The Weekly Anthropocene, September 18 2024
Urban wetlands in Thailand, a coal-free grid in the UK, gorilla-aided drug discovery, the new electric USPS vehicles, wolves recolonizing California, and more!
Thailand
The metropolitan region around Bangkok1, the capital city of Thailand, is home to over 17 million people - but it’s also built on a river delta and highly vulnerable to flooding from increased rainfall and sea level rise. In response, the city is investing heavily in multiple large new urban wetland parks to serve as living sponges, soaking up, retaining, and cleaning stormwater. The 41-hectare Benjakitti Forest Park, completed in 2022, can retain and clean 87 million liters of water with a thick network of native plants acting as a filtration system, and over 90 species of birds have been seen at the new park. Another giant urban wetland, to be named the His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej the Great Memorial Park, is set to open by 2025, and overall Bangkok plans to open 500 new parks (including many smaller ones) by 2026. Climate resilience can bring substantial biodiversity and lifestyle benefits! Spectacular work.
United Kingdom
The first-ever coal-fired power plant was built in London in 1882, kicking off decades of growth in a technology that generated unprecedented amounts of electricity for humanity - as well as the gigantic negative externalities of global climate change and health-devastating air pollution. Now, another historic milestone is at hand. The Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station, the very last coal-fired power plant in the United Kingdom, the country of coal power’s birth, is set to close on or before September 30, 2024.
Finally achieving a coal-free U.K. grid is a highly visible symbolic victory for the ongoing global renewables revolution as well as a manifest demonstration of its practicality. Wind, especially offshore, has led the charge in the early years of the UK’s rapid transition: in 2013, wind provided 8% of the country’s electricity to coal’s 36%, but in 2023 wind provided 29% to coal’s 1%. Now, cheap solar is joining the party in earnest, with the Starmer’s government’s expedited approval of new solar projects set to accelerate decarbonization and electrification still further. Excellent news!
The iconic double-decker buses of London are going electric! London now has 1,600 electric buses, up from just 485 in 2021, and is on track to have 2,500 electric buses in 2025. The city plans for its entire 9,000-bus fleet to be electric by 2034.
The British beaver baby boom continues, with beaver kits born in Hampshire for the first time in 400 years. The parents were released in 2023. Rewilding works!
India
The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC)2 is reportedly considering investing substantially more in clean energy projects in India after a recent highly successful loan. This may sound like bureaucratic trivia, but in fact it’s a great microcosm of several of the world’s most important energy stories at once.
The DFC recently provided a $500 million loan to First Solar, a star American solar manufacturer, to open India’s first vertically integrated solar panel factory in Tamil Nadu. The DFC head and the U.S. Ambassador to India attended the factory’s ribbon-cutting in January 2024, inaugurating a project that will employ over 1,000 people and produce a whopping 3.3 gigawatts (3,300 MW) of solar capacity per year.
India is the most populous nation-state in human history, with over 1.4 billion people, fast economic growth, rapidly improving public health and welfare, and increasing geopolitical heft. Several consecutive U.S. administrations have endeavoured to nurture an emerging alliance with India. Over a billion Indians demand and deserve living standards comparable to Americans, and the way India gets the electricity to power that will determine the future of Earth’s climate. Reporting from India earlier this year, I felt that it was possibly the “highest potential” country in the world right now, with the potential to become a cleantech, manufacturing, financial, and democratic superpower in the next few decades.
Solar is already the cheapest electricity in history, making up most of the new capacity being built almost everywhere, and entering an unprecedented new era of exponential growth across the developing world (check out Bill McKibben’s excellent recent article on this!), with rooftop solar already surging in many nations (notably Pakistan) without much government support or even awareness. Financial investment is often the key “last ingredient” to kickstart renewables projects in the few areas where they aren’t already growing fast.
Leveraging the financial might of the USA to help accelerate India’s vital clean energy transition is one of the most multifacetedly beneficial “win-win-win-win” actions available in political economy right now. The tech is there; just a little more U.S. investment could unleash amazing clean electricity gains, an early preview of the Clean Energy Marshall Plan policy concept. Let’s make it happen!
