#233: You Can Make It Work
Welcome back, Shit Givers.
We have a very special announcement to make today. More below.
In brief: Decentralized solar; US vaccine surplus on the move; biotech’s big new era; AI in healthcare a bust, so far
This Week
The future is here.
Climate. COVID. Clean water. Healthy food. Breathable air. Next-generation vaccines. Data privacy. Health equity. Environmental justice.
The most frequent question I get is: “What can I do”?
My answer, almost always, is “What CAN you do?”
Our mission is focused: to supply you with the context and Action Steps you can take to feel better, and move the needle of history towards radical progress -- for everyone.
Today we’re taking that further, with Important Jobs.
Our newsletter provides you with a weekly update, analysis, and Action Steps on the most vital science news. Deep generalism, by way of science, anthropology, and measurable, efficient impact.
Our podcast provides you with a deep dive into an issue ripped from the news, affecting everyone right now. We introduce you to one of the world’s most incredible humans, and together we bring you the tools, tips, and Action Steps you can take to improve your own efforts to build a better world.
Important Jobs is what’s next.
It’s the first destination for interdisciplinary jobs on the frontlines of the future, curated by me.
These aren’t just climate jobs.
Find work in clean energy. Maternal health care. Regenerative agriculture. Carbon capture. Carbon finance. Infectious disease labs. Voter rights. Battery tech. Policy. Sustainable consumer goods. Mental health. Food waste.
These are jobs for people who give a shit.
Important Jobs is a two-sided marketplace. It isn’t just for candidates on the hunt for impactful work: it provides companies, non-profits, labs, and governments with a chance to get in front of one of the world’s most impactful communities: Shit Givers.
You.
You are are CEO’s, policymakers, activists, journalists, investors, designers, data scientists, chemical engineers, professors, product managers, surgeons, quants, epidemiologists, food scientists, farmers, doctors, teachers, financial advisors, and more.
I am confident in this: hiring a Shit Giver is one of the biggest moves you can make to level up your company for the 21st century.
And now that’s easier than ever, and more affordable than ever, at Important Jobs.
We live in a discontinuity, our work is on the frontlines of the future. This is the work of our lifetimes, and you can make an impact every single day.
Get started at ImportantJobs.com.
Climate Change & Clean Energy
Bigger doesn’t mean better
Understand this: With all this talk about solar and wind, maybe you’re looking around, curious whether it’s time to cover your roof in panels.
Or maybe an earlier hurricane season means you’re thinking about a home battery or two.
If so, someone (a local electrician) has probably told you they’re expensive as hell. Or to just wait for the big solar farm up the road to go live.
From David Roberts at Volts:
“To paint in broad and somewhat crude strokes, advocates for centralized renewable energy tend to view advocates for distributed energy as crunchy pastoral proto-hippies who can’t handle modernity. They note that utility-scale energy is cheaper and capable of powering highly energy-dense modern economies, whereas distributed energy is expensive and diffuse.
Advocates for distributed energy tend to view advocates for centralized energy as corporate capitalists in thrall to perpetual growth. They note that distributed energy brings a range of benefits, from resilience and independence to savings on avoided infrastructure, whereas utility-scale energy tends to do greater damage to landscapes and concentrate economic power.
Turns out, they’re both wrong.
[...] Spoiler: the cheapest possible carbon-free US grid involves vastly more centralized renewable energy, but it also involves vastly more distributed energy. What’s more, far from being alternatives, they are complements: the more DERs you put in place, the more centralized renewables you can put on the system. DERs are a utility-scale renewable accelerant.”
⚡️ Action Step: You may have noticed a recurring theme here at INI, the “we have to do everything (that can have measurable impact)” theme.
Do two things: find your state on this list of the top state energy legislative issues of 2021, and then sign up to volunteer with the highly-effective Environmental Voter Project, where their focus is less on candidates, and more on turning out more environmental voters (Shit Givers!).
COVID
COVAX’s got next (finally)
Understand this: The Biden administration this week revealed plans to start distributing the enormous number of excess COVID vaccine doses we’ve got stockpiled.
25 million will head out the door ASAP, mostly to COVAX, and the rest to some other tough spots, including India and Iraq, with 55 million or so more coming in “a regular cadence of shipments around the world, across the next several weeks.”
What it means: You may be wondering why so many countries are suffering devastating case, hospitalization, and death counts, so long into the pandemic.
It’s complicated, but:
- Viruses don’t just go away over time. We just try (cough cough) to use lockdowns and contact tracing to make it harder for them to find new hosts
- Many countries that “won” the lockdown phase, giving the virus nowhere to go, got very little exposure to the virus, thus leaving most everyone vulnerable when those lockdowns ended
- With more and more contagious variants spread across the world, those populations are even more vulnerable to exposure and infection than they would have been in spring or summer 2020
- We hoarded most of the vaccines.
⚡️ Action Step: Your company can get more people vaccinated worldwide by partnering with GAVI, the org behind COVAX, by participating in a matching fund, or even in an operational capacity (think supply chains, data management, and social mobilization/awareness). Everyone can contribute, Shit Givers.
Medicine & Biotech
A brand new day (vaccine)
Understand this: All these COVID vaccines were just the beginning.
From WIRED UK:
“The race for the next generation of mRNA vaccines – targeted at a variety of other diseases – is already exploding. Moderna and BioNTech each have nine candidates in development or early clinical trials. There are at least six mRNA vaccines against flu in the pipeline, and a similar number against HIV. Nipah, Zika, herpes, dengue, hepatitis and malaria have all been announced.
