Editor’s note: “A new report from Harvard’s Electricity Law Initiative says unless something changes, all U.S. consumers will pay billions of dollars to build new power plants to serve Big Tech.
Data centers are forecast to account for up to 12% of all U.S. electricity demand by 2028. They currently use about 4% of all electricity.
Historically, costs for new power plants, power lines and other infrastructure is paid for by all customers under the belief that everyone benefits from those investments.
‘But the staggering power demands of data centers defy this assumption,’ the report argues.”
AI burns through a lot of resources. And thanks to a paradox first identified way back in the 1860s, even a more energy-efficient AI is likely to simply mean more energy is used in the long run.
For most users, “large language models” such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT work like intuitive search engines. But unlike regular web-searches that find and retrieve data from anywhere along a global network of servers, AI models return data they’ve generated from scratch. Like powering up a nuclear reactor to use a calculator, this tailored process is very inefficient.
“This move is part of a national trend. The data center industry is booming all over, from Virginia to Texas to Oregon, and utilities across the country are responding by building new fossil fuel resources or delaying retirements, all at a time when scientists agree that cutting fossil fuel emissions is more urgent than ever. More than 9,000 MW of fossil fuel generation slated for closure has been delayed or is at risk of delay, and more than 10,800 MW of new fossil fuel generation has been planned, according to the sustainability research and policy center Frontier Group.
The backslide into fossil fuels is alarming to environmental and consumer advocates, and not only because it stands to slow down climate action and extend the harmful effects of fossil fuel use. Some also question the purported growth in demand — meaning utilities could be doubling down on climate-warming coal and gas to meet energy demand that won’t actually materialize.”
Another set of companies lost large fractions of their stock valuations: U.S. power, utility and natural gas companies. Electric utilities like Constellation, Vistra and Talen had gained stock value on the basis of the argument that there would be a major increase in demand for energy due to data centers and AI, allowing them to invest in new power plants and expensive nuclear projects (such as small modular reactor), and profit from this process. [The other source of revenue, at least in the case of Constellation, was government largesse.] The much lower energy demand from DeepSeek, at least as reported, renders these plans questionable at best.
Remembering Past Ranfare
But we have been here before. Consider, for example, the arguments made for building the V. C. Summer nuclear project in South Carolina. That project came out of the hype cycle during the first decade of this century, during one of the many so-called nuclear renaissances that have been regularly announced since the 1980s. [In 1985, for example, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Director Alvin Weinberg predicted such a renaissance and a second nuclear era—that is yet to materialize.] During the hype cycle in the first decade of this century, utility companies proposed constructing more than 30 reactors, of which only four proceeded to construction. Two of these reactors were in South Carolina.
As with most nuclear projects, public funding was critical. The funding came through the 2005 Energy Policy Act, the main legislative outcome from President George W. Bush’s push for nuclear power, which offered several incentives, including production tax credits that were valued at approximately $2.2 billion for V. C. Summer.
The justification offered by the CEO of the South Carolina Electric & Gas Company to the state’s Public Service Commission was the expectation that the company’s energy sales would increase by 22 percent between 2006 and 2016, and by nearly 30 percent by 2019. In fact, South Carolina Electric & Gas Company’s energy sales declined by 3 percent by the time 2016 rolled in. [Such mistakes are standard in the history of nuclear power. In the 1970s, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and utility companies were projecting that “about one thousand large nuclear power reactors” would be built “by the year 2000 and about two thousand, mostly breeder reactors, by 2010” on the basis of the grossly exaggerated estimates of how rapidly electricity production would grow during the same period. It turned out that “utilities were projecting four to nine times more electric power would be produced in the United States by nuclear power in 2000 than actually happened”.] In the case of South Carolina, the wrong projection about energy sales was the basis of the $9 billion plus spent on the abandoned V. C. Summer project.
The Racket Continues
With no sense of shame for that failure, one of the two companies involved in that fiasco recently expressed an interest in selling this project. On January 22, Santee Cooper’s President and CEO wrote, “We are seeing renewed interest in nuclear energy, fueled by advanced manufacturing investments, AI-driven data center demand, and the tech industry’s zero-carbon targets…Considering the long timelines required to bring new nuclear units online, Santee Cooper has a unique opportunity to explore options for Summer Units 2 and 3 and their related assets that could allow someone to generate reliable, carbon emissions-free electricity on a meaningfully shortened timeline”.
A couple of numbers to put those claims about timelines in perspective: the average nuclear reactor takes about 10 years to go from the beginning of construction—usually marked by when concrete is poured into the ground—to when it starts generating electricity. But one cannot go from deciding to build a reactor to pouring concrete in the ground overnight. It takes about five to ten years needed before the physical activities involved in building a reactor to obtain the environmental permits, and the safety evaluations, carry out public hearings (at least where they are held), and, most importantly, raise the tens of billions of dollars needed. Thus, even the “meaningfully shortened timeline” will mean upwards of a decade.
Going by the aftermath of the Deepseek, the AI and data center driven energy demand bubble seems to have crashed on a timeline far shorter than even that supposedly “meaningfully shortened timeline”. There is good reason to expect that this AI bubble wasn’t going to last, for there was no real business case to allow for the investment of billions. What DeepSeek did was to also show that the billions weren’t needed. As Emily Bender, a computer scientist who co-authored the famous paper about large language models that coined the term stochastic parrots, put it: “The emperor still has no clothes, but it’s very distressing to the emperor that their non-clothes can be made so much more cheaply.”
But utility companies are not giving up. At a recent meeting organized by the Nuclear Energy Institute, the lobbying organization for the nuclear industry, the Chief Financial Officer of Constellation Energy, the company owning the most nuclear reactors in the United States, admitted that the DeepSeek announcement “wasn’t a fun day” but maintained that it does not “change the demand outlook for power from the data economy. It’s going to come.” Likewise, during an “earnings call” earlier in February, Duke Energy President Harry Sideris maintained that data center hyperscalers are “full speed ahead”.
Looking Deeper
Such repetition, even in the face of profound questions about whether such a growth will occur, is to be expected, for it is key to the stock price evaluations and market capitalizations of these companies. The constant reiteration of the need for more and more electricity and other resources also adopts other narrative devices shown to be effective in a wide variety of settings, for example, pointing to the possibility that China would take the lead in some technological field or the other, and explicitly or implicitly arguing how utterly unacceptable that state of affairs would be. Never asking whether it even matters who wins this race for AI. These tropes and assertions about running out of power contribute to creating the economic equivalent of what Stuart Hall termed “moral panic”, thus allowing possible opposition to be overruled.
One effect of this slew of propaganda has been the near silence on the question of whether such growth of data centers or AI is desirable, even though there is ample evidence of the enormous environmental impacts of developing AI and building hyperscale data centers. Or for that matter the desirability of nuclear power.
