The Weekly Anthropocene, January 31 2024
Reforestation drones in Rio de Janeiro, megabats welcomed to Adelaide, Biden pauses LNG export terminal approvals, offshore wind booming in Europe, hermit crabs using plastic shells, and more!
Australia
The city of Adelaide, South Australia, is now home to a colony of over 46,000 grey-headed flying foxes, also known as fruit bats due to their diet or megabats due to their meter-wide wingspan. The first fruit bats arrived in Adelaide as recently as 2010; they were ecological climate refugees fleeing drought in the Australian states of New South Wales and Victoria. High temperatures continue to be an issue in their new urban home (over 38C can be fatal to the megabats’ pups); they’ve even been spotted swimming in the local rivers1, and the current mild summer (January is a summer month in Australia!) and abundant fruit have led to strong population growth. Happily, the city of Adelaide is welcoming their new vespertilian neighbors: they’re installing bat guards on power lines and have hoisted up a cooling sprinkler to tree level!
This is yet another beautiful example of progressive, animal-friendly, park-filled modern cities acting as ecological safe havens for wildlife in the Anthropocene, like the red-shanked doucs in Da Nang, caracals in Cape Town, otters in Singapore, leopards in Mumbai, coyotes in San Francisco, whales in New York Harbor, and many, many more! Awesome news.
Brazil
In January 2024, Rio de Janeiro has launched an epic initiative to use reforestation drones to seed native species in hard-to-reach areas, with AI helping choose the sites and the number of seeds to plant. A single drone is capable of dispersing 180 seeds per minute, or 100 times faster than a human. Spectacular work, and a great model for the world!
As the fight against brutal illegal mining and other crimes in the Amazon continues, a new internationally-funded Centre for International Police Cooperation is being established in the Brazilian Amazon city of Manaus, with representatives from all eight Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) countries. One early project will be implementing a brand-new technology that’s like a “DNA test for gold,” analyzing the metal’s radioisotopes and comparing them to samples from mines to be able to prove whether gold is from illegal prospects. Law and order and environmental justice: great work!
Europe
A new S&P Global analysis found that European nations will run 50 gigawatts (50,000 megawatts) worth of new offshore wind auctions in 2024. (That is, the governments want to buy 50 gigawatts’ worth of offshore wind power, and will hold auctions for companies to bid to build the offshore wind farms). A great boost for clean energy as well as European maritime ecosystems; offshore wind farms tend to rapidly become species-rich artificial reefs!
France has instituted a month-long ban on fishing in the Bay of Biscay (the first such ban such World War II) to protect dolphins being killed by industrial fishing techniques.
Netherlands provincial authorities have authorized firing paintballs to scare off wolves in the Hoge Veluwe national park that have grown too comfortable around humans. (Pepper spray was considered, but thought to be too harmful to the wolves).
This makes a great launchpad to check in with a much bigger story. The Netherlands is a highly developed and densely populated country, but it’s also a star player in the great rewilding of Europe, which has seen a multitude of wild mammal species skyrocket in population as forest cover expanded and European attitudes shifted to support wildlife conservation. Wolves were extirpated in the Netherlands in the 1800s, but made a triumphant return in 2019. Whether this specific intervention works or not, conflict-avoiding fixes like the paintball story are a great sign of people working to find new ways to keep human civilization and wild ecosystems thriving alongside each other!
Hermit Crabs
A fascinating new study has analyzed scientific research and Internet photos from around the world to find that 10 out of 16 known terrestrial hermit crab species are now commonly using human-made plastic (and metal) artifacts as their shells. It’s possible (though currently unknown) that this could be making life easier for smaller, weaker individual hermit crabs, as plastic is lighter and easier to carry than snail shell. A great opportunity for future research into an intriguing ecological phenomenon of the Anthropocene!
United States
In a major turning point for the American government’s relationship to the fossil fuel industry and arguably the biggest federal action on climate issues since the epically transformative Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden Administration has announced a pause on federal approvals of liquified natural gas (LNG) export terminals (which had been set for a huge build-out), explicitly citing fossil fuels’ contribution to climate change2 as the reason why.
While the exact emissions impact that this pause will have is contested (it’s possible that other LNG suppliers like Qatar will just fill the gap in the international market), the political and socioeconomic impacts are considerable. This is a powerful signal to the market that fossil fuel expansion projects are politically risky while renewables are the future, and could help further accelerate the already-massive shift in capital towards clean energy!
This newsletter has previously been more than a little disappointed that the American climate action movement didn’t rally more strongly behind Biden in the wake of the amazingly transformative Inflation Reduction Act. Now more than ever, it’s time to unify around supporting Biden’s extraordinary pro-clean energy progress presidency and ensuring his reelection!
“With this decision, President Biden — who already can claim to have done more to bolster clean energy than any of his predecessors — has also done more to check dirty energy, halting the largest fossil fuel expansion in history.”
-Bill McKibben
A wide range of U.S. states now have set renewable and clean energy standards and goals, as shown in the cool graphic above! And this is just the state policy side, with economics and federal policy providing strong additional imperatives to switch to clean energy; Texas is leading the nation in solar installation despite having little to no active state climate policy. On the graphic, the only Texas climate goal is to have 5,880 MW of renewable energy capacity by 2015; as of September 2023, they had 18,364 MW of solar alone. Many other state targets will likely be exceeded like this!
The U.S. Interior Department made tons of historic investments in conservation and climate resilience in 2023; check out their full article!
New Jersey has approved two new massive offshore wind farms, totaling 3.7 gigawatts! Both should be completed by 2031. It is insane that this kind of news is barely noticed these days: if two giant offshore wind farms were approved in America in 2005, it would have been hailed as a harbinger of the green industrial revolution. And it is!
America’s first electric tugboat, dubbed the eWolf, has been built in Alabama and will shortly enter service at the Port of San Diego! The electrification of everything continues apace.
Startup WattEV will be building three massive new electric truck charging depots in California, backed by U.S. Federal Highway Administration grants. Two of the charging depots will be along the I-5 corridor in the Central Valley, and the third near the Arizona border, with megawatts of solar and battery storage at each site and 258 charging points between them. Just a few years ago, somewere saying that electric trucks were infeasible…now massive EV truck infrastructure buildouts are barely-noticed business as usual!
Scientists have mapped the largest ever discovered deep-water coral reef (so far) and it’s off U.S. East Coast, stretching 499 kilometers from South Carolina to Florida and located between 200 to 1,000 meters underwater. In these dark depths, corals can’t use photosynthesis for energy and instead filter food particles out of the water, but it’s still home to life from sharks to swordfish to sea stars to octopuses. Awesome!
Swimming bats! What a cool world we live in.
Natural gas is “cleaner-burning” than coal, emitting less carbon dioxide per unit burned, but that undercounts its climate impact; methane leaks from natural gas infrastructure lead to substantial extra greenhouse gas emissions.
I would describe myself as a climate hawk and I think the Biden decision on LNG was a massive mistake. It will reduce natural gas prices in America which will slow the environmental transition. The extra supply to the international market would have helped out America's European and Asian partners in their decoupling from Russia. Additionally, despite the improvement of grid scale storage options natural gas is (for now) a necessary complement for renewable energy.