The field sometimes resembles the early stage of a gold rush, as pharma giants snap up promising researchers for huge contracts – Sanofi recently paid $425 million (£307m) to partner with a small American mRNA biotech called Translate Bio, while GSK paid $294 million (£212m) to work with Germany’s CureVac.”
What it means: Biotech, long heralded as the next big thing, may finally have arrived.
Not every new effort listed above will succeed. But some will, and it could rewrite disease as we know it.
⚡️ Action Step: One of the most effective NGO’s in the universe is the Against Malaria Foundation. A long-lasting insecticidal net costs just $2! So, so wild.
So while we wait on these amazing new mRNA vaccines to show promise, throw some cash at saving lives right now.
AI
This isn’t it
Understand this: Electronic health records were supposed to be the future. We just needed to get them off the paper and into the cloud. Easy-peasy.
From there, we could build algorithms on top of all that data to bring on individualized medicine, and simultaneously, find signals in the noise of millions of (hopefully anonymized) records, to make stunning advances in diagnosis and treatment.
A decade since the ACA passed, ten long (long) years packed with machine learning advances, and a year and a half into a pandemic, we’ve still got a long (long) way to go.
In the US and UK, patient records are being consolidated as fast as hospitals can sign up private partners like Microsoft and Google.
Investors are throwing billions of dollars at health tech startups.
“The health-care industry is kind of 10 to 20 years behind all other modern industries in terms of adopting innovation,” said Steve Kraus, a partner at venture firm Bessemer Venture Partners and a board member at Bright Health.
Kraus started investing in health care a decade ago, when many U.S. medical providers still relied on paper records. Now he says the industry is catching up. “It happened so quickly, and it happened so quickly because of Covid,” Kraus said.”
But has it?
- One study showed zero successful clinical uses for AI during COVID
- One issue? Abundant methodological flaws
- Another? Massive and repeated ethical failures from big corporations, like Google
“If the performance results are not reproduced in clinical care to the standard that was used during [a study], then we risk approving algorithms that we can’t trust,” said Matthew McDermott, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who co-authored a recent paper on these problems. “They may actually end up worsening patient care.”
We continue to rush more systems online -- where, to be clear, there can be huge benefits -- but once they’re up, they’re as vulnerable as they’ve ever been.
And not just because the same people building many of these systems are the same that built the dominant, racist systems of the 20th century, leaving ethics in the dust, once again.
But actually, practically vulnerable, too:
Ransomware attacks have grown exponentially in the past five years, due to poor defense, new tactics, and safe harbor in Russia.
Meanwhile, what may have been the first AI-powered drone -- that is, able to choose and strike its own targets -- is live. Are we ready?
⚡️ Action Step: Get informed. Sign up for the excellent Montreal AI Ethics Institute free weekly newsletter.
The Round Up
Samantha Bee and the team at Full Frontal went HAM on natural gas and I’m DELIGHTED
The most prolific mainstream VC funds backing climate innovation are...
Coastal dead zones are multiplying (pics). The solution? Seaweed.
We’re going back to Venus. Why does it matter? Because Earth stayed habitable, and Venus didn’t, and we should probably understand why.
My beloved Uncle Steve should have celebrated another birthday this week. Thanks to ALS, for the sixth year running, he wasn’t here for it. But I’m here for the US Army getting funding to try and treat familial ALS.
Is Biden’s anti-weed policy actually anti-climate?
Can regenerative farming lead to sustainable eggs?
Does your kids’ school have garbage ventilation? Still? Here’s an excellent guide on how to improve it.
Asthma in toddlers linked to in-utero exposure to air pollution, he rages
More in Science Racism, because there’s always more in Science Racism:
- New York’s school placing algorithms are, to put it lightly, racist as hell
- Medical journals are “blind” to racism
Biden put a stop to Arctic wildlife drilling, and wants to replace America’s lead pipes. Here’s how that’s going in Flint
Here’s where the next coronavirus might come from
The world’s top methane emitters probably aren’t who you think
Nestle accidentally admits most of its food isn’t healthy
They want you to believe that individual actions don’t matter, but the Toyota CEO says that’s wrong.
Activist investors have infiltrated Exxon and more. Here’s how you can become one.
Important Jobs
Every week, we’ll debut a selection of Featured roles from Important Jobs right here in the newsletter.
Hiring and want to get your open role in front of our community? Submit a Featured role here.
- Chief Engineer, Climeworks (Zurich)
- Lead UI Designer, Canoo (Torrance)
- Senior Software Engineer, Zero Grocery (Remote)
- Product Manager, Apeel Sciences (Santa Barbara)
- People Operations Specialist, Apeel Sciences (Valencia)
- Web Designer, Canboo (Torrance)
- Content Creator, Ecovative (New York City)
- Technical Project Manager, Notpla (London)
- Senior Product Designer, Culdesac (San Francisco)
- Full-Stack Software Developer, Joro (San Francisco)
Browse all open roles, or add your own at ImportantJobs.com.
Important Pod Guests - In The News
Dr. Leah Stokes isn’t pleased we don’t have a Clean Electricity Standard -- yet
Rep. Sean Casten introduced a climate stress test bill for banks
Dr. Kristie Ebi assesses how many deaths the climate crisis has already caused
Rep. Lauren Underwood is adding climate considerations to her “momnibus” maternal health act (more on her work in our podcast, here)
Thanks for reading, and thanks for giving a shit.
-- Quinn
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