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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.

Climate Change & Clean Energy

Why's COVID so bad in Los Angeles?

Throughout these first couple hundred thousand years of human history, most cities, towns, and villages have been intentionally founded next to fresh water. You know, to drink. To wash with.

But not Los Angeles. Which feels like a real oversight for a number of reasons, until you understand that LA was founded on top of one of the world's most plentiful oil fields.

An oil field so ripe that for a while it just bubbled right the hell on up and trapped innocent wooly mammoths, like some sort of prank from Home Alone, and now that poor mammoth's bones and the pits are a delightful museum attraction for kids.

But for thousands of of Brown kids in LA, it's Night at the Museum every night. Why?

Let's go back: the field is enormous, and the hundreds of oil companies that pounced on it dug thousands of wells and, because this work required manpower and we didn't know any better, built homes and schools and entire communities in and around the new wells -- such an easy commute!

But those companies have known about the residual health effects of active and abandoned wells for years now, just like they've known about the greater emissions from fossil fuel production and refining. But that doesn't mean they give a shit. They just lie about it and move on.

Why spend $100,000 to plug up each abandoned well when they can sponsor Ben Shapiro's blog or fund a raid on the Capitol instead?

But you say, good news! Electric cars are coming! The energy sector is in the tank! Yes. This is great news. But these white supremacist oil companies don't give a shit what kind of car you drive, because they will just turn dinosaur bones into Tupperware, or LEGOs (it's LEGOs, fight me) or comfy sweatpants, instead.

Thousands of wells have been abandoned in Los Angeles alone, often uncapped (not to mention New York and Michigan and Wyoming, among others). Forget big explosions, which sometimes do happen, and also to be clear is not a thing wind turbines or solar panels do, and understand that these wells are leaking methane and other toxic shit into people's homes, into schools, into hospitals, every single day.

And still so many more are active, and often hidden in plain sight, disguised as office buildings on major metro streets. It's comical.

And still Governor Newsom approved a couple thousand new drilling permits in 2020, up from 2019, instead of fighting for the 2500 sq ft buffer citizens and environmental groups are clamoring for. This also seems comical, knowing what we know. I genuinely do not understand it.

But understand this: People don't protest these wells, and the pipelines that serve them, just because of the greater good, and because the planet is getting hotter, but because the simple act of living near one (because there's nowhere else to live affordably in LA County) can make it harder to learn, and to breathe.

And this is where COVID comes in.

It's reported that 580,000 LA County residents live less than 1/4 of a mile from an oil well. Meanwhile, there have been almost a MILLION COVID cases in LA. Now, you don't get COVID from an oil well, but you are much more likely to get it when you live with 14 other people, and when you work shoulder-to-shoulder in factories and restaurants, and you're significantly more likely to die from it when you have a preexisting cardiorespiratory or pulmonary condition.

Guess where those can come from?

⚡️ Take Action: learn about, volunteer with, and donate to STAND LA, an kick-ass environmental justice coalition of community groups seeking to end neighborhood drilling. They've worked so hard to phase out active drilling in LA, and the city council is on the cusp of a big vote to do so. Let's get it over the finish line.

COVID

How the next few months will go

A few days ago, I emailed some friends and family a generalist take on how I believe the next few months will go for COVID in the United States.

TLDR: not great, Bob.

I consider it a complimentary piece to the incredibly popular projection I wrote way the hell back on March 2nd, titled "How to Survive the Coronavirus (With Your Sanity Intact)".

I've now published that new letter on our blog, and you can read it in five minutes right here.

As if you weren't aware, I'm a huge fan of expectations setting, and this will help.

⚡️ Take Action: many people are working because they have to -- they have to, or they will be evicted, or have their water turned off, or because they cannot otherwise feed their children. As such, super spreader events among workplaces are exploding.

We have been fighting like hell behind the scenes to enact a nationwide ban on evictions and water turnoffs. Take 2 minutes to call your Congresspeople right now to support that effort.

Medicine

IVF might get a lot more effective thanks to AI

For millions of Americans, and for a thousand different reasons, creating a baby through sex isn't an option.

One way to get around that issue -- a way almost never covered by health insurance, so is insanely expensive, mind you -- is IVF.

But even if you can afford it, IVF works something like half the time. One issue is that embryologists, despite their best attempts, have to judge an embryo's quality with their eyeballs. The same embryos given to a few different embryologists might mean a few different answers on which little nugget might have the best chance of success.

If we want to expand the pool of people that can successfully make children (should they desire to), we need to get a lot better at making babies through science.

A new study in Nature says deep machine learning might help:

"We asked five embryologists from three different clinics to provide scores for each of 394 embryos generated in different labs.

[...] As expected, we found a low level of agreement among the embryologists, with only 89 embryos out of the 394 classified as the same quality by all five embryologists.

[...] When we applied STORK to these 239 images, we found that it predicted the embryologist majority vote with precision of 95.7% (Cohen’s kappa = 0.63). In comparison, STORK agreed with each individual embryologist as follows: 0.69, 0.54, 0.25, 0.62, and 0.54 Cohen’s kappa score.

These results indicate that STORK may outperform individual embryologists when assessing embryo image quality."

⚡️ Take Action: one frequent reason someone can't make a baby? Cancer. Fucking. Cancer. The highly-rated Alliance for Fertility Preservation is working to support preservation clinics, policy chance, and educational awareness around that exact issue. You can use their services -- or donate so someone else can -- right here.

Food & Water

All the way down the food chain

Despite SARS-CoV-2's best efforts to infect every last person working in America's food supply industry, it endures. But at great cost.

The New York Times profiled 11 essential food workers. Antonia Rios Hernandez was one of them:

"In the beginning of the pandemic, we knew that if we didn’t do this work, prices could go way up. We knew that when there aren’t people to pick the food, it could have a much bigger impact on everything else.

Our work is important, but the phrase “essential worker” is a title that we were given. We should have been not just thanked, but given real support. Especially in the beginning, when everything ran out in the stores. They had big gallons of sanitizer at work, and I brought a little bit home to keep our house clean.

If what we’re doing is so important, I thought we would be paid extra. All we got from the government was the one Covid check."

⚡️ Take Action: we talk a lot about knowing where your food comes from. The humans that harvest, sort, pack, transport, and serve it should be a part of that conversation, especially when the rest of us get to stay home and smash our fingers on the Instacart and Doordash buttons. Support your local food workers through World Central Kitchen's Chefs for America program.

Quick Hits

We are on the cusp of fantastical stuff. Biden's climate team is, as hoped, an absolute murder's row of tenacious humans.

Meanwhile, so many of the world's systemic issues come down to a perceived lack of leadership, when in fact white supremacist leaders have been successfully doing their version of leading all along:

• Oil companies are not only happy to sacrifice Black and Brown kids, but also whatever elephants we have left
  
• Iran's back in the warhead business because Trump hated Obama because he's Black and so left the nuclear deal
  
• We desperately need regenerative agriculture to be a thing, but we're pretty set on not letting Black people participate
  
• Black babies suffer increased mortality rates -- but not when they're delivered by Black doctors
  

One year later -- why don't we have better masks?

A reminder that natural disaster damages doubled in 2020 -- and yet most of the disasters responsible missed major American cities. Buckle up.

And finally -- can I interest you in a colonoscopy -- from the comfort of your own home?

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