Anthropocene Magazine

Energy efficiency is a good thing—but is it being undermined by some part of human nature?

There’s a long-running debate in energy economics about whether as technology becomes more efficient, people may cancel out (or significantly decrease) energy savings because they consume more resources, not fewer.

This effect, variably known as the rebound effect or the Jevons paradox, traces way back to 1865, when the English economist William Stanley Jevons noticed that as steam engines burned coal more efficiently, Britain burned dramatically more coal, not less. Cheaper energy services, he argued, simply invite more energy use.

Few examples illustrate the Jevons paradox as starkly as the humble light bulb. A modern LED produces the same brightness as a Victorian gas lamp using less than one percent of the energy (a 1,000-fold leap in efficiency). Yet humanity now uses vastly more light than ever before: glowing billboards, 24-hour parking lots, and cities visible from space. Each efficiency gain in lighting has been met, and often surpassed, by more and more lights. Did the carbon savings we expected partly evaporate into a brighter world?

The question for the climate era is uncomfortable—but unavoidable. Nearly every national climate plan, every net-zero pledge, and every IPCC pathway leans heavily on energy efficiency as a pillar of decarbonization. How much can more efficient cars, heaters, and other appliances really help stave off climate change? 

• • • The Good News

1.  The big numbers look good. Energy efficiency has to date been one of the main drivers of emissions reductions. The International Energy Agency estimates that improvements to energy efficiency saved the world 7 gigatons of carbon dioxide from 2010 to 2022. For context, that’s more than the tailpipe emissions from 1.5 billion gas-powered passenger cars driven for an entire year. And, the IEA projects that improving fuel efficiency in vehicles, better insulation in houses, and other energy efficiency measures could deliver two-thirds of the oil demand reduction and half of the natural gas demand reduction necessary to meet net zero energy sector emissions by 2050.

2.  Jevons’ paradox is only a problem if the metric is a problem. As Adam Dorr pointed out in a blog post for the nonprofit research org RethinkX, swapping out an emissions-heavy coal plant for a more efficient solar farm may cause energy consumption to spike as prices drop, but that doesn’t mean emissions went up. We often associate energy efficiency with energy austerity. But what if a fully decarbonized economy turned that association on its head? We could use a whole lot more energy, but our emissions footprint would be undetectable. Check out Adrienne Bernhard’s piece for the BBC on “How limitless green energy would change the world.”

Source: The International Energy Agency 2026 Electricity Report

3.  A (possible) ceiling on consumption. Full-fledged rebound requires appetites without limits; in practice, energy appetites saturate. In other words, there may be a ceiling to how much energy most people actually want. A family that switches to a heat pump does not crank the thermostat to 85°F because heating got cheaper; they nudge it up a degree or two and pocket the rest. Even at a national level, at some point, enough really is—well—enough. In his New York Times article, “The Paradox Holding Back the Clean Energy Revolution,” Ed Conway cites research showing that steel and copper consumption seem to slow down as countries achieve a high standard of living.

In short, rebound may be real, but it may also be overblown within the context of carbon emissions. In fact, the strongest version of the Jevons’s claim—that efficiency raises total emissions—is, when tested against modern data, surprisingly hard to find.

• • • The Bad News

1.  AI is the wrench in the works. If ever there were a real-time Jevons experiment, it is unfolding now in data server farms in Virginia, Ireland, and Arizona. Google, for example, seems keen on energy efficiency. In their 2024 environmental report, the company reported that their latest custom processors were 2.7 times more energy efficient than the previous generation, and that they’d found ways to slash the energy required to train models by up to a thousand-fold. In their 2025 report, they highlight how improvements in hardware energy efficiency, among other things, helped them avoid two-thirds of possible emissions the previous year. And yet, that same report noted that once you include the emissions produced building and rigging up their new AI data centers, Google’s overall real-world emissions have actually risen by more than 50% between 2019 and 2024. AI systems overall were estimated to have had the same carbon footprint as New York City in 2025.

Source: The International Energy Agency 2026 Electricity Report

2.  Shipping may also have a big rebound. A 2024 study in Nature Energy found that Jevons’ may have eroded the carbon savings from regulations designed to increase fuel efficiency in long-haul trucking by more than 25 percent. “We didn’t anticipate effects of this magnitude,” Jonathan Hughes, one of the study’s authors, told Anthropocene. That’s because more fuel efficient trucking is cheaper trucking, which could encourage manufacturers to switch from the relatively cleaner, but slower rail shipping.

3.  Rebounds don’t stay in one lane. If increases in energy efficiency result in less demand from power plants for petroleum to burn, one might think this would result in a straightforward reduction in petroleum use, but not so fast. As investment management firm Van Eck pointed out in a blog post, petroleum isn’t just an energy source, it’s also a feedstock for many petrochemicals such as plastics and fertilizers. If increased energy efficiency drives down petroleum demand, basic economics suggests petroleum prices should also go down. Manufacturers might happily gobble up the cheaper feedstocks to produce more plastics and fertilizers. Considering that petrochemicals also produce emissions (around 5 percent of the US’ annual emissions), what had been a simple picture gets messier. 

 

• • • What to Keep An Eye On

1.  Autonomous vehicles. When researchers conducted a full life-cycle analysis of autonomous electric cars, they found some tell-tale signs of rebound. While autonomy cuts fuel-use emissions by about 21%, manufacturing the more complex vehicles, combined with increased travel, can surge emissions by up to 40%—and even with recycling offsetting some of that, autonomous electric vehicles end up emitting roughly 8% more greenhouse gases over their lifetime than standard electric vehicles.

2.  The Global South. Most rebound studies come from wealthy economies where appetites for light, heat, and mobility are largely saturated. In countries where billions of people are only now gaining reliable electricity, air conditioning, and personal vehicles, even modest efficiency gains may unlock enormous new demand. How the world handles that legitimate growth, and whether the energy meeting it is clean, may matter more for the global carbon trajectory than any rebound coefficient ever measured.

3.  Carbon pricing. Even where rebound is real, it is not destiny—it is a policy problem with a known fix. Inês Azevedo’s makes the point in a 2014 paper. When efficiency is paired with a carbon price, an emissions cap, or a clean-electricity standard, the freed-up money and energy cannot simply re-fuel fossil consumption, because the cap or the price is still binding. Efficiency under a carbon constraint is not Jevons’s coal mine; it is a tightening lid on a shrinking budget. The paradox, in this view, is not a law of human nature—it is what happens when you do efficiency without doing climate policy.

Top image: ©Anthropocene Magazine  

Farm soils are notoriously abused under conventional agriculture: they are dug up and turned over, compacted, dried out, and heaped with synthetic fertilizers. But, there’s a potential silver lining to this intensive management: all that prodding and poking may have made soil microbes on farms more resilient to climate change. 

