Welcome back, Shit Giver.

This is Important, Not Important, the newsletter that pairs curated, vital science news with Action Steps to fight for a better future — for everyone.

I'm tinkering with the format a bit going forward, to make sure that I'm most effectively helping you understand what's going on, and how you can take action. Please consider this week's version a bit of a launching off point. Reply to this email and let me know any feedback or suggestions!

Climate Change & Clean Energy

We stand on the cusp

When seeking to understand the climate crisis, it's helpful to remind ourselves how and why we got here. The Industrial Revolution, which led to the rise of the West as we know it, was the direct catalyst for the first true systemic pollution of our air and water, with cascading secondary effects all the way down the line, from fires and flooding to overheated classrooms and bleached coral reefs, Cancer Alley, and more.

While we don't focus very much on the past here, a relevant moment to do so is when we're talking about accountability. Accountability is always a touchy subject in any conversation, whether it's with my 5 year old for peeing on the toilet seat (again), or when a new report reveals:

"The US fair share of the global mitigation effort in 2030 is equivalent to a reduction of 195% below its 2005 emissions levels, reflecting a fair share range of 173-229%.”

That is, we can’t meet our moral and practical burdens simply by reducing our own emissions; we’ve already put so much carbon into the air (and hence reduced the space that should rightly go to others) that we need to make amends. Of this hundred-and-ninety-five-per-cent reduction, Athanasiou says, seventy per cent would be made domestically, by building solar panels, rolling out electric cars, and insulating buildings.

”The rest—the other 125%—would come by way of financial and tech support for adaptation and rapid decarbonization in poor and developing countries.”

America doesn't do the best job of paying its moral debts (see: reparations for slavery and 400 years of system racism), but it's time to get started. Doing so would begin to make amends for getting us to where we are today:

• Extreme heat has been linked to a 50% increase in deaths of people over 65 (barely touching the US -- yet)
• We just crushed every major hurricane record, with the Gulf Coast and Central America bearing the brunt of the damage
• Arctic temperatures averaged 35-50 F above normal in November
• 7.6m American children are exposed to wildfire smoke every year (and it's mostly Brown kids)
• Climate change, for the most part, isn't yet factored into mortgages, despite flooding likely to triple for low-income homes
• Amazon deforestation is at a 12 year high
• India's agricultural output is under threat from heat and mass suicides
• Trucks are the best-selling car in America and an emissions nightmare

But also:

• Electric trucks in every flavor are right around the corner
• Solar power is the cheapest energy in history, world-wide, and could power a new green hydrogen industry
• Coal is nearly vanquished and China -- fueled by coal -- plans to end emissions in 40 years
• Electric vehicles are within 10 years of becoming the only choice for new cars, everywhere
• We can use technology to predict King Tides
• COVID has permanently exacerbated Peak Oil
• New Zealand this week joined 31 other nations in declaring a climate emergency
• Stripe -- payment processor for a little shop called the internet -- is fueling mass purchasing of carbon removal
• Banks are bailing on fossil fuels, and investors are rushing for climate tech
• We know which flavor of seaweed can reduce cow methane by 98%
• Joe Biden has promised to make fighting the climate crisis an all-encompassingpart of his administration

Two things: first, all of the news above is from this week. Second, acting with measure could claw back just a little bit of the global leadership we've abdicated in past decades.

⚡️ Take Action: Joe Biden's promised shift from centrist "all of the above" candidate to progressive climate champ won him the election. Many, many groups who persuaded him to do so, but perhaps none have been as effective as the Sunrise Movement.

Maybe you've already volunteered with them, started your own local org, donated to them, or you're one of their founders -- but now it's time for Biden to make good, we desperately need two Senate seats, and Sunrise isn't letting up on either. Donate or join the movement here, and if you're still looking for a tax write-off, you can donate to their education fund here.

COVID

The beginning of the end

In typical action-adventure movies, the hero goes on a relatively predictable journey, overcoming doubt, reluctance, and obstacles aplenty by way of newfound courage and no small amount of timely mentorship. In the end, at the final battle, she uses everything she's learned so far to defeat her exhaustion and greatest fear. Once successful, she's finally able to go home again, reborn.

COVID has made for a hell of a journey, universal and singular all the same, depending on whether you've been lucky (or steadfast) enough to avoid being infected and getting sick, or whether you've suffered, often terribly, because you or a loved one had no choice but to be exposed.

And yet we find ourselves, in perhaps the darkest moment of all, and having learned so much about everything, from the benefits of flipping patients into the prone position, to the most helpful quarantine period, with an eye on the endgame. An endgame -- multiple highly-effective vaccines -- though promising, still fraught with peril: production and distribution will test every stage of global supply chains, from cold storage availability (and hacker threats) to simple glass vials. Young children are (to date, inexplicably) not the mass transmitters that they are of other respiratory viruses, enabling schools to open mostly safely for them, but less so for their teachers and support staff.

