The Weekly Anthropocene, November 27, 2024
Proactive penguin conservation, solar & grid buildouts in China, the greening of Paris, NitroVolt, the first wind farm in Sierra Leone, recovery of the Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog, and more!
New Zealand
The endangered yellow-eyed penguin (Megadyptes antipodes) has seen sharp population declines in recent decades as fish stocks shifted, with only an estimated 3,000 individuals or fewer surviving on New Zealand and several sub-Antarctic islands to the south. Known as hoiho in Maori, these birds are considered a beloved national treasure in New Zealand, even gracing the $5 bill. Now, Kiwi conservationists are taking bold action to ensure that the species will survive climate disruption.
Every single yellow-eyed penguin chick born in the wild on New Zealand’s South Island is now regularly taken from the nest and given intense human care for their critical and vulnerable first week of life, fed “fish smoothies” to ensure that they get enough food, treated with antibiotics to ward off deadly infections, and then returned to their parents. In 2023, Dunedin Wildlife Hospital hand-reared 214 chicks, and estimated that 50 to 70% of them would have died without this human intervention. Spectacular work, and a great example of much-needed proactive Anthropocene conservation!
OpenStar, a startup founded in 2021 and based in a single apartment in Wellington, New Zealand, now claims to have made major progress on nuclear fusion. Their CEO states that they have successfully created and contained a plasma cloud at 300,000 degrees Celsius inside their experimental miniature reactor design, built in less than two years for less than $10 million. Achieving nuclear fusion requires still-higher temperatures, but getting this far with a novel reactor design on a relatively minuscule budget opens up entire new avenues of enquiry and is an extraordinary testament to exploratory innovation. Fascinating!
China
The first phase of the world’s largest-ever offshore solar project, located about 8 kilometers off the city of Dongying in Shandong province, has been connected to the grid. The 1 GW (1,000 MW) array consists of 2,934 60-by 35-meter solar panel-bearing platforms, reportedly combines fish farming with power generation, and will supply power to 2.67 million urban residents when complete.
Just a few weeks ago the newly completed 440 MW floating solar farm off Taiwan was the biggest offshore solar array in the world, as this newsletter recently reported. Solar power is growing very, very fast indeed. Excellent work!
China is rapidly building a nationwide ultra-high-voltage (UHV) transmission line network, carrying clean energy for thousands of kilometers from solar and wind farms to cities. As of 2024, China had 38 UHV power lines with a combined length of over 48,000 kilometers, and more are on the way.
Several recent studies have published new results of the first-ever GPS collar tracking and an unprecedented camera-trap study of wild Chinese mountain cats (Felis bieti) one of many under-studied small feline species worldwide. Native to the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, the species was first photographed in the wild in 2007. The researchers found a high density of mountain cats in a human-restored landscape in Menyuan county, and deployed road signs and brochures to raise awareness of their presence and protected status. Great work!
France
The new climate plan for Paris plans to remove 60,000 parking spaces by 2030 and replace them with newly planted trees, ripping up the asphalt and increasing green spaces to help promote pedestrianization and combat extreme heat. Other elements in the new climate plan include establishing more neighborhood cooling centers, a car-free “core” for each arrondissement, and reserving a lane of the Boulevard Périphérique beltway for the exclusive use of public transit and carpoolers. Superb work!
The French government has finalized long-gestating new regulations requiring large parking lots to cover at least 50% of their parking area with solar arrays. Parking lots larger than 10,000 square meters must comply by July 2026, and parking lots between 1,500 and 10,000 m2 must comply by July 2028. Brilliant work!
Sierra Leone
The first wind farm in Sierra Leone is set to be built on Sherbro Island, including up to five turbines plus battery storage, thanks to a new partnership between European renewables company Octopus Energy, and famous British actor Idris Elba, who is of Sierra Leonean descent. Excellent work!
“We're building not just a wind farm, but a foundation for sustainable growth and energy independence in Sierra Leone. With the turbines scheduled for installation next year, it'll stand as a powerful testament to our commitment to a cleaner, greener future for Sierra Leone and beyond.”
-Idris Elba
Denmark
In Denmark, early-stage startup NitroVolt is revolutionizing fertilizer production with a decentralized clean energy-powered system that allows farmers to produceammonia on-site. Their technology, a new alternative to the venerable Haber-Bosch process that has produces most of the world’s fertilizer for decades, works by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen with an electrolyzer, then using a lithium-mediated reaction to attach the hydrogen to nitrogen molecules from the air, with the whole shebang able to run on the power from nearby solar panels. Great work!
On November 18, 2024, Danish lawmakers agreed on a historic new national land management deal threshed out by farmers, labor unions, and environments. Upcoming legislation will mandate that Denmark plant 1 billion trees and convert 10% of farmlands into wildlands, with at least an additional 250,000 hectares (larger than the land area of Los Angeles and New York City combined) set to be reforested. 43 billion kroner (US $6.1 billion) have already been allocated to purchase land from farmers for tree planting and rewilding over the next two decades. Superb work!
United States
A new study in Nature reports that the endangered Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog (Rana sierrae) is making a “remarkably successful” recovery in the wake of the devastating chytrid fungus, a deadly global amphibian pandemic. Frogs in three Californian alpine lakes started evolving resistance to the fungus, and scientists carefully translocated resistant frogs to 12 other lakes in Yosemite National Park to help establish more resistant populations and safeguard the species as a whole. Spectacular work!
“The lakes are alive again, completely transformed. You literally can look down the shoreline and see 50 frogs on one side and 50 on the other and in the water you see 100 to 1,000 tadpoles.”
-Roland Knapp, biologist.
The endangered least Bell’s vireo songbird (Vireo bellii pusillus) has returned to the Los Angeles River, with a nest and fledglings seen in 2024. This is a great sign of success after years of river restoration efforts by local conservationists!
Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee are building 3D-printed roosts for endangered bat species.
The Biden Administration is rushing to complete as many Inflation Reduction Act-funded loans for cleantech projects as possible, ahead of potential future rollbacks. Relatedly, the White House recently finalized a large CHIPS Act award to guarantee the buildout of a new semiconductor factory in Arizona. Furthermore, President Biden announced (while on a trip to the Brazilian Amazon) that in 2024, the U.S. had met its goal of disbursing $11 billion in international climate finance, making America the largest bilaterial climate finance provider in the world. Superb work!
The Big Picture
The Economist has a great new in-depth article entitled “The energy transition will be much cheaper than you think” (available here, library copy here), sharing The Weekly Anthropocene’s longstanding opinion that clean energy growth will continue to exceed everyone’s expectations. The article also provides valuable context on global warming, noting that even though we’re about to pass 1.5°C of warming, the outlook for total warming by 2100 has improved substantially in the last decade. Check it out!
Love the Denmark/Stanford NitroVolt technology. That would eliminate so much material transport. It dovetails well with the biochar market. Biochar itself has no nitrogen in it.
I'm very more optimistic than iea. I think we'll peak at 1.8 degrees Celsius. That's basically mission accomplished.