Welcome back, Shit Givers.

A massive, massive congratulations and thank you to all of the Indigenous people, and their friends, who showed up for a decade to finally defeat the Keystone XO pipeline.

Let’s kill Line 3, next.

In brief: Climate migration; Vaccine data inequities; A controversial Alzheimer’s drug; Cover crops, covered; AI ethics, just in time (hopefully)

This Week

What are you exposed to?

That’s the question I asked back in September, in my Do Better Better essay, The New Externalities.

The leading questions are simple.

“There are two primary questions to consider today, considering “everything”:

1. What, exactly, are you exposed to?
2. What are the adjustment costs of your exposures?”

The work to answer them is a bit more involved. But no matter what you do, and where you are, it’s never been more important.

“The world is more connected than ever before, that is changing faster than it ever has before, that much of that change is both because of us and now out of our control, and that people, companies, and industries that don’t explore and adjust for externalities are going to be under water in more ways than one, and soon.”

For marginalized peoples, the question is top of mind every single day -- sometimes that’s simply because of the color of your skin, sometimes it’s because you were born and still live in a red-lined city block, with no trees, dirty air, a lack of health insurance and primary care, a food and vaccine desert.

Often, it’s all of the above.

For many others, after what was the warmest year on record, after a year of being trapped at home, mostly safe but feeling newly under threat, the question is suddenly all too real.

For today, that’s banks. As you’re reading, keep in mind that geopolitics and the global economy as we know it are entirely predicated on the supply and demand of a single resource: oil.

And banks -- who finance the extraction, refinement, and transportation (more on that later) of very old dead plants into a variety of every day products, as you already understand -- underpin the whole enchilada.

Banks who produce 700x more emissions from their loans than from their enormous offices.

It’s those loans that now threaten, well, the entire financial system, because assets tied to fossil fuels are plummeting in value -- as words like “illiquid” and “subprime” are thrown around.

Curious to know just how bad (it’s bad) the situation may be, institutions like the Bank of England have devised stress tests to discover just how exposed banks and insurers really are.

Just because it’s bad news doesn’t mean we can bury our heads in the sand any longer. Just because a doctor says “It might be a tumor”, doesn’t mean you refuse a conclusive MRI.

Not when your health affects every country, institution, and person on the planet.

This discontinuity, this transformation over which we have only a semblance of control, was always going to be rocky. But the less we properly set our expectations, the worse it will be.

Having gauged your exposure, it’s time to add up the costs.

457 investors, who hold almost a third of the world’s assets under management -- $41 trillion -- called for governments to strengthen plans to eliminate emissions.

Denmark’s central bank warned that billions in bank loan collateral is at risk of going underwater. And not in the accounting sense. In the actual “we used property as collateral for all those loans and it’s probably going to be flooded and worthless” sense.

Norway may be among the vanguard for EV adoption, but they’re also #2 in oil production per capita.

The G7 -- however effective they may actually be -- meets this week, and may discuss fast-tracking EV mandates.

Great for the planet, not great for banks. Not in the short-term, at least.

The second-order effects of discovering and mitigating for externalities, now, leaves us with a window to look realistically towards the future.

These decisions will realistically, and inevitably lead to a new world; a cleaner one, but equally dependent on finite resources harvested from our single habitable planet.

Where a rising player dominates supply, and the old guard fights to remain relevant.

Climate Change & Clean Energy

“Do not come”

Understand this: Whether or not the climate crisis can be specifically tied to an increasing number and severity of storms, heatwaves, fires, and flooding, people (and especially subsistence farmers) the world over are finding their homelands are increasingly unlivable.

From Grist:

“Vice President Kamala Harris had a simple message for migrants seeking relief during her first international trip in the role: “Do not come.”

Harris, who gave a press conference with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei after private talks about U.S. President Joe Biden’s goals to curb migration at the southern border, named corruption and human trafficking as among the most pressing causes of migration from the Central American country.

What she failed to mention, however, was 2020’s biggest driver of migration: severe weather, which makes the “do not come” instruction nearly impossible to follow. Nearly 600,000 people from Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua were displaced last year due to Hurricanes Eta and Iota.

