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.

Climate Change & Clean Energy

The 80/20 rule works both ways

We've all been stuck behind a school bus, or a cement truck, or one of the 550,000 diesel trucks purposefully stripped of its emissions equipment, black smoke wafting over our windshield -- or worse, our face.

The health implications are as bad as you imagine, sitting there, watching the plume barely dissipate in the air above you: PM2, less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, or one-thirtieth the width of a human hair, is incredibly toxic. Inhalation has been linked to diseases like asthma and heart conditions, and up to 100,000 deaths a year. And that's before COVID. And of course, Black and Brown Americans over-index on exposure, living next to industrial plants and highways.

And yet, per The Washington Post:

"The Trump administration on Monday rejected setting tougher standards on soot, the nation’s most widespread deadly air pollutant, saying the existing regulations remain sufficient even though some public health experts and environmental justice organizations had pleaded for stricter limits.

The Environmental Protection Agency retained the current thresholds for fine-particle pollution for another five years, despite mounting evidence linking air pollution to lethal outcomes in respiratory illnesses, including COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Documents obtained by The Washington Post show that the EPA has disregarded concerns raised by some administration officials that several of its air policy rollbacks would disproportionately affect minority and low-income communities.

[...] Douglas Buffington, West Virginia’s senior deputy attorney general, called Monday’s announcement a major win for coal."

You might remember that the EPA Administrator, Andrew Wheeler, is a former coal lobbyist. You might not remember what the 80/20 rule is, however. Essentially, in many many arenas, we can show that 80ish% of consequences come from 20% of the causes. How did all of the hens die? Well, a couple got cold, but the other forty-three were torn to shreds when we let the fox inside the henhouse. One decision, tens of thousands of early deaths.

⚡️ Take Action: Wheeler's gone in 40 days, but his new cost-benefit rules (which conveniently don't include dead people) will make it super annoying to undo his bullshit, including letting the US air monitoring system self-destruct. Science denial in favor of white supremacist economics is the common denominator for every major Trump decision.

On the other hand, Moms Clean Air Force fights for "Justice in Every Breath" nationally and locally, with over a million moms and dads on board. Join a chapter, start a chapter, or donate right here.

COVID

The incredibly timely importance of "probably"

If thinking practically, and justly, about our uncertain future is a tenet of our community, then the practice of making decisions based on probabilities, not certainties, is among the most valuable tools in our community's toolbelt.

We can learn a lot on how to think from a survey of 700 epidemiologists by The New York Times:

"Epidemiologists worry about many unknowns, including how long immunity lasts; how the virus may mutate; the challenges of vaccine distribution; and the possible reluctance to accept the vaccine among some groups.

Of 23 activities of daily life that the survey asked about, there were only three that the majority of respondents had done in the last month: gathering outdoors with friends; bringing in mail without precautions; and running errands, like going to the grocery store or pharmacy."

Here's three lessons we've learned recently:

1) Indoor transmission is a nightmare. From a rigorous new study: "One person (Case B) infected two other people (case A and C) from a distance away of 6.5 meters (~21 feet) and 4.8m (~15 feet). Case B and case A overlapped for just five minutes at quite a distance away."

2) Natural immunity -- getting infected and recovering -- is probably less effective long-term, immunity-wise, than getting a vaccine. Get the vaccine.

3) Once you are vaccinated? You're probably only protected from getting the disease, not transmitting the virus. Keep that mask on.

As with all things when dealing with a novel virus and a pandemic, we're working with increasingly solid but still incomplete information. New revelations mean new questions: millions of people worldwide don't believe in vaccines, and so even if we can convince them to get the first shot, what about the second -- and what does that mean for personal, and herd immunity?

⚡️ Take Action: Millions upon millions of Americans are going hungry because of COVID. At the same time, restaurants are closing left and right. Congress is a nightmare, so Guy Fieri went out and raised an incredible $22 million for unemployed restaurant workers.

