Well then.

I've been sitting here (for a while) trying to figure out how to adapt our first real newsletter back from the holidays for this week's state of affairs.

You signed up for a reason, but...it's a little wild out there. We've got a bunch of new community members, too. What do they expect? A treatise on how 400 years of intentional choices led to a man in a viking hat briefly lording over the Senate chambers? Maybe!

But I'm going back to first principles and the original intention behind the first newsletter -- to curate the most important science news updates of the week, to provide analysis of those, and to offer Action Steps for you to take to improve your life, and the world around you.

That's the point, after all. To remind you of what's going on below us, above us, all around us, despite...everything.

Not that a lawless terrorist coup instigated by the president himself isn't important. This coup, like any other, is a threat to all of our lives, and should be met with devastating consequences, including impeachment, removal, expulsions, an off-switch for Facebook, and lots and lots of jail time for lots and lots of people.

But what's most important is to remind you that it, too, shall pass (ring ring Nancy), and when it does, the climate crisis will still be here. COVID will still be here. Clean energy, clean food, water, air, and transportation will still be here, waiting for us to grab on.

So whether you're new here or a longtime member of our community, allow me to reintroduce myself: this Important, Not Important, the newsletter that pairs curated, vital science news with analysis and Action Steps to fight for a better future — for everyone. I invite you to use it in combination with our Webby-nominated podcast to help us crack the world's hardest problems.

Let's go.

Climate Change & Clean Energy

Context is everything

Our community has spent our entire existence taking as much action as we can to fight the climate crisis. However much ass we've kicked, though, however many policymakers, investors, and CEO's we've directly influenced, the elephant in the room has been an inability to pass any meaningful federal legislation.

It looks like that may very well end on January 20th. Georgia (Georgia!) has two Democratic senators, and when you include Vice President-elect Harris, the big tent party of action suddenly has the slimmest possible majority to enact ambitious climate and clean energy bills galore.

Will it still be difficult? Of course. See the "big tent" reference, above. And despite progress we can make through budget reconciliation, the filibuster has got to go.

But we've got an entirely new lens with which to view our abilities, and the possibilities are breathtaking. Look at these headlines and think of them in terms of what we cando, now, instead of just what we have to do:

Rooftop solar could save Americas half a trillion dollars, just as 2020 disaster costs doubled year over year to over $95 billion.

Carbon pricing isn't the One Ring to Rule Them All, but these enormous (ENORMOUS) wind turbines are definitely part of the fellowship of the doing-everything-we-can-do ring.

Wall Street wants in on the Colorado River, which is down 20% over the past 20 years. Much of that decrease is from warming, paralleling California's meager snowpack (again). Buckle up.

Speaking of warming -- while we're flailing at 1.5°C, cities (half tree canopies, half red-lined heat deserts) might be headed towards an increase of 4.5°C (that's 40°F). I'm not even talking about sea level rise here (moving to Miami from Silicon Valley? Do I have a story about an impossible seawall for you...).

What'll help cities stave off feeling like an Instant Pot? Bikes. E-bikes. Public transportation. Gas automobiles going bye-bye (and faster than you can imagine).

And of course Exxon going out of business (with these emissions, they'll have to).

⚡️ Take Action: use 5Calls.org to call your representatives and let them know that with a slim majority in hand, you're watching to make sure they use it to save the planet. 5Calls uses your zip code to auto-load your reps, their contact info, and a script tailored for you.

COVID

Back to your regularly scheduled pandemic

You've read that the first round of vaccinations is taking quite a while. Let's clear up why that's happening:

1. States and cities have no money left after a year of pandemic spending. Congress just approved a boatload of necessary funding, but it's not magic. Standing up the infrastructure to vaccinate the entirety of the only habitable planet in the galaxy is expensive and complicated. State health departments could have planned better, but the constraints remain -- on top of vaccinations, they're dealing with testing, tracing, keeping people's water on, oh, and everything else a health department does in a normal non-pandemic month.

2. Hospitals are completely overwhelmed and exhausted. The US was short about 125,000 nurses BEFORE the pandemic.

3. The first doses arrived right around the holidays.

4. You've heard arguments that we should just give everyone first shots instead of saving second shots for the first round of folks, like nursing home residents. Reminder: the issue, in most places, is not the availability of vaccines. It's the rate of vaccinations. We have more than enough on hand. And we don't have much data on the effect of mass half-doses.

Have no doubt, a new administration will help provide more money, and vastly more direction. The bar is low.

For more context on what COVID meant for society, I cannot recommend enough The Plague Year by Lawrence Wright. A long read, but essential one.

