Welcome back, Shit Givers.

This was a momentous week for our most marginalized neighbors. Any week when the monarchy gets shredded AND child poverty is cut in half is a really, really, really good week.

In brief: Batteries are cheaper and increasingly everywhere; the best COVID treatments; a possible opioid alternative; cabbage is off the menu

Reminder: You can read this issue on the website, or you can listen to it on the podcast, in 10 minutes or less.

This Week

Last week we talked about the sunk cost fallacy, and how -- especially now -- it’s vital that our decision making is based on future outcomes.

But while the past can no longer predict the future (if it ever could in the first place), it is important to understand how we got here, to recognize and wrangle with our inherent nature, the incredible places it can take us, and the corners we continually back ourselves into.

In “The Sun Also Rises”, Bill asks Mike, “How did you go bankrupt?” and Mike replies “Gradually, and then suddenly.”

This, like all things, is an oversimplification, but a potpourri of endearing and not so endearing human traits led to the Industrial Revolution, and in just 100 years, we’ve built not only factories, but cars and cities, medicines and hospitals, digital networks and warships, roads and spaceships, microchips and vaccines.

These advances didn’t come out of nowhere, but considered over the course of human history, we hunted, gathered, and toiled in the soil for a very long time, and then (taking an even further step back into Earth’s lifetime): we built a lot of shit, destroyed our natural environment, and made fantastical discoveries, all in the blink of an eye.

Dial back in to more modern history, and we understand that coral reefs didn’t get bleached overnight. mRNA vaccines weren’t developed overnight. Battery costs didn’t drop overnight. Life expectancy didn’t double overnight. Shit, even Beeple didn’t happen overnight.

Decisions and luck compounded for a very long time to get us where we are today, for better or worse.

Every advancement led us to where we are today, unrivaled across the galaxy as our planet’s singular alpha species.

The thing about being atop the food chain though, and seemingly insurmountably so, is that great power comes with not only great responsibility, but inevitable great costs.

And great powers just don’t come out of nowhere. Colonialism was/is a business. More income, fewer expenses.

There isn’t room or resources for everyone at the top. So systems are built that preserve power and wealth for a select few.

And while servitude and slavery, in all their forms, have been a part of human society for thousands of years across a variety of continents and cultures, perfecting them took quite a while.

Thousands of years of iterative improvements later, a Dutch boat called the White Lion, manned by English privateers, and packed with 20 and odd Ndongo slaves pirated from the Portuguese and meant for Mexico, landed on the shores of Virginia in 1619.

And then, “suddenly”, the West was off to the races, building economies and nations from free labor, with my point being: this sort of “growth at all costs” production can be addicting, and as noted below, addiction can end badly.

Where once we couldn’t navigate without the stars, now the seas are rising, by our own hands.

There was an entire second page of expenses we never accounted for, or were blissfully happy to ignore. Now we’re scrambling to fight off pandemics of our own making.

We’ve never really had a ticking clock like this before. There’s no time for the gradually part.

We have to take everything we’ve learned, and every skill we’ve acquired to do it all, right now.

The easy stuff we know we can do, and the hard stuff we have to invest in and scale up, right now.

Climate Change & Clean Energy

Cars and power plants and distributed solar, oh my

Understand this: Batteries will power the revolution, and thankfully, we are building and distributing many, many more of them, but for significantly cheaper.

• In the last year, we installed 3.5 GWh, more than the previous six years combined.
• Goldman has lowered their automotive battery price forecasts to $75/kWh in 2030 from $85 (that’s a 12% drop for you math nerds out there).

What it means: We can’t get combustion engines off the road at a reasonable cost without cheaper batteries, full stop. And we can’t prevent power disasters like Texas and California without more plentiful batteries, either.

But if we can, the load becomes more distributed, and thus the entire network is far less likely to fail, leaving thousands in the dark, or worse, in the cold.

⚡️ Action Step: Save money and find community solar near you with energysage (the sun goes into the solar panels and the solar panels go into your circuit breaker and your circuits lead to your appliances right now, and batteries for later!).

COVID

Process of elimination

Understand this: All of the world’s scientists and labs thrown up against SARS-CoV-2 and COVID means we’ve learned a lot about what works, and what doesn’t -- from repurposed old ideas like convalescent plasma (doesn’t work) to new ones like mRNA vaccines (works).

What it means: Vaccines are increasing in volume and availability, but people are still getting this thing, it’s still very scary, and so labs and trials for treatments are on-going.

It’s more important than ever that you keep track of what your options are, should you get sick.

⚡️ Action Step: If you haven’t already, read up and bookmark the NYT Coronavirus Drug and Treatment Tracker, updated weekly.

Medicine & Bio-tech

Opioids and you

Understand this: Chronic pain is a miserable state of affairs. And despite the condition’s prevalence (20% of American adults experience chronic pain), we don’t have many legal and regulated ways of dealing with it that aren’t incredibly addicting.

Almost 50,000 Americans died from opioid-involved overdoses in 2019 alone. Almost 30% of patients who are prescribed the drugs misuse them, with a percentage of those eventually transitioning to heroin.

What it means: We have to find another way to treat pain. And that might be coming down the pipe.

From Gizmodo:

“A group of scientists say they’re on the verge of developing a promising treatment for chronic pain that works by turning down, but not permanently altering, a gene that helps us sense pain. Their new research with mice suggests that the gene therapy could offer months of pain relief at a time without any major health risks. Still, more work has to be done before we could see trials in people.

The mice they used were meant to develop different types of chronic pain, such as inflammatory pain commonly linked to chemotherapy or nerve pain.

⚡️ Action Step: Need help, or know someone who might? Check out Shatterproof for support for addiction, or to find an evidence-based addiction treatment that makes sense.

Food & Water

How to lose a crop in 10 days

Understand this: Texas wasn’t prepared for the the polar vortex in more ways than one.

And unlike their completely fixable power issues, but very much like California’s inherent geography, there’s only so much they can do when it comes to agriculture.

From The New York Times:

“Texas farmers and ranchers have lost at least $600 million to the winter storm that struck the state last month, according to an assessment issued this week by economists at the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service.

Damage and disruption from the bitter blast of cold and snow, which farmers are calling “the St. Valentine’s Day massacre,” is likely to cause some gaps on grocery shelves in the eastern part of the country and push prices higher, especially on crops like sweet Texas onions that were just about to be harvested, leafy greens that would have headed for the East Coast and even cabbage, which this year might not be the St. Patrick’s Day sale item it often is.”

What it means: For now, produce shortages nationwide. Down the road, thousands of young trees and farmers, unable to bear fruit in the future.

⚡️ Action Step: A surprising fraction of the $1.9 trillion relief bill signed this week will go to disadvantaged farmers, a quarter of whom are Black.

Read about it here, and then support INI pod alum Leah Penniman and her Afro-Indigenous food sovereignty efforts here.

The Round Up

What percentage of global fossil fuel CO2 emissions have occurred in your lifetime?

Preserving 30% of our lands and waters won’t only help slow the climate crisis, but reduce the likelihood of pandemics, too

Facebook is addicted to spreading misinformation. Here’s why.

Pfizer turns their attention to a tiny but troublesome problem: Lyme disease.

From Infrastructure Century: many in Jackson, Mississippi are still without water.

The US is playing serious catchup on AI research. Will it be enough?

Saudi Arabia wants to reinvent itself as a green hydrogen kingpin

Wyoming is finally turning away from coal, and towards wind. But nobody’s happy about it.

The EV’s are coming, and WIRED took a bunch of them for a spin. Climb in!