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In brief: Talking adaptation; The Green Vortex 2.0; Long COVID studies; What’s in your mascara; Farm subsidies; AI in hospitals, unleashed

This Week

When is a drought no longer a drought?

The easy answer is “when significant, normal rainfall returns”, ending -- as the dictionary defines it -- “a prolonged period of abnormally low rainfall, leading to a shortage of water.”

Rains will undoubtedly return to the US West, in some way, at some point. But will they ever return to normal?

And what is normal, now?

Make no mistake, I am committed to Action Steps that heal the earth, protect and replenish ecosystems, and provide for clean air, clean water, nutritious food, and reliable shelter for every human. These are non-negotiable.

And the enormous groundswell of effort underway to provide for these things, and more, is a hell of a thing to be a part of. It’s why we built Important Jobs. To help build the workforce of the future.

But every day we fail to earnestly discuss adaptation, to acknowledge the discontinuity, the future that is here, is a failure to those who are already suffering through it, and an abdication of our responsibility to be, as Bina Venkataraman put it, “better ancestors.”

Openly acknowledging and wrestling with adaptation for this vast, wide-reaching climate crisis means not only building sea walls, retreating from coastal cities, reducing water use, finding new sustainable drinking water sources, completely re-thinking immigration, and more, but also that the earth around us is changing because we chose to change it -- it’s quickly become more inhospitable to our way of life, trapping double the amount of heat since 2005, a trend that is untenable for our soft, pink sacks of flesh and the ecosystems we rely on.

We have to acknowledge and bust our asses to deal with short-term shocks to our systems: California farmers who feed so much of the country, facing water cutoffs, Wisconsin and Iowa farmers not far behind, as the Rockies burn.

Adaptation means living with earlier and worse compounding heat and dry conditions that may not ebb in our lifetimes, the worst in anywhere from decades to thousands of years.

It means negotiating was probably inevitable: water “wars” across US states, across Latin America, India, Indonesia, and more.

And even more difficult, long-term truths: like when drought becomes desertification.

If poverty is a policy choice (hi! it is), then so are the other systems we’ve built and exploited, systems with a huge variety of inputs that have made life in the short-term, in a temperate climate easier, and cheaper, all the while making long-term tradeoffs that find us more vulnerable than we’ve been since we’ve had the capability of understanding our own vulnerability.

This is all to say -- we can absolutely make enormous progress in building a cleaner, more equitable home planet, for everyone. A kick-ass, Star Trek future.

But not unlike how COVID was a pop quiz of all of the choices we’d made to date, the next few decades will require us to not only reduce emissions and reduce our externalities, but to also confront some very difficult truths, and unavoidable choices about how to adapt -- how to live with precious few resources, alongside one another, to simultaneously protect and build anew ways of powering our lives, now.

Along the way, we’ll need help from every corner, we have to do it all. Every choice, every vote, every election, every person matters.

Let’s go.

Climate Change & Clean Energy

The surprising truth about the lost decade

Understand this: Insert standard caveat that for a cleaner, more equitable future we need far fewer automobiles of every stripe, and more (and safer, and cheaper) walking, biking, and public transportation.

But let’s do a quick catch-up on where we are re: electrification, because transportation is about 30% of US emissions:

• Peak internal combustion engines may be behind us
• The world’s largest automaker, who cheated on emissions tests for years, got punished, and reoriented their entire company on electric, will move even quicker and bigger -- if Biden can match it
• #2 Toyota, however, said they’ll continue to make gas-powered cars for a while, because “its too early to concentrate on one option” (if you work at Toyota, please reply to this email, I’d love to discuss)
• The vaunted but maybe worthless G7 had a chance to move the goalpost on new EV’s from 2035 to 2030, but they punted, and in more ways than one
• Cars, as you might have noticed, are not just one giant gas or diesel engine, or battery -- so Volvo’s going further with fossil-fuel free steel
• But batteries matter, a lot, and the US doesn’t really have the minerals to sell, so Biden wants to go all-in on battery manufacturing for cars and buses, and more
• Electric bus manufacturers like Proterra are listening and making their case to clean up the air -- estimates tag converting the entire US public bus fleet at anywhere from $56 to $89 billion
• And just in time: the EPA will review (again) rules for soot, which kills at least 10,000 Americans a year, and (surprise!) Black and brown communities suffer the worst.

What it means: To many of us, the last ten years can feel like a huge wasted opportunity to decarbonize.

