The Weekly Anthropocene, May 31 2023
Sea turtle rights in Panama, solar power going from strength to strength in China, America, and worldwide, a wind farm in Ukraine, Solein in Singapore, and more!
Panama
In an influential new precedent for the global “rights of nature” movement, the Central American republic of Panama has passed a new law granting sea turtles the legal right to “live and have free passage in a healthy environment.” This is one of the strongest and most explicit animal protection laws in the world, with language specifically prohibiting trade in sea turtle parts or eggs, instructing agencies to cancel operating permits for entities that disrupt sea turtle habitat, and allowing any Panamanian citizen to bring a lawsuit against any government, corporation, or individual violating sea turtles’ rights. The new law is already being cited by conservationists calling police to intervene to protect a key nesting site for the critically endangered leatherback turtle from illegal egg hunters. A committee is overseeing full implementation of the law and development of sea turtle research and ecotourism.
This is a really impressive attempt at trying to legislate coexistence between humans and another group of life-forms, and if Panama can pull it off in a functional, equitable, and socioeconomically sustainable way, it could become a model for granting legal rights to other imperiled species. If this stays on the books, is enforced, and results in real on-the-ground changes, it could remembered as a key moment in the history of governing the Anthropocene biosphere.
Global Energy Investment
In a landmark new report, the International Energy Agency reports on the accelerating leadership of clean energy in the global market. In 2023, about $1.7 trillion worldwide is set to be invested in decarbonization technologies like solar, wind, nuclear, heat pumps, and EVs, compared to just over $1 trillion for coal, gas, and oil combined. (Yes, those numbers are correct: about $1.70 is now spent on decarbonization for every dollar spent on fossil fuels!). Solar is now dominating the energy landscape, with $380 billion set to be spent on solar power in 2023-over one billion every day. In 2023, more money will be spent on solar power than on oil, for the first time ever. The IEA notes that if clean electrification continues on this path and fossil fuel spending decreases, human civilization would be on track to meet current climate targets for 2030. The IEA also highlighted critical minerals access (e.g. lithium) as a key area where further investment and innovation is needed to keep the renewables revolution on track.
China
China is installing solar panels at an extraordinarily fast and fast-accelerating rate. According to Bloomberg, the country is on track to install a record-high 154 gigawatts (154,000 megawatts) of solar capacity in 2023 and could install over 200 GW next year. (See their chart). For comparison, the United States had a cumulative total of 144 GW of solar installed in early 2022, and at the end of 2021, the US had just under 1,200 gigawatts of total electricity generating capacity, from all sources from coal to gas to nuclear to wind. China is building a truly insane amount of solar, and that benefits the entire world1.
United States
Italian solar manufacturer Enel has announced that it will build a $1 billion solar panel factory in Inola, Oklahoma. The factory will start selling panels by the end of 2024, reach 3 gigawatts (3,000 megawatts) of annual production capacity by 2025 (i.e., making enough solar panels to generate 3 GW of energy), and potentially expand to 6 gigawatts of production capacity in subsequent years. This one factory would double America’s current domestic solar panel manufacturing capacity, as about 5 GW of solar panels were produced in the US in 2022. But it’s not alone: new factories amounting to 56 GW of solar panel production capacity have been announced since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022!
“Because of my Inflation Reduction Act, private capital is being invested in Oklahoma and all across the country, as communities step up to help build our clean energy economy.” -President Joe Biden
Minnesota, similarly to Colorado, has adopted a wide range of new climate incentives meant to support and build on the Inflation Reduction Act2. A state budget and other bills signed into law on May 24th, 2023 provides $2,500 point of sale consumer rebates for new EVs, $600 rebates for used EVs, $1.3 billion in funding to build out public transit and boost e-bikes, $30 million for rooftop solar panels on schools and public buildings, and more!
In a win for climate adaptation, the federal government has reached a deal with the states of California, Nevada, and Arizona to reduce their use of water from the Colorado River (which primarily goes to agriculture). The states will refrain from using 3 million acre-feet of water over the next three years (through 2026), with the federal government paying $1.2 billion to reimburse farmers and municipalities affected. The payments for the first 2.3 million acre-feet will come from Inflation Reduction Act drought mitigation funds. More cuts will likely be needed in 2026, but this seems to have pleased all stakeholders and kept things relatively functional in the near term.