This unusual finding comes from a recent Nature Food study, where a research team tested dozens of European and Asian soil samples taken from croplands, and from natural environments including forests, grasslands, and wetlands. Under lab conditions, they exposed the samples to temperatures of 25°C. Then they looked at how well the microbes within decomposed the soil’s organic matter—a key indicator of microbial health and functionality, which can also be taken as a measure of how well the microbiome functions under stress.

The first result was that agricultural soils fared better under the warm conditions, continuing to decompose organic matter and show high functionality, compared with the three varieties of natural soils. Going a step further, the researchers inoculated samples of a what they call artificial soil with microbial communities lifted from the cropland and natural samples. This revealed that these artificial experimental soils inoculated with cropland microbes were significantly better at remaining functional under heat stress, compared to the soils treated with microbes from natural environments. 

Next, they exchanged the microbial communities of cropland soils and wetland soil samples, which were found to be the least heat-resistant of all the natural soils. To the wetland soils, this switch brought greater functionality under stress, whereas the resilience of cropland soils was slightly depleted by being inoculated with wetland microbes. 

 

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Taking a final step to test their hypothesis, the researchers then identified and extracted particular microbe strains from cropland samples that were associated with the most resilient behavior and created a new, artificial assemblage. When they inserted this select, elite community of resilient specimens into wetland soil, its resilience and functionality under stress was significantly increased. 

Overall, the results suggest that agricultural soils have somehow been primed by the stress of intensive management into coping better with heat. “These findings align with the concept of ecological memory, whereby repeated disturbances can imprint adaptive features,” the researchers explain in their research.

Their findings are striking, yet they do issue a note of caution about the results. While they sourced their soils from a variety of locations, they exposed them to a limited temperature of 25°C, which doesn’t capture the higher heat extremes that some cropland soils are exposed to in parts of the world. Higher temperatures might change the outcome for microbes. They also point out that transplanting microbes from one environment into another may have unintended negative effects on the soil ecosystem, which needs to be studied in more depth. 

Nevertheless, the study is an interesting first step towards what the researchers call “agricultural microbiome engineering” for the benefit of nature—a future where farming may actually give back, by helping to restore the health and resilience of surrounding habitats. 

Jiao et. al. “Agricultural soil microbiomes are structurally and functionally more resistant to warming than adjacent natural ecosystems.” Nature Food. 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

Sometimes, the fate of lots of small things hinge on the fate of a few very big ones. Take the story of the dung beetles and the elephant.

For a long time, scientists have warned that the loss of certain “keystone” species can cause outsized disruptions in an ecosystem. At the most extreme, it can wipe out still more species, a phenomenon known as “coextinction.”

While this domino effect makes sense in theory, documenting its occurrence in the wild has proven much trickier. Ecosystems are complex and hard to control, defying easy manipulation or observation. But scientists in Kenya appear to have done just that in an ambitious melding of computer modeling, on-the-ground experiments and detailed observations of the landscape.

The upshot: Insect diversity can hinge on the health of a single giant herbivore species. And that in turn can influence everything from nutrient cycling to seed dispersal. It’s a lesson how shifts in diversity can fray whole ecosystems.

“Our findings underscore the value of conserving elephants, not just for their own sake, but also for the biogeochemical integrity of savannas, the prosperity of pastoral and agro-ecosystems, and the cosurvival of charismatic minifauna,” the scientists wrote in a study published today in Science.

At the center of this is the interplay between dung beetles and elephants, or more specifically, elephant poop.

Dung beetles have earned plenty of attention for their appetite for feces, especially the species that roll animal dung into tidy balls and trundle them across the ground. But that’s a trick done only by some of the dozens of beetles that feed themselves and their larvae on other animal’s droppings. There are the “dwellers” that live in the dung, the “tunnelers” that store dung in holes, and then the famous “tumblers.” All told, scientists from U.S., European and African universities identified 176 different species of dung beetles at the Mpala Research Centre in Kenya, ranging in size from a grain of wheat to a chicken egg.

Elephants, of course, aren’t the only animals depositing dung piles in this part of Africa. But when these scientists set up a buffet of eight different kinds of local dung, a disproportionate number of the beetles showed a particular fondness for elephant dung. Traps set next to piles of elephant poop captured between 1.5 and 24 times more individual beetles and 2 to 6 times more species than any other kind of feces.

That might have something to do with the sheer volume deposited by a typical elephant. But it also appeared related to the animal’s digestive system. Beetles showed a preference for animals that digest plant fiber in their intestines near the end of the gut (elephants and zebras), rather than ruminants that break down food more completely in a series of stomach chambers. In other words, not all poop is the same according to some of the most discerning dung connoisseurs.

 

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When the scientists plugged the results into a computer model mapping the interactions between all the species, it showed that if elephants were removed from the landscape, it would trigger between 2 and 8 times more extinctions than if any other animal vanished from the area.

But would this digital scenario hold up in the messy real world? To find out, the scientists turned to a series of test plots, each roughly the size of one city block. Some plots were left open to all animals, others were fenced to exclude the very largest animals (i.e. elephants and giraffes), and others were fenced to exclude all herbivores.

When the scientists checked the test sites in 2023, 15 years after their creation, the areas open to elephants were a veritable dung beetle paradise. They had the highest total number of dung beetles, the largest variety of beetle species and the largest total biomass of the beetles. Sites that excluded elephants and giraffes had two-thirds fewer beetles, a 50% drop in beetle biomass and 23% fewer species. The areas without any herbivores had similar losses.

Giraffes were ruled out as a significant factor, because their dung ranked the lowest in popularity in the earlier taste test, where they had a “trifling effect,” the scientists wrote.

The results in the test plots were mirrored when scientists investigated dung beetle populations in nearby ranches where elephants had been displaced by sheep and goats.

Dung beetles’ dependence on elephants likely rippled through the entire ecosystem. Piles of dung placed on the different test plots broke down 35% more slowly in places where elephants were absent. Decomposition is a key activity in an ecosystem, helping to make nutrients available for plants and other organisms. Small fake seeds placed in the dung were also removed at double the rate in plots with elephants compared to those without.

The study not only illustrates the critical role of elephants in an ecosystem, but “also highlights the vulnerability of dung beetles and adds to growing concerns about the decline of insect populations,” Oxford University entomologist Owen Slade and Nanyang Technological University ecologist Eleanor Slade wrote in a commentary published in the same issue of Science.

Indeed, as much as people revere elephants—an feeling probably reinforced by this study – dung beetles are underappreciated ecological heroes. Their work breaking down dung not only helps disperse seeds and spread nutrients, it also reduces parasites and pests and enhances carbon storage. Their presence in the U.K. alone was estimated to have produced some $800 million in benefits to the cattle industry there in today’s dollars.

