The Weekly Anthropocene, July 10 2024
A new PM for the UK brings a new dawn for climate action, South Sudan's newly quantified Great Nile Migration, U.S. green manufacturing, my exciting new project with Climate Action Now, and more!
United Kingdom
After years of backtracking1 from a fast-changing sequence of Conservative Prime Ministers, it’s a new dawn for climate action in the UK as Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer takes office, winning a massive majority of 411 out of the 650 Members of Parliament elected on July 4th.
Prime Minister Starmer has pledged to “make Britain a clean energy superpower” in his pre-election manifesto, and is reportedly planning to launch Great British Energy, a new public company designed to spur investment in clean energy technologies, within the week. The UK is finally getting back on track as a leader in the renewables revolution! Great news.
India
According to a recent report, India installed over 12 gigawatts (over 12,000 megawatts) of new solar and wind capacity from January through May 2024, including 10,959 MW of solar and 1,686 MW of wind. 1,901 MW of wind and solar capacity were added in May 2024 alone, and many more new projects are underway.
Nothing to see here; just the world’s most populous country ever, home to over 1.4 billion people, rapidly bootstrapping itself out of grinding poverty and increasingly doing it with clean electrons instead of dirty coal! Human civilization is seeing the dawn of a mega-state poverty-busting super-buildout to rival China’s, only this time in a democracy and switching to renewables much earlier in its development. Absolutely excellent news.
South Sudan
South Sudan is one of the poorest and youngest countries in the world (they gained independence in 2011), but they’re starting to gradually move forward in the wake of a 2013-2020 civil war. They’re now sheltering refugees from a different civil war in northern neighbor Sudan, and are set to finally hold their long-delayed first elections in December 2024.
Now, it’s been revealed that during the years of chaos, this remote nation was home to something incredible waiting to be known. Renowned super-NGO African Parks and the South Sudanese government recently released the results of a historic aerial survey conducted across the remote Boma Badingilo Jonglei Landscape in southeast South Sudan, which found that this forgotten wilderness was home to the largest migration of land mammals on Earth. People had a vague idea that there were probably lots of wildlife around here, but this survey, taking and analyzing tens of thousands of photos of the remote landscape from the air, put some numbers on it.
This “Great Nile Migration” consists of over six million antelope (from many species, including the tiang, reedbuck, white-tailed kob, and Mongalla gazelle) seasonally crossing the White Nile river. For context, the deservedly famous “Great Serengeti Migration” of wildebeest, zebra, and gazelle amounts to around 2 million animals.
“Our grasslands and protected sites provide a haven for some of the largest populations of antelope on earth. Today with great pride I announce the findings of this census to this nation and the international community…
As South Sudan continues to develop we are committed to transforming the wildlife sector into a sustainable tourism industry.”
-President Salva Kiir Mayardit of South Sudan.
WOW! It is, apparently, still possible to discover a migration of millions of large mammals that most of humanity didn’t know about! What an incredible world.
Oman
A Chinese solar manufacturer has signed an agreement to build a 10 GW (10,000 MW) solar cell factory in the sultanate of Oman. Another example of the rapid growth and global reach of the renewables revolution! In a few decades, we’ll have solar cell factories all over the world.
United States
It is this newsletter’s long-standing contention that one of the most vitally important yet woefully underreported historic events of the 2020s so far is the one-two strike for green (re)industrialization delivered by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) infrastructure and climate action laws of 2021 and 2022, passed by the Democratic congressional majorities and signed into law by President Biden. These laws have kicked off an amazing wave of green manufacturing across America essentially amounting to a “stealth Green New Deal,” but many people still don’t know about it.
A new vital resource helps make clear what’s going on: the Department of Energy has created a detailed interactive map of the multitude of major new public and private U.S. clean energy manufacturing investments under the Biden Administration, a historic surge spurred on by the passage of the transformative BIL and IRA investments.
