The Weekly Anthropocene, June 28 2023
A halt to whale hunting in Iceland, a record loan for Ford's EV battery plants, America and India team up on decarbonization, growing plants without light, lab-grown chicken legalized, and more!
Iceland
Iceland has suspended its planned 2023 whale hunting season, following the publication of a government report which found (unsurprisingly) that many whales suffer immensely after being harpooned, sometimes taking hours to die. As a majority of Icelanders oppose the whale hunts, and continuing them after the new report may now be illegal under the nation’s animal welfare laws, this is widely hoped to mark a final end to the cruel practice.
The Icelandic commercial whale hunt had planned to kill 200 highly intelligent fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus, a species rated as “Vulnerable” by the IUCN), who will now be spared1. As Iceland is only one of three countries worldwide, along with Norway and Japan, that still maintains a commercial whaling fleet2, this represents substantial progress for humanity’s relationship with cetaceans! Great news.
United States
The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, flush with Inflation Reduction Act funding, has just offered the largest loan in its history (see chart): $9.2 billion to “BlueOvalSK,” a new joint venture between Ford and South Korean battery maker SK On Co. The money will support Ford’s building of three massive new electric vehicle battery factories (two in Kentucky, one in Tennessee) that will create over 7,000 jobs and produce more than 120 gigawatt-hours3 of EV batteries annually, replacing more than 455 million gallons of gasoline per year. Ford made about 132,000 electric vehicles in 2022, but once these new factories are finished, they plan to be making 2 million electric vehicles a year by the end of 2026.
Farmers in drought-stricken western Kansas, above the dwindling Ogallala Aquifer, are increasingly replacing their plantings of wheat, sorghum, and even corn with triticale, a wheat-rye hybrid4. Triticale is highly drought-resistant, able to survive on just 12 inches of rain per year compared to a minimum of 20 for corn. There’s no real market yet for triticale as food for humans, so it’s mostly being used as cattle feed. An example of underreported climate adaptation.
Boosted by $320 million in Bipartisan Infrastructure Law spending allocated in 2021, the US Geological Survey is several years into a historic effort to find and map new critical minerals deposits on American soil. It’s known as the Earth Mapping Resources Initiative, or “Earth MRI”. As detailed in an in-depth new article from Science, they’ve already found many promising leads, including billions of dollars’ worth of zirconium, niobium, and other elements at Pennington Mountain in Maine. The initiative is also reshaping our understanding of North America’s underlying geology along the way, making cutting-edge discoveries including buried ancient volcanoes, hidden seismic faults, fossilized mineral-rich sands from prehistoric shorelines’ beaches, and hitherto unknown deposits of hot brine that might be perfect for geothermal power. Awesome work!
Millions of people in Texas are suffering from an extreme heat wave now in its third week, with some cities seeing temperatures at or near 110°F and heat indices (heat plus humidity, the “feels like” temperature”) as high as 125°F. A recent analysis found that climate change has made this extreme heat event at least 5 times more likely. Texan energy experts have observed that solar and battery storage have come to the rescue in the crisis5, with their plentiful energy providing the key to preventing rolling blackouts: when a coal plant went offline on June 20th due to the heat, battery storage replaced 75% of the lost coal electricity on the grid within minutes.
The federal Bureau of Land Management (which administers about 10% of the United States’ land area) has proposed a new rule that would reduce land rental costs for solar and wind projects on public land by 80%. For context, oil and gas projects have paid ultra-low “sweetheart deal” renting fees for decades; in some cases, oil and gas projects have paid $2 or less per acre in rental fees work on public lands while renewables projects paid over $10,000 per acre in rental fees!
However, despite this, the BLM has approved 35 new renewables projects on their lands in the last two and half years under Biden, and is currently processing 74 more proposals (renewables are just that good of an investment). New lower fees will likely invite many more. Another big boost for decarbonization from the Biden Administration!
On June 21st, the US Department of Agriculture approved two different lines of lab-grown chicken, from startups Good Meat (a division of Eat Just) and Upside Foods. This makes America the second country ever, after Singapore, to legalize cell-cultured “clean meat” (which does not require the original animal to be killed and could be made with much lower emissions than conventional meat) for commercial production and consumption. It’ll likely take years to scale up to supermarket levels production, so cruelty-free chicken will likely first be available to the public at a gradually increasing number of restaurants. And hopefully soon after, everywhere else!
America and India
During Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent official visit to the US, America and India announced a wide range of new military, economic, and technological collaborations in the fields of defense, aerospace, steelmaking, skilled immigration, semiconductors, and more. This profoundly impactful and wide-ranging suite of actions is already being described as “a new quasi-alliance6.”
