The Weekly Anthropocene, June 14 2023
The surprising resilience of the Mekong River and its megafish, floating solar in New Jersey, a critical mineral motherlode in Norway, good times for Colombian hippos, and more!
Cambodia
On June 13th, 2022, a 4-meter, 300-kilogram female endangered giant freshwater stingray (Urogymnus polylepis) was captured and radio-tagged in the Stung Treng province of Cambodia, in one of the deep pools of the great Mekong River1. The largest freshwater fish ever caught, she was given the name “Boramy,” Cambodian for “full moon.” Now, one year later, her telemetry data (it turns out she’s a “homebody”) has helped contribute to a new study on the still-surviving “megafish” populations of the Mekong.
Boramy’s story is a case study in the surprising resilience of the river as a whole. After years of decline due to dam-building, drought, and overfishing led to fears of imminent ecosystem collapse, the Mekong and its wildlife are holding up better than expected. The 2022 monsoon season brought higher-than-average rains, helping the river recover from the 2019-2020 droughts. The Cambodian government has cracked down on illegal fishing in the great Tonle Sap lake (which flows into the Mekong), appears to have shelved two planned Mekong dam projects after a 2019 dam produced less power than expected, and is lobbying for a 100-mile stretch of the Mekong in northern Cambodia to be designated as a UN World Heritage Site. The Tonle Sap River “dai” fishery catch, vital to Cambodia’s food security, rose 30% from 2021 to 2022. Anecdotal evidence indicates that the populations of many rare fish species are increasing as well. And since Boramy was tagged, local fishers have caught several more critically endangered “megafish,” including a Mekong giant catfish, Jullien's golden carp, and giant barb, and decided to sell them to scientists to be radio-tagged as well instead of selling their meat on the market.
“The Mekong is not dead. We’ve seen huge environmental pressures causing the Mekong to dry up and fisheries to almost collapse. And yet we also see the incredible resilience of this river in the face of those threats.” -Dr. Sudeep Chandra, Wonders of the Mekong project director.
United States
As previously reported in this newsletter, data from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory shows that post-Inflation Reduction Act, grid interconnection is one of the final remaining bottlenecks to fully decarbonizing the US economy. A new chart from the Financial Times visualizes the scale of this; the renewable energy projects currently waiting for grid connection add up to more than the entire current electricity generating capacity of the United States. That’s such a crazy reality that it’s hard to fully comprehend. Over 1,500 gigawatts (1,500,000 megawatts) of wind, solar, and battery projects have been proposed by various companies, communities, and other entities, but they have to wait to build them (sometimes for years) because there aren’t enough power lines and substations to accommodate all that new electricity2. This is a really good problem to have, of course (people want to build all that clean power now, it’s cost-effective and everything!), but it also underscores the vital importance of investing in and supporting transmission line and grid modernization projects. Let’s decarbonize as fast as we can!
Ørsted, a major renewables installer, has committed to recycle 100% of its end-of-life solar panels in the US.
Tesla and General Motors have struck a deal for GM electric vehicles to use Tesla’s renowned Supercharger network, two weeks after Tesla made a similar deal with Ford. This is great news for EV adoption in America: Tesla’s Supercharger network is widely known as providing by far the most reliable EV chargers out there (other charging networks have a record of breaking down), and now that Ford and GM cars can use it as well, it’s effectively the national standard.
The largest floating solar farm in North America recently came online: an 8.9-megawatt facility covering 17 acres of the Canoe Brook reservoir in New Jersey. Floating solar is a great “win-win” technology perfect for the age of climate change: the water helps keep the solar panels cool, making them more efficient, and the solar panels reduce evaporation, conserving water supplies. The New Jersey project is a great start, but 8.9 megawatts is tiny compared to the stars of East Asia’s floating solar boom (there’s a 1,200-megawatt floating solar project under development in South Korea). There’s lots of room for this clever technology to grow!
Norway
An immense 70 billion-tonne deposit of vanadium, titanium, and phosphate has been discovered in southwestern Norway. According to Norge Mining, a company planning to commercialize the deposit, there’s potentially enough to supply global demand of all three critical minerals for the next 50 years. Vanadium is a vital component for advanced steel tools and vanadium redox batteries, titanium is essential for aircraft, and phosphate is key for fertilizer, lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, computer chips, and solar panels. This discovery should help stabilize supply chains for the renewables revolution and reduce dependence on China for these minerals.
Colombia
A new census has found that the famed “Pablo Escobar hippo” population is greater than previously thought, with about 181 to 215 hippopotami residing in Colombia’s lush Magdalena River watershed. 37% are juveniles, indicating that the hippos are breeding rapidly. The Colombian government is still debating what to do with these newcomers, descendants of the drug lord’s four pet hippos that escaped in 1993. Some local scientists are lobbying to kill the hippos as an “invasive species,” but public opinion seems against this (hippo tourism is on the rise) and compromise solutions like injecting the hippos with contraceptives or capturing them all would likely be unworkably difficult and expensive. Interestingly, some researchers posit that the Colombian hippos are actually good for the local ecosystem3, as they may be replacing the ecological function of lost South American mammals like the similarly large and semi-aquatic Toxodon that went extinct in the late Pleistocene. This newsletter is rooting for the hippos to continue thriving as an accidentally thriving example of “Anthropocene rewilding”!
And we do need lots of new electricity: decarbonizing the economy requires not only replacing fossil-fueled electricity generation, but roughly tripling electricity generation overall to support newly electrified technologies, from electric vehicles to heat pumps, that are replacing fossil fuel-burning cars and furnaces.
Not to mention that they’re clearly good for the hippopotamus species itself, which is vulnerable in its native Africa.
They are massively dangerous. Given enough time a child will likely be tragically gored and the political calculus will change.