“President Biden’s Investing in America Agenda has spurred a new industrial revolution in clean energy. This web resource provides an interactive map on how the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law are leading to announcements of historic levels of private sector investments in the United States, bringing manufacturing back to America after decades of offshoring, and creating good-paying clean energy jobs—including union jobs—across the nation.”
-Department of Energy
This map shows the incredible new dawn that Americans won with our votes in 2020, building on decades of research and organizing before that. The USA is building an electric future like never before, finally speeding up in the race to compete with the renewables powerhouse that is China, and bringing back manufacturing jobs to long-neglected heartlands along the way. As the NYT recently reported, left-behind counties across America are seeing a huge wave of new jobs.
To keep this amazing progress, we need people to understand what’s going on and what a big deal it is! The 2024 U.S. election is charged with interpersonal drama, but much of the substance of what’s at stake is being ignored. If you’re a U.S. voter, please visit energy.gov/invest, find out where America's new Green Industrial Revolution is creating jobs and clean tech near you, and tell your neighbors, colleagues, and legislators about it!
Climate Action Now
In addition to my personal project The Weekly Anthropocene, I’ve recently joined the team at Climate Action Now, an audacious startup with a scalable, customizable platform for fun, engaging, and inspiring climate action. CAN has really caught my interest, and I think they've created a much-needed new tool to speed our civilizational effort to transition to clean energy and build a better world.
The free Climate Action Now app uses well-researched, well-written customizable messages and custom software to make contacting U.S. state and federal decision-makers about specific climate policies a matter of a few quick clicks2, much faster and more rewarding than conventional advocacy tools like "industry standard" web forms.
I'm currently leading the launch of CAN's brand-new Substack, Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope. Every Monday through Friday, we send out a Substack post including an article about a specific, actionable, and progress-focused climate solution headed by a QR code linking to a CAN app action that readers can take to help make that solution happen faster. Here are the first few:
The CAN app is essentially “gamifying” positive solutions-focused civic engagement in a way that I’m really excited about, like a Duolingo or Khan Academy for climate action. CAN app users can win points and rewards for taking actions, lengthen “streaks” for multiple days in a row of contacting their legislators, send gifts to loved ones by supporting an extremely well-verified reforestation program in their name, and even form teams for friendly competition - for example, right now we’re seeing whether Star Trek fans or Star Wars fans can take more climate actions!
Beyond the interface, Climate Action Now is also doing something different in the climate advocacy space: we’re becoming a service provider for supercharging the entire climate movement, a crowdsourced, engagement-boosting, and simply fun platform for everyone to use. Other climate action organizations, thought leaders, and interested individuals can use our app (for free!) as a fun, engaging platform for their own climate actions and campaigns. When new climate action policy proposals surface in research papers, think tank reports, Substack posts, or elsewhere, we want to rapidly adapt them into scalable mass communications to decision-makers, helping good ideas to better the world spread higher and faster than ever before.
We're really hoping that the new CAN Substack I'm writing3 will help bring more people to the CAN app, and I'd love it if you would check it out and help spread the word! If you’re interested, here are two things I’d really appreciate you doing:
Check out and/or subscribe for free to Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope, and
Use the QR codes in the articles to download the free CAN app and take some actions!
Let’s make this happen! As I wrote recently, “We can run human civilization on clean electrons, stabilize the atmosphere, and revitalize the biosphere in our lifetime.” I think the CAN app is a tool that can meaningfully help do that. Onwards and upwards!
Notable clean energy lowlights under the Conservative government included Ukraine building more onshore wind farms than Britain during its first year of fighting off a Russian invasion (though to be fair, Britain is doing very well on offshore wind), and two-month PM Liz Truss’ thankfully short-lived attempt to ban solar farms from much of England.
The CAN app is currently available only in the USA, with international expansion as a future goal!
I’ve agreed with CAN to cross-pollinate some content between Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope and The Weekly Anthropocene when we cover similar themes, so if certain articles seem familiar, that’s why!