Talk about spinning feces into gold.

Gijsman, et. al. “Importance of elephants for dung beetle biodiversity and ecosystem functions.” Science. May 28, 2026.

Image: By Bernard Dupont via Flickr

Cement is one of the world’s most commonly used manmade materials. It is also one of the largest industrial sources of carbon dioxide; producing cement generates about 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions.

In a new paper in the journal ACS Energy Letters, researchers report a new kind of cement that cuts energy use by 70% and carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 98% compared with traditional cement-making methods.

The new process incorporates an electrochemical conversion step before heating the limestone to reduce the extreme heat needed later. The researchers also utilize recycled cement and concrete to further cut carbon emissions.

Making cement is an inherently carbon-intensive process. The emissions come from two routes. First, the process requires heating limestone (calcium carbonate) and silica at temperatures of over 1,450°C, the energy for which traditionally comes from burning fossil fuels.

Second, the chemical reactions themselves produce carbon dioxide. That’s because the heat converts the limestone to lime by driving off carbon dioxide. The lime then reacts with silica to form calcium silicate clinkers that are used to make cement.

 

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Instead of cooking limestone and silica in a high-temperature kiln, Curtis Berlinguette and colleagues designed an electrochemical reactor that converts limestone and silica into a compound called calcium silicate hydrates. This conversion happens at a temperature of only 60°C. Then the researchers convert the hydrate to calcium silicate mineral in a kiln at 650°C, less than half the temperatures used in traditional methods.

Because of the electricity use and lower temperatures, the new method reduced the energy required by 70% compared to traditional processed. It also cut carbon emissions.

Then, the team went a step further. Instead of using new limestone, they tested their process on recycled waste cement. They found that it could also serve as a source of calcium carbonate in their electrochemical reactor to produce calcium silicate hydrate.

Using recycled cement dramatically slashed emissions, resulting in only about 20 kg of carbon dioxide emitted per ton of clinker produced, a reduction of almost 98% compared to the production of ordinary Portland cement.

The work presents a credible path for dramatically reducing the carbon footprint and increasing the circularity of one of society’s most ubiquitous materials, the researchers say.

Source: Shaoxuan Ren, Tengxiao Ji, Sabrina S. Scott et al. Electrochemical Synthesis of Calcium Silicate Hydrate for Low-Carbon Cement. ACS Energy Letters, 2026.

Image based on Getty Images for Unsplash+

No matter where you live in the United States or what your driving habits are, a battery electric vehicle is likely to have a smaller carbon footprint and cost less overall than a comparable gasoline-powered vehicle, according to a new analysis.

The study calls into question some persistent myths about EVs – and gives policymakers and individual drivers tools to evaluate the benefits for their specific situation.

It’s well known that the emissions savings from EVs vary due to a number of factors, such as the greenness of the local electricity grid, climate, and a person’s driving habits. EVs also tend to cost more upfront than gasoline cars, but have lower fuel and maintenance costs. How all these tradeoffs pencil out can be hard to figure.

Most previous studies have looked at just one or a few of these factors at a time. In the new study, the researchers gathered data from every U.S. zip code and systematically analyzed a host of factors that might affect emissions or costs: local climate, electricity sources, congestion, urban versus rural driving and traffic patterns, electricity and gasoline prices, and individual variations in driving habits.

They used the results of the analysis to update a freely available website that compares the life-cycle emissions and total ownership costs of almost any type of EV and gasoline vehicle. “We provide quantitative answers to common questions asked by prospective EV owners,” the researchers write.

EVs reduce emissions the most in areas with a green electric grid, heavier traffic, greater annual travel distances, and mild climate, the researchers found.

 

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In any given area, EVs reduce emissions more for those drivers who drive more often, drive bigger vehicles, and spend more time stuck in traffic.

In most parts of the country, an EV reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 40-60% compared to a gasoline car. Not surprisingly, the greenness of the local grid is the biggest factor in driving differences in emission savings from place to place.

Many members of the public assume that EVs are no better than gasoline cars if the electricity that powers them comes from fossil fuels. But grids have gotten greener, and even in areas with the most carbon-intensive electricity, EVs almost always come out ahead, the researchers found.

Moreover, because grids everywhere are getting even greener yet, this will become less of a source of variation in the future, and individual driving patterns will matter more and more. Already, in some instances individual differences in driving patterns can matter as much as all regional factors combined, the analysis shows.

EVs also reduce emissions even in the most unfavorable climate conditions, upending assumptions that they have little environmental benefit in cold climates. It’s true that battery function takes a hit in the cold, but considered over the course of a whole year the effect on emissions savings is pretty small.

The cost of electricity is the largest factor in determining the relative costs of the different types of vehicles. In most areas of the United States, EVs are cost-competitive with gasoline vehicles, even without tax credits for clean vehicles. In areas where electricity is relatively cheap, EVs tend to have a lower lifetime ownership cost than gasoline cars.

Source: Miotti M. and J.E. Trancik. “Determinants of electric vehicle emissions savings and costs across locations and individuals.” Environmental Research Letters 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine.

 

The only thing standing between wastewater and its new life as a nutrient-rich fertilizer may be streams of tiny, tiny bubbles. 

This is the novel takeaway from a recent study which focuses on an emerging new approach: plasma bubble technology. This technology can purify water, while retaining its crop-benefiting nutrients. What’s more, when researchers tested the resulting purified and concentrated feed on hydroponic garlic crops, they noted that the plants had notably faster and healthier growth.

In general terms, plasma bubble technology works by pumping ionized gas into water, which creates millions of microscopic bubbles that course through the water, reacting in different ways with the ingredients within it. It’s this reaction that is key to its water-purifying qualities: the bubbles have the ability to degrade organic contaminants in the water. But, they’re also able to fix nitrogen, a key agricultural nutrient.

For their study, the University of Alberta researchers sourced wastewater from the malting industry, which produces spirits and beer. This byproduct is rich in organic elements, including nitrogen. But while one of these—nitrogen—accelerates crop growth, the researchers note that the remaining organic load could put growing plants under strain.

So, they tried their plasma bubbles, using a patented version of the technology that they have developed, which uses an electric pump and is fully automated. After pumping the malt wastewater full of tiny bubbles, the researchers found that the water’s organic load had been reduced by 90%, but the ionized bubbles increased the total levels of nitrogen in the water to 53.1 mg per litre through nitrogen fixation, almost double the amount in the control experiments.

