‍Welcome back, Shit Givers.

In brief: Your new green portfolio. And are we lucky that COVID hit in 2020, vs 2002?

This is Important, Not Important, the newsletter that pairs curated, vital science news and analysis with Action Steps that’ll make you feel good -- and improve the world around you.

You can use it in combination with our Webby-nominated podcast to help us crack the world’s hardest problems.

This Week

Peter Drucker said “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”

Whether he was referencing my rolling Jars of Peanut Butter Per Week (jPB/w) “problem” (it’s not a problem), methane leaks, or the popularity of COVID rescue packages (they’re very popular), the point remains -- while the societal complexities of 2020 exacerbated COVID, if not instigated the pandemic itself, all of our economic choices to date have definitively led us to a climate breaking point.

On the other hand, because of technological progress -- including solar panel efficiencies, battery cell production (still bottle-necked, but how far we’ve come), up-to-the-minute satellite data for those same methane leaks and deforestation, and biotech machine learning for novel mRNA vaccines, quantum computing, sustainable fashion, and ESG-forward investing plans, among so many other innovations -- we’re better prepared to deal with such systemic threats than ever before. 

There are downsides and exceptions to living in the future, of course. Natural carbon capture solutions are proven (if increasingly abused), tech CCS is not -- yet. And in an age of sweeping, freely shared (and harvested) personalized data, government infection monitoring was a complete failure (until basically last week), decentralized currencies like Bitcoin are an energy nightmare, electric cars are a resource-dependent band-aid, not a cure, and misinformation around news like, I don’t know, Jewish space lasers, could ruin the whole plan.

But I continue to believe that we can build a future that is more equitable and more clean than ever before. This approach is not only the just one to pursue, but also makes the most sense for our pocketbooks, P&L’s, and economies.

Climate Change & Clean Energy

How to live a sustainable (and actually enjoyable) retirement

Understand this: The transition to a cleaner world -- and economy -- is underway. There will be fits and starts, and any significant legislation will probably come through budget reconciliation, and after COVID relief, but the pieces are being laid across government and industry for a transformational journey.

• AOC and Bernie Sanders, among other policymakers, are pushing for President Biden to declare a national emergency on climate change
• Friend of the pod Dr. Leah Stokes, together with the teams at Evergreen Action and Data for Progress, just dropped a massive report detailing how Congress can move us to a clean energy standard
• GM and other carmakers are chasing Tesla, and we need to rebuild our grid to support millions of new EV’s
• Blackrock is threatening to sell shares in polluters
• Clean tech investing is skyrocketing
• Norway’s wealth fund (among the world’s richest) is dumping oil stocks
• A Civilian Climate Corps is on the way

What it means: For the first time, there is nearly wholesale agreement that the time is now, and the money is there, to shift away from fossil fuels -- including extraction, production, transportation, transmission, and more.

And the money is finally there because we’re in it -- the cost of inaction vs natural disaster relief isn’t even close, and the power sector, as is, is losing money hand over fist -- and because, in transforming the entire economy, there is a LOT of money to be made.

Many of you have founded or work for some of these new sustainable companies, but there are also tons of public companies ready to make the transition. And index fund managers are getting way better at building (seriously profitable) funds you can use to exercise your values, and participate in the upside.

⚡️Action Step: Two-fer! Use 5Calls.org to call your rep (2 minutes) to support equitable new climate legislation, and then check out Betterment’s new Climate Impact Portfolio.

COVID

Why the vaccine rollout is so slow in America, and why it needs to go much (much) faster

Understand this: Young and middle-aged people (read: me) are responsible for most of the COVID spread, but by age, older folks are most likely to die. By race, Black, Indigenous, and Latinos are 2-4x more likely to die than white counterparts (and yet white people are receiving 2x the vaccines). Infections seem to be dropping across the country, but new variants threaten to undo the progress.

But this doesn’t make young, white people -- or even already-vaccinated people -- safe. The longer viruses proliferate in the world, the more opportunities to mutate, and the closer we get to a variant that escapes our current vaccine capabilities, resetting the clock. Pfizer and Moderna are hustling to make boosters, but if the Brazil variant is any indication, we are still very, very exposed.

America’s vaccine pipeline -- from production to transportation to delivery to appointment-making -- is a logistical nightmare, and you can’t affect most of that (and no, we can’t just get other pharma companies to make them).

What it means: Captain Obvious here, but we have to vaccinate everyone, ASAP. But speed isn’t necessary just because of we want to reduce immediate deaths, but because every single person we vaccinate across the world reduces the opportunity for more extreme mutations.

⚡️Action Step: If you’re further back in line, the easiest way to cut transmission is to protect yourself, and the best way to do that is to upgrade your mask, now.

Medicine & Bio-tech

Have some heart

Understand this: COVID’s nothing new. Disparities in health outcomes have always “varied” among America’s race demographics.

A new study goes deeper. From Inverse:

Black young adults are twice as likely to die in the year following a heart transplant compared to non-Black transplant recipients of the same age.

Across all age groups, Black heart transplant recipients had a 30 percent higher risk of death following the procedure. [...] Black Americans have a higher incidence of cardiovascular diseases and resulting complications — a reality driven by socioeconomic inequity, inadequate access to healthcare, lower-quality care, and the implicit bias of medical providers and insurance companies.

But this study also presents a path forward. “Fortunately, we identified a discrete period, the first year, where young Black heart recipients are at highest risk of death. If clinical research, moving forward, focuses on targeted interventions for young, Black recipients during this period, we could reduce overall racial disparities in heart transplantation.”

⚡️Action Step: Help save Black lives by contributing to more research like this at Johns Hopkins Medicine.

Food & Water

What’s your gut say?

Understand this: It’s intellectually lazy to claim that we know as much about the microbiome (gut) as we do the brain, but I am who I am, and the point is: the more sweater strings we’ve pulled on them both, the more we’ve discovered we have no idea what the hell’s going on in either one.

But we’re making progress on each (and they’re connected, of course). From Science Mag:

Last week, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)announced what it calls the largest study yet to probe “precision nutrition,” a $156 million, 5-year effort to examine how 10,000 Americans process foods by collecting data ranging from continuous blood glucose levels to microbes in a person’s gut.

In May 2020, NIH Director Francis Collins released the agency’s first-ever 10-year strategic plan for nutrition science, acknowledging the importance of diet in chronic diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. The plan aims to fold in basic disciplines such as neurobiology, study the role of diet across the life span, consider how food can serve as medicine, and elevate precision nutrition.

The concept recognizes that how the human body responds to food depends on factors from genetics to sleep habits, social environment, and gut microbes. For example, the Israeli study that found individual differences in the response to refined sugar versus fruit showed the microbiome was largely responsible.

Now comes NIH’s Nutrition for Precision Health, which will piggyback on All of Us, the agency’s huge genomics and health study that has fully enrolled 272,000 of a planned 1 million participants, more than 50% from minority groups.

⚡️Action Step: There’s a few items here. You can play the long game and join the All of Us research program, and in the meantime, start to track your own glucose-data and more with the super cool Supersapiens biosensor.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for giving a shit. New here? Join for free.