[...] Harris is doubling down on the administration’s current cornerstone plan to tackle migration: a $4 billion investment to “build security and prosperity” in Central America.”

What it means: Like other systemic issues (hunger, infectious disease), we need to both take care of people now, through adaptation, and fix the root problem, through mitigation.

Mitigation is on the rocks in the US Senate, so it’s never been more pressing for developed countries to revamp the asylum process.

2021 is just the tip of the iceberg.

⚡️ Action Step: You can volunteer your time (or farm), or donate money to World Central Kitchen. They’re feeding everyone, everywhere, all of the time, including 400,000 recent meals in India.

COVID

So say we all

Understand this: The pandemic isn’t over.

Not for everyone, at least.

I’m just going to post this long quote from The Atlantic’s Ed Yong, because it’s Ed Yong:

“From its founding, the United States has cultivated a national mythos around the capacity of individuals to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, ostensibly by their own merits. This particular strain of individualism, which valorizes independence and prizes personal freedom, transcends administrations. It has also repeatedly hamstrung America’s pandemic response. It explains why the U.S. focused so intensely on preserving its hospital capacity instead of on measures that would have saved people from even needing a hospital. It explains why so many Americans refused to act for the collective good, whether by masking up or isolating themselves. And it explains why the CDC, despite being the nation’s top public-health agency, issued guidelines that focused on the freedoms that vaccinated people might enjoy. The move signaled to people with the newfound privilege of immunity that they were liberated from the pandemic’s collective problem. It also hinted to those who were still vulnerable that their challenges are now theirs alone and, worse still, that their lingering risk was somehow their fault. (“If you’re not vaccinated, that, again, is taking your responsibility for your own health into your own hands,” Walensky said.)

Neither is true. About half of Americans have yet to receive a single vaccine dose; for many of them, lack of access, not hesitancy, is the problem. The pandemic, meanwhile, is still just that—a pandemic, which is raging furiously around much of the world, and which still threatens large swaths of highly vaccinated countries, including some of their most vulnerable citizens. It is still a collective problem, whether or not Americans are willing to treat it as such.”

What it means: Inconsistent data guiding vaccine efforts -- from state to state, and city to city -- is making both assessing the current status and conducting outreach efforts difficult, at best.

In some states, various ethnicities aren’t broken out in the data at all. In others, they’re lumped together.

This, months after America’s marginalized races were infected, hospitalized, and died at 2-4x the rate of whites, and with the Delta variant endangering everyone without a shot.

⚡️ Action Step: The Vaccine Equity Planner, from Ariadne Labs (Brigham Health, Harvard T.H. Chan) and Boston Children’s Hospital can help you sort through identifying vaccine “deserts”. For local governments, that means more efficient targeted outreach efforts. The dataset is also open-sourced on Github.

Medicine & Biotech

We can do better. Can’t we?

Understand this: The US FDA approved the first new treatment for Alzheimer’s in almost twenty years, a pivotal decision as the disease currently affects 6 million Americans, with many more on the way.

Theoretically, it eliminates “clumps of a toxic protein believed to destroy neurons and cause dementia. Aduhelm is not a cure for Alzheimer’s, and it doesn’t reverse the disease’s progression.”

The only problem? It doesn’t work.

At least, not in the way we normally think.

“Instead of judging Biogen’s treatment solely on its effects on cognition, the FDA granted a conditional approval based on Aduhelm’s ability to clear the toxic proteins, called beta-amyloid. In order to continue marketing the drug, Biogen will need to complete a large clinical trial to confirm that removing the plaque has cognitive benefits, the FDA said. If that study fails, the FDA has the authority to rescind its approval.

In approving the drug on a conditional basis, the agency departed from decades of regulatory precedent, setting a new bar for treatments with considerable potential but unproven benefits — a standard that could also be applied to other devastating diseases.”

What it means: Aduhelm will cost anywhere from $10,000-$25,000 a year, with insurance, making it among the most expensive drugs available.