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:Engineered E. Coli produce electricity from wastewater

 

Then it was time to put their nutrient-enriched water to the test. In an experimental hydroponic set up, the researchers watered 36 garlic plants, germinated from bulbs. They found that compared to the control plants, the plasma-wastewater treated bulbs germinated sooner, and developed longer roots.

Tests on the plants revealed that the treated garlic bulbs had assimilated more nutrients than the others, confirming the nutrient-rich status of the bubbled water. This showed up in the garlics’ continued growth, with the biomass of treated plants almost doubling that of the others. 

The scientists think their automated system is a good fit for hydroponic crop production, and could work for a range of other plants grown in this setting, they believe.

Like many of the best solutions, theirs dovetails two in one. “The technology performs the dual function of treating the wastewater and converting it into a nutrient solution that supports hydroponic crop production,” the authors say. “In this way, the treated wastewater becomes a valuable agricultural resource instead of a disposal problem.”

Zhang et. al. “Microbubble-enhanced cold plasma activation of food-industry wastewater for valorization and hydroponic crop production.” Green Chemical Engineering. 2026.

Image: cottonbro studio via pexels

Solar power is on the rise around the world as the cost of solar panels goes down and societal acceptance of the technology rises. The world added record-breaking solar power installations in 2025, and capacity is expected to more than double in the next five years, according to the International Energy Agency.

But there’s one inescapable issue darkening the skies for the transition to clean solar energy: dirty coal plants. Researchers in the UK have found that pollution from coal is significantly reducing the amount of power we could be getting from solar panels.

From 2017 to 2023, annual solar energy losses “from existing systems were, on average, equivalent to one-third of the energy added by new PV installations,” the researchers write in a paper published in the journal Nature Sustainability.

When power plant furnaces burn coal, it releases not just carbon dioxide but also sulfur dioxide. This gas reacts with other molecules to become small particles called sulfates. Called aerosols, these tiny particles get suspended in the air and reflect sunlight.

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:As coal pollution declines, crops begin to flourish

 

For their new study, the researchers used satellite data to map and assess more than 140,000 solar installations worldwide. They combined this data with air pollution data to calculate how much sunlight dims and how this reduces electricity generation. The researchers traced the origins of the aerosols and found that they came mainly from coal-fired power plants.

They found that in 2023 aerosols reduced global solar electricity output by 5.8%, or 111 terawatt-hours of energy; that is equal to the amount generated by 18 medium-sized coal-fired power plants. The losses were highest in China, where solar and coal are expanding and are often located close to each other. China had the largest aerosol-related solar energy losses worldwide, reducing national solar power generation by 7.7% in 2023.

The phase-out of coal power around the world has been slow, the researchers write, and this study presents yet another way that coal could interfere with the world’s clean-energy transition. “Looking forward, the physical interaction between coal-based aerosols and solar PV performance is likely to become an increasingly critical constraint on the global energy transition,” they say.

Source: Rui Song et al. Coal plants persist as a large barrier to the global solar energy transition. Nature Sustainability, 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene magazine/AI-generated

What does a bat-killing fungus have to do with the municipal bond market?

More than you might think. And the link points to the possibility of harnessing investors’ pursuit of profits to help biodiversity.

“This isn’t about conserving bats for bats’ sake,” said Yale University economist Eli Fenichel. “It’s about conserving bats to help communities reduce the cost of borrowing money for all manner of things.”

Conservationists are constantly looking for ways to entice people to invest in protecting wildlife. While “it’s good for the planet” is a common argument, appeals to altruism often fail to unlock the money researchers say is needed. Proponents of biodiversity instead appeal to people’s self-interest, whether it’s touting the role biodiversity protections can play in preventing human diseases, capturing carbon, controlling pests or various other human-centered benefits.  

 But what if wildlife conservation efforts could tap directly into financial markets, without needing to create a novel investment tool like biodiversity credits? Bats’ appetite for crop-eating insects and the connection between local farm income and government bond prices illustrates how that might work, Fenichel and colleagues at Yale and the University of Tennessee argue in a recent paper in Science.

“This approach reframes biodiversity protection not just as the ‘right thing to do’ from the perspective of conserving nature, but as a strategic risk-management strategy with a positive return for local government and investors alike,” said lead author Anya Nakhmurina, a professor of accounting at Yale.

To understand how this might work, we need to take a brief (I promise) journey into the arcane world of municipal bonds. Buckle up. We’ll get back to saving bats in a few paragraphs.

When local governments in the U.S. need to pay for big projects such as new roads or a sewage treatment plant, they usually borrow money and promise to pay back the loans, with interest. Those loans come in the form of bonds, which governments such as counties sell to investors.

The government uses future tax revenues to repay the bonds along with whatever interest rate they promised in order to lure investors. The lower the interest rate, the cheaper it is for the government to take on debt. The higher it is, the more attractive it can be to investors.

A key variable driving the interest rate is how much risk investors see that the government might not have the money to pay off the bond and instead default on the loan. Think of it like the mortgage market for home buyers. If someone has shaky finances, a bank might only provide a loan with a higher interest rate.

 

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So how does this come back to nocturnal flying mammals? Because it turns out that the fate of bats in the U.S. is linked to the financial fortunes of farms, which in turn affects local property tax revenues collected from those farms, which can influence interest rates for municipal bonds. It’s like the kid’s song about the old woman who swallowed a fly, then swallows a spider to catch the fly, in a cascading set of interlinked actions that eventually lead to her swallowing a horse. Only in this case, it’s a story of bats swallowing a whole lot of flies.     

Insect-eating bats are remarkably effective pest-control machines. The paper’s authors calculated that a single colony of 150 big brown bats could eat 600,000 cucumber beetles in a single year, translating into demolishing as many as 33 million larvae the beetles might have produced. Those larvae, known as rootworms, are a major pest for corn growers.

More pests mean less productive crops or more spending on pesticides. That can dent local tax collections which, for farmland, are pegged to farm revenue.

“Not managing bat populations is like letting roads become full of potholes,” said co-author Dale Manning, an economist at the University of Tennessee. “They’re part of the agricultural infrastructure, and when that gets degraded, the effects are felt broadly.”

This isn’t just hypothetical. The spread of the devastating fungus that causes the lethal white-nose syndrome in U.S. bats provided a kind of gruesome experiment, enabling the researchers to see links between bat health and local government health as the infection spread across the country.

First discovered in 2006 among bats hibernating in caves in upstate New York, the illness, caused by the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans, has now been found in 47 states and has killed millions of bats. Depending on the species, it can virtually wipe out a colony.

