Extraordinary work!
Peru
In recent months, both the province of Satipo in central Peru (including the renowned Avireri-Vraem Biosphere Reserve) and the town of Nauta in northeastern Peru passed local ordinances granting specific legal rights to local stingless bees (the Meliponini, over 500 known species with at least 175 in Peru). The ordinances grant the stingless bees (major pollinators!) rights to exist, to regenerate and maintain their populations, and to have their habitat restored. This adds vital new tools to support conservation as meliponines are threatened by invasive bees, climate change, deforestation and pesticides.
Meliponiculture, the cultivation of these stingless bees, is a key tradition for many Latin American Indigenous peoples, with their honey and pollen used in food and medicine and their propolis used in candles and more. Early research has identified hundreds of molecules in meliponine honey with possible medicinal properties. A petition to pass a “stingless bee rights” national Peruvian law is already circulating.
This is the first time that any human jurisdiction anywhere in the world has granted any form of legal rights to any insect! A huge milestone for the emerging rights of nature movement, and a fascinating blueprint for future interspecies coexistence.
Peru installed about 454 MW of new grid-scale solar in 2025. That’s a majority of all power from all sources installed in Peru in 2025 (700 MW) and almost half of all solar power ever installed in Peru (952 MW)! Such rapid takeoffs are becoming common!
United States
As the despicable monster in the White House incompetently flails in efforts to institute a regime of cruelty, people across America keep fighting for a bright future.
Solar power keeps progressing in the United States despite senseless attacks!
In 2025, or the first year ever, solar supplied more electricity than coal to the ERCOT grid of Texas!
In the Central Valley of California, the Westlands Water District approved a truly massive new project: 21 GW (21,000 MW) of solar power plus roughly equivalent battery storage to be built across 600,000 acres. If all goes well, it could supply one-quarter of California’s electricity needs by 2035! (It will also help growers by directly reducing irrigation needs). This would be by far the biggest solar and battery project yet built in the United States — FINALLY a true U.S. landscape-scale buildout on the scale of what China and India are doing! Superb.
In Michigan, the Muskegon solar farm (250 MW) has been built in a wastewater treatment complex’s existing buffer zones and fields. It’ll generate enough electricity to power about 40,000 Michigan homes. Another colocation example!
In Illinois, a community solar project in Waukegan has built a 9.1 MW array on a former landfill Superfund site too polluted for other uses. Subscribing residents are guaranteed to see savings on their energy bills.
In California, rising star State Senator Scott Weiner has introduced a Utah-style bill (SB 868, the Plug Into the Sun Act!) to deregulate backyard “balcony” solar for the Golden State! If we can get it passed in the upcoming months, it’d be by far the biggest win possible for Bright Saver’s 2026 state-by-state strategy. Epic!
Mary Peltola is running for U.S. Senate in Alaska in 2026. One of the best moves yet to win back the vital judge-confirming Senate from the party of a mad king-wannabe!
Governor J.B. Pritzker (D-IL) has signed into law the landmark Illinois Clean and Resilient Grid Act (CRGA), likely the best-yet state-level law on grid-scale battery storage abundance for America! Here’s my action to urge other states to do the same.
A bipartisan coalition in Congress is working to reject the insanely extreme budget cuts to basic science proposed by the mad White House. A package of bills proposed by the Republican-controlled Senate Appropriations Committee reduced overall cuts to all U.S. science funding from the White House’s proposed 22% cut down to a 4% cut, changed the White House’s proposed 55% cut to the EPA down to a 4% cut, and changed the White House’s proposed 56% cut to the vital National Science Foundation (NSF) down to a cut of less than 1%. Not great, but a big bullet dodged!
A judge shot down one recent stop-work order from the insane White House, freeing the 704 MW Revolution Wind offshore project to resume its nearly-done construction!
The New England Clean Energy Connect project is set to come online this week at long last, after 10 years of delays. It’s a 145-mile power line from the Canadian border to Lewiston, Maine, connecting the New England and Quebec grids so U.S. states can buy gigawatts of excess hydroelectricity from HydroQuebec. Better late than never!
As the White House is forcibly ordering many uneconomical old U.S. coal plants to reopen or stay open (which is already costing hundreds of millions!), it’s emerging that in some cases the required repairs “may not even be feasible to complete within the 90-day window covered by the DOE orders.” A flailing, dying industry.
Relatedly, the government recently tried to auction off over 20,000 acres in Colorado for oil & gas drilling. There were no bids. Zero. Not one. Global demand is set to drop!
The $9 congestion pricing fee for cars to enter central Manhattan, adopted by New York City a year ago, has been a massive success! Traffic entering the toll zone has decreased by 11%, average vehicle speeds increased by 23%, and morning rush hour speeds at the Holland Tunnel increased by 51%. Millions of faster commutes! Subway and bus ridership and revenue have increased as well. An improvement in air quality will likely become statistically incontrovertible within a few years. Spectacular work!
Over the past two decades, a hardworking coalition of dedicated conservationists and supportive farmland owners have restored over two hundred oxbow lakes across Iowa, rebirthing wetland ecosystems lost to draining and infilling for farmland. Nature Conservancy research documented 57 fish species and 81 bird species living in restored oxbow habitats. This has empowered an epic rebound in the population of the endangered Topeka shiner minnow (Miniellus topeka) as well! Spectacular news.
All of this has buoyed my spirit immensely to day.
Fascinating roundup! Your coverage of DeepMind's automated research lab and the R21 malaria vaccine rollout highlights how strategic investments in biomedical research can accelerate breakthroughs. I'm particularly interested in how AI-driven discovery platforms could benefit rare disease research, where traditional pharmaceutical development often fails due to small patient populations and limited profit incentives. The budget cuts to NSF and NIH you mentioned are especially concerning for rare disease patients - these conditions affect 30 million Americans but often get deprioritized when science funding shrinks. When Congress fights to preserve basic research funding, they're also protecting the pipeline of treatments for conditions that affect 1 in 10 people but capture far less than 10% of research attention. The automated materials science approach could be revolutionary for orphan drug development if applied to biologics and small molecules.