The Weekly Anthropocene, March 11 2026
Kakapo eggs, OpenStar, CAES, golden frogs, Basra solar, West Papua's Lazarus taxa, jaguar tourism, the Jamshedpur heat battery, Mauritius' heat-tolerant coral, Yurok condors nesting, and more!
The Big Picture
The nonsensical, cruel, and wasteful war of whim launched by America’s mad, bad, and criminal wannabe-king is causing immense disruption to fossil fuel markets. If the Strait of Hormuz remains de-facto closed by Iran’s theocrats due to ongoing warfare, more Gulf fossil fuel exporters will be forced to declare force majeure on their contracted shipments. Oil and gas prices will keep skyrocketing, possibly triggering a 1979 or 1973-level global oil shortage and escalating fuel inflation around the world.
However, unlike in the 1970s, human civilization now has cheaper and clearly superior alternatives to fossil fuels. Solar, wind, batteries, EVs, and heat pumps keep spreading worldwide. China still has tons of cheap electrotech to sell. The European Union generated more power from solar and wind than from fossil fuels in 2025, and Chinese EVs made up 10% of all new EU cars that year. Pakistan had to turn away scheduled Qatari gas imports in late 2025 due their massive surge in solar power. Ethiopia banned the import of fossil fuel cars in 2024 and has since seen an EV boom. It’s increasingly an absolute economic and strategic no-brainer to build out renewables as fast as possible even if you care nothing about the climate or air pollution. This stupid war is likely to accelerate the global renewables revolution even more by highlighting the inherent fragility of a fossil fuels-based system. Quite soon, it will seem positively absurd that we once dug stuff up and shipped it around the world to burn it for power.
New Zealand
The kakapo (Strigops habroptilus), the famous cat-sized critically endangered flightless parrot of New Zealand, has been on an upswing lately thanks to conservation efforts. Wild kakapos now live on predator-free refuge islands, with every one wearing a transmitter pack. The population has risen from 51 to 236 in the last three decades. Now, early 2026 saw a rare surge in kakapo egg-laying due to high mating enthusiasm sparked by a bumper crop of nutrient-rich rimu tree berries. As of March 5, 139 fertile eggs have been laid and so far 52 chicks have hatched, with high hopes to overtake the previous record of 73 chicks in 2019. Climbing towards the light. Spectacular work!
OpenStar, an extraordinary New Zealand nuclear fusion research startup founded in 2021 by Maori physicist Dr. Ratu Mataira, has become the first company in the world to have levitated a half-tonne superconducting magnet in a chamber of confined plasma heated to over one million degrees Celsius. Their “levitated dipole” reactor design prototype, “Junior,” cost less than $10 million — extremely low for the field — and while it doesn’t yet produce more electricity than it uses, they hope to have a revenue-generating model within five years. Incredible underdog innovation!
China
The Huai’an Salt Cavern project, a 600 MW/2.4 GWh compressed air energy storage (CAES) system in Jiangsu province, has come online! It’s the world’s largest CAES system, overtaking a 300 MW/1.5 GWh CAES project in Hubei and soon to be supplanted by a 700 MW/4.2 GWh CAES project being built in Henan. CAES works by forcing air into subsurface caves when there’s extra clean power on the grid, then letting that air out to turn turbines and produce more power when needed. Awesome!
China is reportedly moving towards mass decarbonization of energy-intensive aluminum production, with smelters increasingly planning to use clean electricity.
Panama
The Panamanian golden frog (Atelopus zeteki) has likely been extinct in the wild since around 2009, one of many amphibian species worldwide to be devastated by the lethal chytrid fungus panzootic. But a dedicated captive breeding program has been working for decades, and as of 2026 rewilding efforts have begun, with an early trial reintroducing 100 golden frogs (back to the wild at last!)and gathering crucial data on how to avoid chytrid infection in future releases. Excellent work!
Iraq
As senseless war rages again across the region, the first part of the largest-ever solar farm in fast-rebuilding Iraq has switched on near Basra! 61 MW from the first of 4 250 MW units are now online, set reach a full 1 GW (1,000 MW) by 2028. It will power 350,000 Iraqi homes, and many more solar projects are underway. Superb news!
West Papua
In the lowland mountain forests of the remote Bird’s Head (aka Vogelkop or Doberai) Peninsula in Indonesia’s West Papua province on the great island of New Guinea, researchers led by Australian biologist Tim Flannery have rediscovered not one but two “Lazarus taxon” species of marsupial believed extinct for over 6,000 years and previously known only from the fossil record! Extraordinary work.
The pygmy long-fingered possum (Dactylonax kambuayai), a stripey little mammal, is like a marsupial version of Madagascar’s aye-aye, with an extra-long digit evolved to winkle tasty larvae out of wood. A great new example of convergent evolution!
The ring-tailed glider (Tous ayamaruensis) has a prehensile tail, is considered sacred by local indigenous peoples, and is not just a new species but a new genus.
We’re learning more and more of the incredible creatures of this planet. Great news!
Brazil
Remote communities in the Brazilian Amazon are increasingly benefiting from the Electrotech Age! A project integrating solar and small-scale river turbines now provides 24/7 fully independent clean power to three Xingu Basin villages. Great work!
Brazil is developing a network of long-distance standardized-marking hiking trails similar to those in the U.S. and EU, in a bottom-up process boosting ecotourism.
