The Weekly Anthropocene: September 24, 2025
The High Seas Treaty, record harvests, tiger translocation, solar from India to Iraq to Texas, inselbergs, HaoHan, coral IVF, Bangkok dragons, hybrid jays, Amtrak, California beavers, and more!
The Big Picture: High Seas Treaty!
The incredible High Seas Treaty, establishing a first-ever legal framework to conserve biodiversity and create marine protected areas in international waters (hard fought for at the recent UN ocean summit in Nice!), has now passed the key threshold of being ratified by 60 countries (including France, Spain, Morocco, Chile, Vietnam, Indonesia, and many more) and will enter into force on January 17, 2026! 80+ more countries have signed but not yet ratified. A historic victory for Planet Ocean!
The Big Picture: Record Harvests
2025 is on track to see record-high global total harvests of key staple crops, with particularly notable increases in wheat and maize (corn) production. Data scientist extraordinaire Dr. Hannah Ritchie has an excellent post on this. Such data is important context for working on resolving food systems problems — we are nonetheless living in a time of unprecedented food abundance, the work of centuries!
India
It looks like the carbon emissions from the power sector (i.e. electricity generation) of India, home to over 1.4 billion humans, have fallen by 1% year-on-year in the first half of 2025. That’s only the second such decline in 50 years — and while the first was the COVID shock, this time it’s thanks to record clean energy growth (India added 25.1 GW of new non-fossil capacity in 2025’s first half) powering ongoing development!
It’s really looking possible that India’s per capita emissions will peak far lower than China’s (which in turn have peaked far lower than America’s), and the subcontinent’s ongoing epic rise will be electrotech-powered. Insanely great news!
India is home to over 3,600 tigers, a number which has more than doubled since 2010 and now accounts for 75% of the wild population worldwide). Now, India’s conservationists are working to ensure a diverse gene pool for those tigers stuck in “island” reserves without good corridors to other subpopulations. The isolated tigers of the Similipal reserve saw the rapid spread of a rare “pseudo-melanism” mutation that widened their black stripes — not in and of itself harmful, but an indicator of a too-small breeding population. Biologists recently tranquilized and translocated two tigresses from the faraway Tadoba-Andhari reserve to enrich Similipal’s gene pool. Another great example of proactive conservation for the Anthropocene! Great work.
India’s government and farmers are using open-source AI models to predict and respond to variable monsoon conditions. A great example of climate resilience!
Iraq
As its economy booms, Iraq has opened its first grid-scale solar farm near the Shi’a holy city of Karbala, which will produce 300 MW at its peak. Another 225 MW solar farm is under construction in Babylon Governorate, work will start soon on a 1,000 MW (1 GW) solar farm near Basra, and the government reports a total planned pipeline of 12,500 MW of new solar eventually on the way. Awesome news!
Mozambique
A new study has found that the Niassa Special Reserve in Mozambique, a unique landscape of miombo woodland and granite inselberg “sky island” outcroppings, hosts the largest known breeding population of the rare Taita falcon (Falco fasciinucha). A weeklong survey counted 14 breeding pairs at 35 inselbergs, based on which modeling indicates the entire reserve may have 76 pairs. Great work!
Nigeria
Local state-owned enterprises and a Dutch manufacturer have signed a new deal to build a 1 GW (1,000 MW) solar panel factory in Nigeria.
China
Chinese company Envision Energy has developed a stable two-bladed wind turbine design that has now passed 500 days of successful operation. Using two blades makes it lower-cost, light-weight, and easier to transport, potentially speeding deployment.
BYD, the biggest EV company in the world, has unveiled a new modular grid-scale battery storage unit with the world’s largest-ever (so far!) single-unit capacity. Their HaoHan system integrates the cutting edge BYD Blade battery for 14.5 megawatt-hours of storage per unit, where the industry norm is 6 to 7. BYD claims that using HaoHan can lower maintenance costs by 70% and project costs by 21%. Awesome!
JinkoSolar and Longi, the first and third largest solar companies in China (and the world!) have settled years of back-and-forth patent lawsuits over their new panel technologies with a cross-licensing deal that promises “cooperation.” Great news!
Albania
Albania has installed Diella, an AI model with a female avatar that recently addressed Parliament, as a new cabinet minister for public procurement. Prime Minister Edi Rama is insistent that it’s not a stunt, but a genuine world-first governance innovation. Notably, this means that Diella1 now runs (with human oversight?) public procurement of solar power, which is steadily rising in Albania. You now live in a world where an AI cabinet minister is (at least nominally) in charge of deploying more sheets of techno-glass to harvest power from the local star. Fascinating times!