And because we very clearly do not do well with probabilistic thinking, or systemic thinking, or thinking through almost anything of consequence (including prescribing antibiotics when they won’t actually do anything except make (bad) bacteria more dangerous to us), millions of Americans will inevitably pony up for a drug that doesn’t do much to alleviate a terrifying condition, because we don’t usually approve drugs with unproven benefits.

⚡️ Action Step: Everyone knows someone with Alzheimer’s. Get the fullest picture we have with this article at STAT.

Go Deeper

Get ready for climate work with Terra.do

Want to work in the (huge) climate space, but not sure where you fit in?

Check out Important Jobs, but worried you don’t have the knowledge base to contribute yet?

Visit our friends at Terra.do, take their quiz, and enroll in a cohort-based course to level up, build your network, and get ready to change the world.

Food & Water

Cover me

Understand this: You have have heard that our small farms are in a bit of trouble.

In fact, our soil on the whole is in trouble.

One answer?

Cover crops.

They’re exactly what they sound like. With the intention of shading the precious soil underneath, cover crops are the 5-tool hitter of sustainable ag: they can prevent erosion, supply nutrients, smush out weeds, and break pest cycles.

But they’re not cheap. So the USDA’s Risk Management Agency stepped up and said they’ll pay farmers who planted them $5 an acre.

It’s what feels like a great example of both emergency and long-term thinking, which as you can imagine, is confusing for me.

⚡️ Action Step: Send a message to your member of Congress to support Senator Cory Booker’s Farm System Reform Act.

Food is great, it shouldn’t kill us, or kill really anything, not through drugs or water or air. Let’s go ahead and fix it.

AI

Language barriers

Understand this: Open AI could still change the world.

Its flagship language model, GPT-3, has stunned, utilizing massive text datasets to turn around and write uncanny marketing emails.

But the speed and breadth of adoption scared more than one researcher away. And now some of those breakaway scientists have launched an AI “safety and research” startup to, you know, slow things down a bit. Or in their words, to make AI systems “reliable, interpretable, and steerable.”

Which sounds great.

What’s next: Earthlings traditionally roll out new toys without really stopping to think about whether they should.

So it’s nice that, despite the reckless speed with which black box machine learning has already been implemented, and in some cases, already failed, a bunch of awesome folks recognize the potential for even worse results, and are working hard to question fundamental elements, and to build guardrails.

⚡️ Action Step: Last week I recommended you subscribe to the Montreal AI Ethics Institute’s fantastic newsletter. Today I’m linking to a recent article, called “Permission to Be Uncertain: Ethics & Social Responsibility in AI Research & Innovation”, regarding the use of AI in warfare.

Remember: AI isn’t the issue. We’re the issue.

The Round Up

FEMA disaster aid is (wait for it) vastly inequitable

Is long-term battery storage possible? Sure. Can it be useful? Not so sure.

A million people in Madagascar are on the brink of famine, thanks to drought

And a million years of data confirms: monsoons are going to get more destructive (see our critically-acclaimed pod ep: The Monsoon is 11 Days Late)

If we want everyone to electrify their homes, we should offer upfront incentives. Here’s how to do it.

Hundreds of lakes in the US and Europe are losing oxygen, so that’s fun

The Milken Institute’s new paper calls for a global early warning system for the next pandemic

Target quietly launched a new line of plant-based products, and it’s all under $5

We need to answer these 4 urgent questions about long COVID

Lake Mead is the lowest it’s been since we built the Hoover Dam. The Colorado River is currently at 1070ft there. In a year, it will be 1050ft. At 950ft, it'll fail to generate electricity. At 860ft, Las Vegas will no longer be able to draw water.

• More on the West’s drought grows worse.

Mosquitos armed with virus fighting bacteria crushed dengue infections. Bioethics is hard.

Important Jobs

Every week, we share 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

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is not pleased with the pace of infrastructure talks

The delightful Dr. Gautam Dantas has a new study that suggests international travelers are bringing home deadly strains of antimicrobial resistant superbugs in their gut microbiomes

Thanks for reading, and thanks for giving a shit.

-- Quinn