The Weekly Anthropocene, June 12 2024
Fin whales rebound in Antarctic waters, USA & EU clean manufacturing surges, drones fight fires in Canada, Mexico's election, turtle nests in Bangladesh, China's emissions may have peaked, and more!
Southern Ocean
A new study has found that endangered fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus) appear to be making a spectacular comeback in Antarctic waters of the Southern Ocean! Over 700,000 fin whales were killed in the age of industrialized whaling, and the devastating effects lingered for decades, with a 2000 survey estimating that there were just 4,760 fin whales in the Scotia Sea/Antarctic Peninsula region. Now, researchers conducting seaborne transect surveys of the same region in 2018/19 have estimated that there are likely now over 50,000 fin whales in the Scotia Sea, three times more than were thought to exist across the entire Southern Ocean! Furthermore, local krill populations do not appear to be declining despite this predator increase. Great news!
Canada
In the wake of a deadly “mega-fire” season in 2023, Canada is investing in a wide range of wildfire prevention, mitigation, and suppression techniques. One of the most striking is the use of drones dropping “dragon-egg bombs” of potassium permanganate and ethylene glycol to ignite smaller fires in the path of a wildfire to reduce the deadwood and brush fuel load available, creating a firebreak. Fascinatingly, this is essentially a high-tech version of Canadian First Nations’ ancient fire management practices, setting small-scale controlled burns to reduce the available fuel for wildfires. Climate adaptation takes many forms, including dragon-egg bombs. Great work!
France
Following the model of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, France is rapidly standing up a green reindustrialization “Battery Valley” of its own, with four new EV battery gigafactories set to open in the northern Hauts-de-France region, and more potentially on the way. There’s plenty of market demand to meet: EVs already account for 15% of new sales in the French market, local carmakers Renault and Stellantis have pledged to build 2 million EVs in France by 2030, and the European Union will ban the sale of new internal combustion engine cars in 2035. Great work!
Mexico
Mexico held a presidential election on June 2, 2024, and voters resoundingly chose Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo of the Morena party, former Mayor of Mexico City, who won over 59% of the vote and 31 out of 32 Mexican states. She will be the first woman and first Jewish President of Mexico, as well as the first former climate scientist to lead any country anywhere, having helped write the IPCC’s 2007 climate report before her mayoralty. Ms. Sheinbaum, who has pledged to invest over $13 billion in new energy projects and to speed up renewables deployment, is widely viewed as a leader with the potential to kickstart Mexico’s green transition into a higher gear!
Interestingly, Ms. Sheinbaum succeeds and was endorsed by “AMLO,” outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Morena party, who was known as a strong supporter of Mexico’s heavily indebted state-owned oil industry and generally an anti-renewables figure. In American terms, it’s rather as if a fossil fuel-loving incumbent was succeeded by a former climate scientist making plans for the green transition, but they were from the same party and politically allied with each other. Here’s hoping that President-elect Sheinbaum will help Mexico zoom forward in the global clean energy surge!
China
China just inaugurated the largest solar farm in the history of the world (for now, at least). The Midong solar farm is a 3.5 GW (3,500 MW) behemoth near Urumqi in Xinjiang1, and consists of over 5.26 million individual solar panels spread across the desert. (For context, the vast Pavagada solar farm this writer recently visited in India had a capacity of 2.05 GW).
China also recently switched on its first large-scale sodium-ion battery in the city of Nanning, a milestone for the emerging new battery chemistry based on a much cheaper and more abundant mineral than the lithium-ion standard.
These are just a few of the latest examples of the titanic renewables buildout that has led China’s carbon emissions to decline by 3% from March 2023 to March 2024, raising hopes that the country’s yearly carbon emissions may have peaked in 2023 and begun a long-term decline. Great news for the future of Earth’s climate!
“A 2023 peak in China’s CO2 emissions is possible if the buildout of clean energy sources is kept at the record levels seen last year.”
-Lauri Myllyvirta of CarbonBrief.
Panama
On June 3, 2024, the government of Panama began relocating 300 families of the Guna indigenous people from the low-lying, sea level rise-vulnerable island of Gardi Sugdub to a new mainland village named Isber Yala. This is the first-ever whole-community climate migration project in Latin America, and so far it seems to be going very well, with substantial improvements in quality of life in addition to flood safety. The relocated families are receiving larger houses with running water, and a new school with air-conditioned classrooms is set to open in Isber Yala by the end of the year. Great work, and an excellent model for the future!
“It’s pretty, it’s bigger than I’m used to. I love it.”
-Yany Prestán, speaking of her new home in Isber Yala.
Bangladesh
In 2024, Bangladesh’s beaches saw a record high number of olive ridley sea turtle (Lepidochelys olivacea) eggs, with years of community conservation efforts paying off. Local naturalists found 12,425 eggs across five government-protected hatching areas in 2024, up from 8,096 last year and just 4,713 in 2020-21. Another great example of proactive conservation; spectacular work!