Researcher Ana Rubia Rossi is building canopy rope bridges for golden-headed lion tamarins across the BA-262 state highway of Bahia to help prevent deaths from car collisions. Tamarins used her bridges just 11 days after they were installed, a record.
Jaguar tourism in Brazil’s lush Pantanal region is becoming big business, leading to a virtuous cycle of easily visible human-habituated jaguars generating more revenue for the community, thus incentivizing further conservation, reduction of rancher conflict, and even less fearful jaguars! There may now be 4,000 to 7,000 jaguars in the Pantanal!
India
A Tata Steel steel mill in Jamshedpur in Jharkand state, India, is now using a 20 megawatt-hour heat battery from German startup Kraftblock! It absorbs waste heat from an early stage of steelmaking, sintering, and uses it to replace fossil gas heat in warming water for a later stage. The project, developed with zero government subsidies, has been operating since May 2025 but was only revealed to the public in February 2026. Decarbonization of heavy industry is happening FAST! Awesome news.
Mauritius
The Indian Ocean island republic of Mauritius has made great strides in breeding heat-tolerant coral to help its rich reefs survive the Anthropocene. When a bleaching event ravaged their reefs in summer 2025, it also struck two coral nurseries where heat-resilient strains had been developed. A recent study quantified the effects, finding that heat-resilient strains of three different coral genera had survival rates over 88%, compared to just 10% for corals not bred for heat tolerance! Superb work.
United Kingdom
The UK in 2025 burned less coal than any year since 1600 (the reign of Queen Elizabeth I!) as total greenhouse gas emissions fell by 2.4% (in one year) to the lowest level since 1872 and 700,000 new EVs and hybrids hit British roads. UK emissions (from the whole economy!) are now 54% below 1990 levels, while GDP has doubled.
United States
As resistance keeps mounting against the kleptocratic incompetents in power, people across America are innovating and agitating their way to a brighter future!
California condors were triumphantly reintroduced to the lands of the Yurok people in 2022. Now, a condor pair is nesting for the first time in a century in Northern California, (in an old-growth redwood!) and their behavior strongly suggests that there’s a new-laid egg up there, though it’s too remote to confirm. Spectacular news!
Oxy, an oil and gas company, has started drilling test enhanced geothermal boreholes in Colorado. An encouraging sign of a possible clean-power corporate pivot someday!
Promising candidate James Talarico became the Democratic nominee for the November 2026 election choosing the next U.S. Senator from Texas. Go blue!
A big new grid-scale battery is on the way near Boston! The 700 MW/2.8 GWh Trimount project (at an old oil site) will start work helping stabilize the grid by 2029.
“Laser beam” drilling electromagnetic geothermal startup Quaise has started building Project Obsidian in Oregon, set to become a 50 MW superhot rock clean power plant.
The White House recently held an auction for offshore oil and gas drilling rights to over 1 million acres off Cook Inlet in Alaska, ocean waters home to beluga whales. It just closed with 0 bids. Zero bids. Not a single company anywhere is interested in new offshore drilling in Alaska. The latest in a long line of foolish federal fossil failures!
Self-driving taxis from Waymo (all 100% electric) are now available in 10 major U.S. cities across California, Texas, Georgia, and Florida, with plans afoot to soon expand to many more. Waymo currently has over 3,000 robotaxis on U.S. roads and is on track to provide over 1 million rides per week by the end of 2025. Waymo has around 70 human “emergency backup” remote operators online for its 3,000 cars, a 1:43 ratio.
Three endangered blue whales were recently sighted in New England Atlantic waters, another milestone in the fast-advancing recovery of Earth’s largest animal ever. Epic!
Caltrain successfully electrified 51 miles of track in the Bay Area in 2024. The new electric trains cut 23 minutes off the travel time from San Francisco to San Jose, which has allowed new stops to be added. Weekend ridership has doubled. Awesome!
The Florida governor attempted to purge spending on climate-related research or action, but one of the country’s largest state-level climate resilience programs is surviving with overwhelming bipartisan support. The Resilient Florida fund has spent over $1 billion on projects ranging from living shorelines at Pensacola to a storm drain system in Palm Beach County to moving a wastewater treatment plant inland at Fort Pierce. The state legislature reauthorized it with no votes against, and it now has new funding and no expiration date. Reality has a well-known liberal bias!
Sam,
Thanks for all this great info. I spend the first part of the day diving into the harsh reality of an obscene war, a suffering U.S. and frankly, all manner of demented leadership mistakes.
Here's what haunts me. If Putin wanted to make America weak, what would he ask us to do differently? Shutting down the Strait of Hormuz = higher oil prices benefiting Russia!
Imagine if we spent one billion a day on the grid and renewable energy projects....or fed some kids, built some affordable housing, etc.
And then I read your Substack as the day winds down and it builds me up. Kudos. And thank you.
I mentioned wind turbines to my brother, a retired pilot. He said that wind turbines are in the flyaways for migrating birds. That was enough to make me almost vomit. He went on to say that the energy to build, locate, maintain and dispose of them (wind turbines) exceeds their potential to create ‘clean’ energy. It would seem that humans have decided that birds are expendable. One final thing, you seem to take delight in trashing Americans. As an American, I do not appreciate that.