As Lewis Mumford once despaired: “our technocrats are so committed to the worship of the sacred cow of technology that they say in effect: Let the machine prevail, though the earth be poisoned, the air be polluted, the food and water be contaminated, and mankind itself be condemned to a dreary and useless life, on a planet no more fit to support life than the sterile surface of the moon”.
But, of course, we live in a time of monsters. At a time when the levers of power are wielded by a megalomaniac who would like to colonize Mars, and despoil its already sterile environment.
Editor’s note: “Energy is, of course, fundamental to both human existence and the functioning of capitalism. It is central to production, as well as the heating and lighting systems that most people take for granted, and the energy sector is by far the single largest producer of greenhouse emissions.” A transition to 100% electrical energy will never happen. The percentage of electrical energy is 20%, of which 3% are “renewable”. Those figures have never been higher in well over 50 years. Also everywhere in the world, the development of “renewables” has and remains propped up by government support.
From a distance, the Ivanpah solar plant looks like a shimmering lake in the Mojave Desert(a death trap for migratory). Up close, it’s a vast alien-like installation of hundreds of thousand of mirrors pointed at three towers, each taller than the Statue of Liberty. When this plant opened near the California-Nevada border in early 2014, it was pitched as the future of solar power. Just over a decade later, it’s closing. Ivanpah now stands as a huge, shiny monument to wasted tax dollars and environmental damage — campaign groups long criticized the plant for its impact on desert wildlife.
“It was a monstrosity combining huge costs, huge subsidies, huge environmental damage, and justifications hugely spurious. It never achieved its advertised electricity production goals even remotely, even as the excuses flowed like wine, as did the taxpayer bailouts.
And now, despite all the subventions, it is shutting down about 15 years early as a monument to green fantasies financed with Other People’s Money, inflicted upon electricity ratepayers in California denied options to escape the madness engendered by climate fundamentalism.”
Instead of forcing coal and oil into obsolescence, we’re merely adding more energy to the system — filling the gap with “renewables” while still burning record amounts of fossil fuels. This is the real danger of the “energy abundance” mindset: it assumes that a limitless supply of “clean” energy will eventually render fossil fuels obsolete. In reality, “renewable” energies are not replacing fossil fuels, but supplementing them, contributing to a continued pattern of broad energy consumption.
Historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz: ‘Forget the energy transition: there never was one and there never will be one’
At first glance, no one is waiting for a historian to play down the idea of an energy transition. Certainly not at a time of environmental headwinds. But above all, Fressoz wants to correct historical falsehoods and reveal uncomfortable truths. ‘Despite all the technological innovation of the 20th century, the use of all raw materials has increased. The world now burns more wood and coal than ever before.’
In his latest book, More and more and more, the historian of science, technology and environment explains why there has never been an energy transition, and instead describes the modern world in all its voracious reality. The term “transition” that has come into circulation has little to do with the rapid, radical upheaval of the fossil economy needed to meet climate targets.
In France, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz has been provoking the energy and climate debate for some time. He denounces the obsession with technological solutions to climate change and advocates a reduction in the use of materials and energy.
The cover of the French edition of your book says ‘the energy transition is not going to happen’. Why do you so strongly oppose this narrative?
We are reducing the carbon intensity of the economy, but that is not a transition. You hear very often that we just need to organise ‘a new industrial revolution’, most recently by US climate envoy John Kerry. You cannot take this kind of historical analogy seriously, this is really stupid.
The idea of an energy transition is actually a very bizarre form of future thinking, as if we would transform from one energy system to another over a 30-year period and stop emitting CO2. If it were to come across as credible, it is because we do not understand the history of energy.
But don’t we have historic precedents? Didn’t we transform from a rural economy that ran on wood to an industrial society with coal as the big driver?
This is an example of the many misconceptions of the history of energy. In the 19th century, Britain used more wood annually just to shore up the shafts of coal mines than the British economy consumed as fuel during the 18th century.
Of course it is true that coal was very important for the new industrial economy in 1900, but you cannot imagine that as if one energy source replaced the other. Without wood, there would be no coal, and therefore no steel and no railways either. So different energy sources, materials and technologies are highly interdependent and everything expands together.
So I guess you won’t agree either with the claim that oil replaced coal in the last century?
Again, oil became very important, but this is not a transition. Because what do you use oil for? To drive a car. Look at Ford’s first car of the 1930s. While it ran on fuel, it was made of steel, requiring 7 tonnes of coal. That’s more than the car would consume in oil over its lifetime! Today it is no different: if you buy a car from China, it still requires about three tonnes of coal.
You should also take into account the infrastructure of highways and bridges, the world’s biggest consumers of steel and cement, and that is just as dependent on coal. Oil drilling rigs and pipelines also use large amounts of steel. So behind the technology of a car is both oil and a lot of coal.
You suggest looking at energy and the climate problem without the idea of ‘transition’. How?
Focus on material flows. Then you see that despite all the technological innovation of the 20th century, the use of all raw materials has increased (excluding wool and asbestos). So modernisation is not about ‘the new’ replacing ‘the old’, or competition between energy sources, but about continuous growth and interconnection. I call it ‘symbiotic expansion’.
How do you apply this idea of symbiotic expansion of all materials to the current debate about the energy transition?
The energy transition is a slogan but no scientific concept. It derives its legitimacy from a false representation of history. Industrial revolutions are certainly not energy transitions, they are a massive expansion of all kinds of raw materials and energy sources.
Moreover, the word energy transition has its main origins in political debates in the 1970s following the oil crisis. But in these, it was not about the environment or climate, but only about energy autonomy or independence from other countries.
Scientifically, it is a scandal to then apply this concept to the much more complex climate problem. So when we seek solutions to the climate crisis and want to reduce CO2 emissions, it is better not to talk about a transition. It is better to look at the development of raw materials in absolute terms and to understand their intertwinedness. This will also restrain us from overestimating the importance of technology and innovation .
Didn’t technological innovation bring about major changes?
Numerous new technologies did appear and sometimes they rendered the previous ones obsolete, but that is not linked to the evolution of raw materials. Take lighting, for example. Petroleum lamps were in mass use around 1900, before being replaced by electric light bulbs. Yet today we use far more oil for artificial lighting than we did then: to light the headlights of the many millions of cars.
So despite impressive technological advances, the central issue for ecological problems remains: raw materials, which never became obsolete. We speak frivolously about technological solutions to climate problems, and you can see this in the reports of the IPCC’s Working Group 3.
Don’t you trust the IPCC as the highest scientific authority on climate?
Let me be clear, I certainly trust the climate scientists of groups 1 and 2 of the IPCC, but I am highly critical of the third working group that assesses options for the mitigation of the climate crisis. They are obsessed with technology. There are also good elements in their work, but in their latest report they constantly refer to new technologies that do not yet exist or are overvalued, such as hydrogen, CCS and bioenergy (BECCS).
The influence of the fossil industry is also striking. All this is problematic and goes back to the history of this institution. The US has been pushing to ‘play the technology card’ from the beginning in 1992. Essentially, this is a delaying tactic that keeps attention away from issues like decreasing energy use, which is not in the interest of big emitters like the US.