The damage showed up not just in bat caves but in county government coffers. When researchers compared counties’ financial condition before and after white nose syndrome arrived, they found a clear sign that a county’s tax revenue fell the longer the disease was around. Property tax revenue in infected rural counties fell by 16% per capita, compared with the average performance among rural counties. The effect also turned up in the interest rates for bonds, with fungus-affected counties facing higher interest rates. The link was particularly evident in places with a bigger variety in species of bats, probably because that increased the likelihood that some bats would be vulnerable to the disease.

While the disease creates a headache for bats, farmers and government officials, it could also create an opportunity for investors. That’s because if the damaged caused by the disease is diminished by conservation measures, such as protecting bat habitat, a bond issued by the local government would become less risky.

A savvy investor could, in theory, buy municipal bonds, then announce plans to help boost the local bat population. If the market thinks those plans will help bats and local tax revenues, the bonds suddenly seem less risky and more valuable.

The investor should be able to resell those bonds at a higher price and pocket the difference. Based on a hypothetical scenario, an investor could potentially buy a $1 million bonds and resell it for $1,013,855, the researchers calculated based on how the disease has affected bond values in the past.

“No one is going to become a billionaire with this strategy,” said Fenichel. “But if we can build these broader portfolios in the bond market, we can empower local communities to do things like finance conservation and even adapt to climate change.”

A similar strategy could work for species besides bats as well, assuming there’s a strong link to investment tools such as bonds.

But this all hinges on investors being able to finance things that are proven to counter the damage of white-nose syndrome. So far, there is little good news in that regard. Scientists are working on a vaccine, and there is some evidence that modifying caves to make them colder can help ward off the disease. But all of these remain in the experimental phase. Until one of them goes mainstream, bond investors are unlikely to be aiding in the campaign to rescue bats.

Nakhmurina, et. al. “The fiscal impact of biodiversity loss and a pathway for conservation finance.” Science. March 12, 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

Most discussions of plastic pollution say the problem is that plastic never breaks down. A new study turns that assumption on its head, arguing the problem is that it always does – at least to some degree.

In the study, researchers introduce the concept of the “plastic particle footprint,” the mass of plastic micro- and nanoparticles that will eventually enter the environment when a given item disintegrates. Mounting evidence indicates that these plastic particles pose a risk to human and environmental health, but until now there has been no way to incorporate those concerns into standard study methodologies.

Applying their concept to four everyday manufactured objects, the researchers demonstrate how the plastic particle footprint can radically change our understanding of the sustainability of different consumer choices. “The carbon footprint only tells part of the story,” says study team member Valérie Guillard, a researcher at the University of Montpellier in France.

The plastic particle footprint is the mass of virgin plastic required to produce a given item, minus the amount of plastic that will be molecularly destroyed (such as by incineration or in the rare case of truly biodegradable plastics, by microbes) at the end of the item’s lifetime.

No one has ever proven that macro-plastics won’t crumble into micro-plastics in the medium to long term, so we must assume that they will, the researchers argue. In the long run, in other words, all plastic becomes microplastics. “The irreversibility of this pollution requires a precautionary approach,” Guillard argues.

The researchers analyzed data from published life cycle analyses of four common objects: kettles (one made of 30% plastic and another made of 50% plastic), beverage containers (glass, plastic, or aluminum with plastic liner), crates (wood or plastic), and T-shirts (cotton or polyester—a form of plastic).

 

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When carbon footprints are comparable as in the case of the two kettles, different plastic footprints can help guide consumer choices, the researchers suggest.

The item with the smallest carbon footprint does not always have the smallest plastic footprint. A cotton T-shirt has a slightly larger carbon footprint than a polyester one—but virtually no plastic footprint. Plastic bottles and aluminum cans have smaller carbon footprints than glass bottles because they take less energy to manufacture. But glass bottles and aluminum cans have smaller plastic particle footprints. And the plastic lining inside aluminum cans can leach into beverages and be ingested by consumers – making glass bottles look better and better in the final reckoning.

Sometimes the tradeoffs are not so clear. A reusable plastic crate saves 280 grams of greenhouse gas emissions compared to a wooden one, but results in 21 additional grams of plastic particle pollution. Which is worse in the big picture? How many grams of carbon dioxide is a gram of plastic pollution worth?

In order to weigh up the choices quantitatively, future research will need to link a given mass of plastic particles to a given cost to society from health impacts and so on. The time scale of impact also requires careful thought. While the carbon footprint of items is often concentrated during the manufacture and use phases, for plastic bottles and polyester clothing more than 90% of the plastic particle footprint comes after an item is discarded. “We are building a reservoir of plastic, with a toxicity debt that future generations will inherit,” Guillard says.

Source: Guillard V. et al. “A pioneering plastic particle footprint concept for addressing the challenges posed by plastic pollution.” Science Advances 2026.

Image: © Anthropocene Magazine. AI-gnerated.

Wine is one of the most delicious agricultural products worldwide, but it leaves behind a less delectable trail: millions of tons of wasted skins, seeds, and flesh. Now a team of researchers has landed on a circular economy solution for these mounds of mush. 

They say it can be used as a replacement antibiotic on chicken farms, working almost as well as the real thing.  

In the United States where the study was based, broiler farms—those that raise chickens for meat—have been trying to wean their livestock off antibiotics, over growing fears about drug resistance and environmental damage. But there’s a catch: these drugs, known as ‘antibiotic growth promoters’ serve a useful purpose because they help fight harmful gut bacteria that cause inflamed guts, make chickens sick, and reduce their growth levels. Farmers have been crying out for a solution—and this is where wine waste comes in.

Building on previous work revealing the possible bacteria-fighting potential of wine waste (known as ‘pomace’), the researchers decided to test it out in a series of experiments on 126 chickens, which they split into different treatment groups. Some were fed a diet containing 30% rice bran which is a known gut-inflamer. Others received that diet, but with the addition of a conventional antibiotic called zinc-bacitracin. Another group were fed the bran diet supplemented with a tiny percentage of grape pomace, which was either plain or fermented. 

Even at a tiny dose making up just 0.5% of the chickens’ diet, the researchers found that the addition of grape pomace brought about a remarkable change in the birds. Compared to those animals that received the diet without any added treatment, their body weight gains increased by 79%, and their average body weight increased by almost 20%, both helpful indicators of improved gut health. 

The fermented grape waste produced the most promising results. The researchers think this may be because fermentation changes the grapes’ chemical composition in a way that appeals to beneficial gut microbes that can boost the chickens’ digestive health. Strikingly also, the grape waste-treated birds showed beneficial physiological changes in their guts, 

Overall, the benefits of adding grape pomace were comparable to those recorded in the birds that received the conventional antibiotic treatment. It’s still not known why grape pomace has this antibiotic-like effect, but the researchers speculate that it could have something to do with a series of bioactive compounds contained in the waste including flavonoids, polyphenols, and tannins, which have been shown to reduce inflammation and to have antibacterial qualities. All of that potential sits untapped in wine waste, like buried treasure. 

