The Weekly Anthropocene, January 17 2024
Red-shanked doucs in Da Nang, a solar tree from Hungary, Brazil fights back against illegal mining, a super-advanced grid-scale battery in Hawaii, humpback whales return to South Georgia, and more!
Vietnam
The red-shanked douc is a critically endangered langur species. Its largest remaining population, of about 2,000 individuals, lives in the 6,400 acre Son Tra nature reserve, known as “Monkey Mountain,” in the heart of the Vietnamese city of Da Nang, which is home to 1.2 million humans. The nature reserve is well protected, with a nearby military base contributing to the end hunting as a local threat, and a burgeoning ecotourism industry has sprung up around the colorful and charismatic monkeys. Along with peregrine falcons in New York, leopards in Mumbai and caracals in Cape Town, this is a fine example of an at-risk species thriving with the support of a human city! Great news.
European Union
The European Commission has announced that Northvolt, the Swedish company that just developed a potentially transformative sodium-ion battery, will receive €902 million in aid to help develop a battery gigafactory in the state of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany. France will also receive €2.9 billion to support solar, wind, battery, and heat pump manufacturing.
A new study of 32 solar parks in Slovakia found that utility-scale solar brings substantial benefits to local bird species, with bird species diversity and numbers higher in the solar parks than in control land plots. The solar panel support structures and vegetation under the panels served as prime nesting sites, and the parks may also be helpful as winter migration stopovers by providing snow-free space under the panels.
Scientists in Hungary have invented a prototype “solar tree” design that improves heat dissipation and reduces land-use requirements, producing more electricity with the same number of panels. In a few years, the next solar farm near you might be sporting similar designs!
Brazil
Brazil is continuing to crack down on Amazon-despoiling and Indigenous peoples-attacking illegal gold miners, who were encouraged under Bolsonaro but are starting to be held accountable for their crimes under Lula. A series of recent government raids found 20 mining sites and 11 secret airstrips, destroying camps, barges, fuel caches, excavators, and chainsaws while seizing weapons, radios, scales, and kilos of mercury.
The Brazilian government is now planning even stronger measures to fight back against the thousands of illegal miners still trying to invade Yanomami territory. The forces of law, order, and environmental protection are fighting to come back to the Amazon!
“This meeting is about deciding – once and for all – what our government’s going to do to make sure Indigenous Brazilians no longer fall victim to massacres, hooliganism, mining, and to people who want to invade preserved areas that belong to the Indigenous people.”
-President Lula da Silva at a Cabinet meeting on January 9, 2024
India
A new report found that rapidly rising India installed over 10 GW of solar and over 2 GW of wind power capacity in 2023 (10,016 MW of solar and 2,806 MW of wind, to be precise). Notably, this is spread across multiple domains, with over 6 GW of new utility-scale solar and over 3 GW of new rooftop solar.
While India is planning to build lots of coal infrastructure as well (epic progress against poverty in the world’s most populous country requires lots of energy!) renewables tend to eventually end up outcompeting coal on the grid, as has happened in the U.S. and is happening in China. More clean electrons is good news!
Hawaii
Hawaii shut down its last coal plant on September 1, 2022, and after an interim period in which rooftop solar and home batteries helped fill the gap, it’s now been fully replaced by Kapolei Energy Storage, a gigantic new grid-scale battery system made up of 158 Tesla Megapacks on the west side of the island of Oahu.
The new mega-battery can match the old coal plant’s 185 megawatts of instantaneous discharge capacity (i.e. maximum output of power to the grid at one time), but can respond much faster to shifts in demand, with a 250-millisecond response time. Kapolei also has a bunch of other cool abilities that have led to it being called “the most advanced battery energy storage facility on the planet.” The mega-battery has complex software that can correct grid deviations in real-time to keep everything within optimal parameters, as well as resilience-supercharging “black start capability,” with some energy always kept in reserve to literally jumpstart the rest of the grid in the event of a cyclone or other blackout event. Spectacular work!
Texas
The school district of Martinsville, a small East Texas town, has become the first in the state to have a 100% electric school bus fleet. The U.S. EPA’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law-funded Clean School Bus Program helped the town replace its four old diesel buses with four shiny new electric school buses (thanks, Biden!), which entered service in October 2023. The children of Martinsville will now be directly safer from air pollution and indirectly helping reduce the global threat of climate change. And this is just a sample of the changes to come; the Biden Administration recently announced that 280 more school districts will receive funding from the same program to purchase a total of over 2,700 clean school buses, serving 7 million students across 37 states. Excellent!
South Georgia
A new study has found that humpback whales have returned to Cumberland Bay on the remote South Atlantic island of South Georgia, once a major feeding ground for the species before it became a whaling center. In the early 20th century, whalers stationed on South Georgia killed over 24,000 humpback whales in just 12 years. Now, the historic humpback feeding site has been rediscovered and recolonized at what looks to be close to pre-whaling population densities; researchers found that 17 humpback whales were observed in Cumberland Bay in January 2019, the exact same number that were killed in the area by an early whaling expedition in January 1905. Great news!
This is the latest chapter of a broader post-whaling multispecies cetacean renaissance across the oceans of the Southern Hemisphere! For example, this newsletter previously reported on the observation of feeding groups of up to 150 fin whales at once near the Antarctic Peninsula, another sign that we may be returning to the epic days of cetacean superabundance. That’s great news for climate action too, as whales fertilize the environment with their plumes of iron-rich feces, allowing blooms of phytoplankton to grow, providing food at the base of the ecosystem (for krill especially!) and sequestering lots of CO2. Yet another awesome example of how wildlife can thrive alongside human civilization on Anthropocene Earth!
Super optimistic news to start my day. Looks like more and more positive momentum building as Humanity starts to clean up its act!