What mitigation scenarios do exist that do not rely excessively on technology?
As late as 2022, the IPCC’s Working Group 3 report wrote about ‘sufficiency’, the simple concept of reducing emissions by consuming less. I’m astonished that there is so little research on this. Yet it is one of the central questions we should be asking, rather than hoping for some distant technology that will solve everything in the future.
Economists tell what is acceptable to power because it is the only way to be heard and to be influential, it is as simple as that. That is why the debate in the mainstream media is limited to: ‘the energy transition is happening, but it must be speeded up’.
The transition narrative is the ideology of 21st century capitalism. It suits big companies and investors very well. It makes them part of the solution and even a beacon of hope, even though they are in part responsible for the climate crisis. Yet it is remarkable that experts and scientists go along with this greenwashing.
Do you take hope from the lawsuits against fossil giants like Shell and Exxon?
Of course Exxon has a huge responsibility and they have been clearly dishonest, but I think it is too simplistic to look at them as the only bad guys. Those companies simultaneously satisfy a demand from a lot of other industries that are dependent on oil, like the meat industry or aviation. More or less the whole economy depends on fossil fuels, but we don’t talk as much about them.
That’s why it is inevitable to become serious about an absolute reduction in material and energy use, and that is only possible with degrowth and a circular economy. That is a logical conclusion of my story, without being an expert on this topic.
Degrowth is not an easy political message. How can it become more accepted?
I do not offer ‘solutions’ in my book since I don’t believe in green utopias. It is clear that many areas of the economy won’t be fully decarbonized before 2050, such as cement, steel, plastics and also agriculture. We have to recognise this and it means that we simply won’t meet the climate targets.
Once you realise this, the main issue becomes: what to do with the CO2 that we are still going to emit? Which emissions are really necessary and what is their social utility? As soon as economists do a lot more research into this, we can have this debate and make political choices. Yet another skyscraper in New York or a water supply network in a city in the Global South?
In 2022, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres declared that the “lifeline of renewable energy can steer [the] world out of climate crisis.” In saying so, he echoed a popular and tantalizing idea: that, if we hurry, we can erase the climate emergency with widespread adoption of renewables in the form of solar panels, wind farms, electric vehicles and more.
But things aren’t that simple, and analysts increasingly question the naïve assumption that renewables are a silver bullet.
That’s partly because the rapid transition to a global energy and transport system powered by “clean” energy brings with it a host of new (and old) environmental problems. To begin with, stepping up solar, wind and EV production requires many more minerals and materials in the short term than do their already well-established fossil fuel counterparts, while also creating a major carbon footprint.
Also, the quicker we transition away from fossil fuel tech to renewable tech, the greater the quantity of materials needed up front, and the higher the immediate carbon and numerous other environmental costs. But this shift is now happening extremely rapidly, as companies, governments and consumers try to turn away from oil, coal and natural gas.
“Renewables are moving faster than national governments can set targets,” declared International Energy Agency executive director Fatih Birol. In its “Renewables 2024” report, the IEA estimates the world will add more than 5,500 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity between 2024 and 2030 — almost three times the increase between 2017 and 2023.
But this triumph hasn’t brought with it a simultaneous slashing in global emissions, as hoped. In fact, 2023 saw humanity’s biggest annual carbon releases ever, totaling 37.4 billion metric tons, which has led experts to ask: What’s going on?
The introduction of coal in 19th century England — an innovative, efficient, cheap new source of energy — made some wealthy, produced an onslaught of consumer products, and was a public health and environmental disaster. Contemplating the coal boom, economist William Stanley Jevons developed the Jevons paradox. Image via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).
Jevons paradox meets limits to growth
Some analysts suggest the source of this baffling contradiction regarding record modern energy consumption can be found in the clamor by businesses and consumers for more, better, cheaper technological innovations, an idea summed up by a 160-year-old economic theory: the Jevons paradox.
Postulated by 19th-century English economist William Stanley Jevons, it states that, “in the long term, an increase in efficiency in resource use [via a new technology] will generate an increase in resource consumption rather than a decrease.” Put simply, the more efficient (and hence cheaper) energy is, the greater society’s overall production and economic growth will be — with that increased production then requiring still more energy consumption.
Writing in 1865, Jevons argued that the energy transition from horses to coal decreased the amount of work for any given task (along with the cost), which led to soaring resource consumption. For proof, he pointed to the coal-powered explosion in technological innovation and use occurring in the 19th century.
Applied to our current predicament, the Jevons paradox challenges and undermines tech prognosticators’ rosy forecasts for sustainable development.
Here’s a look at the paradox in action: The fastest-expanding renewable energy sector today is solar photovoltaics (PVs), expected to account for 80% of renewables growth in the coming years.
In many parts of the world, large solar power plants are being built, while companies and households rapidly add rooftop solar panels. At the head of the pack is China, with its astounding solar installation rate (216.9 GW in 2023).
But paradoxically, as China cranks out cheap solar panels for domestic use and export, it is also building six times more coal power plants every year than the rest of the world combined, though it still expects almost half its electricity generation to come from renewables, mainly solar, by 2028.
This astronomical growth at first seems like proof of the Jevons paradox at work, but there’s an unexpected twist: Why is China (and much of the rest of the world) still voraciously consuming outmoded, less-efficient fossil fuel tech, while also gobbling up renewables?
One reason is that coal and oil are seen as reliable, not subject to the same problems that renewables can face during periods of intense drought or violent weather — problems caused by the very climate change that renewables are intended to mitigate.
Another major reason is that fossil fuels continue being relatively cheap. That’s because they’re supported by vast government subsidies (totaling more than $1 trillion annually). So in a sense, we are experiencing a quadruple Jevons paradox, with oil, coal, natural gas and renewables acting like four cost-efficient horses, all racing to produce more cheap stuff for an exploding world consumer economy. But this growth comes with terrible environmental and social harm.
Exponential growth with a horrific cost
Back to the solar example: China is selling its cheap solar installations all over the globe, and by 2030 could be responsible for half the new capacity of renewables installed planetwide. But the environmental cost of satisfying that escalating demand is rippling out across the world.
It has spurred a huge mining boom. Desperate to satisfy fast-rising demand, companies and nations are mining in ever more inaccessible areas, which costs more in dollars, carbon emissions, biodiversity losses, land-use change, freshwater use, ocean acidification, plus land, water and air pollution. So, just as with fossil fuels, the rush to renewables contributes to the destabilizing of the nine planetary boundaries, of which six are already in the red zone, threatening civilization, humanity and life as we know it.
Mining, it must be remembered, is also still heavily dependent on fossil fuels, so it generates large quantities of greenhouse gases as it provides minerals for the renewables revolution. A January 2023 article in the MIT Technology Review predicts that the mining alone needed to support renewables will produce 29 billion metric tons of CO2 emissions between now and 2050.