But at least now there’s a possible alternative. Fermentation to make wine, and then to treat chickens might be exactly the circular solution that both these industries need. 

Tako et. al. “Dietary grape pomace mitigates high-NSP-induced inflammation and production loss via microbiome-SCFA-immune mediated pathways.” npj Biofilms and Microbiomes. 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene

Nature is full of fascinating creatures that produce light. From fireflies putting on mesmerizing summer displays to fish that glow eerily in the depths of the ocean, this bioluminescence is a result of chemical reactions that produce flashes of light.

In a new study published in the journal Science Advances, researchers have harnessed bioluminescent sea-dwelling algae to produce a light source that glows blue without the need for electricity or toxic chemicals. The advance could lead use in living sensors that monitor water quality, autonomous robots that work in dark environments, and eco-friendly consumer lighting such as glow sticks.

“I was curious if we could create a world in which we don’t use electricity but rather use biology to produce light,” said Wil Srubar, a civil, environmental and architectural engineering professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, in a press release. “This discovery really paves the way for engineering other living light materials and devices.”

Marine algae species such as Pyrocystis lunula produce cold blue light that is visible from the water surface. The photosynthetic organisms, which survive on sunlight and carbon dioxide, flash when they are agitated by waves, passing boats, or swimmers. The spectacular light show draws visitors to beaches in the nighttime.

But the sparking light from the glowing algae lasts for only a few milliseconds at a time. The glow is also unpredictable and is hard to control.

Acidic (top) and basic (bottom) environments trigger different bioluminescent behaviors in algae. Credit: Giulia Brachi

Researchers at UC Boulder decided to use chemistry to get the marine organisms to sustain their luminescence. In the past, researchers have suggested that exposing P. lunula to various chemical compounds could activate the algae’s luminescence reaction.

So Srubar and colleagues exposed the algae to two solutions. One was acidic, with a pH of 4, similar to that of tomato juice, while the other was a basic solution with a pH of 10, comparable to mild soap. The acidic solution was a hit. Algae in the solution stayed brightly lit for 25 minutes.

For a more practical way to use the algae, the researchers embedded the organisms into various 3D-printed objects made with naturally-derived hydrogel. In these constructs, the algae survived for weeks while glowing when exposed to the acidic solution. After four weeks, the acid-treated examples still retained 75 percent of their brightness.

Srubar and colleagues are now exploring whether P. lunula may respond to various chemicals. The goal is to harness the algae to light up when exposed to toxins and serve as a tool for water quality monitoring.

Source: Giulia Brachi et al. Chemical stimulation sustains bioluminescence of living light materials. Science Advances, 2026.

Top image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

Scientists, including ecologists, are data hogs. More data can give analyses more statistical power, increasing confidence that a researcher is seeing something real in the numbers, whether it’s fluctuations in an animal’s numbers, location, or some other metric. There is generally no such thing as “too much data.”

Except when there is. As technological advances enable people to collect more information, such as images from satellites or audio from tiny weather-resistant recorders, some scientists are drowning in data.

Just one example: The proliferation of small, cheap wildlife cameras has enabled researchers to amass tens of thousands of images that can take months of tedious work to catalog. Recently, AI tools have been some help, enabling scientists to, for example, sift out images containing no wildlife at all. But people are often still spending months scrolling through grainy snapshots before doing any of the “real” analysis. In computer parlance, there’s still a “human in the loop.”

That might not be true soon, however. AI-powered programs have grown sophisticated enough that in some cases they can screen and analyze wildlife camera data with enough accuracy that the final result isn’t meaningfully different from the more common labor-intensive approach, according to a new paper in the Journal of Applied Technology. In other words, no more human in the loop.

“We’re not trying to replace people,” said Washington State University wildlife ecologist Daniel Thornton, the study’s lead author. “The goal is to help researchers get to answers faster so they can make better decisions about managing and conserving wildlife.”

The new research didn’t involve some fancy technical breakthrough in AI programming. Rather, ecologists like Thornton collaborated with people at tech giant Google to see how they could harness existing AI tools. To do that, they set up what amounted to a competition: computers versus humans.

They started with nearly 3.8 million digital photos taken by 1,200 wildlife cameras in three different locations – eastern and central Washington state, Glacier National Park in Montana, and a jungle reserve in Guatemala. The photos had been scrutinized by experts to identify the species of any mammal that turned up. Then the researchers handed them over to AI.

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:Cloudy with a chance of warblers

 

First, they used MegaDetector, a program that detects whether animals, humans or vehicles are in an image. After that initial screening, the animal-positive images were turned over to SpeciesNet, a Google-developed program built to identify what animals are in a photo. It covers approximately 2,500 different groups of species from around the world. The results were then fed into a computer model built to convert these animal sightings into an estimation of where each species occurred on a landscape, what’s known as “occupancy.”

With the exception of a few outliers, the results from the automated AI approach weren’t very different from the analysis with a more human touch. The results aligned between 85% and 90% of the time.

It doesn’t mean the computers were perfect. Rare or hard-to-identify species sometimes tripped up the programs. SpeciesNet mistakenly classified mountain goats in Montana as domestic goats. Grizzly bears were reported in Washington, when they haven’t been there in decades.

But for many species in each of the three regions, the lightning-fast computers were as accurate as the plodding humans.

“The key question wasn’t whether the AI got every image right,” said Dan Morris, a scientist at Google who helped create SpeciesNet and is a co-author on the study. “It was whether the ecological conclusions you care about would end up being basically the same.”

If this approach finds its way out of academia, it could enable wildlife managers to get up-to-date information much more quickly about what’s happening to wild populations. Among other things, that could mean quicker alerts when an endangered species shows up somewhere, or if it’s starting to vanish.

“The big takeaway is that this doesn’t have to be a bottleneck anymore,” Thornton said of the image backlog. “If we can process data faster, we can respond faster, and that’s really what matters for conservation.”

Thornton, et. al. “Identification of camera trap images by artificial intelligence and human experts produces similar multi-species occupancy models.” Journal of Applied Ecology. May 6, 2026.

Image (based on) ©Smithsonian via Flickr

Dollar for dollar, investing in renewable energy provides greater benefits to society than technology to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, according to a new analysis.

Most previous studies of direct air capture (DAC) have looked at whether it removes more carbon dioxide than it produces, or whether it costs society less to remove a ton of carbon from the atmosphere than it does to leave it there—in effect comparing carbon capture with doing nothing.

“Many analyses ask ‘is direct air capture net-negative?’ and leave it there, without acknowledging that there is an opportunity cost to investing in direct air capture,” says study team member Yannai Kashtan, a researcher at PSE Healthy Energy, an Oakland, CA-based independent research institute.