Central African Republic
The Central African Republic is one of the poorest, bloodiest, and most miserable places on Earth. Ruled by a dictatorial cannibal emperor in the 1970s2, engaged in a civil war since 2012, and increasingly subject to the depredations of Russia’s brutal Wagner Group mercenaries, a recent report calculated that 5.6% of the entire population died in 2022, more than twice as high as estimates for any other country anywhere.
And yet, despite this litany of horror, this beleaguered country is now at the forefront of one of humanity’s noblest achievements yet. On May 24, 2024, UNICEF flew in 43,000 doses of the cutting edge R21 malaria vaccine, with 120,000 more doses to follow, making the CAR the first country in the world to receive thousands of R21 doses. Further R21 shipments should soon arrive in Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Sudan, and Uganda as well. (Several other countries have already received over 4 million doses of the earlier-developed RTS,S malaria vaccine, but the R21 vaccine is cheaper while being as or more effective).
Getting malaria vaccines to where they’re needed is a gigantic win for human well-being (and should happen as soon as possible!). For context, in 2022 over 1.73 million malaria cases were reported in the CAR, a country with about 5.65 million people total. Although the majority of malaria cases are nonfatal, that adds up to widespread debilitation and a steady drumbeat of death, mostly among small children. The invention and nascent deployment of malaria vaccines in the 2020s is one of the most important yet underreported stories of the decade, if not the century. Thanks to this work, in the months and years to come, millions of people across Africa will live longer, healthier, happier lives, with profound ripple effects across economies and societies. Great news!
United States
The green manufacturing boom unlocked by President Biden’s epic Inflation Reduction Act act continues to supercharge American industry! In the first quarter of 2024, a record-high 11 gigawatts of solar manufacturing capacity came online in America, bringing the country’s total solar manufacturing capacity up to 26 GW per year. And ongoing innovation means the long-term future is looking even brighter; the Hanwha Q Cells solar factory hub in Georgia is now trialling breakthrough new “digital printing press” technology that can lay ultra-thin layers of silver in a solar panel’s polysilicon wafers, substantially cutting costs by using less of the expensive metal. It’s possible that someday, these kinds of new developments could help the growing domestic U.S. solar industry (currently tariff-shielded from China’s cheaper solar exports) compete on price in international markets.
In Texas, a new deal has been announced to build 300 MW of a new “geomechanical energy storage” technology, using closed-loop pressurized underground reservoirs to store energy by pumping water in when there’s excess power and letting in surge out to turn turbines when more power is required. It’s essentially classic hillside pumped storage taken underground. Another awesome new component of the renewables revolution in the making!
A new study in Pennsylvania has found a massive new domestic source of lithium in an unlikely place: fracking wastewater from the Marcellus Shale, where groundwater has dissolved lithium over millions of years. If extraction facilities are spun up, this could supply a considerable chunk of U.S. demand!
Wyoming has begun the permitting process for the immense Cowboy Solar project! Construction is set to begin in March 2025, and when complete in 2027, the solar farm will consist of a massive 771 MW (0.771 GW) of solar capacity plus 269 MW of grid-scale battery storage, generating enough electricity for 771,000 homes making it one of the largest solar-plus-storage projects in America (for now!). Spectacular work.
The critically endangered Devils Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis) has the smallest range of any known vertebrate, endemic to a single water-filled limestone cavern in the Mojave Desert of Nevada. Now, their spring population count has reached a 25-year high with 191 fish counted in 2024, up from just 35 fish in 2013. This species was once the center of a Supreme Court case that established that the federal government had a right to protect the fish, which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service continues to do admirably. There’s something profoundly sweet about a human superpower selflessly striving to keep alive a tiny population of unique fish in a desert cavern. Good work!
Standard China Disclaimer: when praising China’s extraordinary renewables build-out, this newsletter feels ethically obliged to note that the Chinese government is doing lots of horrible things: to name just a few, the brutal oppression of the Uighurs of Xinjiang, Hong Kong repression, recent and very possibly ongoing forced organ harvesting, running a massive piratical and forced labor-exploiting global fishing fleet, and routinely threatening the free democracy of Taiwan. Praising good things happening in China can feel wrong given all of this. But still, China decarbonizing faster means that every human and animal on Earth gets a somewhat more climactically stable and less air-polluted planet. Very good news coming from a country whose government does lots of very bad things is still very good news. As China’s clean energy transition accelerates, feel free to mentally append this footnote to everything this newsletter writes about it.
This period is, unbelievably, apparently widely regarded as the good old days in the modern CAR.
When badly led countries do good things... That's China all right. We can wish they were more humane, but at the same time salute their efforts in benefitting the world's environment... Overall, I am optimistic that they will be a very positive force for good.
All the other news is splendid from loveable Pup Fish to Fin Wbales. Firefighting drones to gigawatt solar farms. This was a great issue!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIyJzQN0X4s
Whale poop recycles nutrients to be reused by algae instead of krill clumping and sinking out of the sunlit zones.