Carbon is far from the only problem. Renewables also require a wide range of often difficult-to-get-at minerals, including nickel, graphite, copper, rare earths, lithium and cobalt. This means “paradoxically, extracting this large amount of raw materials [for renewables] will require the development of new mines with a larger overall environmental footprint,” says the MIT article.
There are other problems too. Every year 14,000 football fields of forests are cut down in Myanmar to create cheap charcoal for China’s smelting industries to process silicon, a key component of solar panels and of computers.
This rapid development in rural places also comes with harsh human costs: Mongabay has reported extensively on how Indigenous people, traditional communities and fragile but biodiverse ecosystems are paying the price for the world’s mineral demand in the transition to renewable energy.
There is strong evidence that the Uighur minority is being used as slave labor to build solar panels in China. There are also reports that workers are dying in Chinese factories in Indonesia that are producing nickel, a key metal for solar panels and batteries.
The manufacture of smaller and faster electronic devices is leading to ever more e-waste, the fastest growing waste stream in the world and by far the most toxic. Image by Montgomery County Planning Commission via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).
The search for solutions
“We really need to come up with solutions that get us the material that we need sustainably, and time is very short,” said Demetrios Papathanasiou, global director for energy and extractives at the World Bank.
One popularly touted solution argues that the impacts imposed by the rapid move to renewable energy can be greatly reduced with enhanced recycling. That argument goes this way: The minerals needed to make solar panels and build windfarms and electric vehicles only need to be sourced once. Unlike fossil fuels, renewables produce energy year after year. And the original materials used to make them can be recycled again and again.
But there are problems with this position.
First, while EV batteries, for example, may be relatively long lasting, they only provide the energy for new electric vehicles that still require steel, plastics, tires and much more to put people in the Global North and increasingly the Global South on the road. Those cars will wear out, with tires, electronics, plastics and batteries costly to recycle.
The solar energy industry says that “solar panels have an expected lifespan between 25-30 years,” and often much longer. But just because a product can last longer, does that mean people won’t clamor for newer, better ones?
In developed nations, for example, the speed at which technology is evolving mitigates against the use of panels for their full lifespan. A 2021 article in the Harvard Business Review found that, after 10 years or even sooner, consumers will likely dispose of their first solar panels, to install newer, more efficient ones. Again, the Jevons paradox rears its anti-utopian head.
Also, as solar proliferates in poorer nations, so too will the devices that solar can drive. As solar expands in the developing world, sales for cheap solar lanterns and small solar home electric systems are also expanding. An article in the journal Nature Energy calculates that in 2019 alone, more than 35 million solar products were sold, a huge rise from the 200,000 such products sold in 2010.
This expansion brings huge social benefits, as it means rural families can use their smartphones to study online at night, watch television, and access the market prices of their crops — all things people in the Global North take for granted.
But, as the article points out, many developing-world solar installations are poor quality and only last a few years: “Many, perhaps even the majority, of solar products sold in the Global South … only have working lives of a couple of years.” The problem is particularly acute in Africa. “Think of those solar panels that charge phones; a lot of them do not work, so people throw them away,” said Natalie Gwatirisa, founder of All For Climate Action, a Zimbabwean youth-led organization that strives to raise awareness on climate change. Gwatirisa calculates that, of the estimated 150 million solar products that have reached Africa since 2010, almost 75% have stopped working.
And as Americans familiar with designed obsolescence know, people will want replacements: That means more solar panels, cellphones, computers, TVs, and much more e-waste.
Another disturbing side to the solar boom is the unbridled growth of e-waste, much of it toxic. Gwatirisa cautions: “Africa should not just open its hand and receive [anything] from China because this is definitely going to lead to another landfill in Africa.”
The developed world also faces an e-waste glut. Solar panels require specialized labor to recycle and there is little financial incentive to do so. While panels contain small amounts of valuable minerals such as silver, they’re mostly made of glass, an extremely low-value material. While it costs $20-$30 to recycle a panel, it only costs $1-$2 to bury it in a landfill. And the PV industry itself admits that ‘the solar industry cannot claim to be a “clean” energy source if it leaves a trail of hazardous waste.’
Renewables are rapidly growing, producing a bigger share of global energy. But electricity demand is also soaring, as unforeseen new energy-guzzling innovations are introduced. For example, an artificial intelligence internet search is orders of magnitude more energy-intensive than a traditional Google search, and requires new power generation sources. Pictured is the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Station, infamous for a 1979 partial meltdown. The facility is soon to reopen to support AI operations. Image courtesy of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Solving the wrong problem
Ultimately, say some analysts, we may be trying to solve the wrong problem. Humanity is not experiencing an energy production problem, they say. Instead, we have an energy consumption problem. Thus, the key to reducing environmental harm is to radically reduce energy demand. But that can likely only be done through stationary — or, better still, decreased — consumption.
However, it’s hard to imagine modern consumers not rushing out to buy the next generation of consumer electronics including even smarter smartphones, which demand more and more energy and materials to operate (think global internet data centers). And it’s also hard to imagine industry not rushing to update its ever more innovative electronic product lines (think AI).
A decline in energy demand is far from happening. The U.S. government says it expects global energy consumption to increase by almost 50% by 2050, as compared with 2020. And much of that energy will be used to make new stuff, all of which increases resource demand and increases our likelihood of further overshooting already overshot planetary boundaries and crashing overstressed Earth systems.
One essential step toward sustainability is the circular economy, say renewable energy advocates. But, as with so much else, every year we somehow go in the opposite direction. Our current economic system is becoming more and more linear, built on a model of extracting more raw materials from nature, turning them into more innovative products, and then discarding it all as waste.
Currently, only 7.2% of used materials are cycled back into our economies after use. This puts an overwhelming burden on the environment and contributes to the climate, biodiversity and pollution crises.
If a circular economy could be developed by recycling all the materials used in renewables, it would significantly reduce the constant need to mine and source new ones. But, while efficient recycling will undoubtedly help, it also has limitations.
The 2023 planetary boundaries update shows six boundary safe limits transgressed: climate change (CO2 concentration and radiative forcing), biosphere integrity (genetic and functional), land-system change, freshwater change (blue water use and green water), biogeochemical flows (nitrogen and phosphorus), and novel entities pollution (including thousands of synthetic chemicals, heavy metals, radioactive materials, and more). The ocean acidification boundary is very near transgression. Only the atmospheric aerosol pollution and stratospheric ozone depletion boundaries are still well outside the red danger zone. Image courtesy of Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Richardson et al. 2023 (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
The future
Tom Murphy, a professor emeritus of the departments of physics and astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, San Diego, became so concerned about the world’s future, he shifted his career focus to energy.
While initially a big promoter of renewables, having built his own solar panels back in 2008, he has recently turned skeptical. Panels “need constant replacement every two or three decades ad infinitum,” he told Mongabay. “Recycling is not a magic wand. It doesn’t pull you out of the need for mining. This is because recycling is not 100% efficient and never will be. In the laboratory maybe, but not in the real world. You’re going to have this continual bleed of materials out of the system.”