Instead, Kashtan and his colleagues set a higher bar for DAC, comparing its return on investment to that of other climate-friendly technologies, namely renewable energy development.

“I was surprised how much the answer [to] ‘is DAC worth it?’ changes when you change your metric,” Kashtan says.

The researchers modeled the health and climate benefits of investing $100 million in direct air capture versus investing the same amount in utility-scale solar or onshore wind in 22 regions across the United States through 2050.

The public health impact of DAC is often overlooked in studies of the technology. But if the electricity to power DAC comes even partially from a fossil-based grid, it results in sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and small particulate matter pollution—while renewables do not.

The researchers modeled four scenarios for the development of DAC technology and performance, analyzing each of these in the context of eight different hypothetical future grid scenarios developed by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:New study compares growing corn for energy to solar production. It’s no contest.

 

The results were stark. “Solar and wind beat direct air capture now and all the way through 2050, even if direct air capture gets substantially cheaper and more energy-efficient,” says Kashtan.

If today’s performance of DAC holds—the technology currently requires about 5,500 kilowatt hours of electricity and costs $1,000 to remove one ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—it would have a net negative impact on society through 2050 due to greenhouse gas emissions and harmful air pollution, the researchers found.

Even if DAC energy use falls by more than two-thirds to 1,500 kilowatt hours and its cost by half to $500 per ton of carbon dioxide removed, the benefits of renewables are several-fold greater than those of DAC.

Only in the most optimistic scenario for DAC development—in which these figures fall to 800 kilowatt hours and $100 per ton of carbon dioxide removed—does the technology edge out renewables nationwide. Even then, solar and wind remain the better investment in some regions, such as across the Midwest.

“To be clear, direct air capture can do something solar and wind cannot: reduce atmospheric CO2 concentrations, undoing past damage,” Kashtan says. But until carbon emissions are virtually zeroed out, DAC is highly unlikely to be cost-effective compared to investing in renewables. Kashtan compares the situation to a common-sense principle: “fix your broken faucet before you start mopping the floor.”

A future analysis could try to find the “tipping point” where the grid is sufficiently clean that DAC offers greater bang for the buck, says Kashtan.

Source: Kashtan Y. et al. “Direct air capture has substantial health and climate opportunity costs.” Communications Sustainability 2026.

Image: © Anthropocene Magazine.

A new study reveals the remarkable power of seaweed to clean—and in some cases entirely eradicate—fish waste from aquaculture. 

In the new work based out of the University of Miami, Florida, researchers tested out the abilities of several seaweed species to clean water polluted with fish effluent. Starting with multiple tanks, each containing one of four seaweed species, including a type of red seaweed, and a sea lettuce, the researchers evenly pumped through effluent-filled water into each one from a tank stocked with yellowtail snapper, a common aquaculture species in the region. 

The fish were kept in tanks at commercial production densities, to mimic the polluting effects of a fish farm. All the seaweed species received the same levels of effluent flow to compare their responses. These were also tested against control tanks that contained the seaweeds but weren’t exposed to waste from the fish tank. Researchers took regular readings of water oxygen, CO2, phosphate and ammonia levels in the water, and also tested the seaweeds for levels of protein, fat, minerals, and metals 

This steady analysis revealed that the seaweed had varying—but often striking—abilities to cleanse the water of fish waste. The most significant finding is that one species called Agardh’s red weed, a dense, frilly seaweed with a burgundy hue, reduced levels of polluting ammonia from the fish-contaminated water to below detectable levels, seemingly absorbing all this waste and using it to power its own growth. 

 

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Additionally, tests of the water before and after it had run through the seaweed tanks showed that sea lettuce in particular was very good at absorbing carbon from the water, taking up more carbon than any other seaweed species and leaving the water significantly cleared of dissolved CO2. It also generated more oxygen than any other species. Two other seaweed species also significantly decreased the dissolved CO2 content of the effluent-infused water. 

Meanwhile, a species known as sea grapes contained the highest amounts of protein when researchers did sample testing on the effluent-fed algae, pointing to its potential nutritional value, and suggesting it could make sense to produce seaweed commercially alongside fish aquaculture. In nearly all the seaweed species, the researchers also found that samples were enriched with the analyzed nutrients after exposure to the fish-fed water.

Ultimately, the study shows how mimicking natural seascapes, by bringing together fish and seaweed, could produce double-benefits: significantly curbing pollution in the world’s fastest-growing food production sector, while providing an additional source of human nutrient and farmer revenues.

In the short-term, they hope their investigation will convince farmers to at least give seaweeds a go, and to make smarter choices about which species they select when they do.

Lasco et. al. “Evaluation of native macroalgae species of the Southeast U.S. and Caribbean for use in integrated multi-trophic aquaculture (IMTA).” Aquaculture International. 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine. AI-generated

Every year, the forestry and timber industries produce vast quantities of tree bark as a byproduct. Most of this material is burned, discarded, or left to decompose. At the same time, there is an urgent need to develop scalable and affordable technologies to capture carbon dioxide.

“Our research brings these two issues together through a simple but impactful idea, transforming waste into a resource,” says Suresh Bhargava, director of the Centre for Advanced Materials and Industrial Chemistry at RMIT University.

Bhargava and his colleagues have converted the bark of the eucalyptus tree into a porous carbon material that can help clean water, filter air and capture carbon dioxide. They reported their simple two-step method in a paper published in the journal Biomass and Bioenergy.

Porous carbon materials, which contain a sophisticated network of pores, are already used in filtration and gas treatment systems. Their pores capture contaminants or targeted molecules as water or air pass through. But, says Bhargava, “conventional methods for producing porous carbon materials are often energy-intensive, requiring high temperatures and multiple processing steps, which limits scalability.”

The RMIT team developed a simple and scalable synthesis approach to make their carbon filter from eucalyptus bark. They first make a carbon-rich material called a hydrochar by heating wet bark at low temperature under pressure. Then they physically mixed the hydrochar with zinc chloride.

 

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This results in a highly porous carbon material with a surface area of approximately 2,210 square meters per gram of the material. The porous material captures around 7 millimoles per gram of CO₂, placing it among competitive carbon capture materials, Bhargava says.

“The choice of eucalyptus bark is both practical and scientifically grounded,” he adds. Eucalyptus bark is a widely available, low-cost resource. Australia is home to more than 900 species of eucalyptus and related trees, and eucalyptus is also cultivated widely around the world.

The bark contains lignin and cellulose that lead to the formation of stable carbon frameworks with well-developed porosity. Compared to other biomass sources, it produces materials with higher surface area and better CO₂ adsorption performance.