Great. So what about going forward?

First, the good news, from MIT, by way of Science journal:

"Covid-19 patients who recovered from the disease still have robust immunity from the coronavirus eight months after infection, according to a new study. The result is an encouraging sign that the authors interpret to mean immunity to the virus probably lasts for many years, and it should alleviate fears that the covid-19 vaccine would require repeated booster shots to protect against the disease and finally get the pandemic under control.""

Great, great. Awesome stuff. Take the W.

Now what about those new strains you've heard about? Well, they're both more transmissible, which isn't great, because we're already in a race against time (see vaccination holdups, above). A 50% increase over each new generation is...decidely not helpful. Those of you in the UK can attest to how quickly this baby can get out of hand.

The B.1.1.7 strain is already on US shores, may very well be behind LA's catastrophic winter, and without massive increases in testing and vaccines, will cause all hell to break loose -- again.

⚡️ Take Action: despite the first week of 2021 very much feeling like a direct, over the top sequel to the terrible movie that was 2020, the year will continue, and we will eventually adapt. But we need to continue to reframe not only our lifestyles, but how we think.

No has been better at analyzing what this virus has done to society than The Atlantic's Ed Yong. For his last piece on the pandemic, he explored what to expect in Year Two. Read it here.

Medicine

In the meantime

COVID's (rightfully) distracted a lot of science, scientists, and science funding. If it hadn't, we probably wouldn't have the treatments and vaccines we have today.

But that doesn't mean the train's stopped entirely. One example includes immunotherapy research, where we might have figured out a key to cracking breast cancer treatments.

But the big news might be CRISPR. Here's one example from WIRED:

"Last summer, doctors in Tennessee injected Victoria Gray—a 34-year-old sickle cell disease patient—with billions of her own stem cells that scientists in Massachusetts had reprogrammed with Crispr to produce healthy blood cells. The hours-long infusion made her the first American with a heritable disease to be treated with the experimental gene-editing technology. And it appears to be working.

This July, Gray celebrated a year of being symptom-free."

⚡️ Take Action: up to 10% of Black people in America are affected by sickle cell. Crispr Therapeutics is looking for partnerships with universities and other research organizations. We've got loads of those in our community. Reach out to them here.

Food & Water

Beef. It's what's destroying the Amazon.

Most people enjoy a good burger. The problem is every burger comes not only with direct health implications, but myriad environmental complications, as well, all the way down to deforestation. Plant-based meat is taking off, Beyond's market cap is thriving, Impossible is delicious, but it's still a drop in the ocean.

Of course, it doesn't help that a huge chunk of our meat comes from Brazil.

From Bloomberg Green:

"Brazil’s Amazon region has suffered more deforestation this year than any in the past decade. The lax environmental policies of President Jair Bolsonaro bear some of the blame; so, too, does climate change. But much can be laid at the feet of cattle farmers.

Most cows in Brazil, the world’s largest beef exporter, are grass-fed. Ranchers in the precious biome use bulldozers, machetes, and fire to make room for pastureland—a practice that’s illegal but so widespread that it’s almost impossible for strapped regulatory teams to root out. A study published in Science in July showed at least 17% of beef shipments to the European Union from the Amazon region and Cerrado, Brazil’s savanna, may be linked to illegal forest destruction.

The sheer size of the country’s beef industry—2.5 million ranchers, 2,500 slaughterhouses, and about 215 million heads of cattle spread across 3.3 million square miles (8.5 million square kilometers)—is one reason the big meatpackers say they’ve struggled to keep tabs on their suppliers. Another hurdle: Brazil’s government, which requires ranchers to file documents detailing the movements of their cattle, keeps that paperwork largely to itself."

⚡️ Take Action: you know about buying plant-based meat. You probably know that you can invest in it, specifically, through Beyond at $BYND.

There's plenty of other smaller-cap healthy food stocks out there. I'm looking at baby food. For that? Check out Else Nutrition Holdings Inc, at $BABYF.

Quick Hits

Other science might have been paused because of COVID, but that doesn't mean we can't use what we've learned to speed up other vaccine development.

In the meantime, low-income children are suffering tremendously.

California is packed with low-income children, Black and Brown children, who over-index on air pollution, and wildfire smoke. California doesn't do enough prescribed burns to prevent extreme wildfires, but they're starting soon.

Blackouts from fires and other heat-related overloads could be prevented with residential solar and batteries. Which is helpful, because big power plants and long-distance transmission lines (clearly) can't do it on their own.

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