Yet another renewables problem is that sustainable energy is often siloed: It is nearly always talked about only in the context of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Rarely are the total long-term supply chain costs to the environment and society calculated.
Reducing CO2 is clearly a vital goal, but not the only critical one, says Earth system scientist Johan Rockström, joint director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, and who (with an international team of scientists), developed the planetary boundaries framework.
It is undeniably important to reduce greenhouse emissions by half over the next seven years in order to reach net zero by 2050, he says. But this will be difficult to achieve, for it means “cutting emissions by 7.5% a year, which is an exponential decline.”
And even if we achieve such radical reductions, it will not solve the environmental crisis, warns Rockström. That’s because radical emission reductions only tackle the climate change boundary. A recent scientific paper, to which he contributed, warns that “six of the nine boundaries are transgressed, suggesting that Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity.”
Rockström in an exclusive interview told Mongabay that, at the same time as we vigorously combat global warming, “We also need to come back into the safe space for pollutants, nitrogen, phosphorus, land, biodiversity,” and more. This means that our efforts to repair the climate must also relieve stresses on these other boundaries, not destabilize them further.
Murphy says he believes this can’t be achieved. He says that modernity — the term he uses to delineate the period of human domination of the biosphere — cannot be made compatible with the protection of the biological world.
To make his point, he emphasizes an obvious flaw in renewables: they are not renewable. “I can’t see how we can [protect the biosphere] and retain a flow of nonrenewable finite resources, which is what our economic system requires.” He continues: “We are many orders of magnitude, 4 or 5 orders of magnitude, away from being at a sustainable scale. I like Rockström’s idea that we have boundaries, but I think his assessment of how far we have exceeded those boundaries is completely wrong.”
Murphy says he believes modernity has unleashed a sixth mass extinction, and it is too late to stop it. Modernity, he says, was unsustainable from the beginning: “Our brains can’t conceive of the degree of interconnectedness in the living world we’re part of. So the activities we started carrying out, even agriculture, don’t have a sustainable foundation. The minerals and materials we use are foreign to the living world and we dig them up and spew them out. They end up all over the place, even in our bodies at this point, [we now have] microplastics. This is hurting not just us, but the whole living world on which we depend.”
Like Murphy, Rockström says he is pessimistic about the level of action now seen globally, but he doesn’t think we should give up. “We have the responsibility to continue even if we have a headwind.” What is extremely frustrating, he says, is that today we have the answers: “We know what we need to do. That’s quite remarkable. Years back I could not have said that. We have solutions to scale down our use of coal, oil and gas. We know how to feed humanity from sustainable food systems, that largely bring us back into the [safe zone for] planetary boundaries, the safe space for nitrogen, phosphorous, freshwater, land and biodiversity.”
One key to making such radical change would be a dramatic, drastic, wholesale shift by governments away from offering trillions of dollars in “perverse subsidies” to environment-destroying fossil fuel and mining technologies, to pumping those subsidies into renewables and the circular economy.
Murphy says he doesn’t believe we should give up either. But he also says he doesn’t believe modernity can be made sustainable. “I suspect that the deteriorating web of life will create cascading failures that end up pulling the power cord to the destructive machine. Only then will some people accept that ecological ignorance — paired with technological capability — has dire consequences.”
But, he adds, this does not mean the human race is doomed.
“The modernity project does not define humanity. Humanity is much older. It’s too late for modernity to succeed but it’s not too late for humanity to succeed.” Here he turns to Indigenous cultures: “For hundreds of thousands of years, they survived and did quite well without causing the sixth mass extinction.”
“There isn’t a single Indigenous package,” he says. “Each is tuned to its [particular local] environment, and they vary a lot. But they have common elements: humility, only taking what you need from the environment, and the belief that we can learn a lot from our ‘our brothers and sisters,’ that is, the other animals and plants who have been around for much longer than us.”
Perhaps surprisingly, Murphy remains cheerful: “Most people are extremely depressed by what I say. I’m not. Not at all. I think it’s exciting to imagine what the future can be. You’re only depressed if you’re in love with modernity. If you’re not, it’s not devastating to imagine it disappearing.”
Banner image: Installation of solar panels. Image by Trinh Trần via Pexels (Public domain).
Editor’s note: Major plastic polluters win as the UN Treaty talks conclude without an agreement. Modern lifestyles and practices are intimately entwined with the use of plastics. Our phones, computers, food packaging, clothes, and even renewable energy technologies, such as wind turbine blades and the cables that connect them to the power grid, are all largely made from plastics. Plastics production requires fossil hydrocarbons and this connection continues to grow stronger daily. Powerful oil producers, both private companies and governments of oil-producing nations, were seen as the key impediment to a consensus deal. What will happen next? “Agree to a treaty among the willing even if that means leaving some countries that don’t want a strong treaty or concede to countries that will likely never join the treaty anyway, failing the planet in the process.”
“Plastic has been found everywhere on Earth — from deepest oceans to high mountains, in clouds and pole to pole. Microplastics have also been found in every place scientists look for them in the human body, from the brain to the testes, breast milk, and artery plaque. Microplastics pose health risks to humans and wildlife, researchers warn.” PFAS(perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances) – “forever chemicals” contaminate biosolids(waste from sewage) used as fertilizer and pesticides, they also contain heavy metals and nitrates.
Today’s cheerleaders for increased birth rates are well aware of the silent cause of the ongoing rapid decline in male sperm counts. It’s the very industries these corporate managers run and governments regulate that is the blame. So you can be almost 100 percent sure that they are not going to address the real problem in order to achieve the goal of increasing human birth rates.
Laws must mandate companies to reduce their plastic footprint through production reduction, product redesign, or reuse systems — higher-priority strategies in the Zero Waste hierarchy,
Bottlenose dolphins leapt and torpedoed through the shallow turquoise waters off Florida’s Sarasota Bay. Then, a research team moved in, quickly corralling the small pod in a large net.
With the speed of a race car pit crew, veterinarians, biologists and their assistants examined the animals, checking vital signs while taking skin, blood and other samples. They held a petri dish over each dolphin’s blowhole until it exhaled, with an intensity similar to a human cough. Then, they rolled up the net and the dolphins swam off unharmed. A pod in Louisiana’s Barataria Bay was similarly tested.
Generations of dolphins have been part of this ongoing dolphin health study, which has been run by the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program since 1970. It tracks populations and individuals and also looks for health issues related to pollutants in the marine environment.
In the lab, scientists discovered that all 11 of the dolphins had breathed out microplastic fibers, shed from synthetic clothing, says Leslie B. Hart, associate professor at the College of Charleston and an author on this research. The fibers resembled those found in human lungs in previous studies, proving that dolphins, like us, are breathing plastic. In people, microplastic has been linked to poor lung function and possible lung disease.
