Welcome back, Shit Givers.

In brief: the price of climate change, how to re-open your office, a new wave of nurses, bailing out Black farmers.

As always: You can read this issue on the website, or you can listen to it on the podcast.

This Week

Humans, by their nature, have difficulty with long-term planning. We are biased towards instant gratification, as the expense of iterative -- and much less, radical -- progress.

In 2021, we’re being crushed by wave after wave of the results of our decision making, and in other ways, by the costs of inaction vs action.

Our neighborhoods and schools are hotter and more polluted than ever. We can choose to improve them, almost immediately, by electrifying post office trucks and school buses.

Instead, the American West has thus far chosen to prioritize cars and unaffordable, low-density housing, and now Black and Brown children suffer from heat and air pollution (and now more from increased wildfires), in their bedrooms and classrooms.

We’ve decimated the middle class, and now many Americans who would otherwise qualify for that once-proud cohort face quadrupled flood insurance premiums because of climate change risk.

Our best medical outcomes are expensive, and inherently and empirically biased against marginalized groups, while we come more to depend on AI that’s just as unethically designed.

We proactively and unnecessarily use antibiotics in our persons and our livestock that are losing their effectiveness.

We chose industrial agriculture: water and pesticide intensive monocrops, most of which we don’t even eat, drawing down our fresh water, and destroying our most carbon-rich soil.

We chose meat, protein, and processed foods, and so chose habitat loss, mass deforestation, heart disease, colon cancer, and other cardio metabolic conditions that may have led to 60% of American COVID hospitalizations.

Lie after lie helped us choose natural gas as a bridge fuel -- however unprofitable and dangerous on the outside -- only to discover how dangerous it is inside our homes, too.

Texas -- like California with its water infrastructure -- chose to ignore warnings a decade ago to weatherize their isolated grid, and so while policymakers were paid off, consumers froze, went thirsty and hungry, and paid $28 billion in premiums over the same ten years.

And of course free labor (slavery), the abandonment of Reconstruction, and two hundred additional years of systemic racist policies that continue to deny marginalized groups basic human rights (on top of liberty and the ability to pursue happiness) are more enduring, and more personal, examples.

The receipts have been in on these decisions for quite a while, but folks that look like me have only just started listening.

The lesson here is not that we are entirely fucked. It’s that we are at a crossroads, and just in time.

We have more data than ever, and thus we can and must be more accountable than ever.

We are better prepared to take consequential action than ever before.

We -- you and me -- are more capable of actually demonstrating that we give a shit, than ever before.

Let’s go.

Climate Change & Clean Energy

Mind the gap

Understand this: As detailed above, every decision has a cost. And while the direct price of fossil fuels is in the proverbial toilet, the “social cost of carbon” (SCC) -- the gap between that price and the societal and environmental damage caused -- has never been well-enough defined.

But that’s about to change. From Bloomberg Green:

“It’s a tool used in federal benefit-cost analysis to account for the damage greenhouse gas pollution inflicts on society, whether it comes in the form of deadly heat waves, water shortages or disappearing crops or animals. One of its champions, Michael Greenstone, says it can also be regarded as “the benefit, in money terms, of reducing carbon emissions.”

What it means: It’s a hell of a lot easier to justify (and price) new regulations when you can measure who they’re helping.

By seeking more inclusive perspectives and updating “damage functions”, we can/get to transform the whole place, and live up to MC Hammer’s edict: “When you measure, include the measurer.”

⚡️ Action Step: Climate change and equal rights are irrevocably linked. Check out, create with, and donate to the Population Media Center -- they combine entertainment with behavior theory to create shows that measurably address our most embedded systemic issues. Super cool stuff.

COVID

Get back to work (safely, eventually)

Understand this: The strict tiers and initial vaccine rollout issues have been, perhaps, a blessing in disguise -- most states seem to now have the hang of distribution, with more federal help on the way to reach deeper into marginalized and more hesitant areas.

Thousands of Americans are still dying and mutations are still coming, but we’re finally making real progress. Vaccine supply will steadily (if not exponentially) improve, and hopefully demand will, too.

And then we’ll all have to go back to the office. But one small issue remains. From The Atlantic:

Today, amid a pandemic caused by a novel airborne virus, these old ideas about ventilation are returning. But getting enough schools and businesses on board has been difficult. Fixing the air inside modern buildings, where many windows don’t or barely open, means fighting against the very nature of hermetically sealed modern buildings. They were not built to deal with airborne threats. Nineteenth-century hospitals were.

What it means: Everyone’s waiting on the CDC and then OSHA to set workplace requirements. But we’ve learned a lot, and that means you and your employer can’t get ahead of the big moment with common sense moves: fitted N95 mask requirements, open windows if you can, relaxed attendance policies, increased PTO.

⚡️ Action Step: Be candid, be thoughtful, be inclusive. Everyone’s got a different situation at home, everyone’s been through something this year. Be a Shit Giver, and you, too, can Build Back Better (ugh).

Medicine & Bio-tech

Reinforcements are on the way

Understand this: America was short at least 100,000 nurses, pre-the worst pandemic in 100 years. On top of the many other ways our medical (and frankly, societal) infrastructure was exposed by COVID, “not enough nurses” was a crucial piece of the puzzle.

What it means: Tough news: many frontline medical workers got sick, or will suffer from PTSD-like symptoms.

Good news: help is on the way. Despite the carnage -- and maybe because of it -- enrollment in nursing programs was up 6% last year. Budget constraints and limited faculty means schools are constantly turning down qualified applicants, but we’re on the way.

In fact, “Nurse” was actually the top “How to become” query on Google last year, which honestly just brings me life. If anybody’s a Shit Giver, it’s nurses.

⚡️ Action Step: Being a nurse doesn’t have to mean working in a primary care office or an emergency room.

Get inspired with our amazing conversation with Karin Huster, field coordinator with Doctors Without Borders, on working on ebola in Africa.

Food & Water

Follow the money

Understand this: Trump’s COVID bailout was a dumpster fire of corporate giveaways, and we’re still uncovering all of the marginalized people that were somehow even more marginalized in 2020.

From the Environmental Working Group:

White farmers received nearly 97 percent of the $9.2 billion provided by October 2020 through USDA’s Coronavirus Food Assistance Program, or CFAP, according to data obtained by the Land Loss and Reparations Project through the Freedom of Information Act and shared with EWG. The bailout program, created last May by the Trump administration, was suspended last month while under review by the Biden administration.

USDA data shows that white farmers received, on average, four times more than the average Black farmer. Using data from USDA’s Farm Census, EWG calculated that the average white farmer received $3,398, whereas the average Black farmer received $422.

What it means: It means sustainable Black farmers like Leah Penniman at Soul Fire Farm are still facing an uphill battle to reclaim stolen land, and help improve our food system.

⚡️ Action Step: Get to know Karen Washington, the OG of urban growers, and her mission to dismantle the systemic, exploitative food system that denies so many Black Americans not only land on which to farm, but healthy food, health care, and living wages.