It's not a competition, but it is a "all hands on deck" moment, so José Andrés and World Central Kitchen are going even further; they've built a two-sided marketplace, with struggling restaurants on one side, and hungry people in need of fresh meals on the other. No one is probably hungry. Let's keep up the support.

If you own or work at a restaurant, if you want to volunteer to distribute meals, or donate money for hot meals, you can do so here.

Artificial intelligence

The second order effects of everything

It is not exactly a secret that Silicon Valley companies are very white, and very male. It is also not a secret that these same companies are at the forefront of artificial intelligence research and implementation. What is becoming increasingly understood is the devastatingly biased, if incredibly predictable, second-order effects are of having mostly white males design and implement systems of "intelligence" (to date, mostly extreme pattern recognition) across facial recognition, medical imagery, and more. These new systems end up looking much like and working much like the systems of white supremacy that have existed for hundreds of years: wildly useful and successful, for one specific demographic.

Like The Four Tops sang, "It's the same old song."

One would think, then, that having hired one of the world's most prominent A.I. researchers, an immigrant Black scientist woman who also co-founded their Ethical A.I. team, that Google would protect and support her work at all costs.

Instead, per The New York Times:

"Timnit Gebru said in a tweet on Wednesday evening that she was fired because of an email she had sent a day earlier to a group that included company employees.

In the email, reviewed by The New York Times, she expressed exasperation over Google’s response to efforts by her and other employees to increase minority hiring and draw attention to bias in artificial intelligence.

“Your life starts getting worse when you start advocating for underrepresented people. You start making the other leaders upset."

[...] Google has repeatedly committed to eliminating bias in its systems. The trouble, Dr. Gebru said, is that most of the people making the ultimate decisions are men. “They are not only failing to prioritize hiring more people from minority communities, they are quashing their voices,” she said.

They are who we thought they were.

⚡️ Take Action: join 50 million other people and switch your search engine to DuckDuckGo. They don't store your info, and they don't track you.

Food & Water

Drink it up

The future may seem inevitable, but we can still use the transformation of our grids, buildings, and economies to take the edge off the climate crisis. But a growing population, a hotter climate, and an over-dependence on industrial agriculture means we are straight up crushing our water supply. How much remains? Who gets what? It's hard to predict. Sometimes I feel like Hari Seldon had a point.

Anyways, inevitably, we've turned to capitalism. From Bloomberg:

"Water joined gold, oil and other commodities traded on Wall Street, highlighting worries that the life-sustaining natural resource may become scarce across more of the world.

Farmers, hedge funds and municipalities alike are now able to hedge against -- or bet on -- future water availability in California, the biggest U.S. agriculture market and world’s fifth-largest economy.

The contracts, a first of their kind in the U.S., were announced in September as heat and wildfires ravaged the U.S. West Coast and as California was emerging from an eight-year drought. They are meant to serve both as a hedge for big water consumers, such as almond farmers and electric utilities, against water prices fluctuations as well a scarcity gauge for investors worldwide."

⚡️ Take Action: donations are currently being triple-matched to our friends at Food & Water Watch, who have stopped 600+ localities and 15 states from resuming water shutoffs during the pandemic.

Quick Hits

• A universal flu vaccine might be on the way -- and one for malaria, too.
• It's time to reboot EJSCREEN, the government's environmental justice mapping program that's stuck in 2009.
• Exxon -- and this is going to shock you -- is purposefully holding back on deploying carbon capture tech.
• Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) will be mandatoryacross the UK economy by 2025. Will the US catch up? Not if Microsoft, Disney, and these four other green-ish companies have their say.
• New York State just set a new bar for fossil fuel divestment. Congrats to our friends at 350.org on a huge win.
• These are not the carbon offsets you're looking for (waves hand, is let through, meets smuggler, hires smuggler, smuggler is later frozen as trap for me by my father

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