The Weekly Anthropocene, March 13 2024
Bald eagles nest in Toronto, electric crewless ships in Norway, floating solar in Bangladesh, Biden's epic SOTU, a great 2023 for solar, Colorado River progress, and more!
Canada
For the first time in the city’s recorded history, bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) are nesting in the rapidly growing Canadian metropolis of Toronto, with a pair observed building a nest. (The exact location isn’t publicly shared, to avoid a crowd of excited onlookers freaking out the eagles). This is another great example of an urban environmental renaissance leading to epic rewilding; otters and the large “muskie” fish have also returned to the Toronto recently following years of work cleaning up local waterways.
It’s also yet another landmark in the extraordinary recovery of bald eagles across the continent: in the “Lower 48” United States, the bald eagle population rose from just 417 nesting pairs in 1963 to over 71,400 nesting pairs (and an estimated 316,700 individuals) in 2021! A North America with majestic bald eagles thriving alongside and within vibrant cities is a great example of a good Anthropocene!
Developed in the Canadian Inuit territory of Nunavut, an app called SIKU is rapidly becoming a “social network” for the warming Arctic, with users from Alaska to Greenland sharing information about wildlife sightings, hunts, sea ice conditions (including tagging the location of sled-endangering ice cracks), and the quickly changing climate. Excellent work!
Norway
Norway is incubating the rising global wave of electric and crewless ships. The 80-meter Yara Birkeland, already famous as one of the world’s first electric container ships, is now set to become remote-controlled, running its route without any crew. Norwegian fjords are also home to the early tests of American-British startup Ocean Infinity’s majority-automated “Armada” ships, set to become sensor-studded platforms for underwater drones to survey the seabed and check on infrastructure.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, an agricultural biodiversity preservation “doomsday bunker” located on the eponymous remote Arctic archipelago, just received its largest-ever “deposit” of seeds from around the world. Twenty-three seed banks took part, with seed banks from Bosnia, Cameroon, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Madagascar, Nigeria and Zambia participating for the first time. Great work!
UK & Dominica
Six baby “mountain chicken frogs” (Leptodactylus fallax) have been born at London Zoo. One of the largest frogs in the world, this critically endangered species can reach a mass of 1 kilogram and a length of 22 centimeters. In an interesting adaptation, the nourish their tadpoles with unfertilized eggs.
As a recent survey of their last wild population on the Caribbena island of Dominica found only 21 living individuals, they now look set to be saved from extinction by this international captive-breeding program (there are over 200 individuals at European zoos). Another conservation success story in the making!
Bangladesh
Impressively-industrializing Bangladesh is speeding up its solar build-out1! Bangladesh approved 2.19 GW (2,190 MW) of new solar projects in 2023, with 630 MW approved in December 2023 alone.
Floating solar is starting to make an appearance among the new crop of projects as well, with the country’s first such project (2.3 MW) completed in May 2023, and several more in the pipeline.
The rapid rise of solar across Asia barely gets any attention in the American and European info-spheres, but it’s transforming the world. In a decade, Americans and Europeans will wake up to a much richer and more electrified continent, and wonder how they missed it. Great news!
Malawi
As droughts and extreme storms continue to threaten central Africa, one group in Malawi is innovating new ways to survive with local resources. Ripe bananas rot quickly in extreme heat, but making banana wine can pull a sellable product from the jaws of ruin, saving small farmers’ livelihoods. The Twitule cooperative runs a banana winery without electricity or running water, using plastic mixing jugs and digging holes to provide cooling spaces, but have gained national recognition and hope to expand to other countries’ markets. This is a brilliant example of entrepreneurial resilience in the face of extreme adversity; great work!
Singapore
The innovative city-state of Singapore is building the world’s largest ocean-based carbon removal plant, using the “Equatic process” of separating seawater into hydrogen and oxygen with electricity, then adding air so the CO2 reacts with the oxygen to form calcium carbonate (akin to how seashells form). It’s far from clear if this will turn out to be a cost-efficient or scalable technology, but it’s great that it’s being tried! We’ll see how it goes.