In the decarbonization sector, several Indian companies pledged new investments in the booming American renewables field, including $1.5 billion for new solar panel factories in Colorado and elsewhere, $120 million for steel manufacturing in Ohio targeting offshore wind as a customer, and $650 million in a new graphite anode (EV battery component) factory.
Furthermore, India joined the Minerals Security Partnership, a new geopolitical group already including the US, UK, EU, Japan, Australia, South Korea, and Canada that works to “accelerate the development of diverse and sustainable critical energy minerals supply chains globally.” (In less diplomatic terms, “not letting China run the show.”). As India recently discovered lithium on its territory and is very rapidly expanding renewables manufacturing, deployment, and use, this is a big “get” for the Biden Administration’s vision of democracy-led decarbonization.
Senegal
Following similar international deals for Vietnam, Indonesia, and South Africa in recent years, a Just Energy Transition Partnership with the West African nation of Senegal has been announced, the world’s fourth. The governments of the UK, Canada, France, Germany, and the European Union collectively have pledged to contribute $2.7 billion to help Senegal build out clean, renewable energy for its citizens. The money will arrive as a mix of grants, loans, investment guarantees, technical assistance, and more, from government funds, multilateral development banks, and private investors, although more precise details are not yet public.
Notably, unlike the previous JETP countries, Senegal doesn’t really have much fossil fuel-powered generating capacity to replace. The deal will primarily focus on building new renewables projects to add much-needed brand-new electricity, as about one-fifth of Senegal’s 16 million people still have no access to power at all. If well managed, this deal could be a great new model of global support for African countries to develop in a way that uplifts their people’s living standards without worsening air pollution and climate change!
Plants
Science magazine reports on an array of scientists working on gene-editing plants’ metabolic pathways so that they can grow without light. The general idea is to reactivate the “glyoxylate cycle,” the chemical pathway that plants use to get energy when they are seeds germinating underground, to continue providing energy to adult plants. If sugar, normally produced during photosynthesis, is then supplied to the plants externally (giving them sugar water, essentially), this could result in plants that can efficiently grow and produce fruit, vegetables, or grains in darkness. (Or perhaps with just a few flashes of light at key moments to spur development).
If successful, this would revolutionize agriculture, with applications ranging from farming in deep space and Antarctica to farming underground and in “vertical farm” greenhouses without energy-intensive LED lights. It would also make food growing incredibly resilient: with sugar water as the only input, fresh vegetables and fruits could be grown anywhere in the world without worrying about winter darkness, storms, droughts, or even electricity cuts turning off LED lights. Here’s hoping this pioneering research succeeds!
For context, whaling globally has decreased massively since the 1980s. The Soviet Union alone killed over 500,000 whales in the 20th century. Over 700,000 whales were killed by humans in the 1960s, compared to less than 40,000 in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s combined. Hopefully we can soon get that to near-zero!
There are several other legal killings of cetaceans, often linked to historic cultural traditions, from subsistence hunting in Alaskan Inuit villages in the United States to the notoriously brutal “grindarap” on the beaches of the Faroe Islands. While this writer considers such practices to be morally unacceptable as well, high-seas commercial whaling from industrialized slaughter ships is in a league of its own as an interspecies atrocity, and getting rid of one of its last holdouts in Iceland is excellent news.
Some context for the measurements: a watt is a measurement of power, equating to one joule worth of electrons flowing per second, while a watt-hour is one watt of power flowing for one hour. In 2021, an average American home used just under 11 megawatt-hours per year. 120 gigawatt-hours equals 120,000 megawatt-hours, 120 million kilowatt-hours, or 120 billion watt-hours: it’s a lot of power. It’s also worth noting that watts and watt-hours don’t always line up in a super intuitive way: for example, one kilowatt of power operating constantly for one year will produce 8,760 kilowatt-hours, as there are 8,760 hours in a year.
Fictionalized as “quadrotriticale,” this niche grain is perhaps best known as a key plot element in the classic Star Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles.”
The Republican-dominated Texan political system has been much less responsive to the crisis. Almost unbelievably, amid the heatwave, Republican Governor Greg Abbott has signed a bill nullifying city-level ordinances that grant workers water breaks to help endure the heat. Yes, banning water breaks during an extreme heat event.
The Noahpinion Substack has a great article on this.
Oddly enough, I think the lab-grown meat space is among the most important stories right now. I've been following the "stem cell burger" space for a decade now; I felt the potential back then, and we're starting to see possible applications being rolled out in the real world. Amazing.