Perhaps for those of us left standing, the final test will be the toughest: more patience. Vaccines for high-risk individuals will begin in the UK in a matter of days. In the US, in perhaps a few weeks. But for those of us young enough, healthy enough, and furthest from the frontlines of medicine, education, and food (so, white enough, or conversely, African) will have to wait until late summer at the earliest for our turn to get the first of two shots.

And yet, for those 144 million or so at the front of the line, the timing couldn't be more vital:

"There is no end in sight for the nation’s hospitals as the pandemic continues to hammer cities and rural areas across the country, totaling 13 million cases so far this year. And public health experts warn that the holidays may speed the already fast-moving pace of infection, driving the demand for hospital beds and medical care ever higher.

A record number of Americans — 90,000 — are now hospitalized with Covid, and new cases of infection had been climbing to nearly 200,000 daily.

Health care systems “are verging on the edge of breaking,” Dr. Michael Osterholm, a member of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Covid-19 advisory council, said in a podcast this month."

Some towns don't have ICU units. Some towns don't even have hospitals. Los Angeles County is comprised of 88 cities and 80 hospitals, and yet at 7000+ new cases a day, only 120 ICU beds remain empty this morning.

⚡️ Take Action: find your approximate place in line with this handy NYT tool, and then...accept it. Be grateful for the sacrifices made, and for the greatest scientific achievement in human history, and that you'll live to benefit from it. Gratitude is amplified by paying it forward. Talk about it. Talk to your family, your friends, and your children, about what it means to stay patient. Build a movement. I'm an upper class white man who works at a laptop, and who lives with a non-COVID threatening pre-existing condition. #IWillWaitMyTurn

Biology 401

Connection made

COVID has not only stretched our patience, but also our supply chains, our PPE gear, our people, and also, perhaps unexpectedly, our definition of how you can get help: over your phone. For a pre-existing condition, for an injury, for a medical loan, for your pediatric cancer lab (Hi, Jay!). If 2020 means peak Facebook is destroying the shared common ground that is factual information, 2020 also means we're damn lucky this pandemic didn't hit ten years ago, when so many of the tools of telehealth, decentralized money sharing, and data storage and analytics flat out weren't ready for primetime.

Here's another thing we couldn't do ten years ago, but it's so, so important to remember myriad ways that science, and scientists, are improving our lives:

"An artificial intelligence (AI) network developed by Google AI offshoot DeepMind has made a gargantuan leap in solving one of biology’s grandest challenges — determining a protein’s 3D shape from its amino-acid sequence.

The ability to accurately predict protein structures from their amino-acid sequence would be a huge boon to life sciences and medicine. It would vastly accelerate efforts to understand the building blocks of cells and enable quicker and more advanced drug discovery."

You won't see the results of this advance tomorrow, but many may, and soon. Former pod guest and computational biologist Mohammed AlQuraishi said, "It’s a breakthrough of the first order, certainly one of the most significant scientific results of my lifetime.”

⚡️ Take Action: so many excellent non-profits have suffered huge financial losses in 2020 (and right when we're on the cusp of breakthroughs). You can help support further cutting-edge pediatric cancer research by supporting one of our favorites, Alex's Lemonade Stand, right here. Check out our moving conversation with their co-founder here, and a more nerdy-but-also-teary convo with two of their leading scientists here.

Food & Water

You have to start with the basics

The entire point of utilizing first principles thinking is to clarify problems by taking them apart as far as you can go: to separate any and all underlying facts from any assumptions based on them. You're essentially looking to discover the basest elements, and then rebuild from there.

You're a smart, curious person. You're part of our community. I don't have explain the following facts to you, but I also shouldn't have to explain them to anyone: food, water, and air are the three human necessities. Even Mitch McConnell cannot deny these things. These are facts we can agree on, because we have to. You can see that maybe the problem at hand does not actually have to exist.

Again I don't think this is just me because you're all reading this but, having established these things, shouldn't it make sense that all humans then deserve, no questions asked, clean air, water, and food? Is this so fucking difficult a thing to make a thing? Is it so fucking difficult to see that all of these things are connected?

Well. This week we learned that 26 million Americans are going hungry, due in part to COVID; that a few million humans in the Black Belt, aka Slavery USA, are drinking their own sewer water, due in part to climate change; and that over 3 billion people worldwide are facing water shortages, because of climate change and industrial agriculture.

"Floods carry sewage across people’s lawns and into their living areas, bringing with it the risk of viruses, bacteria, and parasites that thrive in feces. Studies have found E. coli and fecal coliform throughout the Black Belt, in wells and in public waters. A United Nations rapporteur on extreme poverty, visiting in 2017, said that the sewage problem was unlike anything else he had encountered in the developed world.

“This is not a sight that one normally sees,” he said."

It is one thing to have reasonably grounded political opinions and it is another to have failed so spectacularly at pro-life leadership that it has become your priority to turn off a man's drinking water during a pandemic and hunger crisis of your own making. The receipts are in.

⚡️ Take Action: until at least January 21st, it looks like this is on us. Support Feeding America in...America, and support Manchester United star Marcus Rashford's FareShare campaign to feed hungry children in the UK. Let's go.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for being a part of the most impactful community on in the internet.