The dolphin studies are part of a larger quest to understand how plastic pollution is impacting the world’s wildlife. While thousands of human studies have demonstrated damage from tiny plastic particles entering both cells and organs throughout the body, little is known about animal impacts because long-term field studies are difficult and costly. “We’re really just starting to skim the surface,” Hart says.
Beyond the threat plastics pose to individual animals and species, other researchers have detected broader, global harm, a new report warns. Plastic pollution is transforming Earth systems needed to support life, worsening climate change, increasing biodiversity loss, making oceans more acidic and more.
The plastics crisis is escalating rapidly: Each year, petrochemical manufacturers make more than 500 million tons of plastics –– but the world recycles just 9%. The rest is burned, landfilled or ends up in rivers, rainwater, the air, soil or the sea. Today, the planet is awash in plastic. “It’s everywhere. It’s pervasive and it’s persistent,” says Andrew Wargo, who focuses on ecosystem health at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.
Since the 1930s the polymers industry has completely altered daily life: Plastics are in our homes, cars, clothes, furniture, and electronics, as well as our single-use throwaway water bottles, food packaging and takeout containers.
A critically important fifth round of negotiations begins Nov. 25 when delegates hope to hammer out final treaty language for ratification by U.N. member states.
Meanwhile, the natural world is in great danger, threatened by a biodiversity crisis, a climate crisis and serious degradations of planetary systems. Researchers are now scrambling to understand the growing threat plastics pose to the health of all living organisms.
Plastics conquer the world
Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic product ever made, came on the market in 1907. By the 1950s, production ramped up, changing the course of history and revolutionizing modern life. Plastics facilitated innumerable human innovations — and spawned a throwaway culture. Add in poorly regulated petrochemical manufacturing processes and industrial fishing’s plastic gear, and global plastic pollution stats soared.
Plastic debris was first noticed in the oceans in the early 1960s. For a long time, ecologists’ main wildlife concerns focused on the threat to sea turtles and other marine creatures that ate plastic bags or became tangled in plastic fishing nets. Now, everything from zooplankton to sharks and seabirds eat it and are exposed to it.
Hart emphasizes the problem’s global scope: “Plastic pollution has been found on every continent and in every ocean, in people, terrestrial wildlife and marine wildlife.” It contaminates creatures across the tree of life and concentrates up the food chain, threatening
Seabirds are at particular risk from microplastics, easily mistaking particles for food. Ingestion causes physical and hormonal damage to cells and organs. Image by A_Different_Perspective via Pixabay (Public domain).Image by Alpizar, F., et al. via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Insidious plastic harm to health
It’s well known that animals regularly mistake plastic debris for food. Shearwaters and other seabirds, for example, can choke and starve when plastic pieces block their digestive tracts or pierce internal organs. At least 1,565 species are known to ingest plastic. For decades, scientists have noted dead animals ensnared in plastic nets, fishing gear or six-pack rings.
But those big pieces of petrochemical plastic (along with their chemical additives) don’t decompose; they degrade into ever-smaller pieces, getting smaller and smaller. Eventually, they break down into microplastics, tiny particles no bigger than a grain of sand, or become nanoparticles, visible only under a high-powered microscope. These microplastics can leach toxic chemicals. Of the more than 13,000 chemicals currently used in plastics, at least 3,200 have one or more “hazardous properties of concern,” according to a U.N. report.
Most of what we know today about the health impacts of plastics and their chemical additives is based on human medical research, which may offer clues to what happens to animals; that’s unlike most health research, which is done on animals and extrapolated to people.
We know from human medical research that microplastics can damage cells and organs and alter hormones that influence their function. Plastic particles have crossed the blood-brain barrier. They have lodged in human bone marrow, testicles, the liver, kidneys and essentially every other part of the body. They enter the placenta, blood and breast milk. Exposure may affect behavior and lower immunity.
And what plastics do to us, they likely do to animals. The phthalates found in Florida dolphins, for example, along with phenols, parabens and per- and polyfluoroalkyls, are just a fraction of the many endocrine disruptors released by plastics and their chemical additives that can alter hormone levels and derail body functions. Exposure may affect behavior and lower immunity.
Plastic does not disappear: It breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces that settle in soil and float in the air and water. Microplastic can easily penetrate living organisms, their cells, and even cross the blood-brain barrier. Image by European Commission (Lukasz Kobus) via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).
Doctors have confirmed links between plastic and human disease and disability. “They cause premature birth, low birth weight, and stillbirth as well as leukemia, lymphoma, brain cancer, liver cancer, heart disease and stroke,” Phil Landrigan, a pediatrician and environmental health expert stated in a press conference earlier this year.
In the wild, animals are now exposed daily to microplastics, eating and breathing them, while many freshwater and marine species swim in a plastic soup. But little is known about the long-term impacts of chronic exposure or what microplastics do within animal tissues, with even less understood about what happens when microplastics shrink to nano size and easily enter cells.
In lab experiments, microplastics in the lungs of pregnant rats easily passed to their fetuses’ brains, hearts and other organs. In adult mice, plastic nanoparticles crossed the blood-brain barrier, triggering swift changes that resembled dementia. In a wild animal, cognitive decline can quickly prove fatal, making it difficult to find food, avoid predators, mate or raise young.
In the lab, fish were more susceptible to a common virus after a one-month exposure to microplastic. They then shed more virus (a fish public health problem) and died in high numbers. Surprisingly, “there’s a lot of similarities between fish and humans, so that we have a lot of the same immune pathways,” explains Wargo, an author on this study. However, the reaction depended on the type of plastic. Nylon fibers had the biggest effect; most nylon sheds from synthetic clothing.
Nearly all Laysan albatross (Phoebastria immutabilis) carcasses found on Midway Atoll contain marine plastic debris. Experts estimate that albatrosses feed their chicks approximately 10,000 pounds of marine debris annually on Midway, enough plastic to fill about 100 curbside trash cans. Image by USFWS – Pacific Region via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
One challenge to researching health impacts, Wargo explains, is that “plastics oftentimes are lumped into one category, but they’re [all] very different: their structure, chemical composition, their shape and size,” creating thousands of variations. These factors influence how toxic they are, he says, which likely varies between individual animals and different species. Investigation is further complicated and obstructed by petrochemical companies that zealously guard their proprietary polymer product formulas.
The ubiquity of plastics and their global presence means that polymers likely have many undetected and unstudied wildlife health impacts. Some impacts could be masked by other environmental stressors, and untangling and analyzing the particulars will likely take decades.
What we do know is that the poor health, decline or disappearance of a single species within a natural community ripples outward, affecting others, and damaging interconnected ecological systems that have evolved in synchrony over millennia. Here’s just one speculative concern: We know microplastics can bioaccumulate, so apex predators, which balance ecosystems by keeping prey species in check, may be at high risk because they consume and build up large concentrations of microplastics and additive chemicals in their organs.