But Robinson Meyer argues in The Atlantic that the “green vortex” model works, and has been working all along. Now we just need to capitalize on it:

“The green vortex describes how policy, technology, business, and politics can all work together, lowering the cost of zero-carbon energy, building pro-climate coalitions, and speeding up humanity’s ability to decarbonize. It has also already gotten results. The green vortex is what drove down the cost of wind and solar, what overturned Exxon’s board, and what the Biden administration is banking on in its infrastructure plan.

[...] The idea that drives the green vortex is: Practice makes improvement. The more that we do something, whether baking a cake or manufacturing electric vehicles, the better we get at it. (Economists call this “learning by doing.”) This idea might seem intuitive, but it is often ignored in policy conversations. Over the past half decade, learning by doing has driven down the cost of semiconductors, solar panels, and electric vehicles.”

As always, even with good news, the past cannot predict the future, and there’s no guarantee of success.

The model works -- but in the words of Dr. Ian Malcolm, we must go faster. Twice as fast.

Because -- like getting older -- time moves quicker when the dominies begin to fall, and they’re beginning to fall.

⚡️ Action Step: Whether you live in America or not, her historical emissions are second to none. To make up for those, we need more voters to turn out if we want more votes, from cities to Congress.

Volunteer with the incredibly effective Environmental Voter Project to turn out more voters committed to cleaner air, water, and power.

COVID

What the hell is long COVID, anyways?

Understand this: New studies show that at least 14% of people who test positive for COVID are still suffering from any variety of hundreds of symptoms up to and beyond 12 weeks later.

For hospitalized folks, it’s 33-87%.

But if the virus has mostly disappeared after a couple weeks, what the hell is happening, and why?

Some research indicates a new autoimmune disease at work, a remnant of your body’s defense system going ballistic and attacking itself.

But we’re still very early in this thing, and it’s not so simple: other evidence points to fragments of the virus sticking around and causing unknown chaos.

Or maybe it’s related to chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). To some, it sure as heck feels like it.

What it means: A growing number of researchers agree that there must be

“Several mechanisms are at work, so one person’s long COVID might be profoundly different from another’s. In October, a review published by the NIHR raised the possibility that long COVID symptoms “may be due to a number of different syndromes”. “There is a story emerging,” says Deeks. “There’s not one clinical phenotype. There’s different flavours, different clusters. They all may have different mechanisms.”

Whatever the mechanisms may be, 14% of hundreds of millions of cases has meant countries ponying up billions of dollars to get more research underway.

⚡️ Action Step: If you live in the UK, and whether you’ve been diagnosed with COVID or not, you can enroll in the Decode ME/CFS study, to try and better understand of why people get it -- and how it might correlate to long COVID.

In the US, those suffering from long COVID can check out clinical trials here, and researchers can explore NIH Open Funding Opportunities right here.

Should you sign up for a clinical trial? Talk to your doctor, and check out this brief but helpful explainer.

Medicine & Biotech

Face up

Understand this: What’s in your mascara, your lipstick, and foundation?

From The Washington Post:

“Cosmetics distributed in the United States and Canada are rife with a class of chemicals that have been associated with a number of diseases, including cancer, and frequently aren’t labeled accurately, according to a new study.

Over the last three years, researchers tested 231 cosmetics products in North America for fluorine, an indicator of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.

The study found fluorine in 56 percent of foundations and eye products, 48 percent of lip products and 47 percent of mascaras.

[...] PFAS are man-made chemicals that are highly resistant to oil, grease and water, making them common in food packaging, nonstick cookware (such as Teflon) and numerous other applications. In cosmetics, they help create a slippery shine and make products waterproof.”

What it means: The last time the United States passed a major law regulating the personal care industry was 1938, under the Federal Food, Drugs, and Cosmetic Act.

That may finally change.

“On Tuesday, Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) introduced the No PFAS in Cosmetics Act. “Our bill would require the FDA to ban the addition of PFAS to cosmetics products,” Collins said in a statement. “Americans should be able to trust that the products they are applying to their hair or skin are safe.”

⚡️ Action Step: Listen to our fantastic (and hilarious) conversation with BeautyCounter CEO Gregg Renfrew. And then check the Environmental Working Group’s excellent database to find out what’s in your skin care products.

Go Deeper

Back up, wait a minute

Tangle

Maybe you’ve got friends who aren’t quite up to speed on the science behind the climate crisis yet (if you’re subscribed to INI, we assume you’ve already got the hang of -- and agree with -- the basics).

But not everybody’s there yet, so I recommend sending friends and family this helpful explainer post from Tangle).

Think of it like a stepping stone to giving a shit!

Food & Water

Shine a light on it

Understand this: 99% of America’s rural farmland is owned by white people.

But does the same overwhelming percentage receive the bulk of USDA grants, loans, and subsidies?

