The Weekly Anthropocene, September 25 2024
A big relief at the Thwaites Glacier, the ozone layer's continued recovery, agrivoltaic wines in Italy, a restored Finnish wetland, the Biden-Harris battery boom, speed dating for shellfish, and more!
Antarctica
The Thwaites Glacier sits at the seaward edge of the vast West Antarctic Ice Sheet like a cork in a bottle, and has long been the subject of substantial concern that a runaway collapse could rapidly increase global sea level rise, especially due to disturbing reports that seawater was beginning to erode it from beneath. Now, a final meeting summarizing years of fieldwork (including fascinating underwater drone mapping) by the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration concludes that all in all, the glacier is unlikely to collapse before 2100. It will continue to shrink slowly in the upcoming decades, and could still collapse in the decades and centuries after that, but it might also eventually recover if we manage to solve climate change - and the rapid pace of renewables deployment makes substantial emissions reduction by 2100 increasingly probable. And by the 2100s, we might have the wherewithal to prevent even a worst-case collapse scenario: glaciologists are already sketching out speculative ideas for giant underwater curtains or berms to protect the ice sheet.
The slow-motion erosion of the Thwaites Glacier is still a long-term problem, but the latest research amounts to a really big relief for our century! Great news.
The latest update finds that the ozone hole over Antarctica is continuing its steady recovery since 2000, thanks to the highly successful global phase-out of ozone-depleting chemicals agreed to with the landmark Montreal Protocol treaty of 1987. Earth’s ozone layer is now expected to recover to 1980 (pre-ozone-hole) levels by 2066 over Antarctica and 2040 over most of the rest of the world. And as some ozone-depleting substances are also powerful greenhouse gases (in particular HFCs, banned by the recent Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol), the treaty that saved the ozone layer could also prevent an additional 0.5 C of global warming by 2100. Absolutely spectacular news!
“The ozone layer, once an ailing patient, is on the road to recovery. At a time when multilateralism is under severe strain, the Montreal Protocol to help protect the ozone layer stands out as a powerful symbol of hope.”
-UN Secretary-General António Guterres.
Ecuador
A new study reveals the rediscovery of the Molleturo robber frog (Pristimantis ruidus), a species last seen in 1922 and feared extinct, by a recent research expedition to Quitahuaycu Conservation Reserve in the southern Andes of Ecuador. Awesome!
A year after the Ecuadorian people’s 2023 vote against oil drilling in the world-leadingly biodiverse Yasuni National Park, a large block of oil wells has reportedly begun shutting down!
The Los Cedros cloud forest in northern Ecuador won a landmark “rights of nature” court case in 2021 granting it the constitutional right to exist. Years later, the BBC reports that its rich ecosystem continues to thrive. Great news!
Italy
You’ve heard of solar meadows and solar grazing; now here come solar vineyards! As agrivoltaics continues to grow rapidly worldwide, a project in the Apulia region of Italy has 7,770 solar panels installed on vineyard pergolas. The clean electrons aren’t the only benefit, with the shade from the solar panels protecting the grapes from heat and wind to such an extent that the agrivoltaic vineyard can boast 20-60% higher yields and 20% lower water use. It’s even helped reverse an impact of climate change, as hotter summers had moved the harvest season from October to September, but the solar-shaded vines were harvestable three to four weeks later than the vines in surrounding areas.
“We have multi-year measurements of the reduced water stress of vine plants under agrivoltaic shading…
Agrivoltaic red wines are distinguished by greater lightness and elegance and white wines by freshness given by excellent acidity.”
-Emilio Roggero, Italian Sustainable Agrivoltaic Association
Saudi Arabia
The world’s largest microgrid has been built in Red Sea New City, Saudi Arabia, comprising 400 MW of solar capacity and 1.3 GWh of energy storage installed by Chinese company Huawei. There are much larger solar projects in the world today, but this is the largest one ever to be entirely self-contained, not part of a bigger grid.
Saudi Arabia, like Pakistan, is experiencing shockingly fast solar deployment thanks to the wave of cheap cleantech exports from China reshaping the energy economics of the Global South. As even authoritarian regimes bet heavily on the global solar revolution, the resulting lower emissions and cleaner air benefit the entire world.
A research team has discovered a new fish species, the grumpy dwarfgoby (Sueviota aethon) at two locations off Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast.