United States
In a resounding State of the Union address, President Biden highlighted the tens of thousands of jobs being created by his Inflation Reduction Reduction Act, as well as his launch of the American Climate Corps and his many, many, many other climate action policies. Four more years!
“I’m taking the most significant action ever on climate in the history of the world.
I’m cutting our carbon emissions in half by 2030.
I see a future where we save the planet from the climate crisis.”
-President Joe Biden
A new report underscores just how historically epic 2023 was for clean energy in America: solar power provided 53% of new electricity-generating capacity built in the USA in 2023 (over half for the first time: insanely great!), with wind providing an extra 13%. And as regular readers of this newsletter will already know, it’s set to get even better in 2024! Great news.
Just before the State of the Union, the Biden Administration announced a landmark new water management framework for the Colorado River Basin, a mosaic of new water conservation agreements between the federal government, Western states, and metropolitan water districts that together will save an estimated 3 million acre-feet of water by 2026. Under-reported quiet competence and farsighted climate resilience: two of the hallmarks of this presidency!
In a rare bipartisan clean energy win, the U.S. House of Representatives has passed the Atomic Energy Advancement Act, which should provide some much-needed streamlining of the overgrown “red tape” permitting process around new nuclear power plants. (Which, remember, are much safer and cleaner than most think, though not as economically competitive as modularly built renewables). Passage is not assured in the Senate, but it’s a big step in the right direction!
Enhanced geothermal pioneeer Fervo Energy has just raised $244 million in a new round of funding, as they continue to build their landmark 400 MW enhanced geothermal plant in Utah! Drill, baby, drill…for clean geothermal power!
The U.S. Department of Energy is now funding a program to incentivize recycling of wind turbine materials, particularly the rare earth element neodymium found in their electromagnets.
Gray whales were driven to extinction in the Atlantic by the 1800s, but a few bold pioneers have started to venture back in recent years. Now, for the first time in over 200 years, a gray whale has been spotted in the waters off New England, about 30 miles south of Nantucket. Fascinatingly, it was likely climate change that made it possible for this whale to arrive from the species’ Pacific stronghold, via the newly reified “Northwest Passage” of now ice-free channels through the Canadian Arctic.
Since the (almost complete) end of commercial whaling in the 1980s, the Eastern North Pacific gray whale population has rebounded from near-extinction to over 14,000 individuals, but are still dealing with ups and downs due to the volatility brought by climate change. This writer hopes that we could see a new Atlantic population “recolonized” for the species sometime in the coming decades!
Fresh off the 10 wolves reintroduced in December, a new bipartisan bill is proposing to reintroduce wolverines to Colorado.
Wild rice, or manoomin, is being restored by Indigenous communities across the Great Lakes region.
Inspired by traditional Aztec and Miccosukee floating farms, researchers in Florida have found that floating ornamental flower gardens can be an effective and scalable solution to water pollution. Marigolds are particularly well suited to extracting excess nitrogen and phosphorus from stormwater runoff, and can grow in floating mats to produce sellable blooms at a density of about 63 per square meter.
The state of New York is now suing JBS, the world’s biggest meat company, for its wildly misleading sustainability claims.
Biotech startup Colossal has developed the world’s first artificially created elephant stem cells, which could help research and conservation of living elephant species by providing a new supply of oocytes for breeding programs. It’s also (potentially!) a step towards the company’s long-term goal of genetically resurrecting the woolly mammoth.
The bald eagle is a great success story. When we first moved to Michigan it was rare to see them around Lansing and it was a big deal when a pair nested near the zoo. Now bald eagles are so frequently seen in mid-Michigan they’re getting a bit ho hum! We even have a pair here in the home of Dow Chemical, so something must be going right.
It’s also great to hear about the gray whale!
So many interesting news items-. The revival of the "chicken frog" is heartwarming but that chart in electrification is the showstopper.