The Weekly Anthropocene: November 29, 2023
Blue whales return to the Seychelles, offshore wind and electric air taxis in New York, ocelot reintroduction in Texas, flood-resilient homes in Pakistan, new battery chemistry in Sweden, and more!
Seychelles
In the 1960s, the brutal Soviet whaling fleet illegally killed over 500 blue whales in the waters around the Seychelles archipelago, part of a decades-long global slaughter of Earth’s cetaceans. There were an estimated 340,280 blue whales in 1890, but the industrialized whaling of the twentieth century brought their numbers down to just 4,727 by 2001.
Now, blue whales have returned to the waters of the Seychelles1! Researchers and filmmakers caught them on camera, and a year of underwater microphone recordings revealed their songs (here’s the study), revealing that several blue whales (the exact number is still unknown) are spending months in Seychelles waters during the breeding season. This is part of the growing recovery of blue whale numbers throughout the World Ocean; there are an estimated up to 15,000 and increasing as of 2023. Great news!
“It turns out if you stop killing animals on mass scales and you give them a chance to rebound, they can recover.”
-Dr. Kate Stafford
New York
The first of 12 offshore wind turbines in the 130-MW South Fork Wind project has been installed off the coast of Long Island. When complete (by early 2024), South Fork Wind will provide enough electricity for 70,000 homes, while eliminating 6 million tons of carbon emissions. This is just the first of many in-progress offshore wind projects up and down the Eastern Seaboard!
Case in point: the much larger 2.1 GW (2,100 MW) Empire Wind offshore wind project, also in New York waters, just got federal approval!
Two eVTOL startups, Joby and Volocopter, conducted test flights in New York City recently. Joby plans to roll out an air-taxi service providing rapid seven-minute flights linking JFK Airport with Manhattan. Electric flying cars are here, folks!
And the New York Times is starting to run articles acknowledging that we might just be starting to win in the fight against climate change. Check out this excellent NYT essay by Dr. Kate Marvel, lead author of the Fifth National Climate Assessment, entitled “I’m a Climate Scientist. I’m Not Screaming Into the Void Anymore.”
“We can do this. We now know how to make the dramatic emissions cuts we’d need to limit warming, and it’s very possible to do this in a way that’s sustainable, healthy and fair. The conversation has moved on, and the role of scientists has changed. We’re not just warning of danger anymore. We’re showing the way to safety.”
-Dr. Kate Marvel
Texas
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has started an innovative public-private partnership to reintroduce captive-bred ocelots to Texas. Currently, there are only two small populations of these small spotted wildcats in America, at the private El Sauz Ranch and the public Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge. Both are isolated and increasingly inbred, with potential corridors to Mexican ocelot populations stymied by border wall construction.
Now, the USFWS is planning to release captive-bred ocelots on the lands of the privately owned (and much larger) San Antonio Viejo Ranch. They’ll also be offering a “Safe Harbor Agreement” to gain the support of local stakeholders, in which neighbors who allow ocelots to disperse on their land and grant access to researchers will be legally shielded from any land management restrictions and liability.
If successful, this project will be the second-ever reintroduction of a small wildcat species from a captive-bred population, after the Iberian lynx. Another great example of innovative conservation in the Anthropocene!
Iceland
In August 2023, the Bright Ice Initiative successfully field-tested their albedo-enhancing hollow glass microspheres as an ice-protection climate resilience solution at Iceland’s Langjökull ice cap. (Check out The Weekly Anthropocene’s recent interview with Bright Ice Initiative founder Dr. Leslie Field). There’s fascinating potential here for a scalable glacier-protection technology!
Pakistan
In 2022, Pakistan was devastated by titanic floods, with one-third of the entire country underwater at one point in late August and over 33 million people displaced. Now, the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, founded by star architect Yasmeen Lari, reports that they have built 333,000 flood-resilient homes for people displaced by the 2022 floods, with a goal of building 1 million by 2024. To ensure that the process is scalable with local resources, the homes are built with clay, lime, and earth supported by bamboo frames, for a total cost of about $170. Residents often add their own decorations on the outsides. Early “pilot” homes built using this process had an excellent track record during the 2022 floods, in some cases becoming the only remaining inhabitable structures in entire villages. This is a fascinating example of community-led climate adaptation; despite dire circumstances, multitudes of people are striving to build a more resilient future!
Egypt
The Egyptian government has signed a deal with a Belgian engineering firm to build a giant undersea interconnection cable set to carry 2 gigawatts of renewable energy from the sunny sands of the Sahara to the European grid. Construction should be complete in 2027. The World Grid continues to take shape!
Indonesia
For the second time in 2023, a Sumatran rhino calf has been born to the captive breeding program at Way Kambas National Park, Sumatra. The male calf, whose brith was announced on November 25, is the first child of new rhino mom Delilah, who became the first female Sumatran rhino born in captivity to give birth herself.
The Sumatran rhino is an ancient and precious lineage fighting hard to avoid extinction; they’re the closest surviving relative of the Ice Age woolly rhinoceros, and they’re probably the most endangered large mammal on the planet, with just 34 to 47 individuals estimated to remain in the wild. Perhaps the best hope for the species lies with the 11 in captivity (up from 9 in 2021 with the two births this year!), who may soon be joined by new arrivals captured from the wild to increase genetic diversity. More speculative stem cell and IVF projects are also in the works.
This birth is great news for the future of one of Earth’s marvels!
Sweden
Northvolt, a Swedish battery-making start-up backed by Volkswagen, BlackRock, and Goldman Sachs, has invented a sodium-ion battery that uses no lithium, cobalt, or nickel. Critically, this appears to be the first sodium-ion battery to reach the energy storage metric of 160 watt-hours per kilogram, comparable to 180 watt-hours per kilogram for the lithium-ion battery models currently used for grid-scale electricity storage. Northvolt plans to build new factories to make their breakthrough batteries and reach full-scale production by 2030. Lithium prices are very low right now, thanks to strong production in China and Australia, so there might not be that much of an economic incentive to switch to sodium-ion batteries for a while. However, there might well be a strong geopolitical incentive, as China remains a major player in lithium mining and processing.
It’s great that human ingenuity keeps growing the range of battery chemistries we can use in the renewables revolution! The potential is immense.
The Big Picture: Fossil Fuel Air Pollution Deaths
A wide-ranging new macro-study from The Lancet calculated that annual deaths attributable to air pollution from burning fossil fuels (much of it “PM2.5” particulate matter) have fallen from 1,437,000 in 2005 to 1,212,000 in 2020, a 15.7% reduction in deaths thanks to declining coal use.
This underscores one of the key underreported realities of the renewables transition. Even if climate change somehow wasn’t a thing, fossil fuels’ air pollution death toll is so vast that it is absolutely morally critical to move to clean energy as fast as possible. And we’re making progress! Lots of work still to do.
Second neat development is the Swedes and their new battery technology. Lithium prices won't always stay low!
What to choose among so many good developments? I think I like the Bright Ice Initiative the best. Identify the "darkest" mountain glacier and use it as a test bed. Find what applications of the beads work best then scale up to start treating ice caps, setting goals of so many new hectares per year less acreage lost to runoff and new snow fall. The problem I see is that the surface is a dynamic changing one..makes the project more difficult at large scale.