The abundance of the raw materials and the simplicity of the synthesis process makes this approach inherently scalable. The researchers are now trying to evaluate long-term durability, regeneration, and performance under real operating conditions. And they are seeking industry collaborations to explore commercialization opportunities.

“While further work is needed to evaluate long-term durability and large-scale deployment,” says Bhargava, “this study provides a clear pathway toward more sustainable and economically viable carbon capture technologies.”

Source: Pallavi Saini et al. Sustainable valorisation of eucalyptus bark waste into microporous carbon materials for efficient CO2 capture. Biomass and Bioenergy, 2026.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

The vast ocean dwarfs our efforts to understand it. Sensor-laden buoys, high-flying satellites and sophisticated computer models can only do so much to plumb the depths of the waters covering more than two-thirds of the planet.

But a creature with intimate knowledge of the ocean might help humans get a more accurate picture of what lies beneath. Sharks could serve as mobile, wide-ranging sensor systems, collecting data that improves our understanding of ocean conditions in ways that might inform fisheries management and other critical activities, according to new research in the journal npj Climate and Atmospheric Science.

“Sharks are already moving through parts of the ocean that are challenging for us to observe,” said Laura McDonnell, the lead author and a postdoctoral scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts. “This research shows that data they collect can help fill important gaps.”

Scientists have attached sensors to sharks for years, but usually with the intent of understanding what’s going on with the animals. In 2022 I spent five days on the Atlantic Ocean near Africa with a team of scientists catching sharks and drilling holes in dorsal fins to attach light-bulb-sized sensors. They wanted to know how the sharks’ behavior changed as they swam through patches of low-oxygen water.

Neil Hammerschlag, a co-author of the new paper, was using sensors in much the same way as a marine ecologist at the University of Miami (UM) when, in 2018, he spoke with UM atmospheric scientist Ben Kirtman about the possibility of using data from the sensors to study the ocean, rather than the fish.

“Marine predators like sharks naturally seek out dynamic ocean features such as fronts and eddies,” explained Kirtman. “These are areas where models often lack sufficient observations.”

As a Ph.D. student at UM, McDonnell took on the question of whether this might work.  In waters off the Northeast U.S. coast, McDonnell and colleagues attached sensors to the dorsal fins of 18 blue sharks and one shortfin mako shark in October 2021. Then they set them loose, like so many fast-moving drones.

 

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In the following months, the equipment decorating the sharks’ fins collected moment-by-moment measurements of temperature and depth, two pieces of data critical to understanding the state of the ocean in a particular place. When the animals surfaced, the tags transmitted the information to satellite and on to the scientists. All told, they collected more than 8,200 snapshots of ocean conditions from the sharks. While the data was concentrated off the coast of the eastern U.S. north of Virginia, the sharks roamed as far south as Florida and out into the middle of the Atlantic. They also gave scientists glimpses of conditions at depths of almost 2,000 meters as they dove.

The researchers took this trove of information and used it to fine tune a computer program commonly used to model current ocean conditions based on data from ocean-going buoys and other sources. In certain parts of the ocean, the shark-enhanced approach was significantly closer to reality than the standard model, when scientists tested to see how well the models simulated ocean conditions during the time when the sharks were collecting the data. (The ability for computer models to accurately reconstruct past conditions is a standard test for ocean and atmospheric models.)

The improved performance was particularly notable along the shallow continental shelf, where it reduced the model’s error by 43% for November and 33% in December. That added up to the model being around 1.5°C closer to the mark when it came to sea surface temperatures, a significant improvement in an environment where subtle temperature shifts can drive major ecological changes.

 “For fisheries and coastal communities, small improvements in ocean forecasts can make a big difference,” said Camrin Braun, an oceanographer at WHOI who worked on the study. “Reducing uncertainty helps people plan, whether that’s where to fish, how to manage resources, or how to respond to changing conditions.”

That doesn’t mean sharks will be replacing other data-gathering, cautioned McDonnell. This was only a short-term experiment, and there is no mention of a more comprehensive effort to enlist sharks to the front lines of ocean forecasting. But it does show that tags formerly used to just understand the sharks could do double duty by shining more light onto broader mysteries of how the ocean is changing.

McDonnell, et. al. “Improved seasonal climate forecasting using shark-borne sensor data in a dynamic ocean.” npj Climate and Atmospheric Science. April 28, 2026.

Image: Blue shark (Prionace glauca) © Diego Delso via Flickr

A combination of sustainability strategies could slash emissions from delivering parcels from online orders in China by more than four-fifths, according to a new analysis. The study also finds the climate impact of these deliveries may be more than 9 times greater than previous studies have estimated.

The researchers tested two strategies to reduce so-called last-mile emissions – that is, the impact of final delivery of parcels to individual addresses. The first was simply replacing gasoline-powered delivery vehicles with electric ones. If implemented nationwide, they found it could save 18.2% of last-mile emissions. The EV switch would have the largest impact in smaller cities, reducing emissions by almost 30% there compared to about 7% in the largest cities.

The second strategy, however, was the real winner. Cooperation among logistics companies—which the Chinese government has been advocating since 2018—could dramatically slash emissions by avoiding having multiple couriers from different companies make deliveries to the same neighborhood. If all six major delivery companies cooperated in this way, it would reduce emissions by up to 66%.

The two strategies together could reduce last-mile emissions by as much as 84.2%.

The growth of e-commerce and surge in online orders in recent years has resulted in a massive expansion of delivery services. But the climate impact of last-mile delivery hasn’t been rigorously studied until now. Past studies have tended to be small-scale, rely on modeling or simulations, or capture only coarse-grained movements of delivery couriers, leading to underestimates of emissions.

 

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In the new analysis, researchers leveraged data on 14 billion orders from the e-commerce platform JD.com and smartphone location data from 1.9 million couriers to calculate last-mile emissions for parcel delivery in 365 Chinese cities. The analysis is particularly important in China, which handles almost 60% of the world’s parcel volume, with more than 130 billion parcels delivered in 2023.

The researchers’ analysis shows that Chinese delivery couriers traveled more than 70 million miles per day in 2023 and generated 1.59 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.

Surprisingly, last-mile delivery emissions don’t increase linearly with orders. From January 2023 to January 2024, orders increased by 83.5%, but emissions only went up by 31.3%, representing a decline of about 28% in per-parcel emissions.

“This suggests that system-level efficiencies, such as better logistics, routing, and consolidation, can significantly offset the environmental impact of rapidly growing demand,” says study team member Zhiqing Hong, a computer scientist at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Source: Hong Z. et al. “Decarbonizing emissions from last-mile deliveries in Chinese cities.” Nature Cities 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine.