Welcome back, Shit Givers.

In brief: Miami kicks the can down the road, relief for farmworkers, poor Twitter, how not to waste food, how not to do ethical A.I.

Urgent Action Step: 1 in 3 U.S. families couldn’t afford diapers before the pandemic. But COVID, combined with the polar vortex that crushed Texas and Mississippi, means there aren’t nearly enough diapers at diaper banks. Zero (zero) federal programs cover diapers.

We created a list of places to donate right here. Let's go, Shit Givers.

This Week

We sit on the threshold of enormous change. On the one hand, if we let it. On the other, if we pursue it.

There’s been a fair amount of revealing discourse over how we got here. We’ve even started to talk about accountability, but I’ll leave that for a separate convo.

Today I want to visit the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

A reminder: we commit the sunk cost fallacy (often), when we follow through on some project or behavior explicitly because of previously invested time, money, effort, or some combination of them -- and whether or not the current costs outweigh the benefits.

Everybody does it, all the time, on their own, and we damn sure do it collectively. Our failure to be completely rational takes us down, over and over again.

Of course we’re not entirely rational beings. And that’s great, because life would be super boring. Emotion and sentimentality often override our most objective judgement.

Sometimes that works out OK, and sometimes it doesn’t. We’re only human.

But the real failure isn’t the sentimental factor. It’s when we decide to just not do the hard math on future prospects, or if the math’s been done, to ignore it altogether.

We prefer the status quo, we’re loss averse, we put our heads in the sand.

In this moment, we need to get a hell of a lot more ruthless about cutting our losses. We have to get way more comfortable with starting over, wiping the slate clean. We have to focus on the now, and what’s coming -- our current alternatives.

Starting over is often a luxury. Not everyone can leave a broken marriage, or buy a new car. And starting over doesn’t mean you don’t carry the scars with you.

But it can mean no more new scars. Sometimes starting over is a necessity, and that brings us to now.

Climate change means not only drastic emissions reductions, and pursuing carbon removal, but also openly addressing adaptation and mitigation. It means, for example, replacing all of our vehicles, because we have to. Right now.

Radical change will have secondary effects, of course, so we also have to plan to transition millions of workers at gas stations, at repair shops, and at dealerships into new jobs.

But we just dropped a rover from a fucking skycrane on another planet. We just developed a couple incredibly effective vaccines from entirely new technology, about five years faster than realistically expected, and now we’re in the process of putting them in the arms of 7.6 billion people.

We can do hard things, and we can make hard choices, but we have to be honest about them. With ourselves, and with each other.

When we can, and when we must, we have to make a clean break to move forward -- no matter how comfortable we were in the past.

Climate Change & Clean Energy

Sink or swim: the real estate edition

Understand this: New York, Charleston, New Orleans, Miami. These are among the American cities most threatened by sea level rise. Trillions of dollars of real estate under threat, already.

They’re all dealing with it differently. Miami, for example, is wooing Silicon Valley expats and Bitcoin. Makes sense.

From The New York Times:

“Officials in Miami-Dade County, where climate models predict two feet or more of sea-level rise by 2060, have released an upbeat strategy for living with more water, one that focused on elevating homes and roads, more dense construction farther inland and creating more open space for flooding in low-lying areas.

[...] Climate experts, though, warned that the county’s plan downplayed the magnitude of the threat, saying it failed to warn residents and developers about the risk of continuing to build near the coast in a county whose economy depends heavily on waterfront real estate.

[...] What happens in Miami will very likely become a case study for other cities and counties facing climate challenges. Among major U.S. metropolitan areas, it is perhaps the most exposed to sea-level rise, the result of its low, flat geography. And, with some of the most expensive coastal real estate in the world, it has an ample tax base to experiment with solutions — and also enormous economic incentive to dissuade buyers and investors from leaving.”

What it means: It means they’re choosing not to do the hard work. I understand the desire to adapt, to push on, to try and keep your head above water, but at some point, you’ve just got to get the hell out of the water entirely.

⚡️ Action Step: Punch your address into Flood Factor to find out your risk of flooding (wherever you live). And then check out First Street’s guide to flood insurance (which is going up).

COVID

The food chain finally includes vaccines

Understand this: Millions of farmworkers across the US were designated essential workers last year, so they could keep, you know, growing and picking our most (only?) nutritious food.

But like many essential and frontline workers, the virus has decimated their ranks, with estimates for infections at half a million, and deaths nearing 10,000.

The complication? Many of those workers are undocumented immigrants. And the United States doesn’t exactly take care of those folks on a normal day, despite their role in feeding everyone else, and especially not now, during a pandemic.

What it means: California has recently slated a portion of vaccines for communities hardest hit by the virus. But it’s a catastrophically late start, and other states, like Florida and Georgia, workers must overcome misinformation to commit to getting a shot, and then must prove residency, which is difficult, when there’s really no path to citizenship.

⚡️ Action Step: Use Common Cause to call your state and local representatives and tell them to prioritize vaccines for food workers, up and down the food chain.

Medicine & Bio-tech

Delete your account

Understand this: Systemic racism is everywhere, that’s why it’s called systemic, so we systemically talk about it all the time.

And it’s definitely in medicine, despite what some moron intern tweeted from the official Twitter account for The Journal of the American Medical Association:

“No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care?”

What it means: LET ME COUNT THE WAYS.

⚡️ Action Step: Just 5% of doctors are Black. Are you a Black man in medicine, or do you know one? Check out the awesome “Black Men in White Coats” project, which seeks to increase the number of Black men in medicine through exposure, inspiration, and mentoring.

Food & Water

Eat your vegetables (and everything else you ordered)

Understand this: Despite drastic decreases in poverty, many across the world -- and the U.S. -- remain hungry, this despite an overabundance of food.

Part of the reason: food waste. From Bloomberg Green:

“Some 931 million tons of it went to waste in 2019, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. Individual households were responsible for more than half of that, with the rest coming from retailers and the food service industry.

New estimates show that about 17% of food available to consumers worldwide that year ended up being wasted. The matter is even more urgent when considered alongside another UN analysis that tracks the problem further up the supply chain, and shows 14% of food production is lost before it reaches stores.”

What it means: Aside from just how goddamn wasteful we are, and how many folks remain and/or are newly hungry, Drawdown has “Reduce Food Waste” listed as a top 5 emissions reducer -- more than EV’s! We can do so much better.

⚡️ Action Step: Act locally. Use ReFED to find current food waste policies and programs you can learn from and implement in your town.

AI

Do More Evil

Understand this: Google has fired yet another member of their vaunted Ethical A.I. team and it’s not going over well, because once again, the former employee is a woman.

What it means: A.I is barely here and it’s already packed with biases, having been designed and implemented by mostly white men. Who -- if it isn’t clear -- don’t have the best track record. That’s the entire point of ethical teams like these.

⚡️ Action Step: We made a Twitter list of brilliant women in A.I. ethics (per the org itself). You can follow (and learn from) them on Twitter here.

The Roundup (back by popular demand!)

Vaccines are finally rolling out across the world’s poorest countries

A stunning visualization of the changing Gulf Stream

Iron Man (RIP) is investing in electric motors that are 30% more efficient

What AI really needs is hands, ears, and eyes -- right?

The Pfizer and Moderna shots might just be the start. Next up: Malaria.

Here’s how Israel’s “green pass” for vaccinated folks works

Wyoming is finally (and I mean just so slowly) switching to wind.

Hurricane season might officially start two weeks earlier, good good

The future of cars: Singapore will go clean after 2025, Volvo by 2030. How green are EV’s, anyways?

Biden’s SEC pick thinks net zero is bullshit. And. So. Do. I.

‍