Finland
The Linnunsuo wetland in eastern Finland was drained for peat harvesting in the 1980s, leaving behind a scarred waste. Now, a rewetting and rewilding project that started in 2011 has become a resounding success, with invertebrate life thriving, 205 bird species observed returning to the area (including over 100,000 geese at one time!) and wolverines, bears, and moose paying visits again. Rewetting the land has also stopped the carbon-emitting decomposition of the peat remnants, and sphagnum moss has begun to grow in the area again, set to eventually form new layers of carbon-sequestering peat. A great example of successful rewilding in action!
The world’s largest heat pump is being built in Helsinki, Finland. When complete by 2027, it will warm 30,000 homes via a network of underground pipes, no oil needed.
Mozambique
The city of Beira, Mozambique was brutally slammed by two back-to-back cyclones1 in March and April 2019 and then another cyclone in 2023. Now, they’re finally getting some international support to deploy storm early warning systems, including a new weather radar and 26 neighborhood-level citizen alert committees, as part of the broader international UN, WMO, and Red Cross-led Early Warnings for All Initiative.
Early warnings for storms may sound trivial, easy to take for granted in developed countries, but they’re actually an absolutely critical and much-needed climate resilience tool with a long track record of being highly effective. As the success story of Bangladesh demonstrates, deploying early warning systems can save thousands of lives even while the weather gets more extreme. This is vitally important work!
United States
On September 20, 2024, the Biden-Harris Administration announced over $3 billion in funding support for 25 selected battery manufacturing projects across 14 states, projected to create 8,000 construction jobs and 4,000 operating jobs. This is the second round of Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding for battery manufacturing, disbursed by the Energy Department’s Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains (MESC).
The projects newly funded in this round include:
Forge Battery’s new factory in North Carolina.
Blue Whale Materials’ battery recycling facility in Oklahoma.
A new silicon anode factory by NanoGraf in Michigan.
A battery-grade manganese processing facility in Arizona.
A project to extract lithium from underground brines in Southwest Arkansas.
The epic Biden-Harris Green Manufacturing Boom continues to advance, helping switch our civilizational stack to run on clean electrons, create jobs, and reduce reliance on China all at once. Great work!
Florida conservationists have relocated 208 queen conch (Aliger gigas) scattered across now-too-hot shallow waters to a new location in cooler, deeper water off the Florida Keys. In addition to protection from extreme heat, assembling the conchs in one place means that they will be more likely to meet, mingle, and mate, leading the innovative program to be dubbed “speed dating for shellfish.” Proactive Anthropocene conservation produces some amazing events! Great work.
The nascent U.S. “Nuclear Renaissance” appears to be speeding up. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission just gave its first-ever construction permit for a nuclear molten salt reactor, to be built at a Texas university. Separately, a new deal has been signed to restart Unit 1 of the long-shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, bringing 835 MW of clean electricity back online by 2028 to help power Microsoft data centers and the wider grid.
For context, nuclear is much safer and cleaner than fossil fuels (rare nuclear accidents kill fewer people than coal plants working as intended!), though it’s not as fast or cheap to build as renewables and has a slower learning rate. Nuclear is likely to remain a relative sideshow compared to the dizzyingly fast growth of renewables (as of June 2024, the world now has more than five times as much solar capacity as nuclear capacity!), but’s still good to add more clean electrons where we can, so this newsletter supports reopening U.S. nuclear plants. (Here’s my in-depth article on this).
The new Roux Institute in Portland, Maine has launched a new ClimateTech Incubator with support from the Governor’s Energy Office. This writer’s home state continues to impress! (Shout-out to my dad for alerting me to this local news story).
A startup called Equatic has reportedly developed a “breakthrough” new technology that solves the longstanding chlorine problem that’s plagued seawater electrolysis, and thus can produce clean hydrogen from seawater while sequestering carbon dioxide at the same time. Here’s the full story. Equatic has begun manufacturing their oxygen-selective anodes at a facility in San Diego to supply their first large-scale project, set to roll out in Singapore. If this lives up to the hype, it could become a very big deal very fast!
A cyclone is the exact same thing as a hurricane or a typhoon; the name changes depending on which part of the ocean it occurs in.
I love all of this, but the stat on the panels increasing the yield at the vineyards is pure awesomeness.
This is amazing; an incredible resource of positive case studies for ecological action. A living library of research and hope.