Colombia
In 2020, Hurricane Iota devastated coral reefs in Colombia. Since then, the South American nation has become a pioneer of coral restoration! A new “coral IVF” laboratory in Santa Marta opened this May and fertilized 600,000 wild-collected coral eggs by August. They will later seed the adolescents into wild “coral gardens” and plan to start breeding for resistance to bleaching-causing extreme heat. Superb work!
Australia
Fresh off the national home battery plan, PM Albanese of Australia has set a new national climate target of lowering GHG emissions by between 62% and 70% below 2005 levels by 2035, as clean energy keeps surging! Australia also pledged to spend AUS$9 billion on climate adaptation by 2030, including flood mitigation, bushland conservation, and agricultural transitions. The Land Down Under continues to lead!
An experimental “gravity battery” will be trialed at a former coal mine in New South Wales, autonomously pulling up weights to store potential energy when power is abundant and generating extra power when needed by lowering the weights!
The state of Western Australia announced the imminent creation of Exmouth Gulf Marine Park, set to protect the entirety of the eponymous gulf including mangroves, corals, dugongs, and whale nurseries. 30% will be zero-fishing zones. Awesome!
Thailand
Bangkok, capital city of Thailand, is home to a rapidly growing urban population of large “dragon” water monitor lizards (Varanus salvator), particularly in Lumphini Park and the city’s over 1,600 khlong canals. In recent years, the lizards have become viral social media stars. Another example of coexistence in Anthropocene cityscapes!
United States
Though a pathetic and flailing autocrat-wannabe still shames and sabotages the nation, people across America keep fighting to build a brighter future!
People came out across America for Sun Day, an EPIC celebration of solar power! Here’s the NYT writeup, here’s Bill McKibben’s, here’s the YouTube video of the event I moderated, and here’s my presentation on Standing at the Dawn of the Solar Age2.
Startup Eco Wave Power has installed a pilot 0.1 MW wave energy system, the first in the U.S., on a wharf at the Port of Los Angeles, generating clean electrons with seven “floaters” that build up hydraulic pressure to drive a rotating motor onshore. They’re building a 40-floater 1 MW system in Portugal, and extending floaters along the entire LA breakwater would generate 60 MW of baseload clean power. Promising work!
Bright Saver reports that state legislators in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Vermont have expressed strong interest in passing Utah-style deregulation of plug-in “balcony” solar! The next state legislative session could be a watershed moment. YAY!
A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction to allow construction to resume on Revolution Wind, a 704 MW offshore wind farm off Rhode Island that was halted at 80% completion by an absurd White House stop-work order. The fight continues!
A novel intergeneric hybrid “grue jay” (teal jay?) was spotted near San Antonio, Texas, the product of mating between a male blue jay and a female green jay. It likely exists due to climate change, as green jays are native to tropical Central America and only recently have expanded their range far enough north to meet blue jays. Fascinating!
Utilities in California, Nevada, and North Carolina are increasingly planning to build microgrids, as self-contained solar-plus-battery systems now pencil out as a cheaper-than-power-lines method of providing reliable electricity to remote areas!
On August 28, 2025, Amtrak launched 5 of 28 new next-generation Acela trains linking Boston and Washington D.C. Described as America’s first “European-style” trains, they can reach 160 miles per hour, 10 mph faster than the previous generation and enough to qualify as “high-speed rail” under some definitions. The Northeast Corridor railway is also seeing record-high ridership in 2025. Awesome news!
The cleaned-up Chicago River just saw its first official public swim since 1927!
Monarch butterflies are laying their eggs on milkweed in the parks and gardens of New York City, with these urban oases supporting their multigenerational migration!
Texas set new records for solar, wind, and battery storage in summer 2025, with solar meeting 15.2% of all demand and 26.9% of peak-hour demand (more than coal!) on ERCOT (the Texas state grid). Wind and solar together generated 37.7% of ERCOT’s electricity in the first eight months of 2025, as batteries stabilized the grid. Awesome!
In 2023, California began relocating beavers (Castor canadensis) from the Sacramento and San Joaquin watersheds to return them to the lands of the Tule River and Mountain Maidu indigenous tribes. Now, researchers have found that the beavers’ return to the Tásmam Koyóm meadow north of the Sierra Nevada (especially their subsequent dam-building!) has reinvigorated the wetland ecosystem, bringing in new wildlife ranging from willow flycatchers to sandhill cranes while increasing water coverage by over 22%. Rewilding for climate resilience! Great work.
For the record, I’m not convinced that the Diella idea will actually work, but it’s interesting!
Feel free to use these materials to give this presentation yourself and spread the word!
I read that article on the Chicago River and that it had been reversed in a marvel of engineering more than a century ago, and thought “maybe it’s time to reverse the reversal.” Some people are discussing it but it seems it’s a bit too useful at present running the canal westward