#204: Trump's last moves

Welcome back, Shit Giver.

Climate change

The migrant camp on America's southern border

The New York Times: "After first cropping up in 2018, the encampment across the border from Brownsville, Texas, exploded to nearly 3,000 people the following year under a policy that has required at least 60,000 asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for the entirety of their legal cases, which can take years.

Those who have not given up and returned home or had the means to move into shelters or apartments while they wait have been stuck outside ever since in this camp, or others like it that are now strung along the southwest border.

Many have been living in fraying tents for more than a year."

⚡️ Take Action: why lead with an immigration story right now? Because these people have been suffering there since 2018, and COVID and the climate crisis are only making their lives (somehow) worse. That is, until we get a government and policies in place that not only help the people currently stranded there, but that also anticipate massive migration movements in coming years. Please read the article (3 minutes) to fully grasp what these people are going through.

Team Brownsville is helping feed and clothe asylum seekers on both sides of the river, along with providing legal and other living services. You can support their efforts here.

Clean energy

Your gas stove, everybody's gas stove, don't burn your sauce

Earther: "Though gas stoves are comparatively easy to cook with, they’re actually incredibly dangerous. One recent report found that gas stoves spew out levels of air pollution inside that would be illegal under outdoor regulations.

“It’s really a cocktail of emissions that they put out,” Brady Seals, senior associate of building electrification at the Rocky Mountain Institute who co-authored the study, said. “There’s the emissions from the gas itself, the main ones of which are nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and formaldehyde. And then there’s the particulate matter, or the small pollution particles, that come from the stove flames and from the food that’s getting cooked.”

Each of these toxins can enter the human body when we inhale, causing respiratory issues, especially for those who have chronic breathing conditions like asthma. The teeniest bits of particulate matter are so small that they can also pass through the lungs into the bloodstream and even the brain where they have been linked to anxiety and problems with attention and memory."

⚡️ Take Action: as you suddenly peruse sexy induction alternatives, you will be shocked -- shocked, I tell you -- to discover that most renters and low-income households don't even have hoods on their stove, and can't make the switch to electrify, either. These things should be outlawed, but we need a plan to help low-income people pay for them, and to guarantee jobs for the transition. So Say We All.

Read up on San Jose's ground-breaking effort to ban new gas lines -- entirely, and then study how your state is powered.

COVID

We're not quite in the endgame, yet

STAT: “Pauses in clinical trials to investigate potential safety issues, a slower-than-expected rate of infections among participants in at least one of the trials, and signals that an expert panel advising the Food and Drug Administration may not be comfortable recommending use of vaccines on very limited safety and efficacy data appear to be adding up to a slippage in the estimates of when vaccine will be ready to be deployed.

Asked Wednesday about when he expects the FDA will greenlight use of the first vaccines, Anthony Fauci moved the administration’s stated goalpost.

“Could be January, could be later. We don’t know,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an online interview with JAMA editor Howard Bauchner.

[...] While Warp Speed and vaccine manufacturers and others involved in the effort have moved heaven and earth to accelerate vaccine production, at the end of the day, developing, testing, and manufacturing vaccines takes time. Vaccines are difficult to produce and there are always bumps in the road.

“While it’s unfortunate, I don’t find it surprising that the timeline is being moved back,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy. “Clinical trials like this routinely have unexpected occurrences that delay planned timelines. It’s just not unexpected.”"

⚡️ Take Action: in reality, nothing's changed. I'm personally thankful as hell that the process isn't being rushed, because these trials are there for a reason, and vaccines fail all of the time, and sometimes in particularly nasty fashion.

Make no mistake, though, when these things come rolling down the pipe, you're gonna want federal, state, and local officials in charge who know what the hell they're doing. It's the last weekend to make your mark on this election, up and down the ballot. Make it count at VoteSaveAmerica.

Biology

Synthetic biology: one of those innovations you really, really want to get right the first time.

Axios: "Synthetic biology startups raised some $3 billion through the first half of 2020, up from $1.9 billion for all of 2019, as the field brings the science of engineering to the art of life.

The big picture: Synthetic biologists are gradually learning how to program the code of life the way that computer experts have learned to program machines. If they can succeed — and if the public accepts their work — synthetic biology stands to fundamentally transform how we live.

What's happening: SynBioBeta, synthetic biology's major commercial conference, launched on Tuesday, virtually bringing together thousands of scientists, entrepreneurs, VCs and more to discuss the state of the field.

Startups in the field are attracting more funding, including Impossible Foods, which uses bioengineered additives as part of its alternative meat. The company last month picked up another $200 million in funding, valuing it at $4 billion. 

A McKinsey report from earlier this year estimated the entire bioeconomy could have a direct global economic impact of up to $4 trillion over the next 10–20 years."

⚡️ Take Action: from mosquitos to meat to mangos, biotech is all the rage. Check out this evergreen 5 minute primer on biotech ethics so you know which questions to ask, and why.

Food & water

New Orleans is fucked. Again.

The New York Times: "Hurricane Zeta barraged the South with powerful winds on Thursday, shredding homes and businesses, knocking down trees and leaving about two million electricity customers without power.

The storm moved quickly, making landfall on the Louisiana coast as a Category 2 hurricane on Wednesday afternoon. Before the night was over, officials on the coast had already begun assessing the extent of the damage and deploying workers to begin restoring power.

But by Thursday afternoon, about 400,000 customers in Louisiana were still without electricity, according to Entergy Louisiana, while more than 500,000 across Georgia, about 465,000 in Alabama, more than 510,000 across the Carolinas and about 80,000 in Mississippi were also without power."

⚡️ Take Action: food, water, and power. Why the hell are these so hard to come by in America? I know you're being pulled in a million directions this week, but throw some money at World Central Kitchen, who's feeding everyone, everywhere.

Where it all comes together

Here's a simple explainer on how the virus spreads inside a room.

Like, for example, a room in the White House. Which will hopefully soon have a new tenant. Realizing he's maybe on the way out the door, Trump's torching climate efforts left and right: opening up one of our biggest rainforests to logging, getting the media to frame transition efforts as against oil, instead of, you know, pro-human, and purging the NOAA (over email). Meanwhile, geoengineering (here's a quick, helpful, terrifying video primer) is gaining new legs, because we're not doing much else.

We're also not doing enough to triple check our biases against new technology. And that has real world implications, like algorithms denying Black people badly needed kidney transplants.

Looking brighter: Bloomberg dropped their 2020 clean energy outlook, and check this TLDR Twitter thread: we're at peak everything. Including peak bullshit, in Wyoming, where dark coal money runs wild.

Speaking of peak capacity: that's where many European and American hospitals are finding themselves. And now they're being threatened with cyberattacks.

For all you budding (and award-winning) journalists out there: Emily Atkin compiled advice from the best of the best on how to cover our rapidly changing world. A quick must-read.

Wide-ranging quality journalism is essential; it helps us consider this complex machine from every angle -- local, niche, international, and more. Generalist, systems thinking is as important as operating from first principles (as you know), and friend of the pod Rhiana Gunn-Wright co-authored a new paper on how anystimulus policy is going to affect the climate (here's her Twitter explainer). Meanwhile, Evergreen Action is talkin' bout global financial systems, and private equity is going all-in (and abandoning gas along the way). Externalities FTW.

Part of fixing the financial systems means supporting new clean alternatives in the busted-ass power sector, and finding ways to manufacture clean goods cheaper and more efficiently: starting with EV's. They're expensive to build, but not for long. Ford's building out (slowly) EV versions of two of America's most popular commercial vehicles: the F-150, and Transit van. But what about used cars?