We don’t really have any idea, but considering there’s only 45,000 Black farmers, a steep drop from 950,000 just 100 years ago, I’m going to go ahead and guess “yes.”

What it means: We can’t improve the welfare of Black farmers -- often descendants of millions of brutally enslaved people, torn from families to comprise a workforce that was at one point this country’s single most valuable asset -- without understanding how much these huge subsidies are working to further marginalize them.

This week, Rep. Bobby Rush and Senator Cory Booker introduced the Farm Subsidy Transparency Act, which would lift the demographic veil on everything from subsidies and loans to crop insurance and disaster relief.

⚡️ Action Step: Drop your address into Common Cause, and then call your reps (you can even just leave a message!) and (you can literally just read this part to them) demand they “support the Farm Subsidy Transparency Act of 2021 to require the USDA to track and publicly disclose the race and gender of all individuals who receive farm assistance through USDA, as well as the amount of assistance received.”

AI

I’m sure this is fine

Understand this: COVID hit at a unique moment for the American healthcare system. Not that we’d improved any part of it, no, no, please.

But we were (are) in the middle of a long, frustrating effort to move health care records online, to standardize them (woof), and make them more usable -- to doctors, patients, and healthcare startups.

So a novel virus -- often presenting as asymptomatic, but also commonly resulting in a bizarre, initially inexplicable, and for a percentage of folks, incredibly damaging and sometimes fatal assortment of symptoms -- meant we weren’t quite ready.

We needed help.

Enter the Deterioration Index. From Fast Company:

“Built with a type of artificial intelligence called machine learning and in use at some hospitals prior to the pandemic, the index is designed to help physicians decide when to move a patient into or out of intensive care, and is influenced by factors like breathing rate and blood potassium level.

Epic had been tinkering with the index for years but expanded its use during the pandemic. At hundreds of hospitals, including those in which we both work, a Deterioration Index score is prominently displayed on the chart of every patient admitted to the hospital.”

If we can make triage work better, great.

The thing is, it’s a pandemic, so:

“The Deterioration Index was not independently validated or peer-reviewed before the tool was rapidly deployed to America’s largest healthcare systems. Even now, there have been, to our knowledge, only two peer-reviewed published studies of the index. The deployment of a largely untested proprietary algorithm into clinical practice—with minimal understanding of the potential unintended consequences for patients or clinicians—raises a host of issues.”

Which is a really great way of summarizing all of our AI efforts, no matter the arena: we’re deploying futuristic, black-box technologies without having ever reckoned with our own biases.

⚡️ Action Step: We’ve been hammering on AI ethics educational materials lately, and here’s another easy one for you: the World Economic Forum’s 10 steps to educate your company on AI fairness.

Read it, Slack it to your co-workers, start a conversation, implement some policies. Do Better Better.

The Round Up

Science magazine's special feature on adaptation

Half of ocean plastic is from takeout containers

What if you're immunosupressed and the vaccines don't work?

Why, exactly, the Delta variant is more infectious?

The Weather Channel will go all in on climate change news

US shale work has increased earthquakes, so

A fun flywheel: smoke from Western wildfires is reducing solar output, which is intended to reduce inputs for new wildfires

This is exactly why “net zero” corporate pledges are bullshit

Half of DTC fashion is made from virgin plastic

Immigration: Latin America is not ready for hurricane season, again

The Novavax vaccine is ready, and powerful. We should buy a few billion and immediately ship them overseas.

Gazprom -- inexplicably still the sponsor of the European Soccer Championships in 2021 -- discloses massive methane leaks

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.

• AL/ML Data Scientist, GiveDirectly (Remote)
• Country Director, US, GiveDirectly (New York, Remote)
• US Senior Program Manager, Give Directly (New York, Remote)
• Chief Engineer, Climeworks (Zurich)
• Senior Software Engineer, Zero Grocery (Remote)
• Lead UI Designer, Canoo (California)
• Product Manager, Apeel Sciences (Santa Barbara)
• People Operations Specialist, Apeel Sciences (Valencia)
• Web Designer, Canoo (California)
• Content Creator, Ecovative (New York)
• 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

Bren Smith on kelp bagels???

Hana Kajimura on decarbonizing fashion

Dr. Leah Stokes on Biden’s wavering climate infrastructure plans

Julian Brave Noisecat in the NYT on his work with Data for Progress

Raja Dhir and Seed pre/probiotics, reviewed

Rep. Chrissy Houlahan will not run for Senate

VA Rep. Ghazala Hashmi on how COVID slowed solar rollouts for public schools

Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson on her love for “strange but wonderful” parrotfish

Thanks for reading, and thanks for giving a shit.

-- Quinn