The Biden Administration has fast-tracked the proposed South32 Hermosa manganese and zinc mine in southern Arizona, making it the first critical minerals mine added to the federal “FAST-41” process that allows projects to speed through America’s highly cumbersome permitting process. The Hermosa mine will likely supply battery-grade manganese to the US domestic supply chain3, making it another great example of how accelerating critical minerals mining is key to the clean energy revolution!
A new 155-home “microgrid neighborhood” now under construction in South Burlington, Vermont will have “solar on every home and an EV charger in every garage,” as well as heat pumps, all-electric appliances, buried power lines to ensure storm resiliency, playgrounds, and a dog park. A great model for the nation!
Ukraine
Ukraine has built the first wind farm in the world to have been completed in an active war zone. The Tyligulska wind farm is 60 miles from the front line and currently consists of nineteen 800-ton wind turbines with a collective 114 megawatts of electricity generating capacity, with plans to rapidly expand to 85 turbines and 500 megawatts. During the building of the wind farm, workers wore bulletproof vests and spent over 300 hours in bomb shelters4. Ukrainians interviewed for The New York Times noted that the wind farm was substantially harder for Russians to destroy than fossil fuel infrastructure, as a fossil fuel plant can be destroyed with a single missile but a farm of wind turbines would require dozens of missiles. Electric transmission lines are also relatively easy to repair.
Singapore
In September 2022, Singapore became the first jurisdiction in the world to grant regulatory approval to the sale of Solein, a revolutionary new “air-based” edible protein created by Finnish startup Solar Foods. Now, on May 25th 2023, the public got to taste Solein for the first time with a tasting menu event (here’s a video) at a prestigious restaurant in Singapore.
It’s hard to overstate what an amazing technological advance this is. Solein is formed by microbial fermentation (similarly to how beer is brewed) with electricity, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, oxygen, and small quantities of key nutrients as the only inputs. The final product is described by The Straits Times as a powder resembling turmeric and tasting like “a light, nutty mix of cashews and almonds,” capable of being used as an ingredient in almost anything5. It consists of “65-70% protein, 5-8% fat, 10-15% dietary fibres and 3-5% mineral nutrients,” a profile similar to soy. In other words, Solein is the first time in human history when calories have been produced and eaten without photosynthesis providing some of the energy. Solar Foods will open their first commercial-scale production facility in Finland in 2024 and plans to scale up substantially beyond that6. This is an extraordinary moment in the history of food production and is hopefully the beginning of a decades-long rise of this “ultra-sustainable” protein as an ingredient around the globe!
As in previous issues, when praising China, this newsletter feel ethically obliged to note that the Chinese government is doing lots of horrible things: to name just a few, the Uighur genocide, Hong Kong repression, recent and very possibly ongoing forced organ harvesting, 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 write about it.
This was part of an extraordinarily productive and progressive legislative session, thanks to the Democrats taking control of both houses of the Minnesota state legislature in the elections of November 2022. Statewide paid family leave, free school meals, reproductive rights protections…Minnesota has just racked up a whole bunch of victories.
Exactly the kind of the thing that the IEA report highlighted as much-needed.
This wind farm success also provides a contrast to the danger of anti-renewables NIMBYism in other countries: as The Guardian pointed out, Ukraine has now built substantially more onshore wind turbines in the last year than England (which had anti-wind turbine permitting restrictions imposed on 2015), despite having to actively fight off an invasion at the same time.
To be fair, the United Kingdom more broadly is building a lot of offshore wind and has seen strong emissions reductions recently-it’s just nonsensical that England is limiting onshore wind.
Here’s a list of the dishes made with Solein as an ingredient-everything from pasta to ice cream to biscotti.
Reading over this article, it seems so laudatory that this newsletter wishes to clarify that they’ve never talked to anyone from Solar Foods and have no commercial relationship with them-it’s just a really exciting technology!