Gabon
A team of Gabonese researchers have identified four local plant species that contain compounds that could help create future drugs to fight the growing scourge of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, with the bark of all four species found to help kill at least one strain of multidrug-resistant E. coli. One species, the fromager tree (Ceiba pentandra, aka the kapok or ceiba tree), was effective against all strains they tested!
Interestingly, these plants were identified for testing because they were commonly consumed by critically endangered Western lowland gorillas in Moukalaba-Doudou National Park, as well as used by the people of nearby villages in traditional medicine. “Gorillas help with new drug discovery” was not on this writer’s bingo card for 2024, but this world is full of amazing surprises! Great work.
"This suggests that gorillas evolved to eat plants that benefit them, and highlights the huge gaps in our knowledge of the Central African rainforests,"
-Dr Joanna Setchell
United States
The U.S. Postal Service has begun rolling out its Next Generation Delivery Vehicles to deliver Americans’ mail. Within a few years, there should be 60,000 NGDVs, 45,000 of them electric, serving as the primary postal vehicle across the USA. Postal workers are reportedly thrilled; among other improvements, the NGDVs have air conditioning (increasingly vital!), which the older model of postal vehicles lacked. The USPS anticipates that its carbon emissions will be reduced 40% by 2030. Great work!
The first-ever offshore wind lease sale in the federal waters of the Gulf of Maine will be held on October 29, 2024. Artificial reefs on the way; let’s make it happen!
Virginia is piloting a program to build solar-powered data centers on the sites of former coal mines.
The state of Pennsylvania is receiving $76.4 million in federal funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to plug 550 “orphaned” oil and gas wells.
Gray wolves continue their epic self-led recolonization of California after local extirpation in the 1920s, with the state’s wolf population growing from the arrival of one wanderer in 2011 to over 50 individuals as of 2024. The wolves of California have formed at least six separate packs, and have spread as far south as Tulane County in the Central Valley! For the backstory, check out The Weekly Anthropocene’s 2023 interview with wolf advocate Amaroq Weiss. Spectacular news!
The Interior Department has announced a new National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, America’s 572nd. The Willamette Valley Conservation Area will protect 600 acres of oak and prairie habitat.
The shuttle bus fleet at Zion National Park, desert jewel of Utah, is now fully electric.
California farmers are planting drought-resistant, heat-tolerant agave as a response to climate change, with 50 acres of agave cultivation before 2023 rising to over 200 today.
At the historic Manhattan Project-era Oak Ridge facility in Tennessee, the United States is disassembling some of its nuclear bombs to produce a domestic supply of high assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) for use in next-gen small nuclear reactors, as Putin’s war cut off the Russian supply of HALEU. The new TerraPower reactor in Wyoming is awaiting HALEU shipments. As discussed last week, the recent “boomlet” of next-gen nuclear is quite small compared to the giant solar surge, but every additional source of clean electrons helps. Swords into ploughshares!
Fun fact: the city of Bangkok’s full ceremonial name is Krungthepmahanakhon Amonrattanakosin Mahintharayutthaya Mahadilokphop Noppharatratchathaniburirom Udomratchaniwetmahasathan Amonphimanawatansathit Sakkathattiyawitsanukamprasit, one of the longest place-names in the world. This is completely irrelevant, but too good not to include.
The DFC is a U.S. government agency that invests in private sector-led international development projects in a number of fields, from energy to infrastructure to healthcare to telecoms. Their work is notably not traditional “foreign aid”: like a bank, they expect a return on investment, and on net they make money for the United States. The DFC’s resources are considerable, with $9.3 billion committed across 132 transactions in fiscal year 2023, and a total portfolio exposure of $41 billion.
Love the info on USPS electric vehicles. Zion is too crowded, even if the buses are now electric.
The news of the last coal fueled lose plant in England, the initiator of coal power, is so important in its symbolism. India's solar panel effort is great too. They're good people for us to help out!