Plastics harm wildlife –– and humans –– in additional ways: by polluting the air and contributing to climate extremes. Currently, about 19% of plastic waste is incinerated, releasing potentially harmful chemical aerosols into the air. In addition, plastic production sends 232 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere yearly. Then there’s the pollution and carbon released from fracking and drilling operations to source the oil and gas to make these products.
Lastly, the microplastics animals and humans ingest are “Trojan horses.” These tiny particles absorb and carry a wide range of pollutants and bacteria, which then can enter and lodge within our bodies.
Single-use plastic bottles and other throwaway plastic packaging are a major cause of plastic pollution, with many activists and nations calling for a ban. While plastic bottles can be recycled, they frequently aren’t. Also, plastics degrade every time they’re recycled and are usually recycled only once or twice. Image by Hans via Pixabay (Public domain).
Stanching ‘a global-scale deluge of plastic waste’
Climate change and the plastics crisis spring from the same source: The world’s seven largest plastic manufacturers are fossil fuel companies. The U.S. produces the most plastic waste of any country, more than the entire EU combined: 42 million metric tons annually, or 287 pounds per person, according to a 2022 congressional report. It noted that “The success of the 20th-century miracle invention of plastics has also produced a global-scale deluge of plastic waste seemingly everywhere we look.”
Consumers can take small actions to protect themselves and limit plastic pollution by avoiding single-use plastics and carrying reusable bags and stainless-steel water bottles. Disposable fast-food packaging makes up almost half of plastic garbage in the ocean, so cutting back on takeout and bottled water could help.
But realistically addressing the planet’s plastics emergency requires a global paradigm shift that reframes the discussion. Many nations still think of plastics as a waste management issue, but responsibility needs to fall on the shoulders of regulators — and the producers, specifically fossil fuel companies and petrochemical manufacturers.
An international consortium of scientists has stressed the need for “urgent action” in the run-up to this month’s United Nations plastics treaty negotiations, the fifth and hopefully final summit intended to establish international regulations.
The U.S. had been among the largest, most influential dissenters in efforts to limit global plastics production and identify hazardous chemicals used in plastics. But in August 2024, prior to the U.S. presidential election, the Biden administration publicly announced it had toughened its position, supporting production limits, but submitted no position paper. Then, this week it returned to its earlier stance that would protect the plastics industry from production caps.
The plastics treaty summit in Busan, South Korea, beginning Nov. 25 and ending Dec. 1, aims to finalize treaty language that will then need to be ratified by the world’s nations. Regardless of the summit’s outcome, scientists continue to uncover new evidence of plastic’s dangers to humans, animals and the planet, raising the alarm and need for action.
This beach on the island of Santa Luzia, Cape Verde, dramatically illustrates a global problem: a world awash in plastic waste. What it doesn’t show is the breakdown of this debris by wind and tide into microplastics, now sickening people and animals. Image by Plastic Captain Darwin via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Banner: A black-winged stilt (Himantopus himantopus) forages in a swamp polluted with plastic and other trash. Image by Sham Prakash via Pexels (Public domain).
Editor’s note: “Our heating of the Earth through carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas pollution, is closely connected to our excessive energy consumption. And with many of the ways we use that energy, we’re also producing another less widely discussed pollutant: industrial noise. Like greenhouse-gas pollution, noise pollution is degrading our world—and it’s not just affecting our bodily and mental health but also the health of ecosystems on which we depend utterly.”
“Our study presents a strong, albeit selfish, argument for protecting natural soundscapes.”
Wind turbines in coastal waters, along with the noise from construction and surveys, have led to concerns about their impact on marine life. “In particular, cetaceans such as whales and dolphins are likely to be sensitive to the noises and increased marine traffic brought by these turbines.” These marine mammals’ survival depends on the technology of bounce to hear noise thousands of miles away through echolocation.
There are growing concerns regarding artificial sounds produced in waters that could impact marine life negatively. The effects of ocean noise produced by sonar, oil and gas exploration, offshore wind, and ship traffic could alter the behavior of mammals and cause hearing loss or potentially even death. “The latest discovery in this field could provide substantial ground for alterations in the Marine Mammal Protection Act that dictated the kind of noise-inducing activities that can be carried out in the waters. This new conclusion could hinder the scale of the activities or even get certain types of equipment banned from use at sites.”
‘It’s nonstop’: how noise pollution threatens the return of Norway’s whales.
It started as a simple spreadsheet that documented locations where researchers were recording sound to monitor biodiversity. Three years on, the Worldwide Soundscapes project is a global database on when, how and where passive acoustic monitoring is being deployed around the world to study terrestrial as well as aquatic ecosystems.
“This is a project that is now becoming too big to be handled by only one person,” Kevin Darras, currently senior researcher at France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE), who conceived the project, told Mongabay in a video interview.
Darras started the project when he was a postdoctoral researcher at Westlake University in China. The idea struck when he was waiting for updates on another project he was working on at the time. With the project, Darras said he was attempting to fill a void that often led to duplication of efforts in the research community that uses passive acoustic monitoring — audio recorders left out in the wild — to study biodiversity around the world. “There was a scientific gap in the sense that we didn’t know where and when we were sampling sound for monitoring biodiversity,” he said.
Passive acoustic monitoring has long been used to listen in on insects, birds and other animals in ecosystems around the world. It’s aided scientists to detect elusive species in a noninvasive manner. For example, a team in Australia used acoustic recorders and artificial intelligence to track down the breeding hollows of pink cockatoos (Lophochroa leadbeateri leadbeateri) in a remote region. The method has also helped researchers get insights into the behavioral and communications patterns of animals.
Despite advances in recent years with more sophisticated recorders and automated data analysis, Darras said researchers still haven’t “achieved standardization in terms of deployment or analysis.” Darras said he hoped to use the Worldwide Soundscapes project to help build a supportive network that could potentially work toward harmonizing approaches to passive acoustic monitoring.
“We hope people will look at the data and see what is already done to avoid duplication,” he said. “They might also probably find a colleague’s work and wonder, ‘Oh, why is this gap not filled? Maybe I can do something there.’”
Kevin Darras spoke with Mongabay’s Abhishyant Kidangoor on why he started the Worldwide Soundscapes project, how he envisions it growing into a global network, and the potential of ecoacoustics in biodiversity monitoring. The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Mongabay: To start with, how would you describe the Worldwide Soundscapes project to someone who knows nothing about it?
Kevin Darras: In a fairly simple way, I would describe it as a simple inventory of what has been done globally, whether it’s aquatic or terrestrial, in terms of acoustic recording for monitoring biodiversity. Our first goal was to compile something like a phonebook for connecting people who are usually separated by the realms that we study. What I mean by that is we don’t communicate as much among ourselves. For example, marine scientists usually don’t talk much with terrestrial scientists. We have now succeeded in connecting and bringing people together. However, very early on, we realized that we could do more than that, and that we could put our metadata together to get a comprehensive picture of what is going on worldwide in terms of acoustic sampling.
Mongabay: What gaps were you trying to fill with this project?
Kevin Darras: There was a scientific gap in the sense that we didn’t know where and when we were sampling sound for monitoring biodiversity. There was also this gap in the community that made us not so well aware of the developments in other fields. There have been a lot of parallel efforts in different realms when, in reality, the same solutions might already exist in other communities. Our aim is to first make everyone aware of what is out there and ideally, one day, to harmonize our approaches and to benefit from each other’s experience.
Mongabay: Could you give me an example of how acoustic research efforts were duplicated in the past?
Kevin Darras: There are lots of examples when it comes to sound recording, calibration and the deployment of equipment. Because deployment in the deep sea is very much more troublesome and costly, our marine scientists go to great lengths to calibrate their equipment to make every deployment really worth it and to get data that are standardized. As a result, they are able to usually measure noise levels, for instance. Whereas those of us in the terrestrial realm have access to such cheap recorders that setting them up is almost too easy. The consequence is that, generally, we have very large study designs where we deploy hundreds of sensors and recorders and end up with a massive data set that, unfortunately, isn’t very well calibrated. We would only have relative sound levels and won’t be able to really measure noise levels.
On the other hand, I think the community that does terrestrial monitoring has made some great strides with respect to the use of artificial intelligence for identifying sound. By now, we have achieved a pretty consistent approach to bird identification with AI. This is something that could benefit people working in the aquatic realm who often have custom-made analysis procedures.
Mongabay: What was the spark to get started with this?
Kevin Darras: It started three years ago. I was actually busy with another project where I was working on an embedded vision camera. Between the development rounds, we had some time where we were waiting for the next prototype. Rather than just sit and wait, I told my supervisor that I wanted to start another project while waiting for updates. This is when I started contacting people from my close network to find out where they’ve been recording. It started with filling an online spreadsheet, which has grown since then. By now, I believe, a good portion of the community that uses passive acoustic monitoring knows about the project.
Mongabay: Could you tell me how it works currently?
Kevin Darras: The way it currently works is that people find out from their colleagues. Or we actively search for them. Then we send them all the basic information about the project. We ask them to fill in the data in a Google spreadsheet, but we are slowly transitioning to enter everything directly on a website. In the very beginning of the project, we didn’t have the capability, and we needed a really easy and effective way of adding people’s data. A Google spreadsheet was a fairly good idea then. Then we validate the data to see if things make sense. We cross-validate them with our collaborators after showing them the timelines and the maps that represent when and where their recordings have been made. In the end, there is a map which shows where all sounds have been recorded. For each collection, you can also view when exactly the recordings have been made.
Mongabay: Could you give me a sense of the kind of data in the database?
Kevin Darras: If you were a potential contributor, you would have to first provide some general information. Who are the people involved? Are the data externally stored recordings or links? Then we would get to the level of the sampling sites. We require everyone to provide coordinates and also to specify what were the exact ecosystems they were sampling sounds in. That’s the spatial information.
For the temporal information, we ask people to specify when their deployments started and when it stopped, with details on date and time. We also ask for whether they are scheduled recordings with predefined temporal intervals, like daily or weekly, or duty-cycled recordings, meaning one minute or every five minutes, or if they are continuous recordings.
We also request audio parameters like the sampling frequency, high-pass filters, number of channels, the recorders and microphones that they used. Lastly, we ask them to specify whether their deployments were targeting particular [wildlife], which is not always the case. Sometimes people just record soundscapes with a very holistic view.
Mongabay: How do you hope this database will help the community that uses passive acoustic monitoring?
Kevin Darras: We hope people will look at the data and see what is already done to avoid duplication. They might also probably find a colleague’s work and wonder, “Oh, why is this gap not filled? Maybe I can do something there.”
Mongabay: What surprised you the most?
Kevin Darras: It’s probably how big some of these studies were. I was amazed by the sampling effort that, for instance, some Canadian groups did over hundreds of sites over many years.
Also surprising for me was that there were some really gaping holes in our coverage in countries where I would have thought that the means existed for conducting eco-acoustic studies. Many North African countries don’t seem to be doing passive acoustic monitoring. We’ve just had our first collaborator from Turkey. Central Asia is poorly covered. This is for terrestrial monitoring.
For marine monitoring, I was actually surprised to see that the coverage was rather homogeneous. It’s sparse because it’s more difficult to deploy things underwater, but it was globally well distributed. I was surprised to see how many polar deployments there were, for instance, under very challenging conditions. Those are very expensive missions.
Mongabay: What was the biggest challenge in doing this?
Kevin Darras: It’s making everyone happy [laughs].
We had to be fairly flexible with what we expected from people and our criteria. Basically, we decided to trust our collaborators and it worked pretty well. Some people would struggle to provide basic metadata and would have to organize themselves and their data before being able to provide it. Others would be like, “Sure, I can send this to you in five minutes,” and then you get a huge data sheet.
Mongabay: Now that you have a fair idea of how acoustic monitoring is being used around the world, how do you think it is faring when it comes to biodiversity monitoring?
Kevin Darras: I think that the point is too often made that passive acoustic monitoring is something promising and something that has just started. Passive acoustic monitoring has been mature for some time already. It’s true that we haven’t achieved standardization or impact in terms of deployment or analysis, but we are, when using this technology, fairly efficient and effective for gathering rather comprehensive data about biodiversity. I don’t think we need to convince anyone anymore that this is useful and that this is a valid sampling method.
But I have a feeling that this message has not yet reached everyone who’s not using passive acoustic monitoring. It’s rather surprising for me to see that it hasn’t achieved the same level of standardization as what has been done with environmental DNA, when I think that the potential is just as big. Of course, it’s not comparable one to one, but it’s a sampling method that will enable us to have some great global insights.
Mongabay: How do you envision the future of Worldwide Soundscapes?
Kevin Darras: This is a project that is now becoming too big to be handled by only one person. I am soon going to have discussions with the people who want to be involved more deeply so that we have a team that is managing the Worldwide Soundscapes project.
We are going to continue integrating more and more data. We are also looking into automated ways to continue to grow the database from which we can then analyze data to answer macro-ecological questions. As of now, we have only shown the potential of the database. We still need to ask those big ecological questions and show that we can answer them with the database. We would also really like to reach those people in regions where passive acoustic monitoring has not been done yet.
One of the things we’re going to try to develop is something that we’ve tried already on a small scale within our network. To give you an example, I had a North African colleague who wanted to do passive acoustic monitoring in the Sahara and he obtained some recorders from a Polish colleague in the same network. It wasn’t even a loan. They were gifted to him and this enabled him to plug a gap in our coverage. I am hoping that we can develop the network in that sense, where we can loan equipment and provide knowledge for capacity building. It sounds ambitious, but sometimes it’s as simple as sending a postal parcel. I hope it will help expand the use of passive acoustic monitoring.
