‍Welcome back, Shit Givers.

In brief: Your gas stove and water heater are hiding a dirty secret. Where COVID goes from here. And all the good your poop can do.

This is Important, Not Important: science news and analysis for people who give a shit.

This Week

There’s a moment in The Matrix where Morpheus opens both of his hands, revealing a red pill, and a blue pill, and gives Neo a one-way choice:

“You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”

Today’s issues, from climate to COVID, from health care to artificial intelligence, are systemic issues, more complex and intricate, and more difficult to pull apart, than we’d ever imagined.

But that also means they reach down into your every day life. Into your home, and the air you breathe. You’re aware of this, of course, because we’ve all been trapped in our homes for a year.

But trapped in our homes with what? Zoom and sweatpants and gravity blankets, sure. Feral children, of course. You made the decision to buy sweatpants and heavy blankets for a (very good) reason, to have children for a reason, to hide in the pantry shoveling snack mix into your face, for a reason.

Now let me ask you this: why did you choose the water heater you chose? Why did you choose the stove you chose? Maybe they came with the place. Maybe they were the cheapest. Maybe they offer better temperature control, they’re less prone to leaking, they’re better for serious home cooks.

But what if they’re not? What if you chose them because we’re in Wonderland, and the rabbit-hole of greenwashing and industry lies goes so much further than you can imagine? I’m not just talking about your stove or your water heater, but about your recycling bins, your car, your investments, your software, where you live, and who you work for.

You know how to distill a problem down to first principles. This week I want you to take the red pill, and then look around your computer, and your house, around your garage, around your kitchen, and think about what you believe, and why.

Climate Change & Clean Energy

There is no spoon

Understand this: Legacy industries have been incentivized to lie to you for eons, from cigarettes to cars. Capitalism is gonna capitalism.

And because they have often been the biggest and most powerful companies on the planet, we haven’t had a lot of ways to pull back the wizard’s curtain.

But when we do? Hoooo boy.

Just this week:

• In Mother Jones, Rebecca Leber provided the most damning evidence about gas stoves to date.
• Gas lines don’t only provide for fancy stoves, but water heaters, too. Let’s go electric instead.
• In Heated, Emily Atkin details Microsoft’s two faces: work on climate justice, and funding the campaigns of climate deniers (and further: how and why social media allow these lies to proliferate).
• In The Atlantic, E.A Crunden picks apart the myths behind recycling.

What it means: I can’t emphasize enough the tidal change that’s coming our way. Climate change affects your health, every day, and these companies are scrambling.

We know now that fossil fuels kill almost 9 million people a year, so companies like Ford are doubling EV investments a year after the first ones, and everyone else is pushing shiny new “net-zero” goals; continuing to pollute, and banking on carbon removal tech that’s completely unproven, and forests that are already protected.

Meanwhile, they can’t even get the terminology right. And that might be the only part that’s not their fault.

⚡️ Action Step: The more folks like yourself that get on board, the better. Share our newsletter on Twitter, and we can all push these companies to do better, or get the hell out of the way.

COVID

On the one hand

Understand this: as we face down a massively more complicated -- but cleaner, and more just -- future, it’s important we practice holding two seemingly competing ideas at once.

For something like the climate crisis, it’s understanding that we are on the cusp of massive, transformational change, but that millions, if not billions, will suffer as we proceed into coming decades.

For COVID, we can recognize that just 11 months have passed since the United States recognized SARS-CoV- 2 as a real threat, but it’s felt like 11 goddamn years.

And as long as these months have felt, the time has truly been relatively short: we have made incredible progress -- the Moderna and BioNTech/Pfizer vaccines may very well go down as two of humanity’s greatest accomplishments, full stop. Most vaccines take years to come to market, and most fail along the way.

But because of those first two vaccines, and the others on the way, we’re almost out of this thing. Cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are all plummeting. For the first time, the number of humans vaccinated passed the number of confirmed cases.

But on the other hand, because this virus was novel, and we were all susceptible, and thus it was so contagious -- this virus has had a year to proliferate, has had billions of opportunities to try to stay alive, and new mutations threaten to undo the progress we have made (our best hope for tracking them may lie in our sewers).

What it means: Vigilance and vaccines everywhere, at all costs, remains the name of the game for the next couple months. We may never actually reach herd immunity. We may need to continually be working on and receiving new boosters for new variants. But we can reduce its opportunity to spread, and the severity by which it kills, to drastic effect.

⚡️Action Step: Finally, graphs that make you feel good! Treat yourself, and bookmark Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker. And then call your state and local Departments of Health to find out about clinic volunteer opportunties.

Medicine & Bio-tech

Poop, for the win

Understand this: friend of the pod Dr. Diwakar Davar has always believed poop could be a way to help unlock troubled microbiomes.

And now he’s taken the first step in showing how: by giving new life to a small cohort of cancer patients, for whom every other treatment has failed.

From the American Association for the Advancement of Science:

A team of researchers from UPMC Hillman administered fecal microbiota transplants (FMT) and anti-PD-1 immunotherapy to melanoma patients who had failed all available therapies, including anti-PD-1, and then tracked clinical and immunological outcomes. Collaborators at NCI analyzed microbiome samples from these patients to understand why FMT seems to boost their response to immunotherapy.

Davar and colleagues collected fecal samples from patients who responded extraordinarily well to anti-PD-1 immunotherapy...

Out of 15 advanced melanoma patients who received the combined FMT and anti-PD-1 treatment, six showed either tumor reduction or disease stabilization lasting more than a year.

What it means: well, fuck cancer still, obviously, but specifically: immunotherapy can work wonders, but not for everyone, so this is a great step into the future of cancer treatments. Congrats, and thank you, Diwakar.

⚡️Action Step: Do you loathe cancer the way we do? Join our “Cycle for Survival” team! We’re (remote) riding on May 15th to support rare cancer research at Memorial Sloan Kettering. They’ve raised $260 million since 2007 and every dollar matters. All you need is (safe) access to a bike. Reply to this email and let me know!

Food & Water

Your water’s been hacked

Understand this: To say that our infrastructure is aging would be very gentle understatement. But we’ve also hooked the whole thing up to the internet, which, if you haven’t heard, isn’t very secure.

From The New York Times:

Hackers remotely accessed the water treatment plant of a small Florida city last week and briefly changed the levels of lye in the drinking water, in the kind of critical infrastructure intrusion that cybersecurity experts have long warned about.

The attack in Oldsmar, a city of 15,000 people in the Tampa Bay area, was caught before it could inflict harm, Sheriff Bob Gualtieri of Pinellas County said at a news conference on Monday.

He said the level of sodium hydroxide — the main ingredient in drain cleaner — was changed from 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million, dangerous levels that could have badly sickened residents if it had reached their homes.

What it means: Let’s dial it down: we need to rebuild our critical infrastructure, we need to rebuild our cybersecurity that hooks into that infrastructure, we need legislation that funds both of those, and thus we need people in office who understand both how state and local budgets work, and how the internet works.

⚡️Action Step: Run for local or state office. We need you. If you’re under 40, there’s nobody better to get you off on the right foot than our friends at Run for